Learning PHP MySQL JavaScript CSS HTML5 Third

Edition A Step by Step Guide to Creating Dynamic

Websites Robin Nixon download

https://ebookultra.com/download/learning-php-mysql-javascript-
css-html5-third-edition-a-step-by-step-guide-to-creating-dynamic-
websites-robin-nixon/

Explore and download more ebooks or textbooks

at ebookultra.com
We have selected some products that you may be interested in
Click the link to download now or visit ebookultra.com
for more options!.

Learning PHP MySQL Step by Step Guide to Creating Database

Driven Web Sites Second Edition Michele E. Davis

https://ebookultra.com/download/learning-php-mysql-step-by-step-guide-
to-creating-database-driven-web-sites-second-edition-michele-e-davis/

JavaScript Step by Step Step By Step Second Edition Steve

Suehring

https://ebookultra.com/download/javascript-step-by-step-step-by-step-
second-edition-steve-suehring/

The Mobile Marketing Handbook A Step by Step Guide to

Creating Dynamic Mobile Marketing Campaigns 1st Edition
Kim Dushinski
https://ebookultra.com/download/the-mobile-marketing-handbook-a-step-
by-step-guide-to-creating-dynamic-mobile-marketing-campaigns-1st-
edition-kim-dushinski/

Financial Statements A Step by Step Guide to Understanding

and Creating Financial Reports 3rd Revised Edition Thomas
Ittelson
https://ebookultra.com/download/financial-statements-a-step-by-step-
guide-to-understanding-and-creating-financial-reports-3rd-revised-
edition-thomas-ittelson/
Permaculture Design A Step by Step Guide Aranya & (Author)

https://ebookultra.com/download/permaculture-design-a-step-by-step-
guide-aranya-author/

Step by Step to College and Career Success Third Edition

John N. Gardner

https://ebookultra.com/download/step-by-step-to-college-and-career-
success-third-edition-john-n-gardner/

Painter X for Photographers Creating Painterly Images Step

by Step Martin Addison

https://ebookultra.com/download/painter-x-for-photographers-creating-
painterly-images-step-by-step-martin-addison/

Painter 11 for Photographers Creating Painterly Images

Step by Step Martin Addison

https://ebookultra.com/download/painter-11-for-photographers-creating-
painterly-images-step-by-step-martin-addison/

Building Cocoa Applications A Step by Step Guide 1st

Edition Simson Garfinkel

https://ebookultra.com/download/building-cocoa-applications-a-step-by-
step-guide-1st-edition-simson-garfinkel/
Learning PHP MySQL JavaScript CSS HTML5 Third
Edition A Step by Step Guide to Creating Dynamic
Websites Robin Nixon Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Robin Nixon
ISBN(s): 9781491949467, 1491949465
Edition: 3
File Details: PDF, 31.43 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5, Third Edition
by Robin Nixon
Copyright © 2014 Robin Nixon. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are
also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/
institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected].
Editor: Andy Oram Indexer: Lucie Haskins
Production Editor: Kristen Brown Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery
Copyeditor: Rachel Monaghan Interior Designer: David Futato
Proofreader: Jasmine Kwityn Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest

June 2014: Third Edition

Revision History for the Third Edition:

2014-05-19: First release

See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781491949467 for release details.

Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly
Media, Inc. Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5, the image of sugar gliders, and related trade
dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as
trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark
claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps.
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no
responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained
herein.

ISBN: 978-1-491-94946-7
[LSI]
For Julie
 Table of Contents

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi

1. Introduction to Dynamic Web Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

HTTP and HTML: Berners-Lee’s Basics 2
The Request/Response Procedure 2
The Benefits of PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 5
Using PHP 6
Using MySQL 7
Using JavaScript 8
Using CSS 9
And Then There’s HTML5 10
The Apache Web Server 11
About Open Source 12
Bringing It All Together 12
Questions 14

2. Setting Up a Development Server. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

What Is a WAMP, MAMP, or LAMP? 16
Installing a WAMP on Windows 16
Testing the Installation 28
Alternative WAMPs 31
Installing a MAMP on Mac OS X 31
Configuring MySQL 35
Ensuring MySQL Starts on Booting 36
Testing the Installation 36
Installing a LAMP on Linux 38
Working Remotely 38
Logging In 38
Using FTP 39

v
 Using a Program Editor 40
Using an IDE 41
Questions 43

3. Introduction to PHP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Incorporating PHP Within HTML 45
This Book’s Examples 47
The Structure of PHP 48
Using Comments 48
Basic Syntax 49
Variables 50
Operators 55
Variable Assignment 57
Multiple-Line Commands 60
Variable Typing 62
Constants 63
Predefined Constants 64
The Difference Between the echo and print Commands 64
Functions 65
Variable Scope 66
Questions 71

4. Expressions and Control Flow in PHP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Expressions 73
TRUE or FALSE? 73
Literals and Variables 75
Operators 76
Operator Precedence 77
Associativity 78
Relational Operators 80
Conditionals 84
The if Statement 84
The else Statement 85
The elseif Statement 87
The switch Statement 88
The ? Operator 91
Looping 92
while Loops 93
do ... while Loops 94
for Loops 95
Breaking Out of a Loop 97
The continue Statement 98

vi | Table of Contents
 Implicit and Explicit Casting 98
PHP Dynamic Linking 99
Dynamic Linking in Action 100
Questions 101

5. PHP Functions and Objects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

PHP Functions 104
Defining a Function 106
Returning a Value 106
Returning an Array 108
Passing by Reference 108
Returning Global Variables 110
Recap of Variable Scope 111
Including and Requiring Files 111
The include Statement 111
Using include_once 112
Using require and require_once 112
PHP Version Compatibility 113
PHP Objects 113
Terminology 114
Declaring a Class 115
Creating an Object 116
Accessing Objects 116
Cloning Objects 118
Constructors 119
PHP 5 Destructors 120
Writing Methods 120
Static Methods in PHP 5 121
Declaring Properties 122
Declaring Constants 122
Property and Method Scope in PHP 5 123
Static Properties and Methods 124
Inheritance 125
Questions 129

6. PHP Arrays. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Basic Access 131
Numerically Indexed Arrays 131
Associative Arrays 133
Assignment Using the array Keyword 134
The foreach ... as Loop 135
Multidimensional Arrays 137

Table of Contents | vii

 Using Array Functions 140
is_array 140
count 140
sort 140
shuffle 141
explode 141
extract 142
compact 143
reset 144
end 144
Questions 144

7. Practical PHP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Using printf 147
Precision Setting 148
String Padding 150
Using sprintf 151
Date and Time Functions 151
Date Constants 154
Using checkdate 154
File Handling 155
Checking Whether a File Exists 155
Creating a File 155
Reading from Files 157
Copying Files 158
Moving a File 158
Deleting a File 158
Updating Files 159
Locking Files for Multiple Accesses 160
Reading an Entire File 162
Uploading Files 162
System Calls 167
XHTML or HTML5? 169
Questions 169

8. Introduction to MySQL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

MySQL Basics 171
Summary of Database Terms 172
Accessing MySQL via the Command Line 172
Starting the Command-Line Interface 173
Using the Command-Line Interface 177
MySQL Commands 178

viii | Table of Contents

 Data Types 183
Indexes 192
Creating an Index 192
Querying a MySQL Database 198
Joining Tables Together 207
Using Logical Operators 209
MySQL Functions 209
Accessing MySQL via phpMyAdmin 210
Using phpMyAdmin 214
Questions 214

9. Mastering MySQL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Database Design 217
Primary Keys: The Keys to Relational Databases 218
Normalization 219
First Normal Form 220
Second Normal Form 222
Third Normal Form 224
When Not to Use Normalization 226
Relationships 227
One-to-One 227
One-to-Many 228
Many-to-Many 229
Databases and Anonymity 230
Transactions 230
Transaction Storage Engines 231
Using BEGIN 232
Using COMMIT 232
Using ROLLBACK 233
Using EXPLAIN 234
Backing Up and Restoring 235
Using mysqldump 235
Creating a Backup File 237
Restoring from a Backup File 239
Dumping Data in CSV Format 239
Planning Your Backups 240
Questions 240

10. Accessing MySQL Using PHP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Querying a MySQL Database with PHP 241
The Process 242
Creating a Login File 242

Table of Contents | ix
 Connecting to MySQL 243
A Practical Example 248
The $_POST Array 251
Deleting a Record 252
Displaying the Form 252
Querying the Database 253
Running the Program 254
Practical MySQL 255
Creating a Table 255
Describing a Table 256
Dropping a Table 257
Adding Data 257
Retrieving Data 258
Updating Data 259
Deleting Data 260
Using AUTO_INCREMENT 260
Performing Additional Queries 262
Preventing SQL Injection 263
Using Placeholders 265
Preventing HTML Injection 266
Questions 268

11. Using the mysqli Extension. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

Querying a MySQL Database with mysqli 269
Creating a Login File 269
Connecting to MySQL 270
A Practical Example 274
Using mysqli Procedurally 276
Questions 277

12. Form Handling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

Building Forms 279
Retrieving Submitted Data 281
register_globals: An Old Solution Hangs On 282
Default Values 283
Input Types 284
Sanitizing Input 291
An Example Program 292
What’s New in HTML5? 295
The autocomplete Attribute 295
The autofocus Attribute 295
The placeholder Attribute 296

x | Table of Contents
 The required Attribute 296
Override Attributes 296
The width and height Attributes 297
Features Awaiting Full Implementation 297
The form Attribute 297
The list Attribute 297
The min and max Attributes 298
The step Attribute 298
The color Input Type 298
The number and range Input Types 298
Date and time Pickers 298
Questions 299

13. Cookies, Sessions, and Authentication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

Using Cookies in PHP 301
Setting a Cookie 303
Accessing a Cookie 304
Destroying a Cookie 304
HTTP Authentication 304
Storing Usernames and Passwords 307
Salting 308
Using Sessions 312
Starting a Session 312
Ending a Session 315
Setting a Timeout 317
Session Security 317
Questions 320

14. Exploring JavaScript. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323

JavaScript and HTML Text 324
Using Scripts Within a Document Head 325
Older and Nonstandard Browsers 325
Including JavaScript Files 326
Debugging JavaScript Errors 327
Using Comments 329
Semicolons 329
Variables 330
String Variables 330
Numeric Variables 330
Arrays 331
Operators 332
Arithmetic Operators 332

Table of Contents | xi
 Assignment Operators 332
Comparison Operators 333
Logical Operators 333
Variable Incrementing and Decrementing 334
String Concatenation 334
Escaping Characters 334
Variable Typing 335
Functions 336
Global Variables 336
Local Variables 336
The Document Object Model 338
But It’s Not That Simple 340
Another Use for the $ Symbol 340
Using the DOM 341
Questions 342

15. Expressions and Control Flow in JavaScript. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

Expressions 343
Literals and Variables 344
Operators 345
Operator Precedence 346
Associativity 346
Relational Operators 347
The with Statement 350
Using onerror 351
Using try ... catch 352
Conditionals 353
The if Statement 353
The else Statement 353
The switch statement 354
The ? Operator 355
Looping 356
while Loops 356
do ... while Loops 357
for Loops 357
Breaking Out of a Loop 358
The continue Statement 359
Explicit Casting 360
Questions 360

16. JavaScript Functions, Objects, and Arrays. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

JavaScript Functions 363

xii | Table of Contents

 Defining a Function 363
The arguments Array 364
Returning a Value 365
Returning an Array 367
JavaScript Objects 368
Declaring a Class 368
Creating an Object 369
Accessing Objects 370
The prototype Keyword 370
JavaScript Arrays 372
Numeric Arrays 373
Associative Arrays 374
Multidimensional Arrays 375
Using Array Methods 376
Questions 380

17. JavaScript and PHP Validation and Error Handling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381

Validating User Input with JavaScript 381
The validate.html Document (Part One) 382
The validate.html Document (Part Two) 384
Regular Expressions 387
388
Using Regular Expressions in JavaScript 395
Using Regular Expressions in PHP 396
Redisplaying a Form After PHP Validation 397
Questions 403

18. Using Ajax. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405

What Is Ajax? 405
Using XMLHttpRequest 406
Your First Ajax Program 408
Using GET Instead of POST 413
Sending XML Requests 415
Using Frameworks for Ajax 420
Questions 421

19. Introduction to CSS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423

Importing a Style Sheet 424
Importing CSS from Within HTML 424
Embedded Style Settings 425
Using IDs 425
Using Classes 425

Table of Contents | xiii

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
it so bitterly that he entirely omitted the name of his general, the
Marquis of Cañete, in his poem. He returned to Spain in 1565, and
passed the remainder of his life, until his end in 1595, partly in
endeavouring to secure a reward from the king for his services, and
partly in compiling his great Araucana. It appeared in three parts in
1569, 1575, and 1590. The story told by himself, that he wrote it on
pieces of leather and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies,
therefore, only to the first part. It is only by a figure of speech that
the Araucana can be described as an epic. Ercilla said that he found
courage to print it because it was a true history of wars he had seen
for himself. The first part is almost wholly occupied with the
skirmishes of the Araucan war. In the later parts he was tempted to
provide a proper epic machinery, but the change is only a proof of
the tyranny of a fashion. Ercilla was a good handicraftsman of ottava
rima stanzas, he wrote very fine Castilian, and his poem has
unquestionable vitality. Yet it is, after all, hybrid. At its best it is a
superior version of the Varones Ilustres of Castellanos, at its weakest
an echo of the Italians. The literature of the world would have been
richer, not poorer, if Ercilla had written memoirs on the model of his
French contemporary Monluc.
The Italian influence which produced the learned poetry of Spain
had its effect on Portugal also. The Portuguese remember Francisco
de Sa de Miranda (1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their
language for literary purposes, and the work was continued by
Antonio Ferreira and Pedro de Andrade Caminha, his younger
contemporaries and followers. My own knowledge of these writers is
small, but as far as it goes it leads me to believe that Southey’s
sound literary judgment had as usual led him right when he said
that, “They rendered essential service to the language of their
country, and upon that their claims to remembrance must rest.”[22]
They are interesting in fact as examples of a general literary
movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all Western
Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have naturally
not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having no
modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the
Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of
Muntaner and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union
of Spain and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that
Portuguese would have shared the fate of Catalan. It would not have
ceased to be spoken, but it would no longer have been the language
of government and literature. Even as it was, Castilian had in
Portugal something of the pre-eminence which mediæval French had
had among neighbouring peoples. Portuguese who wrote their own
tongue also wrote Castilian—even Camoens is in the list of those
who used both languages. But the unity of the Peninsula was
destined never to be completed, and Portuguese has escaped falling
into the position of a dialect. Before the close of the sixteenth
century it was illustrated by a poem which has at any rate “a world-
wide reputation.”
It becomes the critic and historian of literature to
The Lusiads.
approach works of great fame, which he cannot
himself regard with a high degree of admiration, in
a spirit of diffidence, or even of humility. I have to confess my own
inability to feel the admiration other, and no doubt better, judges
have felt for the Lusiads.[23] The pathetic circumstances of the life of
the author, Luiz da Camoens (1524?-1580), are well known, and
have perhaps served to prejudice the reader in favour of the poem.
He was a Portuguese gentleman who served in the East Indies, who
was ruined by shipwreck, and who ended his life in extreme misery
in Lisbon. The foundation of the Lusiads is supplied by the famous
voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope; but
Camoens has worked in a great deal from Portuguese history, and
the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator. The
matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under
correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion
which has been claimed for the Lusiads is not great in a writer who
had Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a
coherent narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied—and no
one need wish to deny—that Camoens wrote his own language with
great purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more
than bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He
has a real tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his
patriotism is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the
best are fitter for the lyric than the scope of the epic, the Lusiads
suffer from the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both in
language and thought. The supernatural machinery is an example of
childish imitation. Camoens has introduced the heathen mythology
together with the sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese
poet had many precedents for the combination, but he is not strong
enough to make us endure its essential absurdity. The Lusiads has,
in fact, the defect of all the learned poetry of the Peninsula—that it
is very much of a school exercise. He saw his heathen gods and
goddesses in Virgil, and transferred them bodily to his own Christian
poem, not because they had any fit place there, but because they
were ordered to be provided in the “receipt for making an epic
poem.”[24]
The reader who compares the Lusiads, not with the Faërie Queen,
which belongs to a very different mansion in the house of literature,
but with the masterpieces of the class to which it really belongs, the
purely literary epic, done by an accomplished writer according to
rule, is, it may be, liable to be rendered impatient by the loud calls
made on him for extreme admiration. He finds stanza following
stanza of smooth, but somewhat nerveless, ottava rima, full of
matter which might equally well be expressed in prose, and would
not then appear to differ essentially from much of Hakluyt’s voyages.
Now and then he will find incidents—the vision of the Spirit of the
Cape, for example, and the episode of the island of Love—where the
intention to be poetical is visible enough, but which do not come of
necessity, and have no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is,
and that is what is most truly poetical and genuine in Camoens. And
of that again there are better and more spontaneous examples in his
sonnets. On the whole, one has to come to the conclusion that he
was a real poet, though of no wide scope, who could express a
certain tenderness and melancholy in forms he had learnt from the
Italians, but who owes his great name mainly to the fact that he is
the only man his country can quote as worthy to rank with the great
poets of the world. Therefore he has a whole nation to sing his
praise, and nobody is concerned to contradict.[25]
 CHAPTER III.
THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE
SPANISH DRAMA.

THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA—THE

FIRST BEGINNINGS OF THE RELIGIOUS PLAYS—THE STARTING-
POINT OF THE SECULAR PLAY—BARTOLOMÉ DE TORRES
NAHARRO—LOPE DE RUEDA—LOPE DE VEGA’S LIFE—HIS
INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA—THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORK—
CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE—CALDERON—
CALDERON’S SCHOOL.

The dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own,

The national
character of the
purely national. The classic stage had no influence
Spanish drama. on it whatever; the contemporary theatre of Italy
very little, and only for a brief period in the earlier
years. There were in Spain translators both of the Greek and Latin
dramatic literature, while her scholars were no less ready than
others to impress on the world the duty of following the famous
rules of Aristotle. But neither the beauty of the classic models, nor
the lessons of scholars, nor even the authority of Aristotle—though it
was certainly not less regarded in the last country which clung to the
scholastic philosophy than elsewhere—had any effect. It would be
too much to say that they were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic
writers were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them with
profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known passage of Don
Quixote, reproaches his countrymen for their neglect of the three
unities; and Lope de Vega, who more than any other man helped to
fix the Spanish comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and
place, and its habitual contempt for the rules that the comic and
tragic should never be mingled in one piece, or that great
personages should never be brought on except with a due regard to
their dignity, avowed that he saw what was right, and confessed its
excellence. He even boasted that he had written no less than six
orthodox plays. But Cervantes, in the little he wrote for the stage,
never made his practice even approach his precept, while nobody
has ever been able to find of which of his plays Lope was speaking
when he said that he had observed the unities. It has even been
supposed that when he made the boast, he was laughing at the
gentlemen to whom he addressed his Arte Nuevo de Hacer
Comedias (New Art of Writing Comedies). Not a little ingenuity has
been wasted in attempts to discover what both meant. The good
sense of Don Marcelino Menendez[26] has found by far the most
acceptable explanation of the mystery, and it is this,—that
Cervantes, Lope, and their contemporaries had a quite sincere
theoretical admiration for the precepts of Aristotle, or what were
taken to be such by the commentators, but that in practice they
obeyed their own impulses, and the popular will, though not without
a certain shamefaced consciousness that it was rather wicked in
them. Spanish dramatists, in fact, treated the orthodox literary
doctrine very much as the ancient Cortes of Castile were wont to
treat the unconstitutional orders of kings,—they voted that these
injunctions were to be obeyed and not executed—“obedicidas y no
cumplidas,” thereby reconciling independence with a respectful
attitude towards authority. Some were bold enough to say from the
first that the end of comedy was to imitate life, and that their
imitation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally became as fully
established in theory as it always had been in practice. Nothing is
more striking than the contrast between the slavishness of Spanish
learned poetry and the vigorous independence of the native stage.
There was little in the mediæval literature of Spain
The first beginnings
of the religious
to give promise of its drama of the later sixteenth
plays. and earlier seventeenth centuries. Spaniards had
mysteries, and they dramatised the lessons of the
Church as other nations did; but they had less of this than most of
their neighbours, and very much less than the French. In the earlier
years of the sixteenth century there was a perceptible French
influence at work in Spain.[27] The San Martinho of Gil Vicente, a
Portuguese, who wrote both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is
a moral play like many in mediæval French literature. It is on the
well-known story of Saint Martin and the beggar, is written in flowing
verse, and breaks off abruptly with a note that the performers must
end with psalms, for he had been asked to write very late, and had
no time to finish. The Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja, which,
from a reference to the spread of the Lutheran heresy, seems to
belong to the years about 1520, betrays a French model by its very
title. Farce had not the meaning it acquired later. The personages
are Labour, Peralforja, his son, Teresa Jugon, Peralforja’s sweetheart,
the Church, and Holy Writ. The subjects are the foolish leniency of
Labour to his son, and its deplorable effects (a favourite theme with
French writers of farses and moralities), the sorrows of the Church,
who is consoled by Holy Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his
weakness, and induce Peralforja to amend his ways. There is
nothing here particularly Spanish—nothing which might not be direct
translation from the French. The religious play was destined to have
a history of its own in Spain; but its earlier stage is marked by little
national character. Even the Oveja Perdida (the Lost Sheep), written,
or at least revised and recast, by Juan de Timoneda about 1570,
which long remained a stock piece with the strolling players, is a
morality on the universal mediæval model. The Lost Sheep is of
course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite, and rescued
by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other characters are Saint Peter,
the Archangel Michael, and the Guardian Angel. Except that it has an
elaborate introduction, divided between an Introit to Ribera, the
Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, before whom it was
played, and an Introit to the people, it does not differ from the San
Martinho or the Farsa Sacramental de Peralforja.
It has been customary to treat the Celestina as
The starting-point
the foundation, or at least an important part of the
of the secular play.
foundations, of the Spanish secular drama. This
curious story in dialogue is indeed called a “tragi-comedy,” and it
most unquestionably proves that its author, or authors, possessed
the command of a prose style admirably adapted for the purposes of
comedy. But the Spanish is a poetic, not a prose drama. The
qualities which redeem the somewhat commonplace love-story of
Calisto and Melibœa, and the tiresome pedantry of much of the
Celestina, its realism, and its vivacious representation of low life and
character, are seldom found on the Spanish stage. We shall do better
to look for the starting-point of the comedy of Lope de Vega in the
Eclogas of Juan del Encina, who has been already mentioned as one
of the last lights of the troubadour school.[28] The model here is
obviously the little religious play of the stamp of Vicente’s San
Martinho, modified by imitation of the classic Eclogue. The
personages, generally shepherds, are few, the action of the simplest,
and the verse somewhat infantile, though not without charm. Yet the
mere fact that we have in them examples of an attempt to make
characters and subjects, other than religious, matter of dramatic
representation, shows that they were an innovation and a beginning.
Juan del Encina, who was attached in some capacity to the Duke of
Alva of his time, wrote these Eclogues to be repeated for the
amusement of his patrons by their servants. It does not appear that
they were played in the market-place, or were very popular. During
the first half of the sixteenth century the Church endeavoured to
repress the secular play. The struggle was useless, for the bent of
the nation was too strong to be resisted. It conquered the Church,
which, before the end of the century, found itself unable to prevent
the performance of very mundane dramas within the walls of
religious houses. Yet for a time the Inquisition was able to repress
the growth of a non-religious drama at home. The working of the
national passion for the stage, and for something other than pious
farsas, is shown in the Josefina[29] of Micael de Carvajal. This long-
forgotten work, by an author of whom nearly nothing is really
known, was performed apparently for, and by, ecclesiastics at
Valencia about 1520. It is on the subject of Joseph and his Brethren,
is a religious play, but has divisions, and a machinery obviously
adapted from the Latin, if not the Greek model. There are four acts,
a herald who delivers a prologue to the first, second, and third, a
chorus of maidens at the end of each. The dialogue has life, and
there is a not unsuccessful attempt at characterisation in the parts of
the brothers and of Potiphar’s wife. At the close comes the villancico,
a simple form of song hovering towards being a hymn, which was
obligatory at the close of the religious play. The Josefina had no
progeny, and is to-day mainly interesting as an indication of the
struggle of the national genius to find its true path. We cannot say
even that of the few direct imitations of the classic form produced by
the Spaniards. Such works as the Nise Lastimosa—the Pitiable Agnes
—a strictly Senecan play on the story of Ines de Castro, first written
in Portuguese by Ferreira, and then adapted into Castilian by
Gerónimo Bermudez, a learned churchman, and printed in 1577, are
simply literary exercises. They show that the influences which
inspired Jodelle, and Garnier in France, were not unfelt in Spain; but
there, as in England, the national genius would have none of them.
In Bermudez himself the imitation of Seneca was forced. The Nise
Lastimosa has a continuation called the Nise Laureada. The first,
which ends with the murder of Agnes, is correct; but in the second,
which has for subject the vengeance of the king, he throws aside the
uncongenial apparatus of messenger and chorus, and plunges into
horrors, to which the story certainly lent itself, with the zest of his
contemporary Cristobal de Virues, or our own Kyd.
The true successors of Juan del Encina were to be
Bartolomé de Torres
found during the reign of Charles V. in the Spanish
Naharro.
colony at Rome. The Spanish proverb has it that
the Devil stands behind the cross—“tras la cruz está el diablo”—and
the Spaniards who lived under the shadow of the papal Court
enjoyed a licence which they would have missed under the eye of
the Inquisition. One of them, Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, who
lived and wrote in the early years of the century, is sometimes
counted the father of the Spanish stage. He was the author of a
number of comedies, published in Seville in 1520 under the title of
Propaladia, which deal with the favourite subjects of comedy, love
intrigues, and the tricks of lovers, rufianes—i.e., bullies—soldiers in
and out of service, and so forth, types which he had many chances
of observing at Rome when all Italy was swarming with Spanish
bisoños, the wandering fighting men who were mercenaries when
any prince would employ them, and vagabonds at other times.
Naharro had considerable vis comica, and a command of telling
fluent verse. His personages have life, and if his plays have touches
of obscenity, which is not common in Spain, and brutality, which is
less rare, his time must be taken into account. But Naharro, though
a genuine Spaniard, lived too near the Italians not to be influenced
by Machiavelli and Ariosto. His plays mark only a short step forward
to the fully developed comedy of Lope. The Propaladia was soon
suppressed by the Inquisition, not because it contained heresy, but
for a freedom of language in regard to ecclesiastical vices which
would have passed unrebuked in the previous century, but had
become of very bad example after the Reformation had developed
into a formidable attack on the Church. The form of his comedy was
not that finally adopted by the Spaniards. It was in five acts, with
the introito or prologue.
A truly popular national drama was hardly likely to
Lope de Rueda.
arise among courtiers and churchmen. It needed a
chief who looked to the common audience as his
patron, and who also had it in him to begin the work on lines which
literature could afterwards develop, Spain found such a leader in
Lope de Rueda (floruit 1544?-1567?). Little is known of his life, but
that little is more than is known with certainty of some contemporary
men of letters. He was a native of Seville, and originally a goldbeater
by trade. It may be that he acquired his taste for the stage by taking
part in the performance of religious plays, which were always acted
by townsmen or churchmen. The separation of the actor from the
amateur, if that is the right word to apply to the burghers and
peasants of the Middle Ages who appeared on the stage partly for
amusement and partly from piety, on the one hand, and from the
mere juggler, minstrel, or acrobat on the other, was going on in
France and England. The same process was at work in Spain. By
steps of which we can now learn nothing, Lope de Rueda became in
the fullest sense a playwright and actor-manager. He strolled all over
Spain. Cervantes, who had seen him, has immortalised his simple
theatre—the few boards which formed the stage, the blanket which
did duty as scenery, and behind which sat the guitar-player who
represented the orchestra, the bags containing the sheepskin jackets
and false beards forming the wardrobe of the company. The purely
literary importance of Lope de Rueda’s work is not great. That part
of it which survived is inconsiderable in bulk, and shows no advance
on Naharro. He was not an ignorant man. The Italian plays were
certainly known to him, and he wrote pure Castilian. But his chief
contribution to the form of Spanish dramatic literature was the paso
or passage, a brief interlude, generally between “fools” or “clowns”
in the Shakespearian sense, frequently introduced between the acts
of a regular comedy. The monologue of Lance over his dog, or the
scene between Speed and Lance with the love-letter, in the third act
of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, would serve as pasos. But Lope de
Rueda’s chief claim to honour is that he fairly conquered for the
Spanish stage its place in the sun. He hung on no patron, but set his
boards up in the market-place, looking to his audience for his
reward. When he died, in or about 1567, the theatre was a
recognised part of Spanish life. If he had not much enriched
dramatic literature, he had provided those who could with a place in
which they were free to grow to the extent of their intrinsic power. It
is pleasant to know that he had his reward. He seems to have been
a prosperous man, and Cervantes speaks with respect of his
character. The fact that he was buried in the Cathedral of Córdova is
a proof that he was not considered a mere “rogue and vagabond,”
but had at least as good a position as an English actor who was the
queen’s or the admiral’s “servant.” As Lope de Rueda was nobody’s
servant, we may fairly draw the deduction that the Spanish stage
had a more independent position than our own.
The school of Lope de Rueda, as they may be
The followers of
Lope de Rueda.
called with some exaggeration, must be allowed to
pass under his name. The most memorable of
them was Juan de Timoneda, already named as the author, or
adapter, of the Oveja Perdida. He was a bookseller of Valencia, who
died at a great age, but at some uncertain date, in the reign of Philip
II. Juan de Timoneda published all that were published of the plays
of Lope de Rueda, and in his capacity of bookseller-publisher was no
doubt helpful to literature. But as a man of letters he was mainly an
adapter, and his plays are echoes of Naharro and Rueda, or were
conveyed from Ariosto. The sap was now rising, and the tree began
to bear fruit in more than one branch. Spain as it then was, and as it
long remained, was rather a confederation of states than a state.
There was no capital in the proper sense of the word. Charles V. had
never rested, and had spent much of his life out of Spain. Philip II.
did indeed fix his Court at Madrid, or in the neighbourhood, but it
was not until the close of his life that the society of a capital began
to form about him. In the earlier years of his reign the capitals of the
ancient kingdoms were still centres of social, intellectual, and artistic
activity, nor did they fall wholly to the level of provincial towns while
any energy remained in Spain. Thus as the taste for the stage and
for dramatic literature grew, it was to be expected that its effects
would be seen in independent production in different parts of the
Peninsula. The writers who carried on the work of
The dramatists of
Seville and
Lope de Rueda, and who prepared the way for
Valencia. Lope de Vega, were not “wits of the Court,” or
about the Court. They were to be found at Seville
and Valencia. Juan de la Cueva, the author of the Egemplar Poético,
was a native of the capital of Andalusia. To him belongs the honour
of first drawing on the native romances for subjects, as in his Cerco
de Zamora—‘Siege of Zamora’—a passage of the Cid legend, and of
first indicating, if not exactly outlining, the genuine Comedia de Capa
y Espada in El Infamador—‘The Calumniator.’ In Valencia Cristobal de
Virues (1550- ——?) wrote plays less national in subject but more in
manner. He did once join the well-meaning but mistaken band which
was endeavouring to bind the Spanish stage in the chains of the
Senecan tragedy; but, as a rule, he wrote wild romantic plays,
abounding in slaughter, under classic names. This was an effort
which could not well lead anywhere to good, but at least it testifies
to the vitality of the interest felt in the stage; and Valencia has this
claim to a share in the development of the Spanish drama, that for a
short time it sheltered, encouraged, and may have helped to
determine, the course of the Phœnix of wits, the Wonder of Nature,
the fertile among all the most fertile, the once renowned, the then
unjustly depreciated, but the ever-memorable Lope de Vega.
If a writer is to be judged by his native force, his originality, the
abundance of his work, the effect he produced on the literature of
his country, and his fame in his own time, then Lope, to give him the
name by which he was and is best known to his countrymen, must
stand at the head of all Spain’s men of letters.[30]
If it is a rule admitting of no exception that the critic or historian of
literature should have read all his author, then I at least must
confess my incapacity to speak of this famous writer. Yet,
encouraged by a firm conviction that there never lived nor does live,
or at any future period will live, anybody who has achieved or will
achieve this feat, being, moreover, persuaded, for reasons to be
given, that it is not necessary to be achieved, I venture to go on.
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio came of a family which
Lope de Vega’s life.
originally belonged to the “mountain,” the hill
country of northern and north-western Spain,
which never submitted to the Moor. His father was “hidalgo de
ejucatoria,”—that is, noble by creation,—but his mother was of an
old family, and both came from the valley of Carriedo in Asturias. He
was born at Madrid on 25th November 1562. His life is known with
exceptional fulness, partly because many passages of his works are
avowedly biographical, partly because a number of his letters,
addressed to his patron in later years, the Duke of Sessa, have been
preserved. It would be better for Lope’s reputation if he had been
more reticent, or his patron more careless. As it is, we know not only
that he passed a stormy youth, but that in his later years he was an
unchaste priest. His father died when he was very young, and he
was left to the care of an uncle, the Inquisitor Don Miguel de Carpio.
The Jesuits had the honour of educating him, among the many
famous men trained in their schools. It is recorded by his
biographers, and we can believe it, that he was very precocious. At
five he could read Latin, and had already begun to write verses.
After running away in a boyish escapade, he was attached as page
to Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Ávila, who sent him to the
University of Alcalá de Henares, the native town of Cervantes. From
the account given of his youth in the excellently written dialogue
story Dorotea, he appears to have been a mercenary lover, even
according to the not very delicate standard of his time. His
adventures were unsavoury, and not worth repeating. It is enough
that, both before he took orders and in later life when he was
tonsured and had taken the full vows, he presented a combination,
not unknown at any time or in any race, but especially common on
both sides in the seventeenth century, of intensity of faith with the
most complete moral laxity. He alternated between penance and
relapses. After leaving Alcalá he was for a time attached to the Duke
of Alva, the grandson of the renowned governor of the Low
Countries. For him he wrote the pastoral Arcadia, which deals with
the duke’s amours. He married, but marriage produced no effect on
his habits. He was exiled to Valencia for two years, in consequence
of obscure troubles arising, he says, from “jealousy.” Shortly after his
return to Madrid his wife died, but he continued to give cause for
“jealousy,” and other troubles sent him off to join the Armada. From
that campaign of failure and suffering he had the good fortune to
return in safety, and he bore it so well that he wrote at least a great
part of a long continuation of Ariosto, called The Beauty of Angelica,
during the voyage. After his return to Madrid in 1590 he was again
married, and again marriage made little difference. In 1609 he
became a priest. During his later years he was attached, not
apparently as a servant but as a patronised friend, to Don Pedro
Fernandez de Córdova, first Marquess Priego, and then Duke of
Sessa,—a very dissolute gentleman of literary tastes, belonging to
the famous house which had produced the Great Captain, Gonsalvo
de Córdova. He died at the age of seventy-three in 1635.
A poet who could venture on so great an
His influence on the
drama.
enterprise as a continuation of Ariosto amid all the
distractions of the Armada cannot have wanted for
confidence in himself, nor was he likely to have an idle pen. The
productiveness of Lope was indeed enormous. He may be said to
have tried every literary form of his time, from the epic on the Italian
model down to the romance. In bulk, the life-work of an industrious
journalist might be about equal to his surviving writings. And Lope
was no mere journalist. His execution of everything he touched has
a certain interest. If space allowed, there would be something to say
of his religious poem on San Isidro and his sonnets, serious and
burlesque. But space does not allow, and we must consider him here
chiefly in his great and dominant character of dramatist,
remembering always that he was a man of many-sided ability, and
that the average cleverness of his non-dramatic work goes far to
justify the admiration of his countrymen in his time, and the place
they have never ceased to give him as, with the one exception of
Cervantes, the chief of their literature. The number of his plays has
remained a wonder and a legend. Eighteen hundred comedias and
four hundred autos sacramentales is the figure given on fair
authority as his total life-work for the stage. He himself confesses to
two hundred and nineteen pieces as early as 1603, and in 1624 to
one thousand and seventy. An eyewitness has recorded that he once
wrote five plays in fifteen days; and that on another occasion,
having undertaken to collaborate with two friends in a comedy, he
finished his share of the work before breakfast, though it was one
act out of three, and wrote some other verse into the bargain. Nor
are these stories, incredible as they sound, altogether beyond belief.
They could be accepted without hesitation if the writing of Lope de
Vega were all imitative and bad. But that is far from being the case.
Over and above the fact that he sometimes—as in the Dorotea, for
example—wrote an admirable style, he was the creator of a literary
form. Lope de Vega was the real creator of the Spanish comedia, a
word which must not be understood to mean only comedy, but
stage-play of every kind. Others prepared the way, and some
collaborated in the ending of the work, but the merit is none the less
his. Without Lope there could have been no Calderon, who found the
form ready made to his hands. That a writer of so much
productiveness, and so little concentration, would have many faults
will be easily understood. Finish was not to be expected from him,
nor profundity. There would inevitably be much that was hasty and
careless, much repetition, much taking of familiar situations, much
use of stock characters, and a great deal of what the French call the
à peu pris—the “that is good enough”—instead of the absolutely
best, which is not to be attained except by thought and the labour of
the file. He must have been prepared to do whatever would please
an uncritical audience, as indeed Lope candidly avowed that he was.
In short, he might be expected to have all the weaknesses of the
class which Carlyle defined as “the shallow vehement,” and they
would be the more conspicuous because he lived in a time of
learning, but of no great criticism, because he was a beginner, and
not least because he belonged to a people who have always been
indifferent to finish of workmanship. But with all this, for which a
narrow criticism of the stamp of Boileau’s would have condemned
him utterly, Lope had the one thing necessary, which is creative
faculty. The quality of his plays will be best shown later on, when we
treat of the Spanish stage as a whole. For the present it is enough to
deal with the more mechanical side of his workmanship. Before his
time Spanish play-writers had hesitated between the classic division
into five acts and a tentative division into four. One early and
forgotten writer, Avendaño, took three. Lope, not without the co-
operation of others, but mainly by his example, established this last
as the recognised number of jornadas—acts—for a Spanish play. The
choice was made for a definite reason. In the Arte Nuevo de Hacer
Comedias—a verse epistle written to a friend who had asked him to
justify his works before the critics who held by the classic rules—
Lope laid it down that the first act should introduce the characters
and knit the intrigue; the second lead to the crisis, the scène à faire
of French dramatic critics; and the third wind all up. He formulated
the great secret of the playwright’s craft, which is that the audience
must always know what is going to happen, but never exactly how it
is going to be brought about. They must never be left in a puzzling
doubt as to the meaning of what is going on, and yet must always
be kept in a pleasing uncertainty as to what is about to happen next.
This supposed a very real unity of action, compatible with plot and
underplot, but not with two independent plots. For the unities of
time and place he cared as much, and as little, as our own
Elizabethans.
Not even Lope’s fertility and activity could have
The conditions of
the work.
been equal to the production of two thousand two
hundred plays, of which all, or even a majority,
were executed in conformity with his own standard. Such a piece of
construction as the Dama Melindrosa cannot have been one of the
five plays written in fifteen days. There is a great deal in Lope’s
literary baggage which is mere scribbling, meant to please an
audience for an afternoon. Though the Spaniards loved the theatre
much, they were not numerous enough in the towns to supply many
audiences, and they clamoured for new things. To meet this
demand, every Spanish dramatist who wished to stand well with the
managers was compelled to produce a great deal of what may be
called journalism for the theatre, the mere rapid throwing together
of acceptable matter, which might be love-adventures or the news of
the day, historical stories or religious legend, in stock forms. The
stage was not only all the literature of the mass of the people, but
all the newspapers, and all the “music-hall” side of their
amusements too. In all cases the comedy was accompanied by
interludes of the nature of music-hall “turns,” loas, pasos, or
entremeses—brief scenes of a comic kind, songs, and, above all,
dances. The patio or court—that is, the pit—filled by the poorest,
most numerous, and most formidable part of the audience, who
stood, and who were addressed in compliment as the Senate or the
musketeers, and were known in actors’ slang as the chusma—i.e.,
the galley-slaves—would not endure to be deprived of their dances.
So the most truly famous comedy would hardly have escaped the
cucumbers with which the “grave Senate” expressed its disapproval,
if it had been presented without “crutches” in the form of the dance,
the song, or the farcical interlude. Thus it inevitably followed that
the playwright was often called upon to supply what was in fact
padding to fill up the intervals between the popular shows. And this
Lope supplied, besides writing the entremeses, mojigangas,
saynetes—all forms of brief farce. Such work could not well be
literary. His reputation, and indeed the reputation of the Spanish
drama, has suffered because matter of this kind was not allowed to
die with the day for which it was written. During his later years, and
the better part of the life of his successor, Calderon, the drama held
its place at Court. Plays were frequently first given before the Court
(which at that time, and at all festivals, meant substantially every
lady and gentleman in Madrid), before reaching the public theatre.
This audience demanded a higher level of work, and the best
comedias were probably written for it. Yet the drama made its way
to the palace, and was not originally directed to the king and
courtiers. It came as Lope de Vega had shaped it, and so remained
in all essentials. The metrical form was fixed by him: the silvas or
liras—lyric verse in hendecasyllabic and seven-foot lines—for the
passionate passages, the sonnet for soliloquies, the romance for
narrative and dialogue, the redondillas or roundelays of assonant
and consonant verse, are all enumerated by him in the Arte Nuevo
de Hacer Comedias. And what he did for the secular play he did for
the religious. The Voyage of the Soul, given in his prose story, El
Peregrino en Su Patria, is an Auto Sacramental as complete as any of
Calderon’s. Whatever the Spanish drama has to give us was either
found undeveloped by Lope de Vega, and perfected in shape by him,
or was his invention. Other men put their mark on their versions of
his models, or showed qualities which he wanted, but nobody
modified the Spanish drama as he had built it in any essential. He
was, as far as any single man could be, the creator of the dramatic
literature of his country; and even though Tirso de Molina was
greater in this or that respect, Alarcon had a finer skill in drawing a
character, Calderon a deeper poetic genius,—though he might have
cause to envy this man’s art or that man’s scope—yet he must
remain the chief of one of the very few brilliant and thoroughly
national dramatic literatures of the world.
This predominance of the Luca fa presto of literature may have been
a misfortune, though when the conditions are remembered, and the
 innate indifference of the Spaniard to artistic finish
Contemporaries and
followers of Lope.
is allowed for, an inevitable one. We must accept it
and its consequences. One of them is this, that
after Lope de Vega there could be no room for historical
development on the Spanish stage. Calderon was a different man
writing the same drama. There is no such difference between these
two as between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; and nowhere in
Spanish dramatic literature is there anything answering to the
contrast between the Elizabethan and the Restoration stages. The
division often made between the school of Lope and the school of
Calderon is very arbitrary. It is largely a matter of date. The earlier
men are classed with the first, and the later with the second. To find
a distinction between them it is necessary to insist on mere matters
of detail, or on such purely personal differences of genius and
character as must always be found where there is life among a large
body of men. The rule of a literary as of a political despot may
cramp as well as support. It is possible that if they had not been
overshadowed by the Marvel of Nature his contemporaries might
have developed with more freedom. None of them may seem to
have suffered more from the consecration of hasty writing than
Gabriel Tellez (1570?-1648), known in literature as the Maestro Tirso
de Molina, a churchman, who died as head of a religious house at
Soria. Tirso de Molina may be said to live on the universal stage of
the world as the first creator of Don Juan.[31] One of his plays, The
Vengeance of Tamar, contains a scene of very high tragic power—
that in which the outraged sister waits veiled outside the tent
prepared by Absalom for the slaughter of his brother. She has a long
double-edged dialogue with the offender, full of warnings of doom
intelligible to the audience, but misunderstood by him, and when he
has gone to his fate her soliloquy is a fine example of the legitimate
dramatic use of the chorus. There is a certain quiet in this scene, a
reserve, and an appeal not to the mere passion for seeing something
going on, but to the emotions of pity and terror, which is rare indeed
on the amusing, but too often noisy and shallow, Spanish stage.
Calderon, using the freedom of a Spanish dramatist, conveyed the
whole act into his Hairs of Absalom. One is inclined to think that the
playwright who first rough-hewed the universally true character of
Don Juan might, if he had felt called upon to finish as well as to
imagine and sketch, have also given us the finished type of the
debauchee whom the pursuit of his own pleasure has made a
violator and brute, all the more odious because there is on him an
outward show of gallantry and high-breeding. Tirso’s Marta la
Piadosa—‘The Pious Martha’—has been most absurdly compared to
Tartuffe. It is the story of a lively young lady who affects a passion
for good works and a vow of charity in order to escape a
disagreeable marriage, and is in other respects the usual comedia de
capa y espada. Yet there is a power of characterisation in it, a
liveliness and a genial humanity, which need little to be the most
accomplished comedy. But it misses of what it might have reached,
and we may say that it failed because his audience, and the taste of
his time, called upon Tirso for nothing better than hasty work. In
Guillen de Castro (1569-1631), again, the friend of Lope at Valencia,
we find the same contrast between a vigorous original force of
imagination, with great powers of presentment, and a sudden drop
into what no doubt pleased the “musketeers,” but is now only worth
looking at because it did. His Youth of the Cid, which up to a certain
point supplied Corneille with more than a model, falls to puerile
miracle and ends incoherently. Juan Ruiz de Alarcon reached very
high comedy. His Verdad Sospechosa—‘The Doubted Truth’—has had
a great progeny on the stage of the world. All the romancing liars—
they who lie not for sordid ends but by imagination, and from a love
of shining, or getting out of the immediate difficulty—who follow one
another on all theatres, may claim descent from his hero. But
Alarcon was not popular, and he also could be hasty. The list of
names might easily be swollen in a country which counted its known
dramatic writers at certain periods by sixties and seventies, but
nothing would be gained for the understanding of the school by the
repetition.[32]
Although he cannot be said to have developed or even modified the
form of dramatic literature in Spain, Calderon was too considerable a
man to be allowed to pass with a school.[33]
Pedro Calderon de la Barca Barreda Henao y
Calderon.
Riaño, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Priest,
Honorary Chaplain of his Majesty, and our Lords
the New Kings of the Cathedral of Toledo—to give him all his names
and titles—was a native of Madrid, “though from another place he
took his name, an house of ancient fame.” The splendour of his
pedigree was perhaps exaggerated by the partiality of friends. It is a
point on which the Spaniard has all the reverence of the Scotsman.
Yet he was undoubtedly a noble, and “came from the mountain,” as
indeed did all Spain’s greatest men in letters and art. His long life,
which lasted from 1600 to 1681, unlike Lope’s, was honourable, but
is otherwise little known. We are told that he served as a soldier in
his youth, but in a time of truce when not much service was to be
seen. From one of the few certain passages in his life it appears that
he was not slow to draw his sword on sufficient provocation. He had
once to take sanctuary after chasing an actor through the streets of
Madrid sword in hand. The man had stabbed Calderon’s brother in
the back, and the excuse was held to be good. For the rest, the
poet’s life was peaceful and prosperous. He was educated by the
Jesuits and at Salamanca, was known as a writer when he was
twenty, and after the death of Lope de Vega, he became the
acknowledged chief of Spanish dramatists. Philip IV. greatly favoured
and employed him. Calderon was, in fact, as much the king’s poet as
Velasquez was his painter. By the favour of the king he also was
admitted into the Order of Santiago, which might bring with it a
commandery and a revenue. In the revolt of Catalonia in 1640,
when the king went to the army, Calderon joined the other knights
who rendered their military service under the royal banner. At the
age of fifty-one he took orders. This was not always a proof of a
sincere vocation, for Swift’s saying, that it was easier to provide for
ten men in the Church than one out of it, was even truer of Spain
than of England. But Calderon’s sincerity need not be doubted. He
appears to have given up writing directly for the theatre after taking
orders, but continued to produce plays for the Court which were
repeated in public. During the latter half of his life he preferred to
devote himself to the autos sacramentales, which he had an
exclusive right to supply to the town of Madrid. No dramatic author
of the time seems to have been so indifferent to the fate of his
plays. A few were printed by his brother, but he himself published
none, though he was continually vexed by piracies, and by learning
that rubbish had been presented in his name to provincial audiences.
In his old age he drew up a list of his genuine plays at the request of
the Duke of Veragua, the representative of Columbus. From the
letter sent with the list we learn that there were two noted pests of
the Madrid theatre, one known as Great, and the other as Little,
Memory. The first could remember a whole play (one supposes it
must have been taliter qualiter) after hearing it once, the other after
hearing it two or three times, and the two gained a dishonourable
livelihood by poaching for piratical managers. As many dramas
reached the press by their exertions, the wretched state of the text
is easily accounted for. When Great or Little Memory was at a loss he
put in his own trash. Even in Calderon’s genial and peaceful old age
this outrage moved him to bitterness. Yet he never edited his plays.
His executor, Don Juan de Vera Tasis, who published the first edition
after his death, was unfortunately a partisan of the detestable estilo
culto, and is suspected of having inserted some very bad examples
of this vicious affectation. Between the indifference of the poet and
the insufficiency of the editor the text has suffered greatly.
Calderon’s high estimate, not perhaps so much of his own autos as
of the sanctity of work written for a religious purpose, is shown by
the fact that he did publish some of them, lest they should suffer the
same misuse as his plays.
The reputation of Calderon has suffered from the opposite evil to
that which has injured Lope’s. The Phœnix of Geniuses has been
punished in modern times for the wild overpraise of his own, by
some neglect. German criticism has treated him as a mere amuser.
Calderon, on the other hand, has been the victim of the incontinence
in praise of the Schlegels, who were determined to make another,
and a better, Shakespeare if they could not find one. Many readers
who had formed an idea of him at second hand have probably
suffered a severe shock on becoming acquainted with his work.[34]
No reader should expect to find a world poet in
His limitations.
Calderon, who was a Spaniard of the Spaniards.
No more intensely national poet ever wrote, and it
is for that he must be read and appreciated. Moreover, he is a
Spaniard of the seventeenth century, when the monarchical
sentiment was at its height, and when all life was permeated by a
religion in which the creed had, in Mr Swinburne’s phrase, replaced
the decalogue. His conception of honour (we shall come back to the
point of honour as a motive for Spanish plays) is that of his time—
thoroughly oriental. It was not the sentiment which nerves a man
against fear of consequences, and enables him to resist the
temptation to do what is dishonourable, or, better still, makes him
incapable of feeling it, but the fixed determination not to allow the
world the least excuse for saying that somebody has done
something to you which renders you undignified or ridiculous. As has
been already said, he added nothing to the formal part of Spanish
dramatic literature, not even to the auto. He was too much affected
by the Góngorism of his early manhood, for even the most partial of
editors cannot throw all, or even the most, of the errors in that style
found in his plays on Don Juan de Vera Tasis.
Yet with his limitations Calderon was a
His qualities.
considerable poet, and a very skilful master of the
machinery of the Spanish comedy. When not
misled into Góngorism he wrote magnificently, and there are lyric
choral passages in the autos which Mr Ticknor rightly praised as
worthy of Ben Jonson’s masques. Indeed not a little of his work is
identical in purpose with the masque, though different in form. As a
Court poet he was called upon to write for the entertainment of the
king and the courtiers, and to supply theatrical shows at royal
marriages, births of princes, and so forth. There was no intrinsic
novelty here, for Calderon did but give the high-bred Spaniard of the
Court a finer poetic version of the dances, songs, and bright short
pieces under various, names, which delighted the humbler Spaniard
in the patios. The intensely national sentiment which he expresses
may strike us at times as a little empty, but is high and shining, and
lends itself to a certain stately treatment which he could give. The
romantic sentiment was strong in Calderon, and even in the most
purely Spanish trappings that is not remote from us. A poet who
dealt not inadequately with great passions could hardly help
sometimes piercing through the merely national to the universal,
though it must be acknowledged that his characters rarely utter the
individual human saying, and that he was far too fond of long
casuistical amplifications, which are almost always frigidly pedantic,
and not rarely bombastical. The most quoted passage in all his work,
the lines which close the second act of La Vida es Sueño, gain by
being taken apart from their context:

“Que es la vida? Un frenesi:

Que es la vida? Una ilusion,
Una sombra, una ficcion
Y el mayor bien es pequeño
Que toda la vida es sueño
Y los sueños sueño son.”

“We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

It is a fine poetic reflection, well fitted to stand beside the yet more
beautiful lines of the Tempest, but it is not wise to approach the play
in the hope that all of it will be found at the same level.
As in the case of Lope, though not to the same extent, the critic who
is severely limited in space must be content to speak in general
terms of much of Calderon’s work. It would be interesting to take El
Mágico Prodigioso (‘The Wonder-working Magician’), El Mayor
Monstruo los Zelos (‘Jealousy the greatest Monster’), and La Puente
de Mantible (‘The Bridge of Mantible’), and show what has been
added in any of them—or a score of others which it were as easy to
name—to the unchanging framework of the Spanish play. In the
Mágico Prodigioso, for instance, perhaps the most generally known
of Calderon’s greater dramas, which has been ineptly enough
compared to Faust, we have, in addition to the usual machinery of
dama, galan, and gracioso, a story of temptation by the devil.
Looked at closely, it is a tale told for edification, and for the purpose
of showing what a fool the devil essentially is. He is argued off his
legs by Cyprian the hero at the first bout, beaten completely by
stock arguments to be found in text-books. His one resource is to
promise Cyprian the possession of Justina, and he signally fails to
keep his word. The false Justina he has created to satisfy the hero
turns to a skeleton at once, and Cyprian becomes a Christian
because he discovers that the devil is unable to give him possession
of a woman, and is less powerful than God, which he knew by the
fiend’s own confession at the beginning. It is an edifying story to all
who accept the premisses and the parade of scholastic argument,
and are prepared to allow for the time, the nation, and the
surroundings.
Calderon wound up and rounded off the historical
The school of
Calderon.
development of the Spanish drama so completely
that little need be said of his school, which indeed
only means contemporaries who wrote Lope’s drama with Calderon’s
style. Yet Moreto was a strong man, and to him also belongs the
honour of having put on the stage an enduring type, the Lindo Don
Diego, who was the ancestor of our own Sir Fopling Flutter, of Lord
Foppington, and of many another theatrical dandy. Francisco de
Roxas, too, has left a point-of-honour play, not unworthy of his
master, Del Rey Abajo, Ninguno—‘From the King downwards,
Nobody.’ One feature common to all the later writers for the old
Spanish stage may be noticed. It was their growing tendency to re-
use the situations and plots of their predecessors. Moreto was a
notable proficient in this, and Calderon himself did as much. It
seems as if a theatre which dealt almost wholly with intrigue and
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookultra.com