Late in the fifteenth century an impetus was given to
the formation of a drama by the appearance of a dramatic
story entitled * La Celestina,' or, as it is sometimes called,
* Calisto and Melibcea.' This was far too long for repre-
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sentation, consisting as it did of about twenty-one acts ;
but it seems to contain all the elements of popular drama —
easy, spirited dialogue, well-developed characters, and an
intricate and sanguinary plot. *La Celestina' passed
through a large number of editions, and was translated
into almost every language of Europe. It was, naturally,
much imitated, and parts of it were adapted for the stage
by later writers.
Juan de la Enzina has the credit of being the founder
of the secular theatre in Spain. A skilled musician, his
Juan de la P^^* ^^ head of Leo X.'s chapel at Rcane would
Enzina inevitably bring him in contact with the Ee-
naissance in its full development. Some of his * Eclogues,'
as he calls them, were, however, written before he left
Spain, and in none of them is there much trace of the
modem spirit. Some of them are only religious dialogues,
and though in others there is some sort of a romantic story,
he seems to have had little idea of a properly constructed
plot ; nor is there much more that is modem in the plays
of his disciple, Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who
Vicente, wrote in Spanish several courtly plays to be
1602-1686 presented before the King (Manuel of Portugal).
A more decided step forward was taken by Torres Naharro,
who had spent much time in Italy, and had learnt
some useful lessons from the beginnings of the
drama there. While he shows no desire to emulate classic
strictness, he divides his plays into Jomadas, correspond-
ing to acts, and shows more consistency and constructive
power than any of his predecessors. But still, considering
his Italian training, one is disappointed to find so much
that is mediaeval in his plays. It is only one, the
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THE RISE OF THE DRAMA 169
* Hymenea/ that, with its intriguing plot and the character
of its incidents and d/ramatis personce, really foreshadows
the future theatre. Naharro's plays were soon forbidden
by the Inquisition, for the Church had no mind to let so
useful an instrument as the drama slip away from her
control. Indeed, many of the plays which were produced
during the years that followed are only known to us from
the ' Index Expurgatorius.' But at last a brave and
vigorous eflTort was made to free the stage from ecclesiastical
domination, and to popularise it. The man who did this
Lope de ^^^ Lope de Rueda, who began life as a mechanic
Rueda ^^ Seville, but soon followed his strong natural
bent for the stage, and set up, along with his friend
Timoneda, the bookseller, as a dramatist and the manager
of a strolling company. There is no doubt that the young
man was an extremely clever comedian, able both to write
and to speak spirited racy dialogue and to conceive
amusing situations. Appreciative audiences soon gathered
round the little company, wherever in the streets and
squares of the towns they set up their primitive stage.
How primitive and simple this was is well described by
Cervantes. He says that in the time of Lope * the whole
apparatus of a manager was contained in a large sack, and
consisted of four white shepherds' jackets, turned up with'
leather, gilt and stamped ; four beards and false sets of
hanging locks, and four shepherds' crooks, more or less.
The plays were colloquies, like eclogues, between two or
three shepherds and one shepherdess, fitted up and ex-
tended with two or three interludes whose personages were
sometimes a negress, sometimes a bully, sometimes a fool,
sometimes a Biscayan ; for all these four parts and many
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others Lope himself performed with the greatest excellence
and skill that can be imagined . . . The theatre was
composed of four benches arranged in a square, with five
or six boards laid across them, that were thus raised about
four palms from the ground. . . . The furniture of the
theatre was an old blanket drawn aside by two cords,
making what they call a tiring room^ behind which
were the musicians, who sang old ballads without a
guitar/ ^
De Eueda, who as far as we can tell was only twenty-
three when he died, achieved unwonted success for so
young a man. He so impressed his contemporaries that,
though he had been but a gold-beater at first, and his
later profession was one held in no great honour, he was
buried in the nave of the cathedral at Cordova. Had he
lived longer he would in all probability have definitely
settled the form which the drama was to take in Spain ;
but his life was very short, the poverty of his arrangements
made it impossible for him to reach any but the lower
classes, and the few plays he left, in spite of their dramatic
interest, their real humour, and their lively representations
of every-day life, are brief and slight, and resemble the
farce rather than the regular drama. After his death,
though there was certainly a strengthened interest in
plays among the people, yet the drama seemed to fall
back into an uncertain and tentative condition, and the
Church succeeded in getting the strolling companies of
actors under her authority, so that they might only per-
form by her permission and for the benefit of this or that
brotherhood.
^ Ticknor, History of Spa/niah LiteratK/re, vol. ii. p. 17.
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THE RISE OF THE DRAMA 171
But what Lope de Rueda had not. weight enough to
accomplish was achieved by his brilliant and powerful
namesake, Lope de Vega, that wonderful man
Vega, who, at the time when culture in Spain reached
its zenith, was not so much a Spanish dramatist
as the embodiment of the Spanish drama. His position as
a dramatist is quite difiFerent from that of Shakespeare.
His task was not to raise to perfection a drama which was
already in existence, but practically to create one. He
found it all chaotic and tentative, and he gave it a form
and established it on a basis which were never afterwards
materially changed. He set about his work in the same
sort of instinctive way as his English contemporary.
Shakespeare, as we know, was no pedant or scholar. The
path which he followed was laid down for him by men of
University education, who could probably have formulated
a very much more correct theory of the drama than he.
His glory lies in the fact that, by his intuitive genius, he
was able to reach all that his predecessors were straining
after. But, half unconscious though it was, it is this con-
structive power which, combined with his faculty for
delineating character, gives their supreme literary value to
all his plays. Lope, on the other hand, though he was
not unacquainted with the canons of his art, cared little
about applying them. His one purpose was to content
and please the people, though ' the rules of art may
be strangled thereby,' as he says, with good-humoured
cynicism.^ For delineation of character he cares nothing.
^ And again : * I write according to the art invented by those
who sought the applause of the multitude, whom it is but just to
humour in their foUy since it is they who pay for it ' (Ticknor,
vol. ii. p. 224).
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172 THE BENAISSANCE
Various as are the personages who figure in his intrigues,
they are mere masks — the lover, the heroine, and the
brother or father jealous for her honour ; the dialogue is
not intended to reveal individuality, but to work out the
elaborate plot. As for considerations of time or place, they
are ignored ; ancient and modern history jostle recklessly
together, and geography is equally vague. But Lope
knew his audience. He was, to use a modern phrase, a
bom caterer for the public. He knew that all they asked
was to have their senses excited either to laughter or
horror, to be thoroughly interested and thoroughly mysti-
fied, lest, as he says, ' having found out how it will end,
they turn their faces to the door and their backs to the stage.'
His eighteen hundred plays have, in consequence, little
literary value. They are brilliant improvisations, scribbled
down in less time than it would take a copyist to transcribe
them. In order to estimate the achievement of their author,
we must regard them, not as units, but as a whole. Then
we shall see how, in spite of all their faults, they form a
scintillating mass, in which all the life and vigour of the
Spanish Eenaissance are gathered up — its hopes for the
future and its pride in the past ; a mirror which faithfully
reflects alike the ways of the common people, the loves and
sorrows of the hidalgos, and the crimes and glories of
their rulers ; for there is no class of society which does not
play its part upon this brilliant stage. His plays or
comedias, as they are called — though they are not comedies
in our sense of the word — group themselves into fairly
well-defined classes. There are the comedias de capa y
espada^ whose hero is usually the hidalgo — the gentleman
of Spain with his * cloak and sword,' his proud fiery temper,
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THE RISE OF THE DRAMA 17^^
and his absurd devotion to the point of honour. It is upon
the loves, the intrigues, the rivalries, and the revenges of
this personage that the plays usually turn — intrigues
frequently so complicated that it is to be feared a modern
audience would hardly take the pains to unravel them.
There is little difference between these plays and the
coTnedias heroicas^ except that, in the latter, the dramatis
personcB are more exalted personages — frequently kings
and queens — a fact which brought them into royal dis-
favour, as subversive of due reverence to the Throne. The
third kind of comedia is that of common life, where the
incidents are taken from the lives of peasants, shepherds,
and slaves.
At last the Church took fright at the freedom of the
plays, which, under De Vega's leadership, were becoming so
popular, and for a time they were prohibited altogether.
Nothing daunted, the versatile genius of Lope turned to the
Bible and the histories of the saints, from which he framed
plays which offered no handle for ecclesiastical disapproval,
and yet were not shorn of the lively incident and gross
humour which delighted the people. He also turned to
account the Avios Sacra/mentales or Corpus Ghristi
plays, of which he is supposed to have written between
three and four hundred. The auto, which formed the
finale to a long day of pageants, processions, and mum-
meries, was under the special patronage of the Church, and
professed to be of a religious character, but it admitted
much that, from our point of view, seems distressingly
irreverent and revolting. But Lope in this, as in every
other direction, achieved the widest popularity. Kings
and queens honoured him, as well as the common people.
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174 THE RENAISSANCE
and no theatre could be furnished too sumptuously to do
honour to the popular idol. His fame spread far beyond
his own country, and even in France and Italy the
announcement of his name (as author) was enough to fill a
theatre. He obtained his power of touching the hearts of
the people partly from the extreme versatility and sweet-
ness of his verse, using now the statelier Italian measures
that pleased the fashionable people, now the simple old
redondillas and quintillas that were on the lips of every
peasant, and again breaking into one of the old ballads
which at an emotional moment would sweep the very
hearts of his audience away in a tide of irresistible enthu-
siasm. How the man found time, in addition to all this,
to write his novels and his voluminous poems, as well as to
superintend the burning of notable heretics for his masters
of the Inquisition, will ever remain a puzzle to later
and more puny generations. We can only say that he
was one of the products of an age which, like an atmo-
sphere surcharged with oxygen, produced extraordinary
growths.
De Vega could not be so popular without producing a
very large school of imitators, among the most notable of
The School whom are Cervantes, Guevara, and Montalvan.
of Lope : Qervantes, indeed, began to write for the stage
Cervantes, before Lopc ; but neither in his early plays, when
he had the field to himself, nor in those of his
later years, when he was content to follow in the footsteps
of the ' monarch of the stage,' does he show any strong
dramatic power. Only in a few isolated scenes, such as
those drawn from his own bitter experiences in Algiers, do
his originality and genius appear ; of the mechanism of a
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THE RISE OF THE DRAMA 176
play he seems to have had little conception. Some of
his scenes were introduced by Lope into his own dramas
with considerable eflFect. Guevara had better
learnt the lesson, and produced some good plays
marked by the passionate, melancholy sweetness which we
find in the highest Spanish literature. Mont-
alvan implicitly followed the lead of Lope, and
became one of the most popular of dramatists. Thus, in
spite of the intermittent opposition of the Church and
critical disapproval of many of the learned, who would
have preferred a drama on the classical model, or at least
something saner and less extravagant, the school of Lope
continued to flourish. At the time of his death there was,
moreover, already a rival in the same field, of higher if less
Caideron, prodigious genius. This was Calderon, who,
1600-1681 f^p another fifty years, sustained the high repute
of the Spanish stage. Calderon made few alterations in
the form of the drama, which Lope had fixed in happy
accordance with popular taste ; but, possessing much higher
poetical power, he infused into it a loftier, more exalted
spirit. In his plays we find the strongest characteristics
of the Spanish people idealised and pressed to the farthest
point of probability — their romantic chivalry, their passion-
ateloyalty and patriotism, their ardent love, their intense
melancholy. His poetry is always rich, marked by pass-
ages of glowing colour and of utmost tenderness. The
loftiness of his imagination, while it gives a stately im-
pressive air to his plays, sometimes makes them seem stilted
and unnatural, while the personages become more than
ever mere mouthpieces for the author's glowing eloquence,
^atiere puppets tossed in a storm of wild adventures.
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Calderon uses the comic relief that Lope invented, the
gradoso, who is usually the servant of the hero, and enlivens
the piece with buflfoonery, parodying his master's love
affairs in his own. The curiously perverted idea of honour,
which permeates all Spanish literature of this period,
becomes yet more grotesquely exaggerated in Calderon's
plays than in those of his predecessors.
Powerful and brilliant as the drama became in his
hands, it could not escape the domination of the Church ;
the religious element was as strong as ever. Indeed, when
we remember the relentless power of the Inquisition, and
its unceasing hostility to the stage, it is evident that
nothing less than the determined support of the whole
nation could have saved the drama from extinction. As
it was, the authors were driven to evasions and compro-
mises in order to appease the ecclesiastical authorities
without interfering with the pleasures of the people. The
autos sacramentales were more and more developed, and
were celebrated with as much elaborate pageantry as the
masque, from which they were only differentiated by their
ostensibly religious character. Calderon wrote a great
number of these autos, which, in their spiritual, mystical
character, gave plenty of scope for his vivid imagination.
To sum up, the drama in Spain was, in a sense which
applied to no other country, peculiarly national. The
people would have nothing to do with the classical plays of
Bermudez and Argensola, much as these were praised by
a section of the learned. Both Lope and Calderon attained
their immense popularity by carrying out the ideas of the
people, developing them indeed, but making no effort to
train them in any other than their natural direction. And
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THE RISE OF THE DRAMA 177
it was the pleasure of this proud, conservative people that
the drama should be altogether Spanish. They did not
care about faithful representations of foreign scenes or
foreign ways; faithful reproductions of bygone times.
No matter who appeared on the scene — Greek or Roman,
Biblical saint or devil from hell — all must wear the
Spanish dress and have a Spanish air. Again, all plays,
religious or otherwise, were liberally enlivened with
national ballads and national dances (for the dance was
a most important feature in the every-day life of Spain).
Undoubtedly, however disadvantageous this unvarying
national bias was to the drama from an artistic point of
view, it was the only thing that could have saved it in
the otherwise unequal struggle with the Inquisition. The
people might respect and admire their Inquisition while
they shuddered at it, but they loved their drama as them-
selves, and nothing could root it out of their hearts.
N
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CHAPTER VI
THE BENAI88ANCE IN AECHITECTUBE
In Architecture the historian of the Renaissance has not,
as in almost every other department of human activity,
to chronicle the awakening to greater and truer ideals
and the discovery of better or more workmanlike methods.
Here, for the only time, our keynote Humanism fails us, for
it cannot be denied that in the cold correctness of Renais-
sance architecture there is less scope for the heart and
brain of the individual worker than in the shapiug of the
irregular, imperfect, and often uncouth fragments of which
are built up the rugged mighty piles that are still the
glory of Christian Europe. It was in the
architec- raising of these great churches that the energy
of the Middle Ages found its noblest expression ;
in them is crystallised the very spirit of the Christian
religion. They are associated with no builder's name, but
rose slowly through the centuries, soaring heavenwards
with their * misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and
diademed tower,' dim and mysterious^ith their vistas
of column on column ; records, not of individual enterprise
and emulation, but of the faith and fear of a whole nation.
For three centuries Gothic architecture dominated Europe,
but in the last of these, the fifteenth, there were many
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THE RENAISSANCE IN ARCHITECTURE 179
evidences that its inspiring power (following the uni-
versal law that life must be followed by decay) was for a
time exhausted, and that the age was ripe for a new
system. This was the time of French Flamboyant and of
our Late Perpendicular, when ornament was crowded on
ornament, and feats of daring ingenuity were attempted
with more regard for showy effect than for the old prin-
ciple of sincerity in structure and ornamentation. From
this over-luxuriance and degeneracy the Roman revival
with its restraint and refinement seemed to provide a
healthy reaction. It took place of course in Italy.
Gothic architecture had never there become quite
acclimatised. The mystic and the picturesque did not
appeal to the positive Italian spirit, highly
tionin Sensitive to beauty though it was. The Floren-
* ^ tines especially, whose temper was above every
thing intellectual, loved beauty of the majestic, orderly
type — the beauty of symmetry and proportion. The
picturesque irregularity which is the charm of pointed
architecture offended their eyes. They could not forget
the splendid fragments of ancient buildings that lay about
them, and which, as we may see in the works of Niccola
Pisano, the great exponent of Gothic architecture to the
Italians, strongly influenced their designs. Hence the
Italians had retained many features which made the
revival of classic style a much less abrupt change than it
was north of the Alps. They had always shown a strong
preference for horizontal lines, not caring to break up the
skyline by the multitude of pinnacles, gables, towers,
pointed roofs, and dormer windows devised for that
purpose by the Northern builders. Their buildings were
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altogether more simple and regular in plan ; low, round
arches were still used, and colonnades of pilasters ; large
wall spaces were left for decoration by mosaic or fresco ;
the characteristic buttress'was rarely seen, and the Northern
tower or spire had been replaced by the dome and the
carn/panile — ^the tall slim bell tower, of which Giotto's
masterpiece is the great example, the * lily of Florence,'
which soars quivering into the sunshine, bright with its
pink and white marbles, delicate as ivory work in its
carving. It was only the Venetians, always so
much more passionate and vivid in temperament
than the Florentines, who really appreciated Gothic
architecture. They invested it with their own Oriental
love of sumptuous colour ; veiling it with delicate marbles,
porphyry, and .alabaster, and enriching it with mosaic
and fresco. The magnificent palace of the Doges is the
finest of all secular Gothic buildings, while the palaces
whose richly carved balconies overhang the Grand Canal
show, as nothing in Feudal countries could, of what perfect
adaptation to domestic uses the Gothic style is capable.
Rome laffged far behind in architecture as in
the other arts, no public building of any import-
ance being erected during the Gothic period. Her
nobles were too poor and quarrelsome and ignorant to
care about improving the city; her priests had already
buildings enough and to spare for their own needs ; while
the populace was a mere factious rabble, whose only patriot-
ism was a vague reliance upon the tradition of departed
and giory. It was the burgher class, the 'shop-
Florence keepers,' of Florence that made the great Guelf
city what she was, the most cultivated in the whole world ;
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and it was under the auspices of the Guild of the Woollen
Merchants that the first of Renaissance architects came
into prominence.
The majestic Gothic cathedral of Florence, S. Maria
del Fiore, was designed and built by Arnolfo del Cambio,
the chief Florentine architect of the thirteenth century,
who also built the famous Palazzo Vecchio, the walls
of the city, and the church of Santa Croce. But Arnolfo
did not live long enough to crown his church by placing
upon the mighty octagon, where nave and transepts met,
the dome he had designed. For a hundred years it
remained unfinished, no one daring to attempt so great a
feat, until at last, in 1420, it was entrusted to Brunelleschi,
the young Florentine architect, who crowned it
leschi, with the huge dome, so grand in its simplicity,
which now, side by side with Giotto's campanile,
towers over Florence. Brunelleschi had made this task the
main object of his studies among the ancient buildings at
Rome, and he had returned to Florence so thoroughly
imbued with the classical spirit that he was able, as if by
instinct, to solve as well as it ever could be solved the
problem of adapting the ancient Roman style to modem
requirements. It was not a very simple question, for the
extant examples of Roman building, consisting chiefly of
baths, theatres, triumphal arches and so forth, were not
well adapted to buildings intended for domestic or ecclesi-
astical purposes. It is from the efibrt to combine the two
that some of the inconsistencies of Renaissance architecture
arise, so that we find facades of palaces which in their
symmetrical balance have little connection with the
arrangement of the rooms behind them, and we find purely
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182 THE RENAISSANCE
Roman features introduced which have nothing bnt their
classicism to recommend them for the purposes to which
Aiberti, ^^^7 ^^e applied. Alberti, for instance, who
1406-1472 built the Bucellai Palace, and seconded Brunel-
leschi's eflforts by his writings as well as by his designs,
formed the front of his church of S. Andrea at Mantua of
a huge Roman triumphal arch. When we remember the
intense fascination which antiquity exercised on the minds
of the Italians in the fifteenth century it will readily be
understood how warmly this revival was welcomed, Gothic
architecture being entirely forsaken. Enthusiastic disciples