La moza de cántaro | Page 7

the same year, he says that he is the author of fifteen hundred comedias. In the Fama Póstuma, written after his death in 1635 by his friend Montalvan, it is stated that the number of dramatic works of Lope included eighteen hundred comedias and four hundred autos. From the above figures it is evident that Lope composed at times on an average a hundred comedias a year, and this after he had passed his fiftieth year! Yet still more astonishing is his own statement in regard to them:
?Y más de ciento, en horas veinte y cuatro, Pasaron de las musas al teatro.?[4]
And it is a matter of history that he composed his well-known La Noche de San Juan for the favorite, Olivares, in three days. This, in addition to his other works, offers us a slight insight into the wonderful fertility of the man's genius and gives reason to Cervantes and his contemporaries for calling him "el monstruo de la naturaleza" and "el Fénix de los ingenios."
[Note 3: Lope was by no means unaware of his important influence on the Spanish theater. In his Epístola á Don Antonio de Mendoza he evinces it in the following lines:
Necesidad y yo partiendo á medias el estado de versos mercantiles, pusimos en estilo las Comedias. Yo las saqué de sus principios viles, engendrando en Espa?a más Poetas, que hay en los ayres átomos sutiles.
Obras Sueltas, vol. I, p. 285.
]
[Note 4: Obras Sueltas, Vol. IX, p. 368.]
To his plays Lope de Vega has given the general name of comedias, which should not be confused with the word "comedies," for the two are not synonymous. They are divided into three acts or jornadas of somewhat variable length and admit of numerous classifications. Broadly speaking, we may divide the comedias into four groups: (1) Comedias de capa y espada, which Lope created and which include by far the greater number of his important works. In these plays the principal personages are nobles and the theme is usually questions of love and honor. (2) Comedias heroicas, which have royalty as the leading characters, are lofty or tragical in sentiment, and have historical or mythological foundation. (3) Comedias de santos, which represent some incident of biblical origin or some adventure in the lives of the saints. In them the author presents the graver themes of religion to the people in a popular and comprehensible manner, in which levity is often more prominent than gravity. (4) Comedias de costumbres, in which the chief personages are from the lower classes and of which the language is even lascivious and the subject treated with a liberty not encountered in other dramas of the author. To these various classes must be added the Autos sacramentales, which were written to be represented on occasions of religious festivals. Their theme is usually popular, even grotesque, and the representation took place in the streets.
Lope de Vega took the Spanish drama as he found it, and from its better qualities he built the national drama. He knew the unities and ignored them in his works, preferring, as he says, to give the people what they wished, and he laid down precepts for composition, but even these he obeyed indifferently. Always clever, he interpreted the popular will and gratified it. He did not make the Spanish drama so much as he permitted it to be made in and through him, and by so doing he reconciled all classes to himself; he was as popular with the erudite as he was with the masses, for his plays have a variety, facility, and poetic beauty that won the favor of all. His works abound in the inaccuracies and obscurities that characterize hasty composition and hastier proof-reading, but these are forgotten in the clever intrigue which is the keynote of the Spanish drama, in the infinite variety of versification and in the constant and never flagging interest. For over fifty years Lope de Vega enriched the Spanish drama with the wonders of his genius, yet from El Verdadero Amante, certainly in its original form one of his earliest plays now in existence, to Las Bizarrías de Belisa, written the year before his death, we find a uniformity of vigor, resourcefulness and imagination that form a lasting monument to his versatility and powers of invention, and amply justify his titles of "Fénix de los ingenios" and "Monstruo de la naturaleza."
III. LA MOZA DE CáNTARO
This interesting comedia was written in the last decade of the life of Lope de Vega, in the most fertile period of his genius. Hartzenbusch is authority for the statement that it was written towards the close of the year 1625 and revised in 1632.[5] It is evident that the closing lines of it were written in 1632, for the author says in the égloga á Claudio that