The New Art of Writing Plays
BY
TRANSLATED BY
WILLIAM T. BREWSTER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
Printed for the
Dramatic Museum of Columbia University
_in the City of New York_
MCMXIV
COPYRIGHT 1914 BY
DRAMATIC MUSEUM OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Introduction by Brander Matthews
The New Art of Writing Plays by Lope de Vega
Notes by B. M.
By a significant coincidence the marvellous outflowering of the drama
is simultaneous in Spanish literature and in English. Spain almost
exhausted her immense resources in fitting out the invincible Armada;
and England strained every nerve to compass the defeat of the dread
fleet. Lope de Vega, the foremost of the Iberian playwrights,
actually sailed as a soldier on the fatal voyage to the English
channel; and it is dimly possible that Shakspere also saw service on
blue water; the year of the running sea fight is one of those in his
biography about which we have no information, and his use of
sea-terms has been declared by an expert to be scientifically
accurate. In this simultaneous development of the drama in England
and in Spain at the moment when the energy of the two peoples was
aroused to the utmost, we have a confirmation of Brunetière's theory
that the foundation of our pleasure in the playhouse is the assertion
of the human will.
Shakspere came forward after the English drama had already developed
a variety of forms; and he found the road broken for him by Marlowe
and Kyd, by Lyly and Greene. At first he followed in their
footsteps, however far beyond them he was to advance in the end.
Lope de Vega, on the other hand, was a pioneer; he it was who blazed
the new trails in which all the succeeding playwrights of Spain
gladly trod. Shakspere seems to have cared little for invention,
borrowing his plots anywhere and everywhere, and reserving his
imagination for the interpretation of tales first told by others.
Lope, on the other hand again, abounded rather in invention than in
the interpreting imagination; he was wonderfully fecund and prolific,
unsurpassed in productivity even by Defoe or Dumas. It was he who
made the pattern that Calderon and all the rest were to employ. It
was he who worked out the formula of the Spanish _comedia_, often not
a comedy at all in our English understanding of the term, but rather
a play of intrigue, peopled with hot-blooded heroes who wore their
hearts on their sleeves and who carried their hands on the hilts of
their swords.
Where Lope de Vega and Shakspere are again alike is that they both
wrote all their plays for the popular theater, apparently composing
these pieces solely with a view to performance and caring nothing for
any praise which might be derived from publication. Martinenche, in
his study of the 'Comedia Espagnole' (p. 243, note) dwells on Lope's
carelessness for the literary renown to be won by the printing of his
dramatic poems; in his non-dramatic poems he took pride, just as
Shakspere seems to have read carefully the proofs of his lyrical
narratives altho he did not himself choose to publish a single one of
his plays. And Molière, it may be noted, tells us frankly that he
was completely satisfied with the success of his earlier pieces on
the stage, and that he had been content to leave them unprinted until
his hand was forced by a pirate-publisher.