expressions; they also perhaps derived from the same source a not less characteristically refined treatment of the passion of love. The ideas of Spanish chivalry—more especially religious devotion and a punctilious sense of personal honour—asserted themselves (according to a process often observable in the history of civilization) with peculiar distinctness in literature and art, after the period of great achievements to which they had contributed in other fields had come to an end. The ripest glories of the Spanish drama belong to an age of national decay—mindful, it is true, of the ideas of a greater past. The chivalrous enthusiasm pervading so many of the masterpieces of its literature is indeed a distinctive feature of the Spanish nation in all, even in the least hopeful, periods of its later history; and the religious ardour breathed by these works, though associating itself with what is called the Catholic Reaction, is in truth only a manifestation of the spirit which informed the noblest part of the Reformation movement itself. The Spanish drama neither sought nor could seek to emancipate itself from views and forms of religious life more than ever sacred to the Spanish people since the glorious days of Ferdinand and Isabella; and it is not so much in the beginnings as in the great age of Spanish dramatic literature that it seems most difficult to distinguish between what is to be termed a religious and what a secular play. After Spain had thus, the first after England among modern European countries, fully unfolded that incomparably richest expression of national life and sentiment in an artistic form—a truly national dramatic literature,—the terrible decay of her greatness and prosperity gradually impaired the strength of a brilliant but, of its nature, dependent growth. In the absence of high original genius the Spanish dramatists began to turn to foreign models, though little supported in such attempts by popular sympathy; and it is only in more recent times that the Spanish drama has sought to reproduce the ancient forms from whose masterpieces the nation had never become estranged, while accommodating them to tastes and tendencies shared by later Spanish literature with that of Europe at large.
The earlier dramatic efforts of Spanish literature may without inconvenience be briefly dismissed. The reputed author of the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo (R. Cota the elder) likewise composed the first act of a story of intrigue and character, purely dramatic but not intended for representation. Early efforts.This tragic comedy of Calisto and Meliboea, which was completed (in 21 acts) by 1499, afterwards became famous under the name of Celestina; it was frequently imitated and translated, and was adapted for the Spanish stage by R. de Zepeda in 1582. But the father of the Spanish drama was J. de la Enzina, whose representaciones under the name of “eclogues” were dramatic dialogues of a religious or pastoral character. His attempts were imitated more especially by the Portuguese Gil Vicente, whose writings for the stage appear to be included in the period 1502–1536, and who wrote both in Spanish and in his native Gil Vicente.tongue. A further impulse came, as was natural, from Spaniards resident in Italy, and especially from B. de Torres Naharro, who in 1517 published, as the chief among the “firstlings of his genius” (Propaladia), a series of eight comedias—a term generally applied in Spanish literature to any kind of drama. He claimed some knowledge of the theory of the ancient drama, divided his plays into jornadas[1] (to correspond to acts), and opened them with an introyto (prologue). Very various in their subjects, and occasionally odd in form,[2] they were gross as well as audacious in tone, and were soon prohibited by the Inquisition. The church remained unwilling to renounce her control over such dramatic exhibitions as she permitted, and sought to suppress the few plays on not strictly religious subjects which appeared in the early part of the reign of Charles I. Though the universities produced both translations from the classical drama and modern Latin plays, these exercised very little general effect. Juan Perez’ (Petreius’) posthumous Latin comedies were mainly versions of Ariosto.[3]
Thus the foundation of the Spanish national theatre was reserved for a man of the people. Cervantes has vividly sketched the humble resources which were at the command of Lope de Rueda, a mechanic of Seville, who with his friend the bookseller Timoneda, and two brother Lope de Rueda and his followers.authors and actors in his strolling company, succeeded in bringing dramatic entertainments out of the churches and palaces into the public places of the towns, where they were produced on temporary scaffolds. The manager carried about his properties in a corn-sack; and the “comedies” were still only “dialogues, and a species of eclogues between two or three shepherds and a shepherdess,” enlivened at times by intermezzos of favourite comic figures, such as the negress or the Biscayan, “played with inconceivable talent and truthfulness by Lope.” One of his plays at least,[4] and one of Timoneda’s,[5] seem to have been taken from an Italian source; others mingled modern themes with classical apparitions,[6] one of Timoneda’s was (perhaps again through the Italian) from Plautus.[7] Others of a slighter description were called pasos,—a species afterwards termed entremeses and resembling the modern French proverbes. With these popular efforts of Lope de Rueda and his friends a considerable dramatic activity began in the years 1560–1590 in several Spanish cities, and before the close of this period permanent theatres began to be fitted up at Madrid. Yet Spanish dramatic literature might still have been led Classical dramas. to follow Italian into an imitation of classical models. Two plays by G. Bermudez (1577), called by their learned author “the first Spanish tragedies,” treating the national subject of Inez de Castro, but divided into five acts, composed in various metres, and introducing a chorus; a Dido (c. 1580) by C. de Virues (who claimed to have first divided dramas into three jornadas); and the tragedies of L. L. de Argensola (acted 1585, and praised in Don Quixote) alike represent this tendency.
Such were the alternatives which had opened for the Spanish drama, when at last, about the same time as that of the English, its future was determined by writers of original genius. The first of these was the immortal Cervantes, who, however, failed to anticipate by his earlier plays (1584–1588) the Cervantes.great (though to him unproductive) success of his famous romance. In his endeavour to give a poetic character to the drama he fell upon the expedient of introducing personified abstractions speaking a “divine” or elevated language—a device which was for a time favourably received. But these plays exhibit a neglect or ignorance of the laws of dramatic construction; their action is episodical; and it is from the realism of these episodes (especially in the Numancia, which is crowded with both figures and incidents), and from the power and flow of the declamation, that their effect must have been derived. When in his later years (1615) Cervantes returned to dramatic composition, the style and form of the national drama had been definitively settled by a large number of writers, the brilliant success of whose acknowledged chief may previously have diverted Cervantes from his labours for the theatre. His influence upon the general progress of dramatic literature is, however, to be sought, not only in his plays, but also in those novelas exemplares—incomparable alike in their clearness and their terseness of narrative—to which more than one drama is indebted for its plot, and for much of its dialogue to boot.
Lope de Vega, one of the most astonishing geniuses the world has known, permanently established the national forms of the Spanish drama. Some of these were in their beginnings taken over by him from ruder predecessors; some were cultivated with equal or even superior success by Lope de Vega.subsequent authors; but in variety, as in fertility of dramatic production, he has no rivals. His fertility, which was such that he wrote about 1500 plays, besides 300 dramatic works classed
- ↑ The term is the same as that used in the old French collective mysteries (journées).
- ↑ In some of his plays (Comedia Serafina; C. Tinelaria) there is a mixture of languages even stranger than that of dialects in the Italian masked comedy.
- ↑ Necromanticus, Lena, Decepti, Suppositi.
- ↑ Los Engaños (Gli Ingannati).
- ↑ Cornelia (Il Negromante).
- ↑ Lope, Armelina (Medea and Neptune as deus ex machina—si modo machina adfuisset).
- ↑ Menennos.
