in their moral and religious sentiments, and their general views of history and society, there is no difference between the two. Like Lope, Calderon was a soldier in his youth and an ecclesiastic in his later years; like his senior, he suited himself to the tastes of both court and people, and applied his genius with equal facility to the treatment of religious and of secular themes. In fertility Calderon was inferior to Lope (for he wrote not many more than 100 plays); but he surpasses the elder poet in richness of style, and more especially in fire of imagination. In his autos (of which he is said to have left not less than 73), Calderon probably attained to his most distinctive excellence; some of these appear to take a wide range of allegorical invention,[1] while they uniformly possess great beauty of poetical detail. Other of his most famous or interesting pieces are comedias de santos.[2] In his secular plays he treats as wide a variety of subjects as Lope, but it is not a dissimilar variety; nor would it be easy to decide whether a poet so uniformly admirable within his limits has achieved greater success in romantic historical tragedy,[3] in the comedy of amorous intrigue,[4] or in a dramatic work combining fancy and artificiality in such a degree that it has been diversely described as a romantic caprice and as a philosophical poem.[5]
During the life of the second great master of the Spanish drama there was little apparent abatement in the productivity of its literature; while the autos continued to flourish in Madrid and elsewhere, till in 1765 (shortly before the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain) their public Contemporaries of Calderon.representation was prohibited by royal decree. In the world of fashion, the opera had reached Spain already during Calderon’s lifetime, together with other French influences, and the great dramatist had himself written one or two of his plays for performance with music. But the regular national drama continued to command popular favour, and with A. Moreto may be said to have actually taken a step in advance. While he wrote in all the forms established by Lope and cultivated by Calderon, his manner Moreto and the comedia de figuron.seems most nearly to approach the masterpieces of French and later English comedy of character; he was the earliest writer of the comedias de figuron, in which the most prominent personage is (in Congreve’s phrase) “a character of affectation,” in other words, the Spanish fop of real life.[6] His masterpiece, a favourite of many stages, is one of the most graceful and pleasing of modern comedies—simple but interesting in plot, and true to nature, with something like Shakespearian truth.[7] Other writers trod more closely in the footsteps of the masters without effecting any noticeable changes in the form of the Spanish drama; even the saynete (tit-bit), which owes its name to Benavente (fl. 1645), was only a kind of entremes. The Spanish drama in all its forms retained its command over the nation, because they were alike popular in origin and character; nor is there any other example of so complete an adaptation of a national art to the national taste and sentiment in its ethics and aesthetics, in the nature of the plots of the plays (whatever their origin), in the motives of their actions, in the conduct and tone and in the very costume of their characters.
National as it was, and because of this very quality, the Spanish drama was fated to share the lot of the people it so fully represented. At the end of the 17th century, when the Spanish throne at last became the declared apple of discord among the governments of Europe, the Spanish Decay of the national
Spanish drama.people lay, in the words of an historian of its later days, “like a corpse, incapable of feeling its own impotence.” That national art to which it had so faithfully clung had fallen into decline and decay with the spirit of Spain itself. By the time of the close of the great war, the theatre had sunk into a mere amusement of the populace, which during the greater part of the 18th century, while allowing the old masters the measure of favour which accords with traditional esteem, continued to uphold the representatives of the old drama in its degeneracy—authors on the level of their audiences. But the Spanish court was now French, and in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, France was the arbiter of taste in Europe. With the restoration of peace accordingly The French school of the 18th century.began isolated attempts to impose the French canons of dramatic theory, and to follow the example of French dramatic practice; and in the middle of the century these endeavours assumed more definite form. Montiano’s bloodless tragedy of Virginia (1750), which was never acted, was accompanied by a discourse endeavouring to reconcile the doctrines of the author with the practice of the old Spanish dramatists; the play itself was in blank verse (a metre never used by Calderon, though occasionally by Lope), instead of the old national ballad-measures (the romance-measure with assonance and the rhymed redondilla quatrain) preferred by the old masters among the variety of metres employed by them. The earliest Spanish comedy in the French form (a translation only, though written in the national metre)[8] (1751), and the first original Spanish comedy on the same model, Nicolas Moratin’s Petimetra (Petite-Maîtresse), printed in 1726 with a critical dissertation, likewise remained unacted. In 1770, however, the same author’s Hormesinda, an historic drama on a national theme and in the national metre, but adhering to the French rules, appeared on the stage; and similar attempts followed in tragedy by the same writer and others (including Ayala, who ventured in 1775 to compete with Cervantes on the theme of Numantia), and in comedy by Iriarte and Jovellanos (afterwards minister under Godoy), who produced a sentimental comedy in Diderot’s manner.[9] But Other later dramatists. these endeavours failed to effect any change in the popular theatre, which was with more success raised from its deepest degradation by R. de la Cruz, a fertile author of light pieces of genuine humour, especially saynetes, depicting the manners of the middle and lower classes. In literary circles Garcia de la Huerta’s voluminous collection of the old plays (1785) gave a new impulse to dramatic productivity, and the conflict continued between representatives of the old school, such as Luciano Francisco Comella (1716–1779) and of the new, such as the younger Moratin, whose comedies—of which the last and most successful[10] was in prose—raised him to the foremost position among the dramatists of his age. In tragedy N. de Cienfuegos likewise showed some originality. After, however, the troubles of the French domination and the war had come to an end, the precepts and examples of the new school failed to reassert themselves.
Already in 1815 an active critical controversy was carried on by Böhl de Faber against the efforts of J. Faber and Alcalá Galiano to uphold the principles of classicism; and with the aid of the eminent actor Máiquez the old romantic masterpieces were easily reinstated in the public favour, which as a matter of fact they had never forfeited. The Spanish dramatists of the 19th century, after passing, as in the instance of F. Martinez de la Rosa and Bréton de los Herreros, from the system of French comedy to the manner of the national drama, appear either to have stood under the influence of the French romantic school, or to have returned once more to the old Spanish models. Among the former class A. Gil y Zarate, of the latter J. Zorrilla, are mentioned as specially prominent. The most renowned Spanish dramatist at the opening of the 20th century was the veteran politician and man of letters J. Echegaray.
Meanwhile, the old religious performances are not wholly extinct in Spain, and the relics of the solemn pageantry with which they were associated may long continue to survive there, as in the case of the pasos, which claim to have been exhibited in Holy Week at Seville for at least three centuries. As to the theatre itself, there can be no fear either that the imitation
- ↑ El Divino Orfeo, &c.
- ↑ El Magico prodigioso; El Purgatorio de San Patricio; La Devocion de la Cruz.
- ↑ El Principe constante (Don Ferdinand of Portugal).
- ↑ La Dama duende (The Fairy Lady).
- ↑ Vida es sueño (Life is a Dream).
- ↑ El Lindo Don Diego (Pretty Don Diego).
- ↑ Desden con el desden (Disdain against Disdain).
- ↑ Luzan, La Razon contra la mode (La Chaussée, Le Préjugé à la mode).
- ↑ El Delinquente honrado (The Honoured Culprit).
- ↑ El Sí de las niñas (The Young Maidens’ Consent).
