SOURCE: Hughes, Charlotte Bradford. “Introduction: Sources.” In John Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice: A Critical Edition, edited by Charlotte Bradford Hughes, pp. 28-54. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966.

[In this excerpt from her introduction to Sir Courtly Nice, Hughes places the play into context by examining its relation to its Spanish source and to broader Spanish comedic conventions.]

I

The long-continued popularity of Sir Courtly Nice with Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences constitutes only a portion of the play's interest for the student of literary history. In many ways this play is a representative comedy of the period. Although the level of its wit falls below the median for the plays of Etherege and Congreve, and the dialogue lacks the incisive vigor of Wycherley's best writing, within its structure may be found most of the details of plot and character that comprise the genre of Restoration comedy. In other respects it seems to anticipate the early eighteenth-century drama, in its portrayal of the hero as a “true lover”¹ rather than as a rake, and the later novel in its faithfulness to middle-class social portraiture. For the conventional background of titled aristocracy does not carry the conviction of authenticity that it does in Etherege's plays. Crowne's lords and ladies are not genuine. Their arrogance is imitative and overdone and more than a trifle vulgar; it lacks the authority of Dorimant's easy and graceful outrageousness. Compared with the fancies of Sir Fopling Flutter, that “offspring of an orchid and an idiot”,² the delicacy of Sir Courtly Nice seems labored, and his effeminacy distastefully emphasized. Leonora comes close to being a strumpet, without the comic license of Hoyden or Miss Prue; in comparison with the resources of a Millamant, her upstart deceitfulness is common and contemptible. The most original touches in the play, the righteous indignation of the Tory Hothead, the stolid British embarrassment of Belguard in the scenes with the supposedly imbecile Sir Thomas Callicoe, and the managerial preoccupations of the Aunt, are observations from middle-class life in the manner of Smollett and Fielding. The humour-characterization of Surly, Testimony, and Hothead is well within the tradition of seventeenth-century drama derived from the Jonsonian pattern. The ingenious servant is a stock character, and the Aunt a recurrent type. The comic infatuation of the latter with Sir Courtly is a familiar mockery of the main story line, which, as in all such plays, consists of love-intrigue. The two sets of lovers, Leonora and Farewell, Violante and Belguard, each serving as a foil for the other, are also typical of Restoration comedy plotting. The love-contract or stipulation of conditions before marriage on the part of the women is, as Kathleen Lynch points out in The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy, a stock device of precieuse literature, one of the most pervasive influences upon the drama of the seventeenth century. The incident is, of course, wrought to comic perfection in Congreve's The Way of the World.

Crowne's play is representative also of the comedies known to have been derived, at least in part, from comedias of the Spanish Golden Age, of which much has been surmised but little verified by scholars chiefly interested in English literature. The question of the influence of the “Spanish plot” upon the comedies of the Restoration is one which has been debated intermittently since the plays themselves were written. Gerard Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) is the primary source for later writers who, often without explanation, have added to and subtracted from the list of seventeen plays that he attributed to Spanish plays or prose romances. Langbaine subsequently acquired a reputation for having been an “overingenious compiler of sources”,³ but in actuality his assertions are more easily verified or disproved than those of some modern scholars.

The nineteenth-century critic A. W. Ward, in his History of English Dramatic Literature, omitted nine of the titles mentioned by Langbaine, but added others to bring the total of dramas supposedly derived from the Spanish to twenty-five. Although he consulted works by students of the Spanish drama, Ward was often content to attribute a particular play to “some Spanish source”. Nevertheless, he did demonstrate his awareness of the complexity of any discussion of literary influences. Although he did not read Spanish, he saw certain obvious differences between the drama of the Golden Age and that of the Restoration, and it was his opinion that “the connexion between the Spanish and the English drama in this period, which is sometimes assumed to have been extremely intimate, will, the more the subject is inquired into, be found to reduce itself to a narrow range of indebtedness on the part of our writers”.⁴

In the nineteen-twenties, a number of specialists in the Restoration drama, among them Allardyce Nicoll and Montague Summers, indicated the desirability of further research in the matter of Spanish influence, while the attitude of Ward was maintained by Kathleen Lynch, who stated that the “‘cloak and sword’ type of comedy … proved too decidedly nationalistic in spirit to become fused successfully with, or in any memorable way to change, the current of English comedy of manners”.⁵ Writing in 1959, John Loftis has revived the issue in a periodical article, contending that “the borrowing from Spanish drama has been underestimated”, and that “many Spanish plays appeared on the English stage during the Restoration and eighteenth century”. More specifically, he adds:

Among the English writers who took material for plays, either directly or indirectly, from the Spanish dramatists were John Dryden, George Digby Earl of Bristol, Sir Samuel Tuke, William Wycherley, John Crowne, Sir John Vanbrugh, Richard Steele, Susannah Centlivre, Christopher Bullock, Richard Savage, and Robert Dodsley.⁶

The task of searching out sources and analogues in Spanish drama for the plots of Restoration plays is one which can never be satisfactorily accomplished by a scholar working independently. Much work remains to be done by students of Spanish literature in editing plays and establishing accurate bibliographies of individual authors. Greater knowledge of Spanish language and literature is required of scholars in the field of English literary history. Except in isolated cases, such as Allison Gaw's detailed study of Sir Samuel Tuke's adaptation of Coello's Los empeños de seis horas, and the briefer articles of Loftis and J. U. Rundle on the relations between Cibber, John Leanerd, and Tirso de Molina, and between Wycherley and Calderón,⁷ Restoration versions of Spanish plays and novelas have not been compared closely with their originals, and little attempt has been made to analyze the significance of their departure from or adherence to their sources. Nor has a careful study yet been made of the Spanish plays brought to the English stage through adaptations from the French drama. It has been almost customary for scholars to make no distinction between first-hand and second-hand borrowings and to ignore the French version of a play ultimately derived from the Spanish. Finally, no attempt has been made to study the dramas of the Spanish siglo de oro and the English Restoration as common products of a most challenging cultural epoch—the Late Renaissance.

Agustín Moreto, from whose comedy No puede ser guardar una mujer Sir Courtly Nice was adapted, was a courtier and a dramatist of polish and precision, if not of great originality. Indeed, No puede ser itself represents a re-working of the plot of Lope de Vega's El mayor imposible. Gerald Brenan describes Moreto in The Literature of the Spanish People as “the playwright of a refined and self-contained court, cut off from the general life of the country and given up, on the surface at least, to a life of love affairs and pleasure”.⁸ His relative position with regard to Lope de Vega and to Calderón is roughly comparable to Crowne's rank in the company of Etherege and Congreve, although no comparison may be drawn between the latter writers and the greatest of the Spanish dramatists. Moreto is best known for El desdén con el desdén, a play in which a princess who believes she is incapable of love is won by a man who pretends not to love her, and for El lindo Don Diego, the title character of which is a vain and preposterous fop. No puede ser, though perhaps not a masterpiece, is a lively and witty combination of “thesis play” and intrigue comedy. It pictures a way of life that is aristocratic almost in the Platonic sense. Its characters are, with the exception of the obstinate Don Pedro, highly intelligent, and the women are, like Shakespearean heroines, independent without vulgarity. Tarugo, an ancestor of Figaro, is a worthy representative of the gracioso, and Manuela typical in her down-to-earth echoes of her mistress's refined sentiments. That the Restoration should have found Moreto's comedy excessively proper is not surprising, but certainly the play is maligned by historians of English drama, among them Arthur F. White, who suggest that it wanted “improving” at the hands of a dramatist such as John Crowne. No puede ser is a deservedly well-known comedy, in its own way representative of its period. For a discussion of influences and parallel techniques in the drama of both countries, the relationship between the Spanish play and its English counterpart presents an interesting point of departure.

Since comedia is a more inclusive term in Spanish than comedy in English, it is convenient to compare with Restoration comedy only comedias de capa y espada, that is, cape-and-sword or intrigue comedies, comedies of the figurón or humour-character, and a group of plays categorized by writers on the Spanish drama in various ways, that fit the English definition of comedy of manners. The foregoing represent only a fraction of the plays written for the Spanish theatre of the seventeenth century. Religious plays, historical dramas, plays of peasant life and of the supernatural, which must be disregarded here because they have no parallels in the Restoration period in England, combine to make the Spanish drama extremely rich in theme and idea, and therefore perhaps more worthy of comparison with the Elizabethan period in English literature than with the more limited period of the Restoration.

The play of cape-and-sword is, as the name suggests, a romantic adventure plot, the personages of which belong to the upper social classes. It is derived principally from the Italian commedia dell'arte, and its production was directly influenced by the latter, since Italian companies presented plays in Spain during the sixteenth century. Hugo Rennert, in his study of the Spanish stage, observes that “the name of the male lover in these commedie, Fulvio, Valerio, Ottavio, Leandro … and of the female lover, la comica accesa, Isabella, Lucinda, Leonora … we find very frequently in the comedies of Lope”. There is also much similarity in the situations:

They recur from piece to piece with inconsiderable changes, each with the same mistakes, the same quarrels, the same night scenes, where one person is taken for another in the darkness; the same misunderstandings—scene equivoche, etc.⁹

The comedies of manners utilize some of the stock situations of the romantic intrigue, but attempt greater accuracy in portraying the customs of contemporary society. Here, as in the intrigue plays, “honor” is exhaustively debated, and the problems of love treated from many points of view. Some of these plays reveal the desire for release from the social restraint of the feudal hierarchy, and for greater personal freedom, particularly on the part of women. Perhaps there was some breakdown of the social pattern; Kathleen Gouldson, in an essay on the portrayal of social conditions in the comedies of Francisco de Rojas-Zorrilla, presents a composite picture that has its parallel in Restoration England:

Since work was to be avoided, there were necessarily many who had to live by their wits and keep up the appearance of wealth, whatever their actual poverty. In Abre el ojo we see several representatives of the impecunious gentry who were so common. Clara is a social parasite, and sponges on all her suitors since she has no income of her own; when she receives gifts she usually sends them to neighbours and other friends in the hope of drawing a bigger gift in return. Don Clemente … is reduced to selling his father's silver salt-cellar. Don Juan … asks his landlady not to demand rent while he is away from his rooms … he has bored a hole through to the next compartment, so that he may read by his neighbour's light … Laín, the old servant in La Hermosura y la desdicha, says that if he becomes rich he will not be the first to rise in the world … one who now lives as a grand lady under the name of Doña Laurencia was formerly the scullery-maid Lorenza.¹⁰

The comedy of the figurón is an intellectualized comedy of manners. In this type of play, for which the dramatist Juan Ruiz de Alarcón is principally remembered, a “humour”, such as untruthfulness, ingratitude, or malicious gossip, characterizes the protagonist and largely directs the action, although mistaken identity and other devices of the intrigue plot may be employed to support the main theme, which, as in Jonson and his successors, is the curing of the humour and the re-establishment of balance and common sense. The background of such a play is usually contemporary Madrid, and the manners depicted are, as with Jonson, exaggerations of follies to be observed there and then, but, in another sense, everywhere and always. Satire is most direct in these plays, but the note of cynicism, by no means absent from Spanish literature of the period, is remarkably less prevalent in the comedia than in the Restoration drama. Doubtless the firm control of the Church is responsible for the greater stability of Spanish society and the consequent moderation of caricature, satire, and plainness of speech—the comic correctives—in the theatre.

Critical study of Sir Courtly Nice did not appear in print until 1922. In that year an edition of the play by Montague Summers was published in his Restoration Comedies, a monograph upon the career of Crowne by Arthur F. White was issued by Western Reserve University, and a bibliography of Crowne's works by George Parker Winship was printed at Harvard. Summers's edition, apparently derived from the 1703 quarto of the play, is an inaccurate text, and the prefatory material is scanty. White's monograph presents plot summaries of both Sir Courtly Nice and its original, Moreto's No puede ser, together with a brief commentary concerning Crowne's technique of adaptation. White also includes an account of Thomas St. Serfe's version of No puede ser, Tarugo's Wiles; or, The Coffee-house, which was acted in 1667 without success, and of which Crowne was apparently ignorant when he began his own version of the Spanish play.

The frame of Moreto's drama is the meeting of an academia, a society devoted to literature, and to brilliant conversation, at the home of Doña Ana Pacheco, at which an argument develops between two young noblemen, Don Felix and Don Pedro, concerning the possibility of preserving a woman's honor. Don Pedro is convinced that it is possible to protect a woman by keeping her in seclusion, and undertakes to prove it by “guarding” his sister, Doña Ines, from all temptation. Don Felix is of the nobler conviction that a woman's honor must be in her own keeping, and determines to show Don Pedro his own folly by courting Doña Ines secretly. With the connivance of Doña Ana and the inspired strategy of his ingenious servant, Tarugo, Don Felix gains access to Don Pedro's house and helps Doña Ines to escape a marriage of convenience to a man of her brother's choice. Doña Ana, who loves Don Pedro, but wishes to change his views about the frailty of women, is rewarded when he admits the fallacy of his theory and marries her upon more liberal terms of behavior.¹¹

Crowne, in his adaptation, abandoned Moreto's device of the formal debate upon love and honor, a technique reminiscent of the précieuse influence described at length by Miss Lynch in The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy. He ignored also the familiar motif of the wager as a plot situation, and provided a feud between the families of Farewell and Belguard to serve as motivation for Belguard's jealousy of his sister and his enmity toward her lover. The characters of the original play Crowne adapted recognizably, although White overstates when he contends that the role of Tarugo, the gracioso of No puede ser, is “transferred in its entirety in the role of Crack”.¹² Don Pedro of the Spanish play becomes Lord Belguard, Doña Ines becomes his sister Leonora, and Doña Ana, her friend, the scheming Violante. Don Felix appears in the English play as Leonora's lover, Farewell. As White points out,

Don Diego, the shadowy potential rival of Don Felix in No Puede Ser, is metamorphosed into the distinctly individualized Sir Courtly Nice. In this case Crowne borrowed only the occasion for his character's existence. In a similar way the role of Alberto, the trusty relative of Don Pedro, whose duty it is to guard the portals of the fortress, is enlarged to include that interesting group of Lord Bellguard's kinsfolk, the amorous aunt, Hothead, and Testimony. For Surly there is no suggestion in the Spanish play. He is Crowne's creation to serve as a dramatic contrast to Sir Courtly.¹³

The total effect of the character and plot alterations in Crowne is to contribute farcical and satirical effects at the expense of the wit of the Spanish original. Although much is added, much is lost. Don Felix in the Spanish play is a thoughtful young aristocrat who engages in a love plot primarily because his views on the subject of love and women's honor have been challenged by a somewhat obtuse and impolite rival in debate. For a time, vindication of his idea is a more important object than the winning of the lady. In the first scene of the comedy he engages in an entertaining argument with his servant Tarugo concerning poets and learned men, occasioned by his mention of the forthcoming academia at the home of Doña Ana. When he informs Tarugo that Doña Ana is intellectual as well as beautiful and rich, the gracioso replies that this is impossible. His reasoning, supported by popular proverbs and similitudes, is that poetry and learning are incompatible with worldly wealth. Poetry, he says, is a flower in the garden, good to look at, but not to eat.

Y él que un jardín entra a ver
Más presto se irá a buscar
Espárragos que cenar
Que las flores para oler.

Shifting his ground somewhat, Tarugo adds that fortune parcels out the good things of life so that no one may have them all. No one would covet another's piece of meat if he knew the size of the bone inside; to the runt of the litter is given the biggest acorn; and finally, poetry is not written by the light of silver candlesticks:

Sola la poesía es buena
Hecha a moço de candil.

Don Felix responds with a formal “catalogue” of successful poets and sages, from Homer (who was “muy rico”) and Vergil to Petrarch and Ronsard, Guarini and Tasso, Garcilaso and Góngora. A display of wit and ingenious argument is also a feature of the academia scene. Each of the guests reads an original poem, and Doña Ana propounds a riddle about an underground fire:

Este fuego que arde en mí
Otro fuego le encendió,
Que arde también como yo,
Y a un tiempo ardemos así.
El humo que exhala el fuego
Conviene a mi perfección;
Y el cubrirme es por razón
De que no le exhale luego.
Mientras que no me consumo,
Cuando más tierra me das
Más me abrigas y ardo más,
Con que he de arrojar más humo.
No dejando yo de arder,
Salir en vapor presumo.
Decid quién soy yo y el humo,
Que guardar no puede ser.

Don Felix guesses the answer; the hidden fire is a woman in love, and the smoke, the “humo denso”, is her honor. The more the fire is banked, the hotter it burns; as smoke must have an outlet, so must there be freedom before there can be honor. Honor, like smoke, “no puede ser guardar”.

From the subsequent discussion of this bold idea arises the argument that ends in Don Pedro's vowing to keep his sister under guard. Doña Ines, indignant at this unmerited insult to her integrity, repeats in a speech to her maid, Manuela, the metaphor of the subterranean fire, originally introduced by Doña Ana. A stifled blaze, she says, will produce an explosion. With this view Manuela has much sympathy; last year, during Lent, she fasted of her own volition upon bread and water, but this year, having been ordered to fast,

Maldito el día que he dejado
De almorzar y merendar.

Crowne's omission of the philosophical discussions and the scenes from the academia weakens the characters of Leonora, Violante, Belguard, Farewell, and Crack—in short, all of the chief figures of the original play. The jealous Don Pedro is foolish and irrational, but Belguard has not even the excuse of rashness in argument to soften the coarseness of his behavior in marrying his sister to a rich fool. Doña Ana, wise and urbane, is amply motivated to intrigue by the mortifying smugness of her future husband, but Violante, in her plotting against Belguard, is bargaining for a questionable form of “liberty” after marriage. Leonora has, of course, every reason to foil her brother's plans for her future, and she provides the ideal comeuppance for the egregious Sir Courtly, but her brazen lies and impudent rejoinders, amusing enough in a low-comic way, are more befitting the kitchen than the drawing-room. There could be no greater contrast to the high-comedy dialogue and the dignified moral plane of Moreto's play.

White observes that Crowne's retention of the principal incidents of No puede ser follows from the decision to preserve the role of Tarugo. From another point of view, the retention of the intrigue without its original justification in the debate and the wager distinctly lowers the moral status of Tarugo and his master. It is true that there are explicit references to Tarugo's role of “Celestina”; with disarming frankness he admits to Doña Ines that he is Don Felix's go-between, but in the Spanish play there is none of the cynical bravado and none of the indecency in Crack's admission:

I had an ambition to be of some honourable profession; such as People of Quality undertake. As for instance, Pimping. A Pimp is as much above a Doctor, as a Cook is above a Scullion; when a Pimp has foul'd a Dish, a Doctor scours it.

For Tarugo's homespun wit Crowne substituted Crack's more vulgar but more direct form of verbal humor—suggestive double entendre, and gibberish and wild exaggeration in his impersonation of “mad” Sir Thomas Callicoe.

Having weakened the main plot which he had chosen to adopt, and with it the characters which it supported, Crowne was forced to create other characters to sustain interest and to provide the chief comic effects. His most important creation, Sir Courtly Nice, in the role of the rival lover, became one of the Restoration trio of famous fops, along with Sir Fopling Flutter and Lord Foppington. As a foil for Sir Courtly's extravagances of delicacy, Crowne provided the slovenly boor, Surly, and for low comedy in the “guarding” of Leonora, the political rivals Testimony and Hothead. The latter is a humour figure, as his name implies; he is easily persuaded to quarrel, but his religious orthodoxy is not satirized. Testimony, who receives the most satirical treatment, is a hypocritical non-conformist in the tradition of Zeal-of-the-land Busy, and in his “licorish tooth” also suggests Fondlewife and Alderman Gripe.

A tradition which extended at least as far back as Lady Loveall in The Parson's Wedding, and which was developed in Etherege's Lady Cockwood and Wycherley's Lady Flippant, was available to Crowne in the portrayal of the love-sick spinster Aunt in Sir Courtly Nice. Nevertheless, White argues convincingly that Crowne's debt here is to Molière:

The influence of Molière which was so evident in The Countrey Wit is not entirely wanting in Sir Courtly Nice. The character of the amorous aunt was suggested by Belise in Les Femmes Savantes. Sir Courtly, like Clitandre, appeals to the aunt for assistance, and Leonora's aunt, like Belise, mistakes the appeal for a declaration of love. In both incidents the effect is produced by ambiguity of phrase.¹⁴

The farcical episodes involving the Aunt's passion for Sir Courtly and the latter's discomfiture at having won her instead of Leonora are the high moments of Crowne's play, and detract somewhat from the importance of Crack's stratagems, which are more effective in the original because there are fewer characters and incidents. Crowne does, however, imitate this part of the action closely. In both plays, the gracioso gets into the house of the lady as a guest, by disguising himself. In Moreto, he is an indiano, or colonist returned with riches from the New World. In Crowne, he is Sir Thomas Callicoe, the son of a wealthy Far Eastern merchant, who brings to the play a pseudo-oriental savor at a date when popular interest in “Bantam” natives had been aroused by the visit of oriental potentates to London. In both plays the servant in disguise pretends eccentricity—Crowne's in an extreme degree—and from his supposed phobias arise the means of preventing discovery. Both are victims of love charms that make them fear to see women, and both develop fits at opportune moments to help their masters escape detection by the jealous brothers. Both have an imaginary marriageable sister, and so may communicate with eligible suitors (Don Felix and Farewell) inside the house. The final trick in each case is to mask or disguise the heroine as a streetwalker to enable her to escape from the house.

Of the many plays studied for parallels in Spanish plots, Crowne's play is unique in the manner of its composition. Having been supplied the Spanish play by the king, the dramatist was obliged to follow it with a degree of faithfulness not usual in such circumstances. And yet one could not say, as Loftis does, that the Spanish comedy “appeared on the English stage”. The plot borrowings, extensive as they are, have not re-created the original in spirit or in total effect. In the case of other English plays, adapted more casually, perhaps from several sources rather than from one, it is difficult to believe that the relationship to Spanish dramatic tradition would be closer.

II

Much that is misleading has been said about the qualities of realism and romanticism in the Restoration drama. The plays have been said to be “realistic” in portrayal of character and “romantic” in plot; the assertion has been made often that plots were imported wholesale from the Spanish and French drama, and the implication has been that Jonsonian comedy accounts for the realism and foreign literatures for all that is romantic and improbable in the situations. Although attention was called by Miss Lynch to the discrepancy between Jonson's theory and his practice, the foregoing assumption is still current and presents a problem of definition and clarification. If realism in fiction is to be conceived as the technique of beginning with characters drawn from life and of constructing the action thereafter in accordance with the psychological processes of these characters as envisioned by the writer, romance in imaginative literature may be defined as storytelling that first visualizes a situation or an action and fits to it the characters as they are needed. This is not to say that the latter method allows no opportunity for development of motivation, or for the expression of the author's attitudes and ideas, but it is characterized by lack of concern for logical consistency. Realism in the sense of verisimilitude—astute psychology, description from observation, and even topical satire or social commentary, may be found in a story that is obviously constructed from traditional fable. Romantic literature in the latter sense has greater freedom than the kind of literature developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—realism in the most restricted meaning of the term. Romance fiction may take liberties with motivation that are not allowed by the scientific attitude of the modern realistic school, it may allow a stylized language to take the place of normal human speech, and it may shift from single-dimension to multiple-dimension in depicting human beings. To this kind of literature Restoration comedy belongs, as does the Spanish comedia of the Golden Age.

Both the Spanish comedy and the comedy of the English Restoration tend to superimpose upon the heritage of comic themes and plot devices certain situations depicting affairs of contemporary life, and both embody patterns of behavior, standards, and values that reflect, to some degree at least, contemporary social philosophies. Common to both is appreciation of wit, in the broadest interpretation, embracing imagination, acumen, judgment, decorum, and refinement of intellectual taste, in addition to gaiety, sophistication, and verbal facility. Thomas Fujimura in his study The Restoration Comedy of Wit develops the thesis that the comedy of the Restoration is more properly comedy of wit than comedy of manners, and observes that the actions of these plays involve not real people or even humours, but “the figures of Truewit, Witwoud, and Witless in a variety of outwitting situations”.¹⁵ In examining the intellectual background of wit comedy, Fujimura states that “the key words are naturalism, libertinism, and skepticism”.

The Truewits are egoistic and libertine, and they conform to Hobbes' description of young men as “violent in their desires. Prompt to execute their desires. Incontinent. Inconstant, easily forsaking what they desired before. Longing mightily, and soon satisfied”. They are also “lovers of mirth, and by consequence such as love to jest at others”.¹⁶ This description is truer to the character of Dorimant, Bellmour, Horner, and Courtall than the “manners” description of them as butterflies posturing before the social mirror. These young men are drawn as egoists and libertines, concerned principally with the objects of their desire or aversion: they pursue the pleasures of wine, women, and wit, and they ridicule Witless, Witwoud, and unnatural creatures. It was precisely on these grounds that Dennis defended the character of Dorimant against Steele's moralistic censure: Dorimant is portrayed as malicious, egoistic, and libertine because that is the true nature of young men.¹⁷

Doubtless the atmosphere of skepticism in Protestant England described above accounts for much of the disparity of moral tone that exists between the drama of that country and the Spanish. It is, however, interesting because of this disparity to note that Miss Gouldson also applies the word “libertine” to behavior of the upper middle classes depicted in the plays of Rojas-Zorrilla, pointing out the contempt felt by young people for work and serious purposes, the indulgence in flirtation for the excitement of the game, the wavering of religious conviction, “the empty life of the rich, and the hypocrisy of the would-be rich”.¹⁸ Fujimura himself relates the ideal of the Truewit and the Restoration vogue of the “similitude” to non-dramatic works of Spanish literature. These include Baltasar Gracián's El discreto (1646), a treatise upon the ideal qualities of the courtier, emphasizing the attributes of perception, taste, and decorum, and the same writer's critical work Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1640), which was well known to English writers, among them William Wycherley.

If the chief interest of Restoration comedy lies in its witty repartée and in its ironic projection of contemporary moral and social values, intellectual interest in the comedia is centered in ingenuity of plot and in the poetic qualities or rhetorical effects of the dialogue. Something of the Renaissance enthusiasm for the treatise is to be found in Lope de Vega's compendious treatment of problems related to love: the conflict of buen amor, “true love”, with loco amor, or destructive passion; the rival claims of love and honor; the power of love to endow wisdom; the peril of attempting to force or prohibit love unnaturally. Some of the ideas, such as that of La dama boba, later employed by Calderón in De una causa dos efectos, are from Ovid; others were current in the Italian novella and in the commedia dell'arte. The method is reminiscent of the medieval love debate, the actions of the characters in a variety of situations representing theoretical applications of the “laws” of love, but although neither the content nor the technique is precisely original, the result, because of the great volume of the dramatist's work, is unique. The plays, taken together, form a kind of encyclopedia of love, to which Lope's contemporaries and successors made frequent reference for suggestions in plotting and characterization.

That the love debate on stage was popular with audiences may be inferred from the frequent occurrence of the academia situation, such as that taken by Moreto from Lope's El mayor imposible. Some of the variations of the academia in other plays by Lope are discussed in a preface by one of the editors of El mayor imposible:

In Si no vieran las mujeres there is an argument … [concerning] the greatest passion. The prince of Lo que ha de ser is in prison, but this does not prevent him from passing his time with his friends in academic pursuits. They indulge in music, verses, witty criticisms, a bit of erudition, and in the inevitable fling at culteranismo. In El guante de doña Blanca the palace is transformed into an academy, with a lady as presiding genius. The courtiers recite three sonnets upon a set subject, and the clown follows with another in burlesque vein. The prince of El saber puede dañar, in order to divert a tedious moment, holds an impromptu academy. … The prince propounds such questions as: “What is the most hateful thing?” and “What do men desire most?” … In El milagro por los celos the king and courtiers recite epigrams they have composed on the same subject.¹⁹

The academic discussions of poetry, such as the one mentioned above as taking place in Lo que ha de ser, are often concerned with a dispute over the development of the language that had parallels in other European countries during the late Renaissance. The literary war in Spain was waged between advocates of culteranismo, a movement toward refinement of language, stylization of diction, and a Latinized syntax led by the poet Luis de Góngora, and adherents of conceptismo, led by Francisco de Quevedo and by Lope himself. The conceptistas disapproved of the obscurity of culto poetry, and were primarily concerned for the retention of the purity and integrity of the language. They insisted upon the preservation of the Spanish idiom, but they did favor the use of vivid and sometimes over-ingenious conceits, although Lope expressed the principle of decorum and moderation in their use. It is possible to see, as Fujimura does, the relationship between “Gongorism” and the last phase of the Renaissance preoccupation with linguistic invention in the Restoration comedy of wit. The parallel between conceptismo and witty similitudes in English comedy, while not a matter of direct influence, nevertheless establishes a point of contact between the tastes of theatre audiences in the two countries.

III

When a struggling dramatist begs patronage of Farquhar's Sir Benjamin Wouldbe in The Twin Rivals, the usurping heir calls his steward and orders that the playwright be given, not the five guineas he hopes for, but “the Spanish play that lies in the closet window”. In the same fashion Crowne was “helped to a plot” by King Charles; a few years earlier Wycherley had gone to the plays of Calderón for help in plotting Love in a Wood and The Gentleman Dancing Master. It is no coincidence that Moreto and Calderón had themselves adapted plays from Lope de Vega, who had earlier utilized the themes of other writers, native and foreign. In analyzing the sources of Lope's plays, Rudolph Schevill has drawn attention to the number of situations based on disguises, lies, and concealments which were traditional in the medieval chivalric romances. The bribery of servants, the exchange of lovers' tokens, the tricks employed to open a conversation with a woman and the methods of gaining access to her home, the test of fidelity—all are commonplaces in the earliest fiction, and most can be re-discovered in the comedies of the Restoration.

The essential contrast to be established between the treatment of the basic theme of love in the comedia and that in the Restoration comedy rests not upon the difference of customs in the respective societies, great as it may have been, but upon the stricter dramatic censorship in Spain and the narrower limits of the comic genre in England. There is, however, a wider range of treatment in the plays of both countries than might be expected. The greater freedom of the English stage allows the hero to conduct several affairs simultaneously on different social and moral planes, as Dorimant does with Mrs. Loveit, Belinda, and Harriet, and as Belfond, Junior does in The Squire of Alsatia with Mrs. Termagant, Lucia, and Isabella. A concession to morality is nevertheless implied in the fact that the principal affair must conclude in marriage, however hasty and ill-contrived. That the last-act marriage scramble is characteristic of both the English and the Spanish plays is demonstrated by the dénouement of Rojas-Zorrilla's Entre bobos anda el juego and La hermosura y la desdicha, and by the ridicule directed at the arbitrary pairing of lovers at the play's end in Cervantes's La Entretenida.

The “heroic” treatment of love in the Beaufort-Graciana-Colonel Bruce triangle in Etherege's The Comical Revenge and in Wycherley's Valentine-Christina action in Love in a Wood was later abandoned, and interest concentrated in the “gay couple” until the 1690's saw the encroachment of sentimental and moralizing themes upon the earlier “love duel”. In the comedia the treatment of love ranged from the ironic in Rojas-Zorrilla's Abre el ojo to the improbably romantic in Tirso de Molina's Don Gil de las calzas verdes, and even to the tragic, as in Calderón's El médico de su honra.

The majority of situations, particularly in the more serious plays, were in some way concerned with the “honor” theme, a particularly Spanish preoccupation that often baffles the reader of English plays, in many of which exaggerated concern for personal honor is satirized as the sign of witless affectation or hypocrisy, exemplified in the characters of Sir James Formal, the Hispanophile in The Gentleman Dancing Master, and Lady Cockwood in She Wou'd if She Cou'd. The code of the gentleman, distinguishing him from the merchant and peasant classes, was a Renaissance survival of a medieval concept. In Spanish drama, however, it appears in an exaggerated form. Honor in the plays is seen as the symbol of a gentleman's pride and self-respect; its preservation depends less upon his actions than upon his reputation. The honorable man will tolerate no offense against himself or his family, but he does not hesitate to satisfy his own passions. Dishonor thus consists not in committing, but in receiving an injury.

The possibilities of dramatic complication in the love intrigue play were greatly enhanced by the addition of the honor theme, and its use was extended beyond the plays of court and city life. The revenge taken by the peasants in Lope's Fuenteovejuna for the brutal lust of the Comendador and by Pedro Crespo in Calderón's El alcalde de Zalamea for a similar offense is represented as being demanded by a sense of personal outrage, a “refined” notion scoffed at by the villains, who are gentlemen in name only. An ingenious variation of the honor motif occurs in Lope's La moza de cántaro, in which the avenger of injured honor is a woman whose father has been insulted by her suitor. Since there is no male relative to take up the cause, Doña Maria visits the lover, Don Diego, in prison and kills him. Before dying, Don Diego himself acknowledges the justice of her action, and in the final scene she is pardoned and rewarded with a more suitable husband.

The idea of lessening the offense to one's honor by taking secret revenge, which is totally foreign to the English code that countenanced only dueling, is essential to the action of many plays of the period. In Calderón's El médico de su honra Don Gutierre suspects his wife of an affair with the king's brother the Infante Don Enrique, whose rank precludes direct revenge. The wife is innocent in deed, if not entirely so in mind, but Don Gutierre procures a sangrador or blood-letter, directs him to bleed his helpless wife, and after the fatal “accident” is left free to take another wife at the play's end. Similarly, an “accidental” collapse of a wall kills Blanca in Rojas-Zorrilla's Casarse por vengarse, and Antonio, in the same author's Sin honra no hay amistad, is willing to kill his sister, whom he knows to be innocent, because the suspicions of others demand that he should.

The Spanish dramatist whose plot construction notably differs from that of other dramatists of the Golden Age is Alarcón. In his humour comedy he presents a radically different concept of honor as ethical behavior, and constructs his action by allowing the figurón to experience the logical results of his own moral shortcomings. Thus Don Mendo in Las paredes oyen loses Doña Ana because his habit of malicious gossip has finally led him into slandering her within her hearing. The main character of La verdad sospechosa, a young man who cannot tell the truth, is punished for lying about his love affairs by being forced to marry the woman he said he loved rather than the one he actually wanted for his wife. In both plays the slanders and lies themselves provide ample complications for the action.

Generalizations concerning characterization in the Spanish intrigue play and the Restoration comedy emerge in part from those that may be made concerning the actions of the plays. Thus Fujimura, in applying the formula of interaction between Truewit, Witwoud, and Witless, declares wit to be the basis of Restoration comic characterization. Dobrée, Palmer, Perry, and Miss Lynch, whom Fujimura calls “manners” critics because they evaded the moral strictures of nineteenth-century criticism by assuming that Restoration comedy was manners comedy, describe the comic characters as realistic social portraits. There is evidence to support both views, but a third generalization concerning character portrayal may be drawn from observations of structure in the comedies. Dependence upon the clichés of the romantic adventure plot has imposed in these plays severe limitations upon freedom of characterization and has contributed to the “typing” of characters, despite the efforts of some dramatists to draw character from life, or to create a one-dimensional world of elegance and verbal brilliance in the theatre. It has led also to psychological and moral incongruities that should warn critics from serious discussion of the plays as consistent representations of existing social conditions. Impersonation, supposed mistaken identity, feigned death and madness that could not be expected to deceive a child are presented as commonplaces in a world of sophistication. The ubiquitous situation of the seduction or illicit affair, unless treated seriously as the Spanish treat it, revives impressions of the sex jests of farce and fabliau which are scarcely consonant with intellectual refinement. Gallants who hide in trunks and cupboards and under tablecloths and who go about disguised as clergymen in order to obtain forbidden access to women are no more “manners portraits” than they are models of the Truewit. They are, in their uniformly desirable physical attributes, descendants of the romantic hero, and in their psychology they are allied to their more remote connections, the clever student of the medieval tales and the heroes of Latin comedy. Like the latter, they are often the objects, as well as the authors, of mirth and ridicule; the ironic spirit of their creators reveals itself sufficiently in the suggestion of caricature which their names—Ranger, Wildair, Horner—imply.

In the Spanish drama the galán, typified by Don Felix in No puede ser, is the equivalent of the Restoration gallant and even more obviously the heir of the chivalric hero. Generally his manner is unlike the cynical flippancy of the rakes, but there are resemblances too. The following speech of a suitor to his intended fiancée, quoted by Miss Gouldson from Rojas-Zorrilla's Sin honra no hay amistad, could have been written for one of Wycherley's heroes:

Mi madre es muy rica, y está tán vieja que se morirá dentro de un año, mes más o menos.²⁰

The fact that the young lady was favorably impressed with the foregoing recommendation lessens the psychological distance between the heroine of the comedia and her pert and witty Restoration counterpart. The latter, though often given to extreme freedom in manners and speech, is nevertheless preserved in a state of technical moral purity, and the romantic heroine is never completely absent from the English scene. Graciana of The Comical Revenge, Christina of Love in a Wood, and Fidelia of The Plain Dealer are eclipsed by Gatty, Harriet, Angelica, and Millamant, but they are reinforced by the arrival of the sentimental heroines in the wake of Amanda in Love's Last Shift. In the Spanish plays, there are many enterprising and resourceful female characters. Those drawn by Lope, representing all classes of society, from the peasant girl Laurencia in Fuenteovejuna to Doña Maria in La moza de cántaro and the queen in El mayor imposible, are freely imitated by other dramatists.

Rudolph Schevill remarks in his study of Lope that “there are no mothers in the comedia”, and adds that all reasons given in defense of the omission of normal family life from the dramatic scene “but emphasize the fact that we are not dealing so much with a limitation imposed upon a great art by etiquette or current manners as with a silent acquiescence in a literary tradition which goes back through centuries of the life of Rome and the Latin nations”.²¹ This convention, as Schevill makes clear, is accepted in Renaissance drama all over Europe. Foolish old women, of course, there are in abundance, and the nature of their foolishness perhaps reflects upon the part of their creators a hatred of hypocrisy that marks them as “humours” of the age. Whatever its exact derivation, the type is represented not only by the aunt in Sir Courtly Nice who deceives herself with hope of love from a young exquisite, but by the designing mother of Lope's La discreta enamorada, who “has all the gross traits of a duenna, all the undignified weaknesses of a silly old woman who courts the advances of a young gallant, and participates in rendezvous …”.²²

The cast-off mistress, such as Mrs. Loveit and Belinda of Sir Fopling Flutter, and Mrs. Termagant of The Squire of Alsatia, has, for reasons of propriety, no parallel in the comedia. This character, invariably the victim of seduction and often of false promises of marriage and eternal love, is a sacrifice to “morality” of the most cynical kind. In surrendering the gallant to his prospective wife she must repent her own lapses from virtue or be exposed to raillery or, as in the case of Shadwell's play, genuine cruelty. Although the natural appetites must not be denied, the typical attitude of the Restoration toward the victim of unwise love is expressed in Harriet's speech to Mrs. Loveit:

Mr. Dorimant has been your God Almighty long enough, 'tis time to think of another—A Nunnery is the more fashionable place for such a retreat, and has been the fatal consequence of many a belle passion.

Among secondary male characters, the lindo and the fop are satirical exaggerations of the galán and the rake. Both may be punished comically by being married off to servant girls or abandoned mistresses, as the title character is in Moreto's play El lindo Don Diego, and as Tattle and Dapperwit are in Love for Love and Love in a Wood. The returning nabob, or indiano, newly rich and often ludicrously smug, is a source of humor in Spanish plays, and the Frenchified Englishman, fresh from an improving year in Paris, amused the English. The complement of the dandy in the English comedies is the country booby, such as Sir Wilful in The Way of the World, who represents the negation of all fashionable and romantic virtues, but who undertakes a clumsy imitation of them. The farcical treatment of seduction adds to the company of the foregoing varied satirical portraits of elderly gallants, hood-winked fathers, cuckolds, and outwitted “keepers”, among them Sir Oliver Cockwood and Sir Joslin Jolley of She Wou'd if She Cou'd, Sir Sampson Legend and Foresight of Love for Love, Sir Paul Plyant of The Double Dealer, Pinchwife of The Country Wife, and Mr. Limberham of The Kind Keeper.

The dependence of the intrigue plot upon the gracioso or witty servant, who often acts as a catalytic agent, is common to both the English and Spanish plays, although the Spanish version of the character is the more complex and the more varied. Like the Shakespearean clown, he speaks in epigram and poetic conceit, but in his common-sense practicality he resembles his Restoration counterpart. Both owe their origin to the servus of the Latin plays, and to the picaresque tradition, and both serve as confidant to monologues of the principal characters, not without frequent comment in an ironic vein. Tarugo in No puede ser is a typical example, and in English comedy a close parallel is the intellectually superior Jeremy of Love for Love, whose Cambridge experiences and acquaintance with poets have inspired in him a contempt of scholarship:

Does your Epictetus, or your Seneca here … teach you how to pay your debts without money? … Will Plato be bail for you? or Diogenes, because he understands confinement, and lived in a tub, go to prison for you?

The Spanish servant often introduces an additional comic dimension by engaging in an intrigue or love affair that runs parallel to that of the gallant and parodies it as in El estrella de Sevilla or in Lope's El acero de Madrid and El ausente en el lugar. The gracioso may invent or facilitate deception, as Ramón does in El mayor imposible and as Waitwell does in The Way of the World.

The tendency to satire and caricature is much more pronounced in the English drama than in the Spanish. As Fujimura observes, the object of this satire often is the unnatural, the hypocritical, the affected, as depicted in the characters of such types as Lady Cockwood and Lady Wishfort, who violate decorum in the pretension to youth and in unseemly pursuit of young men and then hypocritically deny even so much sexual vanity and appetite as is normal and “natural”. The fop is satirized for pretension to wit which he does not possess, and for affectation of manners which violate moderation and common sense. Unnatural behavior is further held up to ridicule in old men who fancy young wives. The English direct their laughter at outsiders to the fashionable life of London, at foreigners, tradesmen, soldiers, and the clergy. The latter are satirized chiefly for insincerity and immorality, for human frailty that contrasts with their claim to guardianship of the souls of laymen. “Trust a churchman!” shouts Sir James Formal to his sister Mrs. Caution, “trust a coward with your honour, a fool with your secret, a gamester with your purse, as soon as a priest with your wife or daughter.” But even more often than the clergyman, the countryman is cast for the role of Witless. Country pastimes are viewed with the greatest disdain. “I nauseate walking; tis a country diversion”, exclaims Millamant. “What young woman of the town could ever say no to a coach and six”, asks hare-brained Hippolita, and immediately adds a condition, “unless it were going into the country?” Sir Oliver Cockwood delivers the opinion that “a man had better be a vagabond in this Town than a Justice of Peace in the Country”, and Harriet wails, “Methinks I hear the hateful noise of Rooks already—Kaw, Kaw, Kaw—There's musick in the worst Cry in London! My Dill and Cowcumbers to pickle!”

In direct contrast to the foregoing is the Spanish custom of romanticizing rural life and idealizing the peasantry. The creation of such characters as Juan Labrador, who in Schevill's phrase, “embody the uncorrupted ancient Spanish virtues”, emphasizes the contrast between the simple life and the artificial manners of the court. The recognition of personal worth in the countryman Pedro Crespo and his family, and the exposure of the supposed gentlemen who dishonor them is forceful, if implicit, censure of a corrupt social code. Social satire of a restrained order is also unmistakable in Rojas-Zorrilla and in Alarcón. In the works of the latter the “humour” is purged; in those of the former, the aimlessness of contemporary life, the debased manners and sense of honor are often treated ironically.

From the foregoing comparisons it may be seen that fundamental differences in intellectual background, manners, and customs in England and Spain precluded the representation of a Spanish play on the English stage of the Restoration period. The same comparisons nevertheless support the long-standing opinion that many similarities are to be observed between the comedies of the two countries. The transmission of the melodramatic type of action to the theatre in England resulted in a separation of genres in accordance with dramatic patterns already accepted in that country, and a consequent heightening of effect in both comic and serious plays. As in the case of No puede ser, high comedy was often reduced to farce by being enlivened with native humor tending to caricature and with additional complication of plot. This practice produced analogues such as Sir Courtly Nice, true to the outline but not to the spirit of their originals. Such analogues, if studied for evidences of parallel trends and common sources rather than for direct influence and similarity of isolated detail, acquire new significance as documents in the history of European Renaissance drama.

Notes

1. The phrase is that of John Harrington Smith in The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy, pp. 119-20.

2. Louis Kronenberger, The Thread of Laughter, p. 51.

3. W. S. Clark II, ed., Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, I, 373.

4. A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, III, 266-67.

5. Kathleen Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy, pp. 121-22.

6. John Loftis, “Spanish Drama in Neoclassical England”, Comparative Literature, XI (1959), 30.

7. Allison Gaw, “Tuke's Adventures of Five Hours, in Relation to the ‘Spanish Plot’ and to John Dryden”, Studies in English Drama, ed. Gaw; J. U. Rundle, “Wycherley and Calderon”, PMLA, LXIV (1949), 701-07.

8. Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People, p. 314.

9. Hugo Rennert, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega, pp. 44-45.

10. Kathleen Gouldson, “Three Studies in Golden Age Drama”, Spanish Golden Age Poetry and Drama, ed. Allison Peers, p. 114.

11. The central situation of Moreto's play is but slightly altered from that of Lope de Vega's El mayor imposible. In the latter, the queen, who suffers from a consuming melancholy, is diverted by an academia attended by her courtiers. As might be expected, Lope utilizes more fully than does Moreto the opportunity offered for a display of poetic virtuosity. Opening the first scene with a prologue in redondillas, he shifts to the romance for a song by the court musicians. A Petrarchan sonnet, exaggerated in its conceptismo, is the first work presented by a member of the academia. Then an enigma is submitted, a kind of emblem-verse, the central metaphor of which is a heart with an arrow in fetters, a padlock with a key. A quintilla follows on the subject of love's deceits, and next three décimas “to an ungrateful lady” are delivered by Roberto, the prototype of Don Pedro, the jealous brother, who first uses the phrase that gives the play its title, “el mayor imposible.” The greatest impossibility, he contends, is that woman's beauty should cease to be. This gallantry is immediately challenged by the others, who argue that the greatest impossibility is that a man should prosper under an evil star, that a self-made man should fail to hate those who knew him in early life, that a fool should become a wise man, that love should do what money cannot, and finally, that a woman should be guarded from affronts to her honor. Lisardo (Don Felix of Moreto's play) then reads a sonnet in which he says that to preserve a woman's honor when she herself is careless of it is “el mayor imposible”.

    Lope's play serves as Moreto's model for all the main characters and for many devices of plot. The melancholy queen schemes, as Doña Ana does, to embarrass the jealous Roberto (Don Pedro). Lisardo (Don Felix) sends his valet Ramón (Tarugo) to Diana (Doña Ines) disguised as a Flemish jewel merchant, and the lover's picture is secretly offered, as in the plays of Moreto and Crowne. The lover is hidden in the house of the jealously guarded girl, and assists her escape from her foolish guardian Fulgencio (Alberto).

    Moreto compensates for the loss of poetry with greater dramatic economy in his adaptation of Lope's plot and characters. Because the argument concerning honor, which implements the intrigue, emerges from the elaborate riddle propounded by Doña Ana, the academia scene may be shortened and recitation partially replaced with dialogue. By making Doña Ana, the instigator of the intrigue, also the beloved of its victim, Don Pedro, Moreto establishes greater tension within the plot and emphasizes the irony of its resolution.

12. Arthur F. White, John Crowne: His Life and Dramatic Works, p. 142.

13. White, p. 142.

14. White, p. 144.

15. Thomas Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. 17.

16. Thomas Hobbes, The Whole Art of Rhetoric II, 14, in The English Works, VI, 466-67. Quoted in Fujimura, pp. 49-50.

17. Fujimura, p. 50.

18. Gouldson, p. 118.

19. Lope Felix de Vega Carpio, El mayor imposible, ed. John Brooks, University of Arizona Bulletin V (October, 1934), 11.

20. Gouldson, p. 106.

21. Rudolph Schevill, The Dramatic Art of Lope de Vega, p. 17.

22. Schevill, p. 18.

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