Note 607 — Chapter XXII

It is not easy to make out how much the theatre was really interfered with during these four or five years; but the dramatic writers seem to have felt themselves constrained in their course, more or less, for a part of that time, if not the whole of it. The accounts are to be found in Casiano Pellicer, Orígen, etc., de la Comedia, Tom. I. pp. 216-222, and Tom. II. p. 135;—a work important, but ill digested. Conde, the historian, once told me, that its materials were furnished chiefly by the author’s father, the learned editor of Don Quixote, and that the son did not know how to put them together. A few hints and facts on the subject of the secular drama of this period may also be found in Ulloa y Pereira’s defence of it, written apparently to meet the particular case, but not published till his works appeared in Madrid, 1674, 4to. He contends that there was never any serious purpose to break up the theatre, and that even Philip II. meant only to regulate, not to suppress it. (p. 343.) Don Luis Crespé de Borja, Bishop of Orihuela and ambassador of Philip IV. at Rome, who had previously favored the theatre, made, in Lent, 1646, an attack on it in a sermon, which, when published three years afterwards, excited a considerable sensation, and was answered by Andres de Avila y Heredia, el Señor de la Garena, and sustained by Padre Ignacio Camargo. But nothing of this sort much hindered or helped the progress of the drama in Spain.