Part 3

In his 'Hamburg Dramaturgy,' (p. 394-5 of the English version in Bohn's series) Lessing translates a score of these lines, ending with Lope's assertion that nature has set us the example of commingling the ludicrous with the serious; and then he asks: "Is it true that nature sets us an example of the common and the sublime, the farcical and the serious, the merry and the sad? It seems so. But if this is true, Lope has done more than he intended; he has not only glossed over the faults of his stage, he has really proved that these are no faults, for nothing can be a fault that is an imitation of nature." But Mezières in the introduction he prefixt to the French translation of Lessing's dramatic criticism quotes a passage from Diderot on the danger of uniting tragedy and burlesque: "Tragicomedy is never be more than a bad species, because in it are confounded two disparate species, separated by a natural barrier." Here Lessing, who had derived so much from Diderot, reveals himself as in advance and on firmer ground than his French contemporary. It is amusing to note that Diderot, so often hailed as a forerunner of the Romanticists, is here a belated echo of so strict a classicist as Sir Philip Sidney who asserted that the plays he saw on the English stage were "neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling Kings and Clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in Clowns by head and shoulders, to play a part in magestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion: So as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness is by their mongrel Tragicomedy attained."

16. Morel-Fatio notes that this passage also is derived directly from Robortello.

17. These lines Lord Holland turns into English couplets:

The tragic with the comic muse combin'd, Grave Seneca with sprightly Terence join'd, May seem, I grant, Pasiphaë's monstrous birth, Where one half moves our sorrow, one our mirth. But sweet variety must still delight, And, spite of rules, dame Nature says we're right, Thru' all her works she this example gives, And from variety her charms derives.

With this statement of Lope's may be compared the theory set forth by Victor Hugo in the preface to 'Cromwell.'

19. Here once more, as Morel-Fatio has shown, Lope is leaning upon Robortello. Three and a half lines of this passage Lord Holland translates freely in this triplet:

Who seated once, disdain to go away, Unless in two short hours they see the play Brought down from Genesis to judgment day.

This popular liking for the whole story without selection or omission is a survival from the middle ages when the mystery play began with Genesis and ended, if not with judgment day, at least with the casting of the wicked into Hell-Mouth. To the Classicists this prolongation of the action was always most offensive. Lord Holland turned into English the four lines in which Boileau denounces the custom:

The Spanish bard, who no nice censure fears, In one short day includes a lapse of years. In those rude acts the hero lives so fast, Child in the first, he's greybeard in the last.

And Sir Philip Sidney had earlier expressed his disgust for this license, blaming the English playwrights for their liberal allowance of time, "for ordinary it is that two young Princes fall in love. After many traverses, she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth up a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours' space: which how absurd it is in sense even sense may imagine, and Art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified." With this may be compared Corneille's opinions in his 'Discourse on the Three Unities' and in his discussion of his own 'Mélite.'

Lope's limitation of the duration of performance is exactly equivalent to Shakspere's "two hours traffic of the stage." But Shack, and after him Morel-Fatio, adduce evidence that the customary stay of the spectators in the Spanish theaters was two hours and a half.

20. Lope's advice, that a play should first be written in prose to be turned later into verse, Menendez y Pelayo believes to be borrowed from a passage in Vida's Latin poem on the poetic art,--a passage thus rendered in English in Pitt's translation:

At first without the least restraint compose And mold the future poem with prose, A full and proper series to maintain And draw the just connection in a chain. By stated bounds your progress to control, To join the parts and regulate the whole.

Morel-Fatio thinks this very likely, since Lope was familiar with Vida's work. Oddly enough, the principle Lope here lays down was not in accord with his own practise, since the state of the existing manuscripts seems to show that he composed originally in verse, altho on occasion he drew up a preliminary scenario in prose. It may be noted that the method here recommended by Lope was that actually adopted by Moliére, who (in his haste to meet the wishes of Louis XIV) had to call on Corneille to versify more than half of the 'Psyche' which he had completely constructed in prose and which he had not been able wholly to turn into verse within the limits of time set by the king.

Lord Holland thus renders certain lines of this paragraph into English couplets:

Plays of three acts we owe to Virues' pen, Which ne'er had crawled but on all fours till then; An action suited to that helpless age, The infancy of wit, the childhood of the stage. Such plays not twelve years old did I complete, Four sheets to every play, an act on every sheet.

And Ticknor also employs the rimed couplet for his translation of a longer passage:

The Captain Verues, a famous wit, Cast dramas in three acts, by happy hit; For, till his time, upon all fours they crept, Like helpless babes that never yet had stept. Such plays I wrote, eleven and twelve years old; Four acts--each measured to a sheet's just fold-- Filled out four sheets; while still, between, Three _entremeses_ short filled up the scene.

But Camille de Senne and Guillot de Saxe in the preface of their study of the 'Star of Seville' (Paris, 1913, p. 44, note) assert that the three-act form had established itself in the Spanish theater half a century anterior to Verues. And Lessing in his 'Hamburg Dramaturgy' (Dec. 4th, 1767) had pointed out the discrepancy between Lope's assigning the credit of this change to Verues and Calderon's claim, (in the preface to his comedies), that he was the first to make this reduction.

If Lope had been familiar with Aristotle he might have justified the three-act form as simply the carrying out the Greek critic's principle that a play must have an action with a beginning, a middle and an end.

As Attic tragedies were acted without any intermission they had only a single prolonged act,--altho a trilogy was a story shown in three acts. Yet the traditional five-act form of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is indirectly derived from the Athenian drama, wherein the number of choral passages came in time to be limited to four, separating five passages in dialog, which when the lyric interludes were omitted, stood forth as five separate acts. Horace, probably following the precepts of the Alexandrian critics, prescribes five acts (see Weil's 'Etudes sur le Drame Antique,' p. 325). The MSS. of Latin comedy show no division into acts (see Fairclough's edition of Terence's 'Andria,' pp. lii, liii,). It may be noted that as soon as the five-act form was disestablished the tendency of the leading modern dramatists has been to adopt the logical three-act form. Most of Ibsen's social dramas are in three acts, just as Lope's are.

Commenting on Lope's strange prescription of the number of pages a comedy should have, Professor Rennert (p. 163, note) tells us that "this rule, as to the length of the _comedia_, which Lope here lays down, was carefully followed by all the other dramatists of the time, and deviations from it are rare. Four sheets--sixteen leaves for each act, that is forty-eight leaves to a _comedia_. An examination of Lope's autograph plays shows how strictly he adhered to this rule. Where slight variations are found they are due to the difference in the size of the leaves--the _comedia_ always consisting of about three thousand lines.... On the other hand, the comedies of Miguel Sanchez, a predecessor of Lope, contain about four thousand lines."

Lope, like his fellow dramatists Calderon and Corneille, Moliére, Voltaire and Goldoni, had been a pupil of the Jesuits; and it was doubtless when he was a youthful student of the Jesuit school in Madrid that he became acquainted with the critical theories of the Italian commentators of Horace and Aristotle.

21. The rule forbidding the dramatist ever to leave the stage empty Morel-Fatio traces to a passage in Donatus dealing with the omission of the chorus from the New Comedy of the Greeks. Altho Corneille does not expressly discuss this rule, he obeyed it; and it was generally obeyed by all the French dramatists who accepted the Classicist theory, possibly because the leaving of the stage empty became the conventional signal of the end of the act. Even today at the Théâtre Français, the curtain does not always fall on the termination of an act; the stage is left unoccupied for a moment and then the three raps of the wooden hammer are heard, whereupon the characters enter who are to begin the next act. On the English-speaking stage this rule has never established itself; and our dramatic poets have now and again achieved an effect of expectancy by leaving the stage bare and letting the spectators wonder who is next to appear.

23. A part of this paragraph is turned into English couplets by Lord Holland:

In ten line staves should wailing grief be shown; The sonnet suits a man who speaks alone; Let plain narration flow in ballad lines; Though much a tale in copious octaves shines; Grand weighty thoughts the triplet should contain But _redondillas_ suit the lover's strain.

In the introduction to his 'Select Plays of Calderon' Norman Maccoll gives a clear explanation of the various sorts of verse that Lope mentions here:--_Romances_ are "octo-syllabic trochaics--the customary measure of the Spanish ballads. As in the ballads, these trochaics are sometimes rimed and sometimes assonant. _Redondillas_ are arranged in strophes of four lines each. Strong endings and weak endings are both employed. The first and fourth lines rime together, and so do the second and third. This is the simplest of the riming measures in common use.... _Quintillas_ are arranged in strophes of five lines each. The only rule observed in the riming is that the same rime must not occur in more than two successive lines.... The _Decima_ is a combination of two _quintillas_ in one strophe of ten lines. The arrangement of rimes is as follows: the first five are disposed ... a, b, b, a, a, and the second five are arranged c, c, d, d, c.... Three other forms of iambic verse are borrowed from the Italians, the _Terceto_ (the _terza rima_ of the Italians), the _Octava_ (or _ottava rima_) and the Sonnet." Maccoll in his turn renders several of Lope's lines into English rimes:

In _décimas_ finds voice the mourner's wail; The sonnet's fitted for the action's stay; _Romances_ serve to tell the player's tale. Yet octaves well can stirring news convey; While deed of high import in _terzas_ shines, And _redondillas_ are the lover's lines.

The incessant employment of these various lyric measures is evidence, were any needed, of the prevailing lyrical quality of the dialog of the Spanish drama when Lope and Calderon were its chiefs. It may be noted that in 'Prunella, a Fantasy in Three Acts,' by Lawrence Hausman and Granville Barker, the authors emphasize the lyrical element in their rococo story by scattering riming stanzas at irregular intervals thruout the dialog.

That the sonnet with its artificial and arbitrary scheme of intricately interlaced rimes should be intercalated into dramatic dialog may seem to modern readers a strange suggestion. Yet Lope was here only recommending a practise inherited from the medieval mysteries wherein various fixt forms of verse were frequently employed. Their stanzaic rigidity did not prevent the deviser of a French passion-play from utilizing the triolet, the ballade, and even the long-sustained and stately chant-royal; and the playwright availed himself of their aid not only in passages of lyrical emotion but also in the swift give and take of the intenser dramatic moments of the action. This tradition of the religious pieces was taken over by the founders of the secular drama in most of the modern languages,--in English as well as in French and in Spanish. Corneille's first play 'Mélite' was composed especially to bring in a sonnet; and even as late as the 'Cid' Corneille cast his lyrical monologs into stanzas, for which he was censured by the Abbé d' Aubignac and by Voltaire; and Brunetière (in his annotated edition of Corneille's more important plays) likens the lyrical soliloquy of Rodrigue at the end of the first act to the bravura solo of a tenor, coming down to the footlights with his hand on his heart (p. 69). Shakspere used the looser Elizabethan sonnet for the prolog to 'Romeo and Juliet' spoken by Chorus; and Ben Jonson employs it for the Prolog for the Court of his 'Staple of News.' The incongruity of the fixt form is least obvious when the sonnet is thus kept outside the play itself and when it is utilized only in the address to the audience before the action begins. But Shakspere did not hesitate to employ this fixt form inside the play; in 'Love's Labor's Lost' (act iii, scene 2) and also in 'All's Well that ends Well' (act iii, scene 4) he casts a letter into fourteen lines, with three riming quatrains and a terminal couplet. And again in 'Romeo and Juliet' where hero and heroine meet and fall in love at first sight, the lyrical significance of this meeting is suggested by the employment of the fourteener, Romeo speaking the first quatrain, Juliet the second, while the third quatrain and the final couplet are shared between them, each taking in turn a line or two. M. Rostand prefixes a sonnet to every act of his 'Chantecler,' utilizing them for a poetical description of the successive sets in which the action of his lyrical play is supposed to take place.

The ballade is to be found in two nineteenth century French plays, the 'Gringoire' of Théodore de Banville, and the 'Cyrano de Bergerac' of Rostand; but in both these pieces it is frankly presented as what it is,--a poem composed in the fixt form by the hero of the play. Maccoll suggests that sonnets were introduced by the Spanish playwright "to please the more cultivated part of the audience"; and he remarks that "from their nature [they] could be employed sparingly--not more than two or three sonnets were usually put into a play." He notes that in one of Calderon's pieces, 'Gustos y Disgustos' a duenna who is in doubt as to her immediate duty, begins her speech "by saying that she must either indulge in a soliloquy or pronounce a sonnet. She elects the former, and proceeds to soliloquize in _redondillas_."

28. Lord Holland has turned these lines into English couplets:

None than myself more barbarous or more wrong, Who hurried by the vulgar taste along, Dare give my precepts in despite of rule. When France and Italy pronounce me fool. But what am I to do? who now of plays, With one complete within these seven days, Four hundred eighty-three in all have writ, And all, save six, against the rules of wit.

It needs to be recorded that Lope's commentators have been sadly put to it in their endeavor to identify the half dozen of Lope's plays which he here claims to be in accord with the theories of the Classicists.

Attention has been called also to the similarity of attitude between Lope here and that taken by Webster in the preface to his 'White Devil,' published in 1612, only three years after the Spanish poem had been delivered:--"If it be objected that this is no true Dramatic Poem, I shall easily confess it; _non potes in nugas dicere plura meas Ipse ego quam dixi_; willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted; for should a man present to such an Auditory the most contentious Tragedy that ever was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of style and gravity of person, enrich it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, life 'n Death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius, yet after all this divine rapture, _O dura messorum ilia_, the breath that comes from the incapable multitude is able to poison it; and ere it be acted, let the author resolve to fix to every scene this of Horace,

_Haec Porcis hodie comedenda relinques._"

B. M.

OF THIS BOOK THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE COPIES WERE PRINTED FROM TYPE BY CORLIES, MACY AND COMPANY IN NOVEMBER : MCMXIV

PUBLICATIONS

_of the_

Dramatic Museum

OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

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_First Series_

Papers on Playmaking:

I THE NEW ART OF WRITING PLAYS. By Lope de Vega. Translated by William T. Brewster. With an Introduction and Notes by Brander Matthews.

II THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PLAY. By Bronson Howard. With an Introduction by Augustus Thomas.

III THE LAW OF THE DRAMA. By Ferdinand Brunetière. Translated by Philip M. Hayden. With an Introduction by Henry Arthur Jones.

IV ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AS A DRAMATIST. By Arthur Wing Pinero. With an Introduction and Bibliographical Appendix by Clayton Hamilton.