Spanish Drama of the Golden Age

225 Pages·1969·9.641 MB·English

by  Margaret Wilson, R. B. Tate, G. Ribbans and H. Lester (Auth.)

SPANISH DRAMA OF
THE GOLDEN AGE
by
MARGARET WILSON
Lecturer in Spanish in the University of Hull
PERGAMON PRESS
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Copyright © 1969 Margaret Wilson
First edition 1969
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 74-78906
Printed in Great Britain by A. Wheaton & Co., Exeter
This book is sold subject to the condition
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TO THE MEMORY OF
ANNIE ROSE NUTTALL
INEZ ISABEL MACDONALD
AND
FLORENCE SPENCER STREET
PREFACE
I WAS first prompted to write this book by the number of my
colleagues in Arts Faculties who knew the names of Lope de
Vega and Galderon but little else about them, and who wanted
some guide to a clearly important but little-known field of
European drama. There has hitherto been nothing in English
to which one could conveniently refer them, and I very much
hope that this work will meet that need. At the same time I hope
it may also be of use to university students of Spanish and teachers
of Spanish literature to sixth forms. Recent criticism on the
comedia is mainly in article form and may not be easily accessible
to them; and they might in any case find it difficult to build
up a complete picture from isolated studies of individual authors
and works. I have tried to give such a picture of the comedia
as a whole, and of its development through the century of its
existence.
For the sake of readers without a knowledge of Spanish I
have translated all quotations, giving the Spanish text first
in the case of plays, but not prose and other writings where the
original language is of no special significance. Titles are translated
on their first appearance, except for those which are proper
names, or self-explanatory.
The field I have attempted to cover is a vast one, not merely
in the quantity of the drama itself, but also in the amount of
criticism it has called forth. This is a sphere in which it is almost
certainly true to say that knowledge has doubled itself in each
of the last two decades. Faced with so much material I have had
to be selective, and I am well aware that my selections may be
open to question. Had space and time been unlimited I should
have liked to include more minor dramatists and to analyse
ix
χ PREFACE
many more plays; and my apologies are due to a number of
critics of whose views and findings it has not been possible for me
to give account.
No one, I think, could nowadays claim specialist knowledge
of the whole field, and I have necessarily relied greatly on the
works of other scholars. For instance, the Introduction and
those parts of Chapter 11 dealing with stage presentation are
drawn entirely from N. D. Shergold's splendid History of the
Spanish Stage, and my indebtedness to A. A. Parker, Ε. M. Wilson,
A. E. Sloman and others in my chapters on Galderon will be
clearly apparent. It may very well be too that over the years of
my study of the comedia certain views of others may have become
a part of my own thinking without my being aware of it, and for
any such unacknowledged debts I apologize in advance. Generally
speaking, however, the analyses and estimates of the plays I
deal with are my own; and while it is not to be expected that
they will all meet with the complete agreement of other His-
panists, I hope they will be found to include a fair measure of
broadly acceptable independent criticism.
My practice has been to refer to particular points of criticism,
and editions of single plays, in the appropriate chapters or the
notes thereto. These will thus offer guidance on further reading
to those interested in individual works. The bibliographies are
restricted to collections of plays and general critical studies.
Over and above my gratitude to all those scholars on whose
work I have drawn and who have so much enriched my under-
standing and enjoyment of the comedia, I must express my sincere
thanks to Professor A. A. Parker and Professor F. W. Pierce
for their repeated encouragement, and to Professor R. B. Tate,
Professor G. W. Ribbans and Mr. G. B. Morris for reading my
text and making many valuable suggestions for its improvement.
As head of the department in which I have been working for the
last five years Mr. Morris has shown me the utmost consideration
and helpfulness, and this, together with Miss Pat Foster's
careful and willing assistance with the typing of the manuscript,
has greatly eased my task. Lastly, there are two debts of a more
PREFACE xi
personal nature which I gratefully acknowledge. My friend
Dr. Renée C. Winegarten first convinced me that I ought to
try to write this book, and has gone on believing that I could
do it, long as it has taken me; and the same support has come
from my husband, Dr. Harold H. Borland, whose help and advice
have been constantly sought, and unfailingly and ungrudgingly
given.
Hull
July 1968
INTRODUCTION
THE THEATRES
ON ALMOST any afternoon in the early seventeenth century,
if it were not in Lent, a play would be performed in each of
the theatres of Madrid. There were only two of them at the time,
and like most of their English counterparts they were housed
not in roofed buildings but in yards. The theatres themselves
were even known as corrales, the Corral del Principe and the
Corral de la Cruz. They stood respectively in the streets which
still bear those names today, close to each other and barely
five minutes' walk from the Puerta del Sol. Modern audiences
at the Teatro Espafiol in the Calle del Principe see plays per-
formed on the same site as their predecessors of the 1600's.
What would most surprise these modern playgoers if they
could observe a seventeenth-century audience would be the
segregation of the sexes, in all but the most expensive seats.
The yards were not by this time those of inns, as often in London,
but courtyards surrounded by houses. The windows of these
houses along the side walls served as boxes, occupied by the
gentry and town officials, and here men and women did mix.
But in the lateral rows of seats below these, and in the central
pit where the groundlings stood, there were only men. Women
entered through a separate door and sat in enclosures at the
back of the corral, opposite the stage, expressively called the
cazuelas, or stewpots. These were at ground and first floor levels. At
second floor level there was another enclosure, the tertulia, for
the clergy, who were thus directly above the cazuelas and pro-
tected from any contact with their occupants.
The stage took up the fourth side of the theatre. It was a plat-
form stage with no proscenium arch or front curtain. A curtain
1
2 SPANISH DRAMA OF THE GOLDEN AGE
stretched across the back provided the actors with a green-room
and exits and entrances, and like the Elizabethan arras could
be partially drawn back to supply an inner room or alcove when
the action required it. Above the stage the gallery which ran
round the corral at first-floor level could be brought into service
as an upper storey, or even a mountain. Although costumes were
fairly elaborate, scenery where it existed at all was simple, and
the spectators were prepared to use their imagination. In particu-
lar, since performances took place in daylight and in the open
air there was no means of creating darkness, and the many night
settings in the drama of the time could only be conveyed by
the text and by the actors wearing appropriate clothing. Yet
the darkness is often so much a part of the atmosphere and
of the action that it must be assumed that the audience was
capable of supplying it mentally.
There was a charge for admission to the theatre itself, and
a further sum to be paid if one occupied a seat. The takings
were distributed in a way which is somewhat unexpected:
the surprising fact is that the permanent public theatres of
Madrid really came into being as fund-raisers for charity. Already
by the 1570's some of the confraternities devoted to good works
had sensed in the growing popularity of the drama a possible
source of regular income for the hospitals they ran, and from
the following decade they were the owners and beneficiaries
of Madrid's two theatres. Much of the administration was put
into the hands of lessees. These were originally little more than
caretakers to whom certain perquisites such as the sale of refresh-
ments had been farmed out ; but in the seventeenth century they
became virtually theatre managers, with responsibility for
hiring the acting companies and for the finances of the whole
enterprise. They met the running costs and also paid to the
hospitals a proportion of each day's takings, in addition to the
considerable fixed sum which their lease had cost them.
Eventually the ownership and control of the theatres passed
to the Town Council, who compensated the hospitals by means
of an annual subsidy. But the charitable connection had been
INTRODUCTION 3
of great importance in the development of the theatre and in
its resistance to moral opposition. It was one of the justifications
for the frequency of performances, which some people found
excessive. They had originally been given only on Sundays and
holidays; then permission was granted to hold them on two
week-day afternoons, then on three, and finally all limitation
was abandoned. With a performance most days, and a relatively
small population, plays naturally had a much shorter run than
is usual today. They were often subsequently performed in the
provinces, but the habitués of the Madrid corrales probably
demanded a new play at least once a week.
Who were these habitués? Virtually, it seems, the whole
population of the city. Members of the enclosed religious orders
would not be there (though they sometimes saw plays performed
in their convents), but the secular clergy were catered for in
the tertulia. Reserved rooms in the houses overlooking the corrales
were one of the privileges of town officials. Nobles would rent
similar "boxes" for a whole season or longer, and the King
himself had his own "box" at the Corral de la Cruz. The side
benches, the cazuelas and the pit were there for the populace,
whose catcalls and quarrels constituted part of the entertainment
for their superiors. The facts that the quarrels were often over
seats, and that a booking office was open in the mornings, indicate
that the space available was not always equal to the demand.
Once the audience were settled in their places, the musical
prelude played and the prologue recited, what kind of plays
did they see ? What was the nature of this drama so avidly deman-
ded and so constantly supplied, and by what processes had it
evolved? Who were the playwrights who devised it? What are
its merits, and its interest for the student of literature today?
These are the questions which this book will try to answer.
General Works
RENNERT, Η. Α., The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (2nd ed., New
York, 1963).
SHERGOLD, N. D., A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval Times until the
End of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1967).
1
THE BEGINNINGS
THE Spanish plays written during the century which ran from
the start of the career of Lope de Vega in the 1580's to the death
of Galderon in 1681 may be said to constitute a genre of their
own. It is a genre which shares a number of features with Eliza-
bethan drama, but could never be confused with it. Although
it developed partly through contacts with Italy and with classical
drama, it remained essentially non-classical, and made no clean
break with the Middle Ages as did the contemporary theatre
in France. It is therefore with the dramatic activity known to
have existed in medieval Spain that a study of the evolution of
the Spanish national theatre must begin.
In Spain as elsewhere the beginnings of modern drama must
be sought in the Latin tropes, or short illustrative scenes, which
from the eleventh century onwards were performed in church,
in close connection with the Liturgy, to celebrate the festivals
of Christmas, Epiphany and Easter. The parts of Spain where
this early liturgical drama seems to have flourished most are
Catalonia, Valencia and Majorca, that is, those eastern regions
where French influence was strongest. But whereas in France
and England it had by the fourteenth century developed into
long, elaborately staged and highly artistic cycles of "mystery
plays", in Spain this evolution did not take place. "Mysteries"
do eventually appear in the Levantine provinces, but only in
the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries; and they are still
isolated pieces in honour of a saint or of a festival such as the
Assumption. The Misteria de Elche, still annually performed in
that town today, is an example.
In Castile, where contacts with France were fewer, little
5