Rodriguez's Teatro en españa, 1908 and 1909, though more fragmentary, deserves commendatory mention, together with the critical study of La Malquerida by José Rogerio Sánchez, the conclusions of which are repeated with amplification in the same author's comprehensive Autores españoles e hispano-americanos. With these the lengthy and enthusiastic study by Andrés González-Bianco, with which he begins his Dramaturgos españoles contemporáneos, may be consulted. It makes no attempt, however, at analysis, and remains wholly indefinite. Few Spanish writers of compendia of criticism, although of gifts and attainments unquestionably beyond cavil, convey the impression of having read the works of which they write. A series of scattered articles by R. Pérez de Ayala, an imitator and at one time youthful admirer, has been collected in that author's Las máscaras. They are based upon an æsthetic improvised as they go along, and are without adequate critical equipment.
Greater weight and importance may be attached to the opinions of Julio Cejador y Frauca, contained in the tenth volume of his encyclopædic Historia de la lengua y literatura castellana, to which a serviceable bibliography has been appended. "In this theatre that is upside down," writes Cejador, "the action, which was formerly the end, has been converted into the means." Although conscious of the antithesis between the theatre of Benavente and the theatre as it has existed hitherto, Cejador shows himself to be deficient in grasp of dramatic principle, besides displaying an almost unbelievable ignorance of the modern movement in European literature, which alone can account for the mistakes of the general fraternity of Spanish critics in interpreting the programme of the moderns as the personal achievement of Mr. Benavente. Cejador, it may be observed, devotes several pages of his monumental history to an examination of "The Yellow Jacket," the Chinese fantasy by George C. Hazelton and Benrimo, translated into Spanish by Benavente, and performed at the Teatro de la Princesa, Madrid, in 1916. He concludes that the reputed authorship of the comedy by Americans is a huge hoax, and pronounces the play the sole, original, and most highly characteristic work
