Barbarians at the Gates:
The Invasive Discourse of Medieval Performance in Lope's Arte nuevo

Bruce R. Burningham

Then saw I Rome, invincible to the valiant men, that day overcome with loiterers. Rome, which could never be won by the Carthaginians, is now won by Jesters, Players and Vagabonds: Rome, which triumphed over all the Realms is now vanquished by such idle persons: Finally I saw Rome, which in times past gave laws to the Barbarians, now become the slave of fools.

--I.G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors ¹

Villainous Actors; Barbarous Theatre

In his now famous advice to the players, Hamlet admonishes the clowns of his acting troupe not to add more to the text than its author intended, saying that such improvisation is "villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it." ² As an attack on one of the more common performative practices of his actors, his complaints demonstrate the persistent antagonism between literary and theatrical approaches to dramatic works, a conflict that often manifests itself in a contempt for the performer who always seems intent on subverting--if not in fact destroying--the "text," and who thus cannot be entirely trusted with something so important as literary artifacts. Why is the performer the "villain" of this particular melodrama? The term "villain," of course, meant something slightly different to Shakespeare than it does to us today, although our current usage obviously grew out of its original meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary delineates its semantic evolution from a term originally referring to a "low-born base-minded rustic" (not unlike the Spanish villano) into "a man naturally disposed to base or criminal actions." ³ What began as a marker [End Page 289] of social caste has become over the course of several hundred years a marker of anti-social or bad behavior; Hamlet considers the performers "villainous" not because he regards their treatment of the dramatic text as some kind of crime per se, but because he suggests they represent a "rustic" approach to the stage. These "clowns" are not criminals who consciously undermine the literary order; rather, they are buffoons who do not understand their rightful place within that order. His pejorative adjective insinuates that they cannot be trusted precisely because they come from the intellectual rabble of society, and are thus bound to betray the text because they understand nothing of the higher values of "art" and "literature." Inscribed within Hamlet's term "villainous" is the age-old clash between low culture and high culture, and more importantly--as we will soon see--between the pre-modern world of medieval actors and the "renewed," early modern world of Renaissance authors.

The term "barbarous" functions in much the same way in Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, where the author--like Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poetry--seeks to justify the literature of his own society by tying it, in part, to the authority of the classical world. ⁴ Responding to critics who had faulted his apparent lack of intellectual rigor, Lope attempts to reconcile his extremely popular theatre with the humanist philosophies which then seemed to be the measure of all things. Because the word "barbarous" was historically and etymologically connected to the Goths, Franks, and Huns who invaded the "literate" classical civilization, establishing in its place the "illiterate" culture that Renaissance humanism later sought to supplant, it cannot be understood without its pejorative connection to medieval society. Similarly, in the context of a dramatic theory like Lope's, bent on positing Renaissance theatre as the renewed continuation of the lost, classical, literary drama, "barbarous" cannot be understood without its pejorative connection to medieval popular performance. Specifically, the adjective "barbarous" cannot be disassociated from the mimes, jongleurs, scôps, and minstrels who--long after the fall of Rome and its classical drama--continued to work their performing arts right up to the moment when Western theatre was supposedly "reborn" within the sacred and erudite bosom of the Church. ⁵

The Arte nuevo is an occasional piece consisting of some 389 hendecasyllabic verses, divided into roughly 28 stanzas of unequal length, each terminating with a rhymed couplet, and was probably written for presentation at the Academy of Madrid sometime between 1604 and 1608. ⁶ As such, it is an anomalous text, as Juana de José Prades has noted, since few Golden Age dramatists bothered to write their dramatic theory so directly, but it is also a performance text in its own right and bears all the marks of what has been called a "dramatic soliloquy." ⁷ With palpable irony, Lope, the [End Page 290] most successful playwright of his generation, claims to appear before the learned tribunal almost under subpoena, stating he has been "commanded" to write an "art" of making plays in order to defend himself against the very charge we have seen Hamlet level at the "villainous" clowns: that his works are nothing more than "barbarous," "vulgar," and "crude" entertainments unworthy of high cultural consideration. And because the semantic field of the debate is prejudiced against Lope from the outset, no further accusation is necessary; the charge of "villany" alone is almost indefensible.

No clear consensus has been established concerning the meaning and importance of this short manifesto; nevertheless, at least since the eminent nineteenth-century Spanish scholar, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, called it "superficial, diminutive, ambiguous and contradictory," critics have generally held the Arte nuevo to be a divided text in which Lope vacillates between dramatic theory and theatrical practice, between the exigencies of the classical literary rules and the demands of his contemporary public. ⁸

These divisions, though widely noted, are not characteristic of Lope's text alone; on the contrary, the impulses behind them are part of the greater pan-European transition from medieval to Renaissance theatre, a transition triggered in large part by the technological shift from oral to graphic culture that substantially accelerated in the fifteenth century. Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type in 1440 and the ensuing rise of the modern, literary author shifted theatrical power away from the actor and toward the playwright, although by 1608 a clear-cut division between the two had not yet emerged entirely; indeed, there still existed some confusion between the English words "author" and "actor," while the Spanish term "autor de comedias" clearly referred not the dramatist who wrote the plays, but to the actor-manager who staged them. ⁹ Thus, the textual frictions in the Arte nuevo--between the values of the literary elite and those of what Lope calls the "vulgar crowd"--are much more profound than the concurrent tensions between a work of humanist theology like Luis de León's The Names of Christ and the popular chivalric novels parodied by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote. ¹⁰ The Arte nuevo's divisions are, in fact, a product of the cultural clash between the residual performance traditions of medieval actors and the newly asserted literary role of Renaissance playwrights. Lope's ambivalences stem less from his own imprecise thinking than from the inherent ambiguities of the shifting critical discourse he must employ.

The Arte nuevo shares with other early modern European texts a concern for the growing differentiation and concomitant friction between "authors" and "actors." A prologue written by the Italian performer/playwright, Flaminio Scala, for his play Il finto marito, for instance, features a "Stranger" and a "Player" who debate the relative [End Page 291] importance of playwrights and performers in the creation of theatre. The Stranger argues that it is the poet who best knows how to make good plays, being well-versed in philosophy and the rules of oratory, and knowing best how to (pre)serve the Aristotelian precepts of dramatic composition. The Player, on the other hand, counters that it is performance that matters most, and that experience, in fact, produces art: "A rule is made by the frequent repetition of actions, and if rules derive from experience, then the valid rule is that which comes from such actions. Thus the player may give rules to the playwrights, not they to him." ¹¹ The major difference between this prologue and the Arte nuevo is that while Scala divides his opposing arguments between two characters, both "voices" in the Arte nuevo come from Lope who is engaged in a dialogic exchange with himself, where neither "voice" entirely convinces the other. Like the Stranger, he seeks to tie his comedias to a respectable set of classical literary rules; however, like the Player, he finds he cannot easily erase the weight of the medieval performance tradition he has inherited. Over the course of several attempts, he earnestly tries to argue that the Spanish theatre is indeed a worthy inheritor of its Greek and Roman "precursors"; yet, this argument breaks down at precisely those points where his discourse slides from a literary vision of "text" to a performative one, where the poetics of medieval spectacle breach the walls of his Renaissance literary criticism. He repeatedly finds himself unwillingly confirming the suspicions of his scholarly audience that (according to their definitions) his works are indeed "vulgar," "vile," and "barbarous," that they are no better than the theatrical buffooneries vilified by Hamlet.

Lope the Stranger

Lope begins his manifesto with a straightforward declamatory sentence: "You command me, noble spirits, flower of Spain [. . .] to write you an art of the play which is today acceptable to the taste of the crowd." ¹² In the middle of this declaration, however, he inserts a long, baroque parenthesis comparing the members of the Academy of Madrid to such eminent figures as Plato and Cicero. Aside from noting Lope's obvious ironies here, few scholars spend much time on this digression; nevertheless, if we pause to consider its function, we can see that what is at stake here is the creation of a mythos of foundation that will directly connect the "classical art" to the "new art" while happily skipping over the barbaric influence of the medieval performance tradition. Thus, Lope posits an intellectual kinship between the classical "conclave[s] of philosophy" (12)--an image not coincidentally visualized for the Renaissance eye in Raphael's School of Athens ¹³ --and his own contemporary erudite audience. What he does not mention here, of course, is precisely that portion of history separating Athens from Madrid. Whether this omission is deliberate or occurs simply [End Page 292] due to the time constraints of his oral performance matters little. His effective leap from ancient Greece and Rome directly to Golden Age Spain creates tacit support for the notion that the medieval period contributed little to the contemporary cultural landscape. And if the sparkling court of Alfonso X the Wise (1221-1284)--which produced an enormously important body of legal, historical, and poetic work--can be dismissed this easily, how much more so the anonymous jongleurs who sang inside his palace and on the surrounding streets of his capital? ¹⁴ By beginning in this fashion, Lope firmly inscribes himself within the ascendant humanist discourse whose authority he appears not to question.

In the next paragraph, however, this unquestioning support for the "literary" begins to wane; Lope's praise becomes further colored in irony as he bestows a back-handed compliment,which simultaneously reaffirms and then undermines the authority of the very organization he currently addresses. While he defers to the theoretical knowledge of the Madrilenian academy's illustrious philosophers (who, he says--like the "poets" praised by Scala's Stranger--know more about the "art" of writing plays than he), he also notes that they have written fewer plays. Moreover, then, by the logic of equivalency he has created in the first paragraph, he has also just reaffirmed and then undermined the authority of the classical "precursors" as well, whose own "philosophers" possessed no more concrete experience than Lope's contemporaries; he thus questions the authority of the "classical art" itself.

In the third paragraph he initiates a different rhetorical strategy that functions both as a defensive move and an attack. By arguing that he has long been schooled in the "grammar" of dramatic theory, Lope seeks to defend himself against the indictment that he is nothing more than a celebrated but ignorant player, one of Hamlet's "villainous" clowns who does little more than wander about singing for his supper. More than this, however, he assails the very notion that this "grammar" is of any real importance; after all, he says, he learned all there was to know before he was ten years old. The point of this obvious bit of bravado is to show that in many ways the "classical art" is child's play, that any ten-year-old can memorize rules of composition, and can learn Aristotelian "theory." Lope's implicit question remains: How many children can write successful plays? And with this he drives home his earlier point about his audience's collective lack of experience.

The next section marks the beginning of the first fissure in the text:

But because, in fine, I found that comedies were not at that time, in Spain, as their first [inventors] in the world thought that they should be written; but rather as many [barbarians] managed them, who confirmed the crowd in its crudeness; and so they were introduced in such wise that he who now writes them artistically dies without fame and guerdon; for custom can do more among those who lack light of art than reason and force. ¹⁵

[4] [End Page 293]

This passage illustrates the centrality of the Thespis myth as the reigning critical paradigm for describing the "birth"--or in this case, "rebirth"--of theatre. Specifically, Lope's rhetoric is haunted here by the ghost of Lope de Rueda (1510-1565) who is widely considered to be a kind of Spanish "first actor," a performer who appeared on the national scene after so many centuries of supposed theatrical inactivity; indeed, in this and other texts, Lope designates Rueda as one of the "first inventors" of the Spanish stage and argues that--like the classical playwrights before him--he closely adhered to Aristotelian dramatic precepts. Nevertheless, Rueda also resembles the "barbaric" actor-managers Lope complains of here, popular entertainers who form part of a rich performance tradition connecting the mimes of ancient Rome to the fools and troubadours of the European Middle Ages. While Spain conspicuously lacked the kind of medieval liturgical drama so prominent in France and England, it nonetheless supported a thriving jongleuresque theatre whose acrobatic, improvisational spectacle greatly influenced the performative poetics of the later, more literary comedia. Professional acting troupes of the kind depicted in Hamlet performed on the Iberian peninsula at least as early as 1534 when Carlos V issued a "pragmática" condemning them (although we can probably assume they practiced their profession unencumbered for some time before finally inciting this royal censure); indeed, Rueda may very well have belonged briefly to one of the Italian companies who toured southern Spain during the period. ¹⁶ More importantly, however, as Cervantes's own youthful eyewitness account demonstrates, the medieval ballad tradition was also very much a part of Rueda's spectacle from its very "beginnings"; ¹⁷ hence, the "custom" Lope mentions above does not surge out of a vacuum: in order to be "tradition"--as Scala's Player so aptly reminds us--it must be informed by a historical continuum of common performative practices. Lope's opposition between the Western theatre's "first inventors" and the "barbarians" who later deformed it strongly implies that it was the Iberian Thespis himself, Rueda, who very likely contaminated the pure literary drama of the nascent Spanish theatre with his own medieval performative "crudeness"; that what corroded the "light," "reason," and "force" of the rediscovered "classical art" is precisely the caustic influence of the "barbaric" jongleuresque and commedia dell' arte traditions from which Rueda's performance borrowed so heavily.

In the next segment Lope returns briefly to his privileging of the "classical art," although this privileging remains short-lived. He states that at one time he wrote according to its constraints, but having seen the success of the competing plays, he returned to his "barbarous" (medieval) ways and locked up the "civilized" (classical) authorities in order to devote himself fully to that "art" preserved by those who have always sought the applause of their "vulgar" spectators (5). ¹⁸ Thus, Lope winds up bolstering the very thing he set out to supplant. From the beginning of this section he has endeavored to defend himself against the charge that he writes without "art"; that is, without well-defined literary precepts; yet, he has ended up confirming this accusation by admitting that he routinely banishes the classical authorities from his [End Page 294] study; that he has found it better to follow the "art" of those performers he calls "barbarous," "vulgar," and "foolish." In the minds of his audience this is as much to say that he does indeed write without "art." What began as an attempt to acknowledge and sustain the myth of the classical foundations of Golden Age drama has ended with the reinscription of the medieval precursors into the debate. Thus, this entire section has become a dead end--we can locate no synthesis between the polar extremes of the classical literary "art" and the medieval performance tradition. In short, there is no "new art" to be found. Faced with this truth, Lope simply starts over again.

Critics seeking unity in the Arte nuevo have not been totally oblivious to this first (dis)juncture. In trying to account for it within the parameters of some overarching rhetorical schema, they have labelled the first five paragraphs a captatio benevolentiae ¹⁹ or an introductory preamble. ²⁰ Nevertheless, the argument of this first section has proven unconvincing at best--even to Lope himself--and as we shall see, the next section will become nothing more than a variation on a theme. As with the opening of the Arte nuevo, the initial paragraph of the second section again harkens back to the classical world. This time, however, Lope attempts the myth of equivalencies, not by relating the present academy to its presumed predecessors, but by going straight to the primary source of classical literary authority: Aristotle's Poetics. Like Scala's Stranger, Lope finds it useful to defer to "the Philosopher" in order to establish the limits of interpretation for this second Golden Age; thus, he once again invokes the discursive authority of Aristotelianism in order to establish the classical definition of the term comedia. ²¹ At the end of this paragraph he makes what he thinks will be a foundational link, arguing that the Spanish plays rarely lack any of the essential classical elements: "Look whether there be in our comedies few failings." And here it occurs to him to offer an example:

Auto was the name given to them, for they imitate the actions and the doings of the crowd. Lope de Rueda was an example in Spain of these principles, and today are to be seen in print prose comedies of his so lowly that he introduces into them the doings of mechanics and the love of the daughter of a smith; whence there has remained the custom of calling the old comedias entremeses, where the art persists in all its force, there being one action and that between plebeian people; for an entremés with a king has never been seen. And thus it is shown how the art, for very lowness of style, came to be held in great disrepute, and the king in the comedy to be introduced for the ignorant.

[7]

Here we encounter the second textual fissure in the Arte nuevo, and once again it revolves around Rueda's ad hoc theatre. This latest rupture occurs precisely because, even as Lope seeks to tie the Spanish comedia to its presumed literary predecessor--the "true [Greek] comedy" (13)--his rhetoric once again subtly implies that the former has forsaken the latter's theoretical values. He begins by insisting that Rueda was an inheritor of the "classical art," a writer whose commitment to Aristotelianism [End Page 295] was plainly manifest in his respect for the "unities"; Rueda initially seems to be a literary stalwart whose fine example has been betrayed by the "vulgar" Spanish dramatists who came after him. Yet, as Lope moves deeper into a discussion of Rueda's plays themselves, he seems unable to keep his own discourse from pitting the classical writers against the "barbarous" actors of the Spanish theatrical tradition, including Rueda himself. Thus, what stands out most in this section is that the early Spanish theatre was "vulgar" from its inception, and that this vulgarity continues to influence the plays up through Lope's day. If this is indeed true, then what the text demonstrates here is that the pasos, entremeses, and autos of Renaissance Spain are not, in fact, pillars of classical theory, but rather "prosaic" farces which have caused the entire concept of "art" to fall into disrepute. If Rueda was indeed an "inheritor" of Aristotelian precepts, it is an inheritance he himself immediately squandered; hence, if Lope hoped to tie the Spanish comedia to the classical stage through Rueda, he has instead demonstrated just how "barbarous" the whole of Golden Age theatre really is. For a second time he finds himself at an ambiguous dead end, and once again must start over.

If up to this point Lope only hinted at the Thespis myth to trace his works back to the classical origins of drama, he now invokes it directly by naming Thespis as the "first inventor" (8) of Western tragedy. Still, if we expect that this latest Aristotelian evocation will enlighten us, we are soon disappointed. The opening lines here constitute a two-part digression that is totally antithetical to Lope's project. In trying once more to create an equivalency between his own "comedy" and the Greek "comedy" he attempts to tether his Jeruslalén conquistada to the literary authority of both Homer and Dante. But this allusion to the generalized use of "comedia" in relation to the Homeric epics and the Divine Comedy destroys any chance he might have to connect his plays to the classical ones; for, if the term "comedia" can be applied indiscriminately both to "dramatic" and "non-dramatic" texts alike, on what lexical authority can Lope rely when he insists that his theatre is commensurate with that of its ancient inventors? If he is attempting to connect the Spanish comedia to the literary authority of its presumed Greek "prototypes," then he has just nullified his best argument by showing that there is nothing particular about the term "comedia" which relates exclusively to theatre--let alone, his theatre. By erasing the specificity of his nomenclature he has raised the specter that perhaps his is, after all, a bastard art. Again he confronts a rift in his argument and for a fourth time must start over.

In the ninth paragraph Lope seems to shift tactics, and he glosses Aelius Donatus, the fourth-century Roman grammarian and commentator, on the evolution of the Greek "New Comedy" and on the function and relative prestige of the chorus. Instead of trying (unsuccessfully) to tie the Spanish plays to the "reason," "light," and "force" of the classical ones, he endeavors here to tie the former to the latter by demonstrating parallel deviations from the established norm. We might suspect that what he hopes to accomplish in this current trajectory is to further demonstrate his own respect for the ancient precepts, while at the same time pointing out that even some of the greatest classical writers were accused--like him--of ignoring them. This latest strategy leads him to make the following assertion: [End Page 296]

Tragedy has as its argument history, and comedy fiction [fingimiento]; for this reason it was called [planipedia], of humble argument, since the actor performed without buskin or stage. There were comedies with the pallium, mimes comedies with the toga, fabulae atellanae, and comedies of the tavern, which were also, as now, of various sorts. ²²

[10]

Here Lope finally does succeed in establishing an equivalency between the classical and Golden Age stages; yet, this argument, it should be stressed, leans precariously toward a vision of theatre grounded more on Hollis Huston's performative notion of the "simple stage" than on any literary "art." ²³ Closely following Donatus, he differentiates "tragedy" from "comedy" by contrasting their relative foundations in truth and fiction. However, whereas Donatus contraposes "de historia" with "de fictis," Lope translates the second term as "fingimiento" (from the verb fingir: 'to feign, to pretend, to fake, to imagine'), ²⁴ and although he undoubtedly seeks merely to contrast fact from fiction, his translation introduces linguistic resonances that are more performative than literary; for, what is theatre but acting, and what is acting but "pretending"? And if "pretending" is the primary emblem of the theatre, then, as he points out, certain elements of the tragic costume and even the stage itself are unnecessary complications of the performance space created by the actor.

Lope, of course, is not unique in seeing an important connection between the planipedia and the early modern theatre. His contemporary, Thomas Heywood--in the Arte nuevo's English cousin, An Apology for Actors--not only insists on a nexus between the Roman popular theatre and the Italian commedia dell'arte, but explicitly links several touring commedia actors with a number of contemporary English performers such as Richard Tarlton--Lope de Rueda's theatrical sibling. ²⁵ More recently, Elaine Fantham has outlined the many "affinities" which tie these late Roman performances to the commedia dell'arte, while Ezio Levi has demonstrated the important influence these Italian improvisational players had on the Spanish Golden Age stage. ²⁶ Thus, comparing the comedia to the planipedia is hardly the most fortunate of strategies for Lope. Instead of tying his theatre in any effective way to the delimiting literary authority of the classical erudite world, he has just tied it instead to the late Roman popular theatre, which was precisely the type of decadent theatre that the humanist literary establishment would prefer to forget. Obviously, this link will hardly improve the standing of the Spanish comedia in the eyes of his learned audience; for just as the puritanical I.G., in his A Refutation of the Apology for Actors, condemns the "Mimicks, [End Page 297] otherwise called Planipedes" for their "extreme licentiousness," ²⁷ the neo-Aristotelians of Madrid will condemn the "depraved" actors of the Spanish corral. Lope immediately senses this and tries to retreat from this connection by admitting that the classical authorities routinely awarded prizes to the playwrights for "chid[ing] vice and evil custom" (11). In order to bring the discussion back into an arena of discourse that his erudite colleagues will accept, he has to endow both his plays and those of Terence and Plautus with some higher value than mere entertainment. This retreat from equivalency comes just slightly too late, however, and Lope finds himself at an impasse; his connection of one "artless" theatre with another has yet again torn the fabric of his text.

Lope the Player

After four unsuccessful attempts to establish an equivalency between the classical stage and his own within the acceptable literary discourse of the Madrilenian academy, Lope seemingly decides to abandon this project entirely. He admits that by glossing Donatus's notions of classical drama in light of current performative practices, he has succeeded only in creating a theoretical confusion. He concedes the difficulty of discussing the "art" of making plays at a time and place where everything that is staged goes against the whole concept of "art" as his audience understands it; by highlighting the near impossibility of defining the "new art" against the "old art" when the latter can be discussed in terms of "reason," while the former can be discussed only in terms of "experience." In sum, he plainly admits that his endeavor to defend the Spanish comedia from within the rhetoric of classical literary theory has repeatedly come to nought, and his parallel construction in the next two paragraphs creates an either/or dichotomy by which he forces his audience to choose their mode of discourse. ²⁸ In essence he says, "I cannot continue to compare two very different modes of representation in terms of only one of these modes: if you wish to know about the 'classical art,' go to the source of its discursive world: Aristotle and his commentators; if, however, you wish to know something about current performative practices, 'vulgar' and 'vile' though they may be, I will tell you all I know." In this, Lope apparently shifts from playing the role of Scala's Stranger to performing that of his Player.

Yet, even as he makes this concession to the medieval performance tradition, he seeks forgiveness for deferring to its barbarous authority, saying: "and do you pardon me" (14). This formula of contrition indicates the same kind of resistance to performance exhibited by Hamlet, and it lies at the heart of the Arte nuevo's many ambivalences. If, as we have said, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries mark an exponential acceleration in the awkward transition from the oral, performative poetics of nearly all pre-modern literature toward the written, literary poetics of the modern world, then drama remains a problematic genre apart. ²⁹ Unlike modern novelists, who can wield [End Page 298] considerable control over the final version of "text" that reaches the reader, modern dramatists must continue to rely--if only as a self-imposed fiction--on performative mediators who imperfectly transmit their words to an audience. For this reason, Lope's request for forgiveness here manifests the deep uneasiness literary "authors" necessarily feel when trying to bridge the gap between stage and page, a gap which hardly existed prior to the time of the writing of the Arte nuevo when concern for a stable, reproducible, "authorial" text had not yet become paramount. ³⁰ Thus, Lope does not long remain consistent in his decision to defer to the "vile chimera of this comic monster" (14); almost immediately he seeks yet another reconciliation. By "gilding the error of the crowd" (14), he hopes to find a "middle ground" between the two, and once again hopes to have it both ways.

As Lope moves, then, into what most critics refer to as the "doctrinal" section of the Arte nuevo--the body of the work wherein he expounds on the mixed nature of the Spanish comedia--his stratagem shifts to a two-fold attack on the nagging antithesis he seeks to bridge. First, he insists that the comedia does not--or should not--completely supplant the rules of the classical theatre; at the very worst it should merely "bend" rather than "break" them. Second, he continues to argue that, even when the Golden Age dramas diverge from the established rules of the "classical art," there exist precedents even among the Greek and Roman plays themselves. Most of all, however, throughout this section he exhibits the same ambivalences toward performance we have seen above, at times privileging the literary "art" ("may you excuse these precepts" [15]), while at other times deferring to the performance tradition ("let the learned this once close their lips" [16]; "But let not him who is offended go to see them" [18]). In sum he continues to oscillate between what Stanley Fish would call two conflicting interpretive communities. ³¹

The most interesting aspect of the "doctrinal" section is precisely how it transitions into what has been called the text's epilogue. ³² This fifth trajectory begins with a discussion of the concept of tragicomedy, shifts to a discussion of the "unities," and then to the generic divisions of the literary text. It moves shortly thereafter to a discussion of linguistic style, meter, rhetorical figures, and finally to themes. It then transitions into a consideration of the length of the performances, and ends with a reflection on the sets and costumes. In this transition we can detect a subtle shift from a "literary" to a "performative" understanding of the Spanish stage, and as Lope drifts from one mode to another, his discourse turns more and more on the residual influences of the popular theatre that have plagued him all along: "[F]or in Spain it is the case that the comedy of today is replete with barbarous things: a Turk wearing the neck-gear of a Christian and a Roman in tight breeches" (27). For all his relative success in synthesizing his two stated "extremes," he ends this "doctrinal" section not by solidifying that synthesis, but by undermining it one further time; his latest words on the Spanish comedia again demonstrate the power of the medieval performance tradition to mold and define the Renaissance dramatic form. Lope is not oblivious to [End Page 299] this, and with his utterance of the word "barbarous" (a word he has not used until now in the "doctrinal" section), he sees whence his treatise has taken him:

But of all, nobody can I call more barbarous than myself, since in defiance of art I dare to lay down precepts, and I allow myself to be borne along in the vulgar current, wherefore Italy and France call me ignorant. But what can I do if I have written four hundred and eighty-three comedies, along with one I finished this week? For all of these, except six, gravely sin against art. Yet, in fine, I defend what I have written, and I know that, though they might have been better in another manner, they would not have had the vogue which they have had; for sometimes that which is contrary to what is just, for that very reason, pleases the taste.

[28]

This segment should be read as a companion to the opening two paragraphs of the text, because together they create a frame within which to view the Arte nuevo. Lope creates a series of contrastive parallels between the first segment and this last, parallels which trace an arc over the middle segments of the text and which unite its various trajectories by demonstrating his own awareness of the manifesto's problematic fissures. In the first segment Lope mentions the famous classical academies of ancient Greece and Rome and compares them favorably to the Academy of Madrid, thus implying a reverence for their critical influence; in the last segment he makes reference to the neoclassical academies of France and Italy and implies that he has grown indifferent to their authority. In the prologue he praises the great knowledge of his erudite audience with regard to their understanding of the "art" of writing plays; in the epilogue he compares this with his own experience of writing several hundred--which he pointedly notes were very well received--and by implication finds the academic experience wanting. Finally, in the opening verses he complains of being hindered by the accusation that he has written his plays "without art"; in his conclusion he states that it is often better to write "contrary to what is just" in order to delight "the taste." What these frame paragraphs demonstrate is that Lope recognizes his own inability to synthesize the Stranger and the Player quarrelling within him. He remains locked in a dichotomy from which he cannot escape, a dichotomy that will forever leave him begging forgiveness from one group or another. And it is in this light that we should examine the following passage:

Why is the comedia a mirror held up to life? What benefits other than the pleasure of its entertainment does it provide for both young and old? What good is it, you ask, aside from the charms of its jests, the elegance of its words, and the purity of its eloquence? In the middle of its fun and games, what serious questions does it ponder; mixed among its jests, what transcendent issues does it consider? That the servant who seems true, is, in fact, false; that the woman who seems honest and chaste, is, in fact, perverse, full of whiles, and unmitigatedly fallacious; that the lover who seems happy, is, in fact, unhappy, miserable, foolish, and simple; and that the thing which seems to begin well often ends poorly [my translation]. ³³ [End Page 300]

This is the third time in the Arte nuevo that Lope has reflected on the question of the purpose of the theatre and its function as a "mirror held up to life," and in doing so, he employs a metaphor that both Shakespeare and Scala use in their own discussions of the topic. For Lope, however, this performative "mirror" reveals something very different than the "mirrors" of either Hamlet or Il finto marito, where the voice that speaks the metaphor clearly belongs to the literary critic (in the guise of the author/director, Hamlet, and the well-educated Stranger). In the Arte nuevo, however, the voice that stands out is not Lope the theorist, but Lope the Player; or, more accurately, the face staring out of the "mirror" is Lope the performative critic of Lope the literary playwright. This only Latin passage of the text becomes a final gloss on the Arte nuevo itself, and represents a simulacrum of the process that Lope has just gone through: trying to define the limits of one discourse from within a discourse prejudiced from the start against the first. He makes this fact explicit by both asking and answering the essential questions about the performative Spanish comedia from within the language of the classical literary tradition itself; for this is what he has been doing all along: discussing the Spanish popular theatre on Greek and Latin erudite terms.

And just why is the comedia a mirror held up to life? Precisely because it highlights the baroque preoccupation with "being" and "seeming." More importantly, it demonstrates that "the thing which seems to begin well often ends poorly" [my emphasis]. Together, these represent Lope's own criticisms of his manifesto. He began hoping to create a myth of equivalence which would tie his theatre--in some acceptably erudite fashion--to the classical drama and enable him to see a likeness of the ancient literature in his own plays. But, as it turns out, the mirror image is only an inversion and a distortion likely to deceive: the classical academies only seem to be the precursors of the contemporary literary academies of Europe; the collective experience of the members of the Academy of Madrid only seems to equal that of Lope; the "new art" only seems to have to justify itself in terms of the "old art." In the end, Lope says, his numerous attempts at reconciling the "literary" with the "performative," each of which seemed to begin so well, have all ended badly. He admits that there is no synthesis. This recognition leads directly into his concluding statement: "Let one hear with attention, and dispute not of the art; for in comedy everything will be found of such a sort that in listening to it everything becomes evident" (28). Here, Lope simply refuses any further comment on the Spanish comedia from within the classical literary discourse. His final assertion--which he frames in an aural rhetoric for a listening audience--is that the only way to come to know the comedia is in performance.

This is quite a remarkable declaration, ceding--as it does--definitive textual authority to the corral actors. We might expect such a statement, of course, from Lope de Rueda whose plays were primarily performance-driven texts and who became an "author" only posthumously when another early Spanish playwright, Juan de Timoneda (1490?-1583?), did us the immense favor of publishing his scripts; we might expect such sentiments from Flaminio Scala whose commedia dell'arte scenarios were little more than blueprints for performances greatly enhanced by the improvisational skills of the zanni; we might even expect such words from Shakespeare who, before becoming the "center" of the Western literary canon, ³⁴ was first and foremost an actor [End Page 301] in a successful theatrical troupe, and who seemingly gave no more thought to his future literary reputation than Rueda. Lope de Vega, however, was at base a professional author, a member of the vanguard of post-Gutenberg literary figures for whom writing was something more than just a cultivated hobby; thus, his deference here to the performance text has caused no small amount of consternation among critics. ³⁵ Yet, even this deference is an integral part of the dialogue which has been unfolding throughout the Arte nuevo. At its core lies the quintessentially pre-modern assumption that all texts are inherently oral, that the written word exists primarily in order to provide scripts for future performances. ³⁶ That Lope would view the corral rather than the bookseller's storehouse as the ultimate locus of his work demonstrates how very different his early seventeenth-century concept of text is from our own.

Cervantes, who perhaps did more than anyone else to establish the parameters of modern authorship, bitterly resented Lope's theatrical success, and considered himself to be a literary failure simply because he could find no actor-manager willing to stage his plays. In fact, he only published his small dramatic corpus after many fruitless years of searching for a performative venue, and then only as a consolation for his inability to see them on the boards. ³⁷ Likewise, despite (or perhaps because of) his own successful career, Lope shared with Cervantes this pre-modern vision of theatrical text; for, although he excelled at all the established genres of his day, he did not see himself (as many future playwrights eventually would) exclusively as a literary dramatist. Lope's abiding self-identification with his actors ultimately remains perhaps the most enduring vestige of medieval performance in the Arte nuevo; for, this literary dramatist still considered himself a "player," even though the increasing division of labor between playwright and performer meant that his actual contribution to the corral spectacle--unlike that of Rueda, Scala, or Shakespeare--ended precisely at the tip of his pen.

We will never know, of course, how many of the illustrious members of the Academy of Madrid took up Lope's challenge and visited the corral (perhaps surreptitiously) later that week in order to view the performance with a renewed critical eye; in any event, it is unlikely the experience would have changed any minds. A firsthand look at the comedia, measuring it on its own terms, would have revealed more or less what Lope ended up insisting in the Arte nuevo, and what most of the academicians had undoubtedly suspected all along: that the Spanish Golden Age theatre had very little to do with the ancient Greek and Roman literary worlds, that the "new art" depended very little on the "old art," if by the latter term one meant the classical "drama." "Listening" to the comedia, these humanist scholars would have confronted an object that was still grounded on the performative poetics that had thrived throughout much of the Middle Ages. They would have encountered a variety of performances and spectacles in which the literary work often survived as just one more performative variant of texts that had circulated orally for perhaps hundreds of years. In short, they would have come face to face with a very "barbarous" theatre indeed.

Bruce R. Burningham is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California. His current projects include an intertextual study of the relationship between the Spanish Romancero and the Golden Age comedia and a study of the influence of the jongleur performance tradition on the theatre of early modern Europe.

Notes

1. I.G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors, ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars' Facsimilies & Reprints, 1941), 47. I have modernized the spelling.

2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 3.2.44-45. All subsequent references come from this edition and will be included parenthetically in the text.

3. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "villain."

4. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poetry, ed. Lewis Soens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970).

5. This is certainly true for an Enlightenment writer like Giambattista Vico when he says, "The first language of the Spaniard was that called 'el romance,' and consequently that of heroic poetry, for the romanceros were the heroic poets of the returned barbarian times." See The New Science of Giambattista Vico, ed. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 144.

6. El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, ed. Juana de José Prades (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1971), 241.

7. Juan Manual Rozas, Significado y doctrina del "Arte nuevo" de Lope de Vega (Madrid: Sociedad general española de librería, 1976), 53.

8. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1974), 1:775.

9. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "actor"; "author"; Diccionario de la lengua española, 21st ed., s.v. "autor."

10. Luis de León, The Names of Christ, trans. Manuel Durán and William Kluback (New York: Paulist Press, 1984); Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950).

11. Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Ferruccio Marotti (Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1976); The English translation comes from Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell'arte: A Documentary History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for The Shakespeare Head Press, 1990), 199.

12. Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (Madrid: Viuda de Alonso Martin, 1621); Unless otherwise noted, English translations come from William T. Brewster, The New Art of Writing Plays: An Address to the Academy of Madrid, in Papers on Playmaking, ed. Brander Matthews (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 12-29. Subsequent references, which refer to the Brewster edition, will be provided parenthetically in the text.

13. Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509-1511. Fresco. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace, Rome.

14. In addition to the original literature produced (or at least overseen) by King Alfonso, his School of Translators--in providing thirteenth-century Christian Europe with some of the first vernacular translations of Jewish and Islamic works of science and philosophy (including commentaries on Aristotle and other important classical figures)--laid the early groundwork for much of the humanistic thought later espoused by the Academy of Madrid in the early seventeenth century.

15. Brewster has rendered the Spanish 'inventores' as "devisers," while translating 'bárbaros'as "rude fellows."

16. Lope de Rueda, Eufemia; Armelina, ed. F. González Ollé (Salamanca: Anaya, 1967), 19; 26.

17. Miguel de Cervantes, "Prologue to the Reader," trans. Randall W. Listerman, in Miguel de Cervantes' Interludes/Entremeses (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 22.

18. In his own diatribe against the "villainous" performers, Hamlet condemns the complicit specatators as "barren" (3.2.41).

19. Rozas, Significado, 179.

20. José Prades, ed., Arte nuevo, 51.

21. Lope actually glosses Francesco Robortello's (1516-1567) version of the Poetics. See In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes. Paraphrasis in librum Horatii, qui vulgo de arte poetica ad Pisones inscribitur (1548; reprint, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968).

22. Brewster translates "planipedia" as "flat-footed," thus metaphorically implying a certain baseness of literary style. The term, however, likely derives from the fact that the actors of Greek comedy did not use the tall wooden shoes worn by the tragic actors, and hence has more to do with performative issues than literary ones.

23. Hollis Huston, The Actor's Instrument: Body, Theory, Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 69-89.

24. Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo, 6.

25. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars' Facsimile & Reprints, 1941), D1.

26. Elaine Fanthan, "The Earliest Comic Theatre at Rome: Atellan Farce, Comedy and Mime as Antecedents of the commedia dell'arte," in The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell'Arte, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo, 3 vols., University of Toronto Italian Studies (Ottowa: Doverhouse, 1989), 1:23-32; Ezio Levi, Lope de Vega e Italia (Florence: C.G. Sansoni, 1935), 20-26.

27. I.G., Refutation, 22-23.

28. In the original Spanish, Lope begins both stanzas with the words "Si pedís . . . " (Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo, 7).

29. For more on this transition, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982; reprint, London: Routledge, 1993), 78-116.

30. Ibid, 117-38.

31. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

32. Rozas, Significado, 180.

33. I have provided my own translation for this segment because Brewster's version is somewhat weak. He unfortunately decided to render the passage in verse, thus sacrificing a certain clarity of meaning to the demands of English rhyme and meter. My translation has been greatly informed by P. José López de Toro's Spanish translation, which appears in Preceptiva dramática española del renacimiento y el barroco, ed. Federico Sánchez Escribano and Alberto Porqueras Mayo (Madrid: Gredos, 1972), 165.

34. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 45.

35. José Prades, for instance, as she does so often in her reading of the Arte nuevo, simply refuses to believe that Lope means what he says here (240).

36. Silvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 42.

37. Cervantes, Interludes/Entremeses, 23-24.

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