[25] _Obras de Camoens._ Lisbon, 1782-1783.
CHAPTER III. THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA--THE FIRST BEGINNINGS OF THE RELIGIOUS PLAYS--THE STARTING-POINT OF THE SECULAR PLAY--BARTOLOMÉ DE TORRES NAHARRO--LOPE DE RUEDA--LOPE DE VEGA’S LIFE--HIS INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA--THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORK--CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE--CALDERON--CALDERON’S SCHOOL.
[SN: _The national character of the Spanish drama._]
The dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own, purely national. The classic stage had no influence on it whatever; the contemporary theatre of Italy very little, and only for a brief period in the earlier years. There were in Spain translators both of the Greek and Latin dramatic literature, while her scholars were no less ready than others to impress on the world the duty of following the famous rules of Aristotle. But neither the beauty of the classic models, nor the lessons of scholars, nor even the authority of Aristotle--though it was certainly not less regarded in the last country which clung to the scholastic philosophy than elsewhere--had any effect. It would be too much to say that they were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic writers were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them with profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known passage of _Don Quixote_, reproaches his countrymen for their neglect of the three unities; and Lope de Vega, who more than any other man helped to fix the Spanish comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and place, and its habitual contempt for the rules that the comic and tragic should never be mingled in one piece, or that great personages should never be brought on except with a due regard to their dignity, avowed that he saw what was right, and confessed its excellence. He even boasted that he had written no less than six orthodox plays. But Cervantes, in the little he wrote for the stage, never made his practice even approach his precept, while nobody has ever been able to find of which of his plays Lope was speaking when he said that he had observed the unities. It has even been supposed that when he made the boast, he was laughing at the gentlemen to whom he addressed his _Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias_ (New Art of Writing Comedies). Not a little ingenuity has been wasted in attempts to discover what both meant. The good sense of Don Marcelino Menendez[26] has found by far the most acceptable explanation of the mystery, and it is this,--that Cervantes, Lope, and their contemporaries had a quite sincere theoretical admiration for the precepts of Aristotle, or what were taken to be such by the commentators, but that in practice they obeyed their own impulses, and the popular will, though not without a certain shamefaced consciousness that it was rather wicked in them. Spanish dramatists, in fact, treated the orthodox literary doctrine very much as the ancient Cortes of Castile were wont to treat the unconstitutional orders of kings,--they voted that these injunctions were to be obeyed and not executed--“obedicidas y no cumplidas,” thereby reconciling independence with a respectful attitude towards authority. Some were bold enough to say from the first that the end of comedy was to imitate life, and that their imitation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally became as fully established in theory as it always had been in practice. Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the slavishness of Spanish learned poetry and the vigorous independence of the native stage.