Note 614 — Chapter XXII
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How completely a light, worldly tone was taken in these plays may be seen in the following words of the Madonna, when she personally gives St. Ildefonso a rich vestment,—the chasuble,—in which he is to say mass:—
Receive this robe, that, at my holy feast, Thou mayst be seen as such a gallant should be. My taste must be consulted in thy dress, Like that of any other famous lady.
Comedias, 1760, Tom. VI. p. 113.
The lightness of tone in this passage is the more remarkable, because the miracle alluded to in it is the crowning glory of the great cathedral of Toledo, on which volumes have been written, and on which Murillo has painted one of his greatest and most solemn pictures.
Figueroa (Pasagero, 1617, ff. 104-106) says, with much truth, in the midst of his severe remarks on the drama of his time, that the comedias de santos were so constructed, that the first act contained the youth of the saint, with his follies and love-adventures; the second, his conversion and subsequent life; and the third, his miracles and death; but that they often had loose and immoral stories to render them attractive. But they were of all varieties; and it is curious, in such a collection dramas as the one in forty-eight volumes, extending over the period from 1652 to 1704, to mark in how many ways the theatre endeavoured to conciliate the Church; some of the plays being filled entirely with saints, demons, angels, and allegorical personages, and deserving the character given to the “Fenix de España,” (Tom. XLIII., 1678), of being sermons in the shape of plays; while others are mere intriguing comedies, with an angel or a saint put in to consecrate their immoralities, like “La Defensora de la Reyna de Ungria,” by Fernando de Zarate, in Tom. XXIX., 1668.
In other countries of Christendom besides those in which the Church of Rome bears sway, this sort of irreverence in relation to things divine has more or less shown itself among persons accounting themselves religious. The Puritans of England in the days of Cromwell, from their belief in the constant interference of Providence about their affairs, sometimes addressed supplications to God in a spirit not more truly devout than that shown by the Spaniards in their autos and their comedias de santos. Both felt themselves to be peculiarly regarded of Heaven, and entitled to make the most peremptory claims on the Divine favor and the most free allusions to what they deemed holy. But no people ever felt themselves to be so absolutely soldiers of the cross as the Spaniards did, from the time of their Moorish wars; no people ever trusted so constantly to the recurrence of miracles in the affairs of their daily life; and therefore no people ever talked of divine things as of matters in their nature so familiar and commonplace. Traces of this state of feeling and character are to be found in Spanish literature on all sides.