But if the drama presents an adequate picture of the way men think and feel, contrariwise it influences their thoughts and feelings. It gives voice to the inclinations that they have repressed and by the vividness of its appeal enables them to carry into action the promptings of their hearts. The contagiousness of the emotions it arouses, the man to man address, give it a power incomparably greater than that of fiction. Far more wives left their husbands because Nora slammed the door in Torvald Helmer's face than ever men shot themselves because Werther suffered from the melancholia of the age. Though it must be admitted that suicide is a drastic and often painful affair. The dramatist not only represents the persons of his period, but by giving to their instinctive tendencies living shapes forms them after the pattern he has devised. So Mr. Coward not only portrayed the querulous frivolity of the decade that followed the Great War, but created a generation of querulously frivolous people. It is owing to this power that the playwright wields, that the church has always, and it may be with wisdom, looked upon the drama askance.
Now when you come to study the Spanish theatre from this point of view you make some very interesting discoveries. The field is enormous and I do not suppose even the most industrious student has completely covered it. Lope de Vega alone wrote as many plays as all the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists put together. He is said to have written two thousand two hundred. Nearly five hundred of these are extant. I have read twenty-four. It may seem impertinent to speak of a writer of whose work you claim to know but a fragment. I remember the story of Mr. Page, the publisher, who refused a certain novel that was sent him; the author then wrote an indignant letter telling him that she had stuck together two pages and since, when the novel was returned to her they were still stuck, it proved conclusively that he had not read her manuscript. 'Madam,' replied Mr. Page, 'it is not necessary to eat a whole egg to know that it is bad.'
For my part I have read with pleasure the twenty-four plays of Lope de Vega that have come my way, but I find in myself no overwhelming desire to read more. His fertility was of course amazing and fertility is a quality to be praised in an author. It denotes physical energy, a gift a writer can as little do without as a tennis player, vitality, power of invention and variety of interest, which may from time to time create a masterpiece. I do not believe in your constipated geniuses. Lope de Vega said he had written twenty sheets every day of his life and more than a hundred comedies in twenty-four hours apiece. His contemporaries called him the Phœnix of Wits and Cervantes described him as a Prodigy of Nature. The reader (if he knows anything about men of letters) will, however, not be surprised to learn that there was no love lost between the two greatest authors of their time; and Lope, writing a chatty letter to a friend, remarked that there was no one so stupid as to praise Don Quixote. Lope's first acted play was written when he was twelve and for hard on fifty years he was supreme in the theatre. When the younger generation came knocking at the door he firmly put his foot against it. He had a small pension from the king and as a retainer of the great house of Manrique enjoyed the emoluments of a chaplaincy at Avila; but his main source of livelihood was his pen. The managers paid fifty ducats for a play. A ducat was worth five shillings, but so far as I can make out its purchasing power was about equal to that of a pound. Since this does not mean very much I have had the curiosity to note the relative prices that were paid for certain commodities. According to the contriver in Cervantes' Coloquio de Cipión y Berganza a man could live on a real and a half a day, and there were eleven reals in a ducat. From La Gitanilla I gather then ten ducats was a good price to pay for a donkey; fifty, as I have just said, for a three-act play; and when Cervantes was rescued from slavery in Algiers his ransom was five hundred. On the other hand when a middle-aged gentleman desired to be rid of Cervantes' daughter, who had been living under his protection, he had to provide her with a house and two thousand ducats. From this it is evident that a play was worth ten times as much as a donkey and a man of genius fifty times; but a maiden's innocence was worth more than four times as much as a man of genius. The price of a virtuous woman, as we know, is far above rubies.
Though certain critics carped (as critics will) because they thought that Lope did not pay sufficient respect to the precepts of antiquity, the public acclaimed him with a united voice. He was a popular dramatist. In that fortunate age this was not a term of reproach and Lope was thought highly of not only by the vulgar, but by the great, the good and the intelligent. Though from time to time (as authors will) he spoke bitterly of the public it was their suffrage he sought. 'If anyone should cavil at my plays,' he said, 'and think that I wrote them for fame, undeceive him and tell him that I wrote them for money.' He wrote to please. He was one of the few professional writers of his day and he had the professional writer's merits: he wasted no time on exposing his subject; incident followed incident, if not always with probability, generally with dramatic effect; his language was easy and natural, his dialogue pointed and quick. The necessity of getting through within a certain time and the greater necessity of holding the attention of an audience saved him from the two defects most common to Spanish literature, diffuseness and digression. Critics nowadays complain that the ending of his plays is hurried and it is true that in the study the knots seem to be cut rather than untied. He was an improviser, and with the improviser it is always the same thing: his theme and his beginning, which he owes to his native inspiration, are for the most part brilliant; but when his inspiration fails him he has no solid sense of construction on which to fall back nor the energy of mind to enable him by the exercise of reason to bring his work to a logical conclusion. But I am not sure if these scamped endings of Lope's were offensive in performance. He knew that when you have interested your public in the presentation of your subject and held them, by the display of unexpected or thrilling events, during its development, when the end is in sight you had better come to it as quickly as possible. The audience are done with you and so long as they can get out of the theatre speedily do not care much what means you use to give them their liberty. They are quick to see the upshot and easily bored if a sense of propriety induces you to gather all your threads together into a single pattern. They will take an astonishing amount for granted. The wise author brings down his curtain while his audience are still under the spell.
In the intolerable La Arcadia Lope makes one of his characters say: 'Not only must the poet know all the sciences, or at least their elements, but he must have the greatest experience of all things that happen on land or sea . . . he must know as well the habit and the way of life, and the customs of all manner of people; and finally all those things of which they speak, treat and have their being . . . ' It is an ideal at which none must more deliberately aim than the dramatist. Certainly Lope de Vega put himself in the way of gaining the experience that would be useful to him. His life, a long story of romantic adventures, violent passions and domestic virtue, reads like one of his own cape and sword plays. His first notable love affair was with the daughter of one actor and the wife of another. When she abandoned him for a more opulent admirer he revenged himself by writing scurrilous verses about her family. He was arrested, brought to trial and on pain of death exiled from Madrid. But in a short time he returned and ran away with Isabel de Urbina, whose father was King-at-Arms. He married her and immediately set sail in the Great Armada. He used the paper on which he had written verses to the fickle actress as gun-wads. He saw his brother killed by his side. His wife died and three years later he married the daughter of a pork-butcher. In the interval he was prosecuted for his relations with a certain Antonia Trillo and fell in love with an actress called Micaela de Lujan. He had children by his wife and children by his mistress. By a happy coincidence each was brought to bed of a son, one only a few months after the other, and he proudly called them Lope Felix and Carlos Felix respectively. The pork-butcher's daughter died in childbirth about the middle of August in 1613; and in September Lope in the retinue of Philip III went to Segovia. He lived with the actress Jeronima de Burgos: 'Here I have seen the lords prowling around my house,' he writes; 'the gallants come, but with less money than we needed.' It looks as if the Phœnix of the Age was not above a bit of pimping when the occasion arose. At the beginning of the following year, being then a little over fifty, he determined to enter the priesthood and in March 1614 was ordained. His fertility did not abandon him, for he had two children by Marta de Nevares Santoyo, whom he celebrated as Amarilis in an eclogue, and continued to write plays, a great deal of poetry and some prose. He was a conscientious priest. He belonged to a pious fraternity that buried poor clerics, clothed the naked and assisted the needy; and as a familiar of the Inquisition he presided over the burning of a heretic monk. He performed these duties with Christian charity. He had an oratory in his modest house and spent there much time in prayer. He scourged himself so that the walls of his room were spattered with blood. Fray Francisco de Peralta in the sermon he preached at his funeral related that once a man came to his house and challenged him to a duel.
'Let us go outside,' he cried, drawing his sword.
'Let us go,' answered Lope, slowly putting on his cloak, 'I to the altar to say mass, and your worship to assist me.'
When he was buried, a great throng following, the funeral procession went out of the direct path so that it might pass by the convent of the Trinitarian nuns where his bastard daughter had taken the vows.
Though Lope de Vega wrote plays of all kinds, romantic, historical, pastoral and religious, his fame rests chiefly on the comedies of intrigue known as cape and sword. These present a vivid and varied picture of life as it may have been led during the Golden Age. His plays can be read with interest; a warmer feeling than that, they can now excite in few. With all his fluency, profuse invention, eye for dramatic effect and nimble sense of life's multifarious scene, he had a commonplace mind. He was a good-natured normal, sensual man. In fact he was exactly what a dramatist should be if he is to have success. His personality was of no great importance. His characterisation is thin and there is not one of his noble, passionate heroes that can be distinguished from another. Sometimes his women have the rudiments of individuality and occasionally show a trace of sardonic humour. His men never. His heroines know what they want, a man, and have no hesitation in using every means at hand to get him. Lope's great subject matter is love, love at first sight, of a devastating kind, which stops at nothing to obtain its satisfaction; but a reputable love for the most part, whose end is marriage: the great lord may have no intention of fulfilling his promises, but his lady will not admit him to her bed till he has made them. And oddly enough it is a love that ceases as suddenly as it arose when marriage is out of the question. So, in Lo Cierto por lo Dudoso, Don Pedro, the king, is enamoured of Doña Juana and when she tells him that his brother, Don Enrique, has kissed her, in his fury gives orders that he shall be killed; but no sooner does he discover that Doña Juana and Don Enrique are already married than his passion is immediately extinguished and he gives the pair his blessing. And in another play, called Por la Puente, Juana, when a nobleman gets the object of his affections alone on an island in the Tagus she has but to tell him (in a hundred and fifty lines) the story of her life for him to hand her over to her affianced husband. Indeed he carries his generosity so far as to provide her with a dowry.
It would be impertinent in a foreigner to attempt to judge the merit of Lope's verse. I can recognise its ease and grace. It is not often monotonous. In his frequent scenes of rapid, broken dialogue he manages with uncommon skill to preserve the pattern. But I do not feel anywhere the ring of true poetry. When he indulges in general reflections he is platitudinous and it requires a good deal of patience to read him when he breaks into a purple passage. You wish then that the Renaissance had never rediscovered Antiquity so that you might have been spared these tedious allusions to the gods of Greece and the iron-hearted heroes of Rome. And there must be few who can suffer gladly the carnations of so many ladies' cheeks, the pearls of their teeth, the snow of their brow and the marble of their hands.
But what a happy state of affairs when an audience was ravished by verse for its own sake! Of course few people could read and their ears were more sensitive than ours. Books were scarce; the reader will remember that in the castle of so respectable a family as the Loyolas there were but two books. I think it is not merely patriotic bias that makes me believe that in an English country house of the same standing you would find to-day not only the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, but also a good many bound volumes of Punch and Ruff's Guide to the Turf. I know little of the mysteries of versification and I must accept from the histories of literature the fact that Lope de Vega was a master of all its forms. His plays, to tell the truth, can be best appreciated if you look upon them as operatic 'books' in which verse takes the place of music. He will write a bravura passage in which three persons, for instance, embroider upon an idea, each one ending his speech with the same refrain, so that you can almost hear the burst of applause that greets the ingenuity. Sometimes a character will present a theme in four lines and then enlarge upon it in stanzas each of which ends with one of the four lines. It is as much a set aria as La Donna è mobile. In one of his plays that I have read all the soliloquies are cast in sonnet form. It gives a formal distinction that must have been very grateful to an audience sensible to such elegances. It further gives the soliloquies a pleasing brevity. I have read somewhere that the courtiers of Philip III used to amuse themselves by carrying on among themselves conversations in verse. It was an amiable accomplishment.
Theatres were originally the yards of houses. At the back was the stage and persons of quality viewed the play from the windows of the houses built round the yard. In the yard stood the populace. Raised benches surrounded it for those who could afford to pay for seats, and the women sat in a gallery, called the cazuela or stew-pan, which had a separate entrance and into which men were not admitted. Nevertheless it was hard to keep them out, and I have read that Bernardo de Soto having got in raised the petticoats and touched the legs of the women who were watching the play, by which great scandal was occasioned. So keen was the demand for seats that sometimes windows and benches were left as heirlooms. The public that stood in the pit, students, artisans and ruffians, was most disorderly. As many of them as could got in without paying and there were frequent brawls at the door as they tried to force their way past the doorkeeper who took the entrance money. Once in they waited noisily. Itinerant vendors walked about crying their wares (as they still do at bull-fights), selling fruit and candy; someone would throw down money in a handkerchief and the vendor, wrapping up in it what was wanted, would throw it back. Now and then a spectator would be tapped on the shoulder and asked if he would pay for a dozen oranges for a woman he had ogled in the stew-pan. Performances began at two in winter and at three in summer. They were given by the light of day and at first under the open sky so that a downpour of rain cut the play short and the money was returned. At the appointed hour, more or less, the musicians appeared, with guitars and harps, and sang a ballad. After this a member of the company came on the stage and recited a monologue, called a loa, which was designed to put the spectators in good humour. Then the first act of the play was given. It proceeded in so great an uproar that the words could often not be heard. When the public were displeased they broke into shrill whistles, cat-calls and scurrilous abuse. The women in the stew-pan were as vociferous as the men in the pit. But when they were moved by a noble sentiment or charmed by an adroit piece of versification they shouted Victor, Victor! To prevent the audience from being bored a short, often topical, farce followed the first act.
This was called an entremes. It was accompanied by music and ended with a dance. Then came the second act, another entremes, and the last act. But the public had a passion for short pieces called jacaras, which were roistering ballads in thieves' slang, and the mob clamoured for them at every interval. A final dance brought the proceedings to a close. The audience surely got their money's worth.
It is plain from these interruptions how little they cared to preserve the illusion of reality. Each act was almost a self-subsistent part of the general entertainment. The audience were not, one imagines, expected to enter into the emotions of the characters represented, but rather with cool minds to watch them. So they were able to give more attention to the ingenuity of the intrigue and the elegance, the variety and the appositeness of the language. Thus there was small reason why improbability and incoherence should incommode them. So long as a situation was effective they were not such fools as to ask how it had been come by.
I should like to give some description of one of Lope's plays, but it so happens that the play that I find most interesting was not written by him at all. It is called La Estrella de Sevilla and is printed in all the editions of his works. The experts however have shown (I do not know how, for I have not read their remarks) that Lope did not write it, and it remains of unknown authorship. Still, it has so many of his characteristics, it is so typical of the drama of the period, its characters and their motives conform so well with the prepossessions of the Spaniards of that day, that it does not matter who wrote it. It is an interesting piece, and I should think would act uncommonly well.
Don Sancho the Brave, King of Castile, makes a state entry into Seville and among the crowd who watch his progress catches sight of a most lovely young woman seated at her window. In the Spanish way he falls violently in love with her. She is known as the Star of Seville. Her name is Estrella, and this is very unfortunate, for it gives the various characters in the play an opportunity, which they seize with one accord, to be abundantly poetic. They play upon the name in harmonious numbers and show their wit in all manner of conceits. Even the heroine, when catastrophe befalls her, bewails her fate with every possible reference to her pretty name. She is the sister of a brave and gallant gentleman, Busto Tavera by name. The king is determined to gratify his desire that very night. His confidant suggests that Tavera should be granted favours and the king, sending for him, appoints him Commander of the troops on the frontier. When Tavera declines the honour he makes him a gentleman in waiting at his court. He declares besides that he will marry Estrella according to her station. Now Estrella loves, and is loved by, a gentleman of Seville, Don Sancho Ortiz, and their marriage has been arranged. When Tavera, suspicious because the king has thus favoured him, tells them that his royal master has decided to dispose of her himself, and dower her, they are dismayed. Night comes and the king, disguised, is wandering about Estrella's house. Tavera comes out and recognises him. The king tells him that he desires to see his house, but Tavera, though with respect, refuses him admission. Don Arias, the confidant, however manages to get in and telling Estrella of the king's passion offers her on his behalf the wealth of Castile. He offers her towns of which she shall be suzerain and for husband a gentleman of birth. The virtuous creature refuses with scorn. Then he suborns her slave and maidservant. Under a promise in black and white (since the promises of kings are often broken), of freedom and a thousand ducats a year, she agrees to betray her mistress. When Tavera is out and not expected back till dawn she introduces the king into the house. But before he has set eyes on Estrella, Tavera returns and, coming upon a strange man, is about to kill him when the king (not so brave as his name indicates) tells him who he is. Busto Tavera feigns not to believe him. It is impossible that the king, disguised and alone, should have forced his way into his loyal subject's house and he swears to punish the intruder for venturing to make such a pretence. Swords are drawn. The noise brings in servants and in the confusion the king escapes. Tavera guesses that it is the slave who has let the king in and forces her to confess. He upbraids his sister for having thus dishonoured him, but convinced by her protestations that she was no party to what has happened, decides to marry her at once to Don Sancho Ortiz. For himself he will seek safety in flight.
The king, frustrated and angry, decides to have Tavera killed. His confidant suggests a safe man to do the deed. This is no other than Don Sancho Ortiz. While they are talking they see a body swinging from a rope. It is the slave with the king's written promise in her hand. The king sends for Don Sancho and orders him to kill a man who has grossly outraged him. He promises in reward to grant him any boon he asks. He tells him that he may kill the man by guile, but this Don Sancho proudly refuses to do; he will kill him only in fair fight. The king gives him a written order so that he may disculpate himself, but Don Sancho, very imprudently trusting in the king's word, tears it up. Then the king hands him another paper on which is written the victim's name. When Don Sancho leaves the palace the news is brought him that Tavera has decided that he shall marry Estrella immediately. He is transported with delight. But he opens the paper the king has given him and sees with horror that it is Tavera he must kill. He loves him more than a brother; he realises that if he kills him he will lose Estrella; but his hesitation is short; his loyalty to the king bids him put away his private feelings, and meeting Tavera he picks a quarrel and kills him. The dying man leaves Estrella to his protection. The alcaldes of the city come, accompanied by guards, and arrest him. While Estrella is dressing for her wedding the alcaldes bring to the house the body of Busto Tavera and tell her that it is her lover who has killed him.
(Attaboy, that'll knock 'em. Gee!)
The king is informed that Don Sancho confesses to the murder, but will not say why he committed it, whereupon he sends to him with the command that he shall tell his reasons for the wilful deed and if he has a paper to prove what he says, produce it. Don Sancho says that he has no paper (we have indeed seen him destroy it before the king's eyes) and being sworn to secrecy can say nothing. Though betrayed, he will not betray. Then Estrella goes to the king and begs him to give up Don Sancho to her so that she may herself avenge her murdered brother. The king, thinking she will kill him and glad of a way out of his very awkward predicament, gives her an order to the governor of the prison. She presents herself disguised and when her lover is handed over to her, tells him that she has provided for him a horse and money so that he may escape. Don Sancho, not recognising her (it was well known that when you were disguised even your own mother couldn't know you) desires to know to whom he owes his liberty and eventually forces her to discover herself. When he sees Estrella he refuses to accept it and notwithstanding her entreaties returns to his prison. Meanwhile, Don Arias, the confidant, has tried to induce the king to acknowledge that Tavera was murdered by his order; but this the king cannot bring himself to do. He fears the anger of Seville and the effect on Castile of a report of such treachery. The resourceful confidant then suggests that he should persuade the justices to commute the death penalty to banishment. The justices are sent for. The king gives them plausible reasons for the step he desires them to take, but they plead the majesty of the law; they represent the king and, though as vassals he may command them anything, as judges they must act according to their conscience: Don Sancho must die. The king is troubled and confused; he is indeed in a most embarrassing situation. Now Don Sancho and Estrella are introduced. Don Sancho still refuses to speak. He demands death so that he may atone for the killing of his friend. The king is shattered by all this nobility and admits at last that it was he who gave the order for Tavera's despatch. The justices yield; if the king did this it could only be because he had just cause; not theirs to reason why. Don Sancho, exonerated, will go into voluntary exile and reminding the king of his promise to grant him whatever boon he demands asks that Estrella should become his wife. The king, perhaps thinking that she has caused him quite enough trouble, is willing, but Estrella declares that she cannot eat the bread and sleep in the bed of Busto Tavera's assassin.
'Sir,' she tells the king, 'though I love and adore him, the man who killed my brother can never be my spouse.'
'And I,' adds Sancho, somewhat tamely, 'though I love her, see that it would be unjust.'
Thus the play ends. Not the least of its merits is that it has hardly any comic relief. You would have thought that with ballads and dances and comediettas during the intervals the Spanish audience had enough distraction to enable them to support the seriousness of a three-act play. Not so. The comic servant was obligatory. His business was to pair off with the heroine's maid, and in La Hermosa Fea, as though Lope were ridiculing the tedious convention, the Gracioso complains that for once there is no waiting woman for him to marry. But I have a notion that his dramatic purpose was not only to give the groundlings occasion for laughter: with his realistic attitude and caustic sarcasm he represented the opposition of common sense to the idealism and high-flown bombast of the other personages. They might sacrifice themselves for love or duty, they might risk their lives for honour's sake, the Gracioso was there to point out that a wench, a square meal and a whole skin were better than all your heroics. He was so popular a figure because he corresponded with something deep and permanent in the Spanish temper. They have always recognised that there were two sides in them, and that is why (somewhat late in the day, it is true), they have accepted Cervantes' immortal novel as a true epitome of their character. They are at the same time the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance and Sancho Panza. Perhaps they were never more conscious of this than during the Golden Age. They had conquered vast empires in America and all Europe acknowledged their power; but they were hungry, they were hungry all the time. Some force impelled them to foolhardy adventures of universal conquest, and to the even more perilous adventures of the spirit, and they hazarded them because they could not help themselves; but all the time, at the back of their minds, was the uneasy feeling that all this was moonshine, and a full belly and a bed to sleep on were the only realities.
Lope had a lively sense of humour and he made his Graciosos living persons; they were ingenious rascals, ironists with a cynical wit; but with Calderon they are only ignorant clowns. Calderon had no vestige of humour and his comic servants are of a monstrous dullness. Outside Spain Calderon is the most celebrated of the Spanish dramatists. The romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century held him in high esteem and their judgment has been accepted by succeeding generations who have not much bothered about him, La Vida es Sueño has the reputation of being a great play. I am not sure that it is his best. I think it is more admired than read. Calderon had of course notable merits. He had the mystical feeling, common to many Spaniards of his age, that the world of sense we live in is but a part of the spiritual world and to this owes its significance. It gives certain of his plays a nobility that dramatists have seldom achieved. They say he was a great poet, but speaking with the diffidence proper to a foreigner, I should have said that it was his mind that was poetic; to me his verse is monotonous and the conceits with which, following the fashion of the time, he stuffed it full, are wearisome. He had an intolerable verbosity, and when he sets out on a poetic flight it seems as though nothing could stop him. He had little power of invention. He had no sense of character. Few of his personages live. But he had personality, a grim, cold and yet passionate personality; and personality, I think, is the only thing that keeps a writer alive. With all his faults he can be read now more easily than Lope de Vega. There is in such of his plays as I have read (for I have read but a dozen out of the couple of hundred he wrote) a sense of the mystery of things that can hardly fail to move. You seem to hear in the distance, faintly audible, while this or the other is happening, the sinister drums of unseen powers. But it is not my business to offer the reader a criticism of Calderon. My interest in him is for the light he throws on the character of the Spaniards of his day. His great success proves that his instincts corresponded with the prepossessions of his audience.
His religious sense was profound, and indeed, after having a natural son or two, he was ordained. (The Spanish writers were prolific not only with their pens; they produced enough bastards to man a regiment and fill the nunneries of a fair-sized town.) He was passionately faithful to the Church and only naturally expected the Church to do the right thing by him. When he was not given certain preferment that he expected he wrote to the Cardinal-Archbishop and said he would write no more plays till the injustice was remedied. It was. Happy days for the dramatist! Now, a playwright's decision to write no more would be accepted with equanimity. At the time he wrote the condition of Spain was desperate; ruin faced the country and a large part of its territory was wrested from the Spanish crown. The Spaniards clung all the more fiercely to the faith that had once seemed their greatest glory. But it was a cruel faith, cruel to those that practised its precepts and cruel to those that neglected them. With many it was no more than an extravagant and senseless superstition. In an outrageous play called La Devocion de la Cruz, Calderon allows his hero, guilty of shocking crimes, to be saved because he has always had a devotion to the Cross, and while he committed them had consistently trusted in its efficacy for salvation. And Don Fernando, Prince of Portugal, when captured by the King of Morocco refuses to allow the city of Ceuta to be surrendered to ransom him because the Portuguese had made it Catholic and he could not suffer its churches to be turned into mosques. The thought of it in his own words strikes him mute (which however does not prevent him from going on for another hundred lines), takes his breath away, chokes him with pain, breaks his heart, raises his hair on end and leaves him all of a tremble.
But in this scene there are two fine lines. The audience may very well have thought them sublime.
Por qué ne me das á Ceuta? Porque es de Dios y no es mia.
'Why,' the king asks his captive, 'will you not give me Ceuta?' 'Because it is God's, not mine.'
Another thing that makes Calderon's plays interesting is his preoccupation with the point of honour, and here again one can imagine that he faithfully portrayed the ruling passion of the times. For honour was an obsession. It is not too much to say that it was as strong a motive for the Spaniard's fidelity to the church as was his fear of hell. Even the picaroons are sensitive of their honour and will stick at nothing to avenge an affront upon it. A slight unknown to any but him who suffers it, a suspicion thrown on the virtue of his wife, though he knows it to be unfounded, will rankle, depriving a man of sleep, driving him crazy, till he can wipe it out in blood. In no play of Calderon's is this more clearly shown than in El Medico de su Honra. Though he loves his wife passionately and knows that she loves him, when Don Gutierre discovers that the king's brother has taken a fancy to her he is distracted with jealousy. Doña Mencia, his wife, has refused to listen to the prince's declarations, but he knows that the prince has set foot in his house. He has no doubt that she is faithful to him, but cannot endure the outrage to his honour. He kills her in cold blood. And in El Alcalde de Zalamea, to my mind Calderon's finest play, the mayor when the captain of a troop on the march to Portugal seizes and rapes his daughter, begs the seducer on his bended knees to marry her. Though a peasant he is rich and he offers the seducer all his fortune if he will make good by marriage the wrong he has done. The captain scornfully refuses to mingle his noble blood with that of a peasant. When the mayor realises that the captain will not make amends, sternly, but with expressions of great respect for his quality, he has him strangled. Only thus can the injury be satisfied.
The life of the actors was, as Cervantes said, one of intolerable labour. They were up at dawn to learn their parts. They rehearsed from nine to twelve, dined and went to the theatre; they left it at seven; and then, however tired, if important people wanted them, the mayor, the judge or what not, off they had to traipse and give a show. They earned their bread in the sweat of their brows; and Agustin de Rojas, of whom I have already spoken, said that there was not a negro in Spain nor a slave in Algiers whose lot was harder than theirs. He has left a lively picture of the life led by these strolling players on the road. Agustin de Rojas was celebrated for the loas he wrote, the monologues with which the performances at the theatre began, and wanting to publish them he hit upon an ingenious device. He contrived a series of conversations between four actors, Rios, Ramirez, Solano and himself, as they wandered from city to city to fulfil their engagements, and to while away the tediousness of the journeys, for they went on foot, he recited to them his loas. His companions must have been good natured to listen to some of them. Their ingenuity is very trying. They bristle with conceits and abound in learning, biblical, mythological and historical. Some praise the merits of the cities the actors are about to visit; there is one in praise of the letter A and another in praise of the days of the week. The amusing ones are those in which the author vivaciously narrates his own adventures. Perhaps the reader will not have forgotten the curious love story that emerges from his tale. Fortunately he needed a good deal of padding, and between his recitations the four players talk of one thing and another. On one occasion Rios recounts his experiences on a certain journey as follows.
'We left the city of Valencia, Solano and I, on account of a misfortune, one of us on foot and without a cloak, and the other walking and with only a doublet. We gave our traps to a boy who got lost in the town and so we were left gentlemen of the road. We arrived at a village at night, exhausted, with only eight cuartos between us. Having nothing to eat we went to a hostelry and asked for a bed, but they said there was none to be had because there was a fair. Seeing the small chance there was of our finding one, I went to an inn and said that I was a merchant from the Indies. The hostess asked me if we had pack-horses and I answered that we had come by cart and that while our goods were coming she should make us up a couple of beds and prepare supper. She did so, and I went to the mayor of the village and telling him that a company of players was passing through asked his leave to act a play. He asked me if it was religious. I told him it was and he gave me leave; I went back to the inn and told Solano to run over the auto of Cain and Abel and then go to a certain place and collect money because we were to give a show that night. Meanwhile I went to look for a drum, made a beard out of a piece of sheepskin and went through the whole village announcing my play. There were a lot of people in the place and many came. This done, I put the drum aside, took off my beard and going to the hostess told her that my goods were arriving and she must give me a key to the door of my room so that I could lock them up. She asked me what they were and I said grocery. She gave me the key and I took the sheets off the bed and pulled down an old hanging and two or three bits of stuff and so that I shouldn't be seen coming down, made them into a bundle, threw it out of the window and flew down like the wind. When I got to the yard the host called me and said: Master Indian, d'you want to see a show by some strolling players who have just come? It's good. I said I'd go and hurriedly went to look for the things that we were to act our play with, but though I looked everywhere I couldn't find them. Faced with this blow as the job might get me a whipping, I ran to where Solano was taking in the money, told him what had happened and said that he must stop collecting and we'd better make ourselves scarce with the cash. . . . That night we didn't go far and we kept off the high road, and in the morning we counted our money. We found three and a half reals in small change. Picture us wandering on, with money, but a bit scared; after about a league we saw a hovel, and when we reached it they treated us to wine from a gourd, milk from a trough and bread from saddle-bags. We had breakfast and that night got to another village where we set about earning our supper. I asked for leave to give a performance, got a couple of sheets, advertised the show, got a guitar, invited the woman of the inn and told Solano to collect the money. Finally, before a full house, I came out and sang the ballad, 'Afuera, afuera; aparta, aparta'; after one couplet I dried up and the public couldn't make it out, but Solano began a loa and so made up for the shortage of music. I dressed myself in a sheet and began my part, and when Solano appeared as God the Father, with the other sheet on, but open in the middle, his beard stained with grape-skins and a candle in his hand, I thought I should die of laughing. The wretched public didn't know what had happened to him. After this I came on as a clown and did my entremes, then went on with the play; but when I came to the point of killing the 'miserable Abel I'd forgotten the knife to cut his throat, so I took off my beard and cut it with that. It caused an uproar and the crowd began to yell. I begged them to forgive our shortcomings as the company hadn't arrived yet. At last the audience struck and the inn-keeper came and told us to get out because they wanted to give us a hiding. On this grand advice we made tracks and went off that very night with no more than the five reals we'd made. After spending this, selling the little we had left, often eating the mushrooms that we picked by the way, sleeping on the ground, walking barefoot (not on account of the mud, but because we had no shoes), helping the muleteers to load up, watering mules, and living for more than four days on turnips, we slunk in to an inn one night where four carters who were there gave us twenty maravedis and a blood-pudding to give them a show. Leading this wretched existence, with all these misfortunes, we reached the end of our journey, Solano in his doublet, without his coat (which he'd pawned at an inn), and I bare-legged and shirtless, with a great straw hat full of holes, dirty linen breeches and my coat all torn and threadbare. I was in such rags I made up my mind to take a job with a pastry-cook, but Solano was so grand he wouldn't work. And then all of a sudden, when we were in this mess we heard the beating of a drum and a boy advertising a show: the good play, Los Amigos Trocados, is being presented to-night at the town-hall. When I heard this my eyes opened as wide as a calf's. We spoke to the boy and when he recognised us he dropped his drum and began to dance for joy. I asked him if he had any money hidden away and he took out what he had wrapped in the tail of his shirt. We bought bread, cheese and a cut of dried cod (which was very good there) and after eating went to find the manager (who was Martinazos), but I don't know whether he was glad to see us when he saw how beggarly we were. Anyhow he greeted us and after we'd given him an account of all our trials, we had dinner and then he told us to delouse ourselves, because he was going to let us act and he didn't want a lot of lice in the costumes. That night, in fact, we helped him and next day he gave us a contract for three quarters of a real per show . . . We led this cheerful life for rather more than four weeks, eating little, travelling a lot, with our properties on our backs, and never saw a bed the whole blessed time.'
I do not imagine that anyone can read this story without thinking it lucky for Rios that he had high spirits. He must have been a man whom it was difficult to disconcert. He was certainly no fool. When one of the party lamented the fickleness of some young person who had left him when he had no more money, he delivered himself of the following remarks:
'Brother,' he said, 'women are like bird-lime; good at sticking and bad at letting go. When a man spends his money on them and gives them presents, they do the dirty on him. And if he gives them nothing they say he's as mean as cat's meat. If he lets them gad about as much as they like, they think he's a fool; and if he won't, they think he's a bore. If he's in love with them they can't bear the sight of him and if he isn't, they won't give him a moment's peace.'
'A girl, a vineyard, a pear-tree and a beanfield want a deal of looking after,' observed one of the others.
'Sir,' he replied, 'you can't have a woman without a fault or a mule without a sire.'
+-mymaughamcollection.blogspot.com-+ | | | | \|/ | | \~|~/ | | ,#####\/ | ,\/§§§§ | | # #\./#__|_§_\./ | | # \./ # _|_§ \./ | | # #/ # | § \ | | # # # | `~§§§§§ | +--------mmccl.blogspot.com--------+