This motley company was dispersed later. In the revised version of The Palace of Art Calderón finds no place, and the omission causes no more surprise than the omission of ‘eastern Confutzee.’ He is admired as a splendid poet and a great dramatist, but we no longer see him, as Tennyson saw him in 1833, on a sublime and solitary pinnacle of glory—‘a poetical Melchisedec, without spiritual father, without spiritual mother, with nothing round him to explain or account for the circumstances of his greatness.’ As Trench says, there are no such appearances in literature, and Calderón has ceased to be a mystery or a miracle. Yet it was not unnatural that those who took the Schlegels for guides should see him in this light. The fact that the works of other Spanish dramatists were not easily obtainable necessarily gave an exaggerated idea of Calderón’s originality and importance, for it was next to impossible to compare him with his rivals. We are now more favourably situated. We know—what our grandfathers could not know—that Friedrich von Schlegel was as wrong as wrong can be when he assured the world that Calderón was too rich to borrow. In literature no one is too rich to borrow, and Calderón’s indebtedness to his predecessors is great. To give but one instance out of many: the Second Act of Los Cabellos de Absalón is taken bodily from the Third Act of Tirso de Molina’s sombre and sinister tragedy, La Venganza de Tamar.

This was no offence against the prevailing code of morality in literary matters. Most Spanish dramatists of this period borrowed freely. Lope de Vega, indeed, had such wealth of invention that he was never tempted in this way: so, too, he seldom collaborated. So far from being a help, this division of labour was almost an impediment to him, for he could write a hundred lines in the time that it took him to consult his collaborator. But Lope was unique. Manuel de Guerra, in his celebrated Aprobación to the Verdadera Quinta Parte of Calderón’s plays, calls him a monstruo de ingenio. The words recall the monstruo de naturaleza, the phrase applied by Cervantes to Lope, but there is a marked difference between the two men—a difference perhaps implied in the two expressions. Lope was possessed by an irresistible instinct which impelled him to constant, and often careless, creation; Calderón creates less lavishly, treats existing themes without scruple, and his recasts are sometimes completely successful. His devotees never allow us to forget, for instance, that in El Alcalde de Zalamea he has transformed one of Lope’s dashing improvisations into a most powerful drama, and they cite as a parallel case the Electra of Euripides and the Electra of Sophocles. Just so, when Calderón receives a prize at the poetical jousts held at Madrid in 1620-22, the extreme Calderonians are reminded of ‘the boy Sophocles dancing at the festival after the battle of Salamis.’ Why drag in Sophocles? There are degrees. It is quite true that Calderón has made an admirable play out of Lope’s sketch; but it is also true that the dramatic conception of El Alcalde de Zalamea is due to Lope, and not to Calderón.

Any other dramatist in Calderón’s place would have been compelled to accept the conventions which Lope de Vega had imposed upon the Spanish stage—conventional presentations of loyalty and honour. Calderón devoted his magnificent gifts to elaborating these conventions into something like a code. His readiness in borrowing may be taken to mean that he was not, in the largest sense, an inventor, and the substance of his plays shows that he was rarely interested in the presentation of character. But he had the keenest theatrical sense, and once he is provided with a theme he can extract from it an intense dramatic interest. Moreover, he equals Lope in the cleverness with which he works up a complicated plot, and surpasses Lope in the adroitness with which he employs the mechanical resources of the stage. In addition to these minor talents, he has the gift of impressive and ornate diction. It is a little unfortunate that many who read him in translations begin with La Vida es sueño, a fine symbolic play disfigured by the introduction of so incredible a character as Rosaura, declaiming gongoresque speeches altogether out of place. Calderón is liable to these momentary aberrations; yet, at his best, he is almost unsurpassable. Read, for example, the majestic speech of the Demon in El Mágico prodigioso which Trench very justifiably compares with Milton. The address to Cyprian loses next to nothing of its splendour in Shelley’s version:—

It was once the fashion to praise Calderón chiefly as a philosophic dramatist, and it may be that to this philosophic quality his plays owe much of the vogue which they once enjoyed—and which, in a much less degree, they still enjoy—in Germany. As it happens, only two of Calderón’s plays can be classified as philosophic—La Vida es sueño and En esta vida todo es verdad y todo es mentira—and, with respect to the latter, a question arises as to its originality. French writers have maintained that En esta vida is taken from Corneille’s Héraclius, while Spaniards argue that Corneille’s play is taken from Calderón’s. On a priori grounds we should be tempted to admit the Spanish contention, for Corneille was—I do not wish to put the point too strongly—more given to borrowing from Spain than to lending to contemporary Spanish playwrights. But there is the awkward fact that Héraclius dates from 1647, whereas En esta vida was not printed till 1664. This is not decisive, for we have seen that Calderón was not interested enough in his secular plays to print them, and we gather incidentally that En esta vida was being rehearsed at Madrid by Diego Osorio’s company in February 1659. How much earlier it was written, we cannot say at present. The idea that Calderón borrowed from the French cannot be scouted as impossible, for Corneille’s Cid was adapted by Diamante in 1658.102 Perhaps both Calderón and Corneille drew upon Mira de Amescua’s Rueda de la fortuna—a play which, as we know from Lope de Vega’s letter belittling Don Quixote, was written in 1604, or earlier. But, whichever explanation we accept, Calderón’s originality is compromised. With all respect to the eminent authorities who have debated this question of priority, we may be allowed to think that they have shown unnecessary heat over a rather unimportant matter. Neither Héraclius nor En esta vida is a masterpiece, and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo holds that En esta vida contains only one striking situation—the tenth scene in the First Act, when both Heraclio and Leonido claim to be the sons of Mauricio, and Astolfo refuses to state which of the two is mistaken:—

This amounts to saying that Calderón’s play is no great marvel, for very few serious pieces are ever produced on the stage unless the first act is good. The hastiest of impresarios, the laziest dramatic censor—even they read as far as the end of the First Act. But, if we give up En esta vida, Calderón is deprived of half his title to rank as a ‘philosophic’ dramatist. We still have La Vida es sueño, a noble and (apparently) original play disfigured, as I have said, by verbal affectations, such as the opening couplet on the

which is almost invariably quoted against the author. So, too, whenever La Vida es sueño is mentioned, we are almost invariably told that, as though to prove that life is indeed a dream, ‘a Queen of Sweden expired in the theatre of Stockholm during its performance.’ This picturesque story does not seem to be true, and, at any rate, it adds no more to the interest of the play than the verbal blemishes take from it. The weak spot in the piece is the sudden collapse of Segismundo when sent back to the dungeon, but otherwise the conception is admirable in dignity and force.

Many critics find these qualities in Calderón’s tragedies, and I perceive them in Amar después de la muerte. The scene in which Garcés describes how he murdered Doña Clara, and is interrupted by Don Álvaro with—

is, as Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo says, worthy of Shakespeare; and it long ago reminded Trench of the scene in Cymbeline where Iachimo’s confession—

is interrupted by Posthumus with—

But, for some reason, Amar después de la muerte is not among the most celebrated of Calderón’s tragic plays, and it is certainly not the most typical—not nearly so typical as Á secreto agravio secreta venganza, and two or three others. Here the note of genuine passion is almost always faint, and is sometimes wanting altogether. Othello murders Desdemona in a divine despair because he believes her guilty, and because he loves her: Calderón’s jealous heroes, with the exception of the Tetrarch in El Mayor monstruo los celos, commit murder as a social duty. In Á secreto agravio secreta venganza Don Lope de Almeida, with his interminable soliloquies, ceases to be human, and becomes the incarnation of (what we now think to be) a silly conventional code of honour. Doña Leonor in this play is not so completely innocent in thought as Doña Mencía in El Médico de su honra; but Don Lope de Almeida murders the one, and Don Gutierre Alfonso Solís murders the other, with the same cold-blooded deliberation shown in El Pintor de su deshonra by Don Juan de Roca, who has some apparent justification for killing Doña Serafina.

With all the skill spent on their construction, these tragedies do not move us deeply, and they would fail to interest, if it were not that they embody the accepted ideas concerning the point of honour in Spain during the seventeenth century. It is most difficult for us to see things as a Spaniard then saw them. He began by assuming that any personal insult could only be washed away by the blood of the offender: a man is killed in fair fight in a duel, but the survivors of the slain must slay the slayer. Modern Europe, as Chorley wrote more than half a century ago, has nothing like this, ‘except the terrible Corsican vendetta.’ And, as stated by the same great authority—the greatest we have ever had on all relating to the Spanish stage—‘beneath the unbounded devotion which the Castilian professed to the sex, lay a conviction of their absolute and universal frailty.’ In Spanish eyes ‘no woman’s purity,’ Chorley continues, ‘was safe but in absolute seclusion from men:—guilt was implied and honour lost in every case where the risk of either was possible,—nay, even had accident thrown into a temptation a lady whose innocence was proved to her master, the appearance of crime to the world’s eye must be washed out in her blood.’ It has often been said that, in Calderón, ‘honour’ is what destiny is in the Greek drama.

This code of honour seems to many of us immoral nonsense, and it is difficult to suppose that Friedrich von Schlegel had El Médico de su honra in mind when he declared Calderón to be ‘in all conditions and circumstances the most Christian ... of dramatic poets.’ It is hard to imagine anything more unchristian than the conduct of Don Gutierre Alfonso Solís which is held up for approval; but no doubt it was approved by contemporary playgoers. In this glorification of punctilio Calderón is thoroughly representative. He reproduces the conventional ideas which obtained for a certain time, in certain complicated conditions, in a certain latitude and longitude. This local verisimilitude, which contributed to his immediate success, now constitutes a limitation. The dramatist may be true to life, in so far as he presents temporary aspects of it with fidelity; he is not true to universal nature, and therefore he makes no permanent appeal. This, or something like it, has been said a thousand times, and, I think, with good reason. Still, it leaves Calderón where he was as the spokesman of his age.

He is no less representative in his comedias de capa y espada—his plays of intrigue, which are really dramatic presentations of ordinary contemporary manners in the vein of high comedy. Opponents of the Spanish national theatre have charged him with inventing this typical form of dramatic art, as though it were a misdemeanour. There is no sense in belittling so characteristic a genre, and no ground for ascribing the invention of cloak-and-sword plays to Calderón. They were being written by Lope de Vega before Calderón was born, and were still further elaborated by Tirso de Molina. Lope’s redundant genius adapts itself easily enough to the narrow bounds of the comedia de capa y espada, but he instinctively prefers a more spacious field. The very artificiality of such plays must have been an attraction to Calderón. All plays of this class are much alike. There are always a gallant and a lady engaged in a love-affair; a grim father or petulant brother, who may be a loose liver but is a rigid moralist where his own women-folk are concerned; a gracioso or buffoon, who comes on the scene when things begin to look dangerous. The material is the same in all cases; the playwright’s dexterity is shown in the variety of his arrangement, the ingenious novelty of the plot, the polite mirth of the dialogue, the apt introduction of episodes which revive or diversify the interest, and prolong it by leaving the personages at cross-purposes till the last moment. Calderón is a master of all the devices that help to make a good play of this kind. Character-drawing would be almost out of place, and, as character-drawing is Calderón’s weak point, one of his chief difficulties is removed. He is free to concentrate his skill on polishing witty ‘points,’ on contriving striking situations, and preparing deft surprises at which he himself smiles good-humouredly. The whole play is based on an idealistic convention, and Calderón displays a startling cleverness in conforming to the complicated rules of the game.

He fails at the point where the convention is weakest. His graciosos or drolls are too laboriously comic to be amusing. He has abundant wit, and the discreteo of the lover and the lady is often brilliant. But there is some foundation for the taunt that he is interested only in fine gentlemen and précieuses. He had not lived in courts and palaces for nothing. The racy, rough humour of the illiterate clearly repelled his fastidious temper, and the fun of his graciosos is unreal. This is what might be anticipated. It takes one cast in the mould of Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Lope, to sympathise with all conditions of men. Calderón fails in another point, and the failure is certainly very strange in a man of his meticulous refinement and social opportunities. With few exceptions, the women in his most famous plays are unattractive. A Spanish critic puts it strongly when he calls the women on Calderón’s stage hombrunas or mannish. No foreign critic would be brave enough to say this, but it is not an unfair description. A man’s idea of a womanly woman is often quaint: he sees her as something between a white-robed angel and a perfect imbecile. That is not Calderón’s way. Doña Mencía in El Médico de su honra and Doña Leonor in Á secreto agravio secreta venganza are distinctly formidable, and, even in the cloak-and-sword plays, there is something masculine in the academic preciosity of the lively heroines. It is manifest that Calderón has no deep knowledge of feminine character, that his interest in it is assumed for stage purposes, and that his chief preoccupation is—not to portray idiosyncrasies, nor even types of womanhood, but—to make physical beauty the theme of his eloquent, poetic flights. In this he succeeds admirably, though his flights are apt to be too long. You probably know Suppico de Moraes’ story of Calderón’s acting before Philip IV. in an improvisation at the Buen Retiro, the poet taking the part of Adam, and Vélez de Guevara that of God the Father. Once started, Calderón declaimed and declaimed, and, when he came to an end at last, Vélez de Guevara took up the dialogue with the remark: ‘I repent me of creating so garrulous an Adam!’ Most probably the tale is an invention,104 but it is not without point, for Philip and the rest would have been a match for Job, if they had never been bored with the favourite’s tirades. Like most Spaniards, Calderón is too copious; but in lyrical splendour he is unsurpassed by any Spanish poet, and is surpassed by few poets in any language. Had he added more frequent touches of nature to his idealised presentations, he would rank with the greatest dramatists in the world.

As it is, he ranks only just below the greatest, and in one dramatic form peculiar to Spain, he is, by common consent, supreme. Everybody quotes Shelley’s phrase about ‘the light and odour of the starry autos’; but scarcely anybody reads the autos, and I rather doubt if Shelley read them. It is suggested that he took an auto to mean an ordinary play, and this seems likely enough, for that is what an auto did mean at one time. But an auto sacramental in Calderón’s time was a one-act piece (performed in the open air on the Feast of Corpus Christi) in which the Eucharistic mystery was presented symbolically. We can imagine this being done successfully two or three times, but not oftener. The difficulty was extreme, and as a new auto—usually two new autos—had to be provided every year, authors had recourse to the strangest devices. There are autos in which Christ is symbolised by Charlemagne (surrounded by his twelve peers), or by Jason, or Ulysses; there are autos in which an attempt is made to evade the conditions by introducing saints famous for their devotion to the Eucharist. Such pieces are illegitimate: they are not really autos sacramentales, but comedias devotas.

Calderón treats the subject within the rigid limits of the convention,—as a doctrinal abstraction,—and he treats it in a spirit of the most reverential art. He does not fail even in El Valle de la Zarzuela, where he hampers himself by connecting the theme with one of Philip IV.’s hunting-expeditions. He tells us with a certain dignified pride that his autos had been played before the King and Council for more than thirty years, and he apologises for occasional repetitions by saying that these are not so noticeable at a distance of twenty years as when they occur between the covers of a book. But no apology is needed. Calderón dealt with his abstruse theme more than seventy times—not always with equal success, but never quite unsuccessfully, and never repeating himself unduly. This is surely one of the most dexterous exploits in literature, and Calderón appears to have done it with consummate ease. His reflective genius, steeped in dogma, was far more interested in the mysteries of faith than in the passions of humanity, far more interested in devout symbolism than in realistic characterisation. His figures are pale abstractions? Yes: but he compels us to accept them by virtue of his sublime allegory, his majestic vision of the world invisible, and the adorable loveliness of his lyrism.

His autos endured for over a century. As late as 1760 El Cubo de la Almudena was played on Corpus Christi at the Teatro del Príncipe in Madrid, while La Semilla y la cizaña was played at the Teatro de la Cruz. The autos were obviously dying; they were no longer given in the open air before the King and Court, and the devout multitude; they were shorn of their pomp, and played indoors before an indifferent audience amid irreverent remarks. On one occasion, according to Clavijo, after the actor who played the part of Satan had declaimed a passage effectively, an admirer in the pit raised a cheer for the devil:—¡Viva el demonio! There is evidence to prove that the public performance of the autos sacramentales was often the occasion of disorderly and scandalous scenes. Clavijo has been blamed for his articles in El Pensador matritense, advocating their suppression, and perhaps his motives were not so pure as he pretends. Yet he was certainly right in suggesting that the day for autos was over. They were prohibited on June 9, 1765. But they must soon have died in any case, for the supply had ceased, and later writers like Antonio de Zamora were mostly content to retouch Calderón’s autos.105 Zamora and Bancés Candamo were not the men to keep up the high tradition, and the attitude of the public had completely changed.

The fact that his autos sacramentales are little read in Spain, and are scarcely read at all out of Spain, is most unfortunate for Calderón, for his noblest achievement remains comparatively unknown. His reputation abroad is based on his secular plays which represent but one side of his delightful genius, and that side is not his strongest. The works of Lope de Vega and of Tirso de Molina have become available once more, and this circumstance has necessarily affected the critical estimate of Calderón as a dramatist. Paul Verlaine, indeed, persisted in placing him above Shakespeare, but Verlaine was the last of the Old Guard. Calderón is relatively less important than he was thought to be before Chorley’s famous campaign in The Athenæum: all now agree with Chorley that Calderón is inferior to Lope de Vega in creative faculty and humour, and inferior to Tirso de Molina in depth and variety of conception. But, when every deduction is made, Calderón is still one of the most stately figures in Spanish literature. Naturally a great lyric poet, his deliberate art won him a pre-eminent position among poets who used the dramatic form, and he lives as the typical representative of the devout, gallant, loyal, artificial society in which he moved. He is not, as once was thought, the synthesis of the Spanish genius, but no one incarnates more completely one aspect of that genius. Who illustrates better than the author of El Principe constante what Heiberg wrote of Spanish poets generally just ninety years ago:—‘Habet itaque poësis hispanica animam gothicam in corpore romano, quod orientali vestimento induitur; verum in intimo corde Christiana fides regnat, et per omnes se venas diffundit’? The same thought recurs in The Nightingale in the Study:—

To most of us, as to Lowell, the Spain of romance is the Spain revealed to us by Calderón. Though not the greatest of Spanish authors, nor even the greatest of Spanish dramatists, he is perhaps the happiest in temperament, the most brilliant in colouring. He gives us a magnificent pageant in which the pride of patriotism and the charm of gallantry are blended with the dignity of art and ‘the fair humanities of old religion.’ And unquestionably he has imposed his enchanting vision upon the world.

CHAPTER IX

THE DRAMATIC SCHOOL OF CALDERÓN

Lope de Vega, as I have tried to persuade you in a previous lecture, may fairly be regarded as the real founder of the national theatre in Spain. His victory was complete, and the old-fashioned Senecan drama was everywhere supplanted by the comedia nueva in which the ‘unities’ were neglected. Playwrights who could no longer get their pieces produced took great pains to prove that Lope ought to have failed, and dwelt upon the enormity of his anachronisms and geographical blunders. These groans of the defeated are always with us. Just as the pedant clamours for Shakespeare’s head on a charger, because he chose to place a seaport in Bohemia, so Andrés Rey de Artieda, in his Discursos, epístolas y epigramas, published under the pseudonym of Artemidoro in 1605, is indignant at the triumph of ignorant incapacity:—

The meaning of this little outburst is quite simple: it means that Rey de Artieda was no longer popular at Valencia, and that he and his fellows had had to make way on the Valencian stage for such followers of Lope de Vega as Francisco Tárrega, Gaspar de Aguilar, Guillén de Castro and Miguel Beneyto—all members of the Valencian Academia de los nocturnos, in which they were known respectively as ‘Miedo,’ ‘Sombra,’ ‘Secreto’ and ‘Sosiego.’

A very similar denunciation of the new school was published by a much greater writer in the same year. Cervantes ridiculed the comedia nueva as a pack of nonsense without either head or tail—conocidos disparates y cosas que no llevan pies ni cabeza; yet he dolefully admits that ‘the public hears them with pleasure, and esteems and approves them as good, though they are far from being anything of the sort.’ The long diatribe put into the mouth of the canon in Don Quixote is the plaint of a beaten man who calls for a literary dictatorship, or some such desperate remedy, to save him from Lope and the revolution. Whether Cervantes changed his views on the merits of the question, or whether he merely bowed to circumstances, we cannot say. But he tacitly recanted in El Rufián dichoso, and even defended the new methods as improvements on the old:—

Passing from theory to practice, Cervantes appeared as a very unsuccessful imitator of Lope de Vega in La Casa de los Celos ó las Selvas de Ardenio. The dictatorship for which he asked had come, but the dictator was Lope.

All Spanish dramatists of this period came under Lope’s influence. He was even more supreme in Madrid than in Valencia, and other provincial centres. He set the fashion to men as considerable as Vélez de Guevara, Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón himself. Lope and Ruiz de Alarcón were at daggers drawn; but these were personal quarrels, and, original as was Alarcón’s talent, the torch of Lope flickers over some of his best scenes. These men were much more than imitators. If Lope ever had a devoted follower, it was the unfortunate Juan Pérez de Montalbán; but even Pérez de Montalbán was not a servile imitator, and it was precisely his effort to develop originality that affected his reason. Lope’s influence was general; he founded a national drama, but he founded nothing which we can justly call a school—a word which implies a certain exclusiveness and rigidity of doctrine foreign to Lope’s nature. So far was he from founding a school that, towards the end of his life, he was voted rather antiquated, and this view was still more widely held during Calderón’s supremacy. In the autograph of Lope’s unpublished play, Quien más no puede, there is a note by Cristóbal Gómez, who writes—‘This is a very good play, but not suitable for these times, though suitable in the past; for it contains many endechas and many things which would not be endured nowadays; the plot is good, and should be versified in the prevailing fashion.’ This is dated April 19, 1669, less than forty years after Lope’s death; he was beginning to be forgotten by almost all, except the playwrights who stole from him.

Calderón, on the other hand, did found a school. For one thing, his conventionality and mannerisms are infinitely easier to imitate than Lope’s broad effects. ‘Spanish Comedy,’ as Mr. George Meredith says, ‘is generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as of marionettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troupe of the corps de ballet; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an animated shuffle of feet.’ Whatever we may think of this as a judgment on Spanish comedy as a whole, it describes fairly enough the dramatic work produced by many of Calderón’s followers: with them, if not with their master, art degenerates into artifice—a clever trick. Calderón himself seems to have grown tired of the praises lavished on his ingenuity. He knew perfectly that neatness of construction was not the best part of his work, and, in No hay burlas con el amor, he laughs at himself and his more uncritical admirers:—

Unfortunately these stage devices—these concealed lovers, these muffled mistresses, these houses with two doors, these walls with invisible cupboards, these compromising letters wrongly addressed—were precisely what appealed to the unthinking section of the public, and they were also the characteristics most easily reproduced by imitators in search of a short cut to success. Other circumstances combined to make Calderón the head of a dramatic school. Except in invention and in brilliant facility the dramatists of Lope’s time were not greatly inferior to the master. In certain qualities Tirso de Molina and Ruiz de Alarcón are superior to him: Tirso in force and in malicious humour, Ruiz de Alarcón in depth and in artistic finish. There is no such approach to equality between Calderón and the men of his group. No strikingly original dramatic genius appeared during his long life, extending over three literary generations. He himself had made no new departure, no radical innovation; he took over the dramatic form as Lope had left it, and, by focussing its common traits, he established a series of conventions—a conventional conception of loyalty, honour, love and jealousy. The stars in their courses fought for him. He was equally popular at court and with the multitude, pleasing the upper rabble by his glittering intrigue and dexterous discreteo, pleasing the lower rabble by his melodramatic incident and the mechanical humour of his graciosos, pleasing both high and low by his lofty Catholicism and passionate devotion to the throne. Though not in any real sense more Spanish than Lope de Vega, Calderón seems to be more intensely national, for he reduced the españolismo of his age to a formula. Out of the plays of Lope and of Tirso, he evolved a hard-and-fast method of dramatic presentation. He came at a time when it was impossible to do more. All that could be done by those who came after him was to emphasise the convention which, by dint of constant repetition, he had converted into something like an imperative theory.

It follows, as the night the day, that the monotony which has been remarked in Calderón’s plays is still more pronounced in those of his followers. The incidents vary, but the conception of passion and of social obligation is identical. The dramatists of Calderón’s school adopt his method of presenting the conventional emotions of loyalty, devotion, and punctilio as to the point of honour; and, having enclosed themselves within these narrow bounds, they are almost necessarily driven to exaggeration. This tendency is found in so powerful a writer as Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, of whom we know scarcely anything except that he was born at Toledo in 1607, and that he was on friendly terms with both the devout José de Valdivielso and the waggish Jerónimo de Cáncer—who in his Vejamen, written in 1649, gives a comical picture of the dignified dramatist tearing along in an undignified hurry. In 1644 Rojas Zorrilla was proposed as a candidate for the Order of Santiago, but the nomination was objected to on the ground that he was of mixed Moorish and Jewish descent, and that some of his ancestors two or three generations earlier had been weavers and carpenters. These allegations were evidently not proved, for Rojas Zorrilla became a Knight of the Order of Santiago on October 19, 1645. The autograph of La Ascensión del Cristo, nuestro bien states that this piece was written when the author was fifty-five: this brings us down to 1662. Rojas Zorrilla then disappears: the date of his death is unknown. The first volume of his plays was published in 1640, the second in 1645. In the preface to the second volume he makes the same complaint as Lope de Vega and Calderón—namely, that plays were fathered upon him with which he had nothing to do—and he promises a third volume which, however, was not issued.

It has been denied that Rojas Zorrilla belongs to Calderón’s school, and no doubt he was much more than an obsequious pupil. Yet he was clearly affiliated to the school. He belonged to the same social class as Calderón; he was seven years younger, and must have begun writing for the stage just when it became evident that Calderón was destined to succeed Lope de Vega in popular esteem; and, moreover, he actually collaborated later with Calderón in El Monstruo de la fortuna. It is hard to believe that Calderón, at the height of his reputation, would condescend to collaborate with a junior whose ideals differed from his own. No such difference existed: as might be expected from a disciple, Rojas Zorrilla is rather more Calderonian than Calderón. Out of Spain he is usually mentioned as the author of La Traición busca el castigo, the source of Vanbrugh’s False Friend and Lesage’s Le Traître puni; but, if he had written nothing better than La Traición busca el castigo, he would not rise above the rank and file of Spanish playwrights. His most remarkable work is García del Castañar, a famous piece not included in either volume of the plays issued by Rojas Zorrilla himself. The natural explanation would be that it was written after 1645, and this is possible. Yet it cannot be confidently assumed. As we have already seen, La Estrella de Sevilla is not contained in the collections of Lope’s plays. Plays were not included or omitted solely on their merits, but for other reasons: because they were likely to please ‘star’ actors, or because they had failed to please a particular audience.

The story of García del Castañar is so typical that it is worth telling. García is the son of a noble who had been compromised in the political plots which were frequent during the regency of the Infante Don Juan Manuel. He takes refuge at El Castañar near Toledo, lives there as a farmer, marries Blanca de la Cerda (who, though unaware of the fact, is related to the royal house), and looks forward to the time when, through the influence of his friend the Count de Orgaz, he may be recalled. News reaches him that an expedition is being fitted out against the Moors, and he subscribes so largely that his contribution attracts the attention of Alfonso XI., who makes inquiries about him. The Count de Orgaz takes this opportunity to commend García to the King’s favour, but dwells on his proud and solitary nature which unfits him for a courtier’s life. Alfonso XI. determines to visit García in disguise. Orgaz informs García of the King’s intention and adds that, as Alfonso XI. habitually wears the red ribbon of a knightly order, there will be no difficulty in distinguishing him from the members of his suite. Four visitors duly arrive at El Castañar, passing themselves off as hunters who have lost their way, and, as one of the four is decorated as described by Orgaz, García takes him to be the King. In reality he is Don Mendo, a courtier of loose morals. Unrecognised, Alfonso XI. converses with García, telling him of the King’s satisfaction with his gift, and holding out to him the prospect of a brilliant career at court: García, however, is not tempted, and declares his intention of remaining in happy obscurity. The hunting-party leaves Castañar; but Don Mendo, enamoured of Doña Blanca, returns next day under the impression that García will be absent. Entering the house by stealth, he is discovered by García who, believing him to be the King, spares his life. Don Mendo does not suspect García’s misapprehension, and retires, supposing that the rustic was awed by the sight of a noble. But the stain on García’s honour can only be washed away with blood. In default of the real culprit, he resolves to kill his blameless wife, who takes flight, and is placed by Orgaz under the protection of the Queen. García is summoned to court, is presented to the King, perceives that the foiled seducer was not his sovereign, slays Don Mendo in the royal ante-chamber, returns to the presence with his dagger dripping blood, and, after defending his action as the only course open to a man of honour, closes his eloquent tirade by declaring that, even if it should cost him his life, he can allow no one—save his anointed King—to insult him with impunity:—

Del Rey abajo, ninguno—‘None, under the rank of King’—is the alternative title of García del Castañar, and these four energetic words sum up the exaltation of monarchical sentiment which is the leading motive of the play. Buckle, writing of Spain, says in his sweeping way that ‘whatever the King came in contact with, was in some degree hallowed by his touch,’ and that ‘no one might marry a mistress whom he had deserted.’ This is not quite accurate. We know that, at the very time of which we are speaking, the notorious ‘Calderona’—the mother of Don Juan de Austria—married an actor named Tomás Rojas, and that she returned to her husband and the stage after her liaison with Philip IV. was ended. Still, it is true that reverence for the person of the sovereign was a real and common sentiment among Spaniards. Clarendon speaks of ‘their submissive reverence to their princes being a vital part of their religion,’ and records the horrified amazement of Olivares on observing Buckingham’s familiarity with the Prince of Wales—‘a crime monstrous to the Spaniard.’ This reverential feeling, like every other emotion, found dramatic expression in the work of Lope de Vega. It is the leading theme in La Estrella de Sevilla, and Lope has even been accused of almost blasphemous adulation by those who only know this celebrated play in the popular recast made at the end of the eighteenth century by Cándido María Trigueros, and entitled Sancho Ortiz de las Roelas. The charge is based on a well-known passage:—