Don Pedro Francisco Lanini Sagredo (?1640-?1715): A catalogue with analyses of his plays. Part one¹

Ann L. Mackenzie

University of Liverpool

This undistinguished but productive imitator of Calderón began his lengthily dramatic career in the early 1660s, and more than fifty years later was still composing plays. The exact date of his death is unknown, but El apóstol de Alemania, San Norberto, completed in 1715, is believed to be his final work. His numerous comedias, some entirely his own compositions, others the results of collaboration with two, or more, fellow-dramatists, include a few comedias de capa y espada, many plays of secular history or contemporary events, and large numbers of comedias de santos, a genre for which he developed, and indulged, a noteworthy predilection. Generally respected by playwright-contemporaries, and popularly applauded by seventeenth -and eighteenth- century audiences, nowadays Lanini is scarcely known, and is almost unread even by specialists particularly concerned to study the School of dramatists to which he belonged. None of his comedias has yet been published in a modern edition, with the remarkable exception of Antonio Roca, which, having been mistakenly identified with Lope's play of the same title, was inserted as it were unintentionally, into the first volume of Cotarelo's nueva edición of the Obras de Lopa de Vega, publicadas por la Real Academia Española². Moreover, to date only one detailed commentary upon «The comedias of Don Pedro Francisco Lanini Sagredo» -his dramatic concerns and techniques, merits and defects- has appeared tn print³. This commentary showed that, among many admittedly third-rate works, the dramatist composed several respectably second-class plays of secular history. Moreover, it demonstrated that even his comedias de santos, spectacularly theatrical but mainly deficient in literary quality, contribute significantly to our historical knowledge of the Spanish stage. This minor Calderonian playwright was revealed to possess «a creative ability rather less limited than one had supposed», which is by no means undeserving of scholarly attention⁴.

The catalogue, of which the first part is published here, has been compiled optimistically with the intention of stimulating critical interest, long overdue, in the more detailed study of Lamm's comedias⁵. Research personally undertaken in Spain, mainly in the Biblioteca Nacional and Biblioteca Municipal, Madrid, facilitated the collection of importantly factual material and enabled the completion of analyses and annotations. Early versions of rare comedias, inserted in partes or printed in sueltas, were directly consulted. Since many of Lanini's works had remained unpublished, numerous manuscripts were also scrutinized, among which were discovered an unusual number of autographs or partial autographs. The plays catalogued, some of which have not been previously recorded, even by La Barrera, have been alphabetically ordered, with cross-references given to alternative titles. In the case of each drama listed, all editions and manuscripts consulted are described and their location indicated. Manuscripts, sueltas, etc., not personally utilized but found mentioned in reliable bibliographies (Paz, Simón Palmer, etc.) are also included. Authorship is confirmed and co-authors are identified where possible or necessary. Censuras on manuscripts are indicated and, if appropriate, copied and discussed. Details of early performances are given, derived, in many instances, from the invaluably collected theatre -documents published by Varey and Shergold. Analyses supplied, which include comments on sources, thought- content, characterization, staging, etc., vary in length, depending on the dramatic interest or quality of specific works or their literary-historical value and relevance. Though detailed, the catalogue should not be regarded as comprehensive. A small number of manuscript-plays, notably those housed in the Biblioteca del Instituto del Teatro de Barcelona, were not directly consulted. Information about these works -which are indicated with an asterisk- is, therefore, incomplete⁶. Moreover, there are doubtless suelta-editions of individual plays additional to those recorded here. It should be observed also that this catalogue deals only with Lanini's comedias, and that his numerous short pieces -entremeses, loas, bailes- are excluded. Let us hope that some other researcher will concentrate his, or her, critical and bibliographical attention on Lanini's rich store of teatro menor, of which some were published in seventeenth-century collections⁷, but many have survived unprinted⁸.

A. Libraries


• BITB.- Biblioteca del Instituto del Teatro de Barcelona.
• BMM.- Biblioteca Municipal de Madrid.
• BN.- Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid

B. Collections of «Comedias»


• Escogidas V.- Quinta parte de comedias escogidas de los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid, 1653).
• Escogidas XVI.- Parte diez y seis de comedias nuevas, y escogidas de los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid, 1662).
• Escogidas XXXII.- Parte treinta y dos de comedias nuevas, nunca impresas, escogidas de los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid, 1669).
• Escogidas XXXV.- Parte treinta y cinco. Comedias nuevas, escritas por los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid, 1671).
• Escogidas XXXVI.- Parte treinta y seis. Comedias escritas por los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid, 1671).
• Escogidas XXXVIII.- Parte treinta y ocho de comedias nuevas, escritas por los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid, 1672).
• Escogidas XLII.- Parte cuarenta y dos de comedias nuevas, nunca impresas, escogidas de los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid, 1676).

C. Bibliographies, Catalogues and Works of Reference


• La Barrera.- Cayetano Alberto de LA BARRERA Y LEIRADO, Catálogo bibliográfico y biográfico del teatro antiguo español (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1860).
• Cambronero.- Carlos CAMBRONERO, Catálogo de la Biblioteca Municipal de Madrid (Madrid: Imprenta Municipal, 1902).
• Coe.- Ada M. Coe, Catálogo bibliográfico y crítico de las comedias anunciadas en los periódicos de Madrid desde 1661 basta 1819 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935).
• Juliá Martínez, «Preferencias teatrales».- Eduardo JULIÁ MARTÍNEZ, «Preferencias teatrales del público valenciano en el siglo XVIII», RFE, XX (1933), 113-59.
• Mackenzie, «Lanini».- Ann L. MACKENZIE, «The comedias of Don Pedro Francisco Lanini Sagredo», in The Eighteenth Century in Spain. Essays in Honour of I. L. McClelland, ed. Ann L. Mackenzie, BHS, LXVIII (1991), 13951.
• Paz, I.- A. PAZ Y MELIÁ, Catálogo de las piezas de teatro que se conservan en el Departamento de Manuscritos de la Biblioteca Nacional (2.ª ed. [by Julián Paz]; Madrid: Blass, S. A., 1934-35), 2 vols.; Vol.Noticias y documentos I.
• Pérez Pastor, «».- Cristóbal PÉREZ PASTOR, «Noticias y documentos relativos a varios escritores españoles de los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII», Memorias de la Real Academia Española, X (1910), 9-307.
• Morley and Bruerton.- S. Griswold MORLEY and Courtney BRUERTON, The Chronology of Lope de Vega's «comedias» (New York/London: The Modern Language Association of America/Oxford-U. P., 1940).
• Shergold, Spanish Stage: N. D. SHERGOLD, A History of the Spanish Stage (London: Oxford U.P., 1967).
• Shergold and Varey, Fuentes VI.- N. D. SHERGOLD and J. E. VAREY, Teatros y comedias en Madrid: 1687-1699. Estudio y documentos. Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en España VI (London: Tamesis Books, 1979).
• ——, Fuentes XI.- N. D. SHERGOLD and J. E. VAREY, with Charles DAVIS, Teatros y comedias en Madrid: 1699-1719. Estudio y documentos. Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en España XI (London: Tamesis Books, 1986).
• Simón Palmer.- María del Carmen SIMÓN PALMER, Manuscritos dramáticos del Siglo de Oro de la Biblioteca del Instituto del Teatro de Barcelona. Cuadernos Bibliográficos XXXIV (Madrid: CSIC, 1977).
• Varey and Shergold, Fuentes IX.- J. E. VAREY and N. D. SHERGOLD, with Charles DAVIS, Comedias en Madrid: 1603-1709. Repertorio y estudio bibliográfico. Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en España IX (London: Tamesis Books, 1989).

EL AFRICANO NERÓN. MULEY ISMAEL, SITIADOR DE CEUTA. PRIMERA PARTE.

The signed autograph manuscript (BMM 1-4-3) reveals that this play was written by Lanini (Act II and the first half of Act III) in collaboration with Nicolás de Villarroel (Act I and the second half of Act III). Little is known about Nicolás de Villarroel (La Barrera, 489), but several of his plays survive in manuscripts (Biblioteca Municipal de Madrid). He was also Lanini's collaborator in La perla de Cataluña, y peñas de Monserrate (q. v.). La Barrera (524) lists the play but without identifying its authors; and Cambronero (279) mistakenly attributes it only to Villarroel. Also in the Biblioteca Municipal, Madrid are two eighteenth-century manuscript copies, one of which contains annotations by the authors and their signatures. So far as is known, the Segunda parte, promised in the final lines, if the first part proved successful, was never composed. The play could not have been particularly popular in its day, for it does not appear to have been printed. The autograph-manuscript contains a censura, by Francisco Bueno, dated Madrid, 24 August 1702, which is the probable year of composition. Since Lanini was a censor de comedias in Madrid at that period⁹, Bueno must have known him personally. The same censor, in 1697 and 1699, had approved for performance two other plays by Lanini: Los valles de Sopetrán and El gran cardenal de España (q. v.). Moreover, Bueno was himself a playwright (see La Barrera, 46). Surely influenced by friendship rather than motivated by conviction, Bueno praises El africano Nerón, with notable inaccuracy as:

«[...] escrita con todo el decoro que pide el teatro, y con toda la decencia que se debe a la pureza de las buenas costumbres».

Though not without some positively dramatic qualities, this play of contemporary events, which are mixed distastefully with magic powers, incredible atrocities and phantastic circumstances, in its entirety is a spectacularly debased example of late Baroque drama in ultimately sensationalized decline.

The play concerns the siege of Ceuta. A Spanish possession since 1688 (by the Treaty of Lisbon), Ceuta was besieged by Muley Ismael, tyrant-sultan of Morocco (1646-1727), towards the end of the reign of Carlos II. Since the playwrights had originally intended it to serve as the first play in a two-part work, not surprisingly, this «Primera parte» ends indecisively: in Lanini's first half of Act III news of the death of Carlos II is brought to the beleaguered city; and the conclusion, provided by Villarroel, ends with a temporary cessation of hostilities when a two-month period of truce is declared between the Christians in Ceuta and the Moorish besiegers.

Lanini was noted, even notorious in his period as an enthusiastic «stage-manager» of noise-effects and sound-reverberations¹⁰. Even so, this drama, in performance, must have been an ear-splitting experience for contemporary audiences: loud cries ring out and weapons clash, as men engage in battle; bombs crash and explode; martial music resounds. The music of lamentation, different in tempo, is equally strident, when the Spanish noblemen of Ceuta, dressed in mourning, trailing banners, mourn at full pitch of voice and sound the death of Carlos II. Comparably sensational are the visual effects and «supernatural» happenings engineered through stage-machines. In contemporary reality Muley Ismael, intelligent, but tyrannical, was rumoured to practise, among other iniquities, the black arts -which reputation provided the playwrights with sufficient excuse to engage their protagonist in such activities and to give the Moorish king a magician-companion, Abdalla. This character -the dramatically invented equivalent of the sultan's real-life general, Ali-ben-Abdalladh- performs many deeds of stage-magic, which, for instance, allow his lord to travel, like a bird, through the air, or to see immediate «visions» of extraordinary events which are taking place in distant locations. Through one such magical vision, Muley, appropriately described as «el africano Nerón» watches, with pleasure, the apparent destruction by fire of the city of Fez. This destruction is only «apparent», however, because Abdalla has disobeyed Muley's order to raze Fez, which is the magician's birthplace, and shows the sultan a merely simulated conflagration. Ironically, therefore, in this case audiences are expected to suspend their belief, not their disbelief, and to accept the burning city as a theatrically constructed illusion. Such magical transformations, which convert El africano Nerón into a near-relation of the eighteenth-century comedias de magia, were obviously included to entertain theatre-goers with an already developed fondness for wonder-plays loaded with occult-marvels and phantasies. Nevertheless, theatrically the most accomplished incident, handled by Villarroel in Act III, and probably based on an historical occurrence, depends neither on fake magic nor on sophisticated stage artefacts. Soldiers while gambling notice that dice they have already thrown down on a drum seem to roll over again spontaneously. The movement, caused by vibrations below ground, realistically warns the Spaniards in Ceuta of Moorish endeavours to undermine the city's fortifications.

In their portrayal of Muley Ismael the dramatists were influenced by reports and rumours, heard or read, about the Moorish ruler's sadistic tyranny. Thus, for instance, they exploit dramatically the horrifying punishments he was reputed to have inflicted, for trivial offences, upon his brother's children and a woman pregnant with his own child. The children are covered in molten metal and turned into statues; the pregnant woman is crushedto death in a press, her child forcefully expelled from her body. Perhaps because the dramatists themselves believed the truthfulness of these reported atrocities, perhaps because they troubled to explore the mental processes and motivations of their protagonist, they have created a repulsively wicked tyrant, who is, nevertheless, believably inhuman, a man insanely terrified of his own death or overthrow, made sadistically evil by mortal sickness of the mind.

EL ÁGUILA DE LA IGLESIA, SAN AGUSTÍN.

Published in Escogidas XXXVIII (Madrid, 1672), the play is ascribed to Lanini and Francisco González Bustos. A late seventeenth-century playwright, Bustos composed a number of historical plays and comedias de santos, which, we may suppose, were quite successful, since they were published in different volumes of Comedias Escogidas (La Barrera, 177). Since Bustos is named first, probably he wrote the first act, Lanini composed another act, and both doubtless shared in composing the remainder. An eighteenth-century suelta also attributes the play to these dramatists: Valladolid: Alonso del Riego, n. d. (BN T 14. 807 [14])¹¹.

This is one of numerous comedias de santos, through which Lanini technically indulged his interest and expertise in managing elaborately staged marvels and effects. A scholar but still a pagan when the play begins, San Agustín is encouraged to study the tenets of the Christian faith through the influence of an angel experienced during a miraculous visitation:

(Aparece en lo alto del tablado un ángel con una espada en forma de rayo, echando fuego por la punta, y a otro lado se descubre una gloria, en que estarán algunos niños vestidos de blanco.)

The role of the devil is more interestingly developed here than in most of Lanini's other comedias. Usually a demon evilly possesses and revitalizes the dead body of a friend or former lover of one of the characters, in order, thus concealed, to deceive, confuse and corrupt the human objects of his inhuman malevolence. At least once in the course of the action this demon appears undisguised before the audience, disclosing the wicked spectacle of his true identity. By contrast, in El águila de la iglesia, the devil is essentially an unseen spirit-creature, which enters the body of a still living person. In Act II Porcia, resentful of Agustin's pure indifference, calls out for assistance from hell to reawaken his once passionate love for her, and asks:

¿y para cuando el demonio aguarda a ser en mi amparo?

From offstage the inhuman voice of a demon-spirit responds:

(Dice una VOZ muy borrosa dentro.)

VOZ. Para ahora, que en tu cuerpo se introducen mis estragos.

Immediately Porcia is possessed by this invisibly evil spirit which enslaves her will, torments her soul and perpetrates wickedness in her name until, in Act III, with God's help, the saint forces the interior demon to depart its host. Porcia collapses unconscious, as her soul is redeemed, and somewhere far off («dentro») the demon's disembodied voice admits that good has vanquished evil. The play ends conventionally, with the saint's exemplary death, but not before the title's significance is explained. An angel addresses San Agustín as:

Espiritual águila en quien se vio la naturaleza humana, tan remontada, que pudo en tu sutileza trascender, donde jamás penetró su inteligencia.

As the saint dies, «descúbrese una rueda grande, y dentro se ve el sol», and he is borne heavenwards by angels to the sunlight of God's presence. Spoken by the gracioso, Bonete, the final lines confirm the work was composed in collaboration:

Y aquí senado da fin el águila de la Iglesia, que dos plumas de la fama, de su virtud siempre excelsa, a tan ilustre senado ofrecen esta comedia.

ALLÁ VAN LEYES DONDE QUIEREN REYES, Y MOZÁRABES DE TOLEDO.

The autograph manuscript has survived (BN 14.887). No other version, manuscript or printed, is known. Records show that Lanini was paid 240 reales for composing a play called Los mozárabes de Toledo, which was performed in Madrid, in December 1713 (Pérez Pastor, «Noticias y documentos», 229). The play is not listed by La Barrera. Also in the Biblioteca Nacional is a manuscript-copy of a play entitled Allá van leyes do quieren reyes (BN 16.943), on which is written, in a modern hand, «de Lanine», and which Paz mistakenly assumes to be the first part of Lanini's similarly named work. In fact, however, this manuscript-copy is a version of Guillén de Castro's Allá van leyes do quieren reyes (published in Escogidas XVI [Madrid, 1662]), a drama with which Lanini's play has nothing in common except its title. Lanini mainly derived his play from Juan Hidalgo's Los mozárabes de Toledo (Escogidas XXXVIII [Madrid, 1672]), which deals with the same subject; though some details of plot might have been taken from historical sources (possibly, Esteban de Garibay's Los XL libros del Compendio historial de las crónicas y universal historia de todos los reinos de España [Amberes, 1571]). On the proverb «Allá van leyes» see A. G. Solalinde, «Allá van leys o mandan reys», RFE, III (1916), 298-300.

Though Lanini's comedia contains much that is borrowed from its dramatic source, it also includes new plot-material imaginatively developed. Thus, whereas the source-play deals throughout with the reconquest of Toledo, in the refundición the Christians have retaken that city by the end of the first act. In the rest of the comedia Lanini dramatizes, individually, the controversy between the Mozarabs and their rescuers as to which missal, Mozarab or Roman, should be used in Toledan churches. Various attempts are made, unsuccessfully, to discover God's will. For instance, both missals undergo trial by fire, but neither is consumed in the flames -a miraculous occurrence related by Garibay. Finally King Alfonso VI settles the dispute by allowing the continued use of the Mozarab missal in specified churches. Hence the title: Allá van leyes donde quieren reyes. Some conventionally added elements confusingly complicate the plot: the Christian hero, Don Pedro falls in love with a Moorish girl, with Christian sympathies; predictably, a hidden statue is uncovered -of the Virgin Mary. An incident involving Queen Constanza is more originally developed. She is the only character interestingly individualized. Assisted by church dignitaries, she deprives the Moors in Toledo of their largest mosque without King Alfonso's knowledge and consent. Having acted thus forcefully on her own initiative, she resorts to feminine guile and with disarming humility begs her royal husband for his pardon. Altogether, Lanini's inventively accomplished refundición leads one to recognize that the creative ability of this minor Calderonian playwright is rather less limited than one had supposed.

*AMOR CONVIERTE LAS PIEDRAS.

This zarzuela, of which the autograph manuscript still exists (BN Res. 170), was written to be performed («cantada y representada y precedida de Loa») at the wedding of Doña Josefa de Valenzuela, Marquesa de Prado y Roldan, to Don José de Peñaranda (Paz, 21). The work is not listed by La Barrera.

EL ÁNGEL DE LAS ESCUELAS, SANTO TOMÁS DE AQUINO.

The signed, but undated, autograph-manuscript has survived (BN 14.777). The play was printed as a suelta -e. g., Sevilla: Francisco de Leefdael, n. d. (BN T 3403). There is evidently a play on the same subject and with the same title, by Manuel Vidal y Salvador (d. 1698). Superficially conceived but technically sophisticated, this comedia de santos, heavily dependent on apariencias and tramoyas, is typically loaded with such stage directions as: «Vase elevando el santo; Suenan chirimías, y baja la virgen en medio de dos ángeles»; and «Baja Cristo en un sol resplandeciente». Early in Act I the devil initiates his principal role in the action, making a spectacular entry to set fire to a castle under siege:

(De un lado del castillo baja de rápido el DEMONIO en forma de hombre, con vestido negro militar, sobre una sierpe, que echa fuego por la boca, y llegando al tablado, se llega al castillo, y pegándole su fuego, arde todo: apéase el DEMONIO, y por un escotillón se hunde el Serpiente [...].)

The devil conceals his identity by utilizing the body of a man just killed in battle, who was friend to Arnaldo, brother of Tomás Aquino. Disguised as his friend, the devil deceives Arnaldo, persuading him to tempt Tomás into sin and to oppose his brother's religious vocation. Tomás is portrayed as an individual of extraordinary virtue, devotion and learning, miraculously favoured by God and profoundly revered among men. As Fray Martin comments, in the course of a eulogy lengthily delivered in Act II, his friend Fray Tomás:

[...] en su entendimiento es rayo, en su memoria es archivo, en su virtud es un pasmo, en su vida es un prodigio.

As a general result, the saint is an inadequately interesting protagonist, though in Act I his goodness is reduced to more convincingly human proportions, when he is briefly tempted into experiencing lustful passion for Irene. He successfully resists temptation, however, through the power of his faith and the miraculous intervention of God's angels. Finally, the devil is vanquished («Ábrese un escotillón y húndese»), Christ descends to promise Tomás eternal life, the saint dies in exemplary fashion, and is conveyed heavenwards by angels:

TODOS. Y aquí Don Pedro Lanini pone fin a la comedia de Santo Tomás de Aquino, el ángel de las escuelas.

ANTONIO ROCA, O LA MUERTE MÁS VENTUROSA.

This play was possibly written in collaboration. A manuscript exists (BN 15.205), of which the final act is in Lanini's handwriting and carries his signature. Acts I and II are written in a hand which resembles that of Cañizares, who was Lanini's collaborator in Cumplir a un tiempo quien ama con su Dios y con su dama (q. v.). Lope composed a drama entitled Antonio Roca, which he lists in El peregrino en su patria (1603). Mistakenly assuming that the manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional was Lope's text, with some modifications by Lanini to Act III, Emilio Cotarelo y Mori published Lanini's Antonio Roca -still the only comedia by this playwright to have been edited in modern times- (in Obras de Lope de Vega, publicadas por la Real Academia Española, nueva edición [Madrid, 1916-30]; see I, 660-92).

Other critics have made the same erroneous assumption, and have studied Lanini's play in some detail as an example of Lope's dramatic art (see, for instance, Joan Fuster, El bandolerisme català, II, La Llegenda [Barcelona: Ayma, 1963], 55- 76). Morley and Bruerton (258), however, discounted Lope's authorship, and accepted that of Lanini, having established from an analysis of its versification that the work could not have been written until the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. More recently Victor Dixon identified «El auténtico Antonio Roca de Lope», in Homenaje a William L. Fichter, ed. A. David Kossoff and J. Amor y Vázquez (Madrid: Castalia, 1971), 175-88, which drama has survived in a single manuscript-copy, part of the Holland collection, now housed in Dorset. La Barrera (428, 436) mentions this manuscript, but incorrectly supposes it to be an autograph. Dixon offers a detailed commentary on Lope's Antonio Roca, of which he has a favourable opinion:

«Cuando se escriba la historia definitiva de la comedia de santos y bandoleros, quizá se verá que Lope, en Antonio Roca, dejó en esbozo ya gran parte de ella; que fue en este caso, como en tantos más, el primero en percatarse de la potencialidad de un tema dramático».

(187)

Both plays dramatize the life of Antonio Roca, a famous Catalan bandit-priest, who was tortured, repented and was executedjn Barcelona in 1546. Lanini's play is a refundición, without being a slavish imitation, of Lope's work. Dixon calculates that Lanini «copió, más o menos mutilados, seis o siete episodios, y unos 104 versos que aparecen en nuestro manuscrito: lo demás lo sacó de su cosecha» (188). One is reminded of Lanini's similarly selective borrowings from his sourceplay in Allá van leyes (q. v.). As in Lope's original work, in Lanini's refundición Antonio Roca is persuaded into his career of wrongdoing by his mother, Juliá, whose dominant role and forceful character deserve further study. Juliá insists that she is still a young woman (she was married at age thirteen). Her insistence serves to illustrate the reluctance of Spanish actresses to play older women, and, therefore, to explain the scarcity of mothers on the Golden-Age stage. Another less interesting character, an example of the «female bandit», helps her lover control his bandit-gang, and ends her life repentantly in a convent (see Melveena McKendrick, Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age [London: Cambridge U. P., 1974], 129). Despite his late-Calderonian taste for sensationalism, Lanini, in contrast to Lope, possibly intimidated by Roca's originally priestly calling, alters dramatically the fate of the historical Antonio Roca. In Lanini's comedia the protagonist is not imprisoned and executed as he is in Lope's drama, and as was Roca in reality. Lanini's hero, as he repents, still a free man, expires of natural causes, thus escaping the ultimate penalty for his crimes. There is an episode in Lanini's third act, which is apparently derived from Don Quijote, II, ch. LX (cf. Dixon, 188, n. 46). Several incidents and adventures in which Lanini's protagonist is involved-for instance, he shares a bed with a corpse-are reminiscent of, and doubtless influenced by, similarly strange experiences which extravagantly befall characters created by Diamante and other late Calderonian playwrights. Diamante, of course, collaborated with Lanini in several plays (see El gran cardenal de España, etc.). Dixon (188) alludes to «el desastroso resultado» of Lanini's adaptation-arguably an excessively negative assessment of a drama which had sufficiently dramatic merit to convince Fuster (op. cit.) that «les dues primeres jornadas de l'obra semblen ésser indiscutiblement de Lope».

*EL APÓSTOL DE ALEMANIA, [Y] SEGUNDO SAN PABLO, SAN NORBERTE.

There is an anonymous manuscript of this play in the Biblioteca Municipal, Madrid (see Cambronera, 290). This comedia de santos, for which Lanini received payment in February 1715 (Pérez Pastor, «Noticias y documentos», 229), was probably the last work which he composed. La Barrera (201) says that the drama was printed suelta.

*EL APÓSTOL DE VALENCIA, SAN VICENTE FERRER.

There is an early eighteenth-century manuscript, entitled El apóstol valenciano, San Vicente Ferrer, and attributing the play to Juan Bautista Diamante and Pedro Francisco Lanini, in the Biblioteca del Instituto del Teatro de Barcelona (BITB CL-5) (see Simón Palmer, 15, n.º 159). There is a play called Las misas de San Vicente Ferrer by Fernando de Zarate [Antonio Enríquez Gómez]. La Barrera (70) lists a two-part drama by Cañizares, called San Vicente Ferrer, which is doubtless the work performed seven times in Valencia in the early eighteenth century (Juliá Martínez, «Preferencias teatrales»).

LA BATALLA DE LAS NAVAS.

See El rey don Alfonso el Bueno.

CERCO Y TOMA DE NAMUR.

See Sitio y toma de Namur.

*LAS CINCO BLANCAS DE JUAN DE ESPERA EN DIOS.

A manuscript-copy evidently attributing this play to Lanini is in the Biblioteca del Instituto del Teatro de Barcelona (Simón Palmer, 27, n.º 304). A play with this title, attributed to Antonio [Sigler] de Huerta, was published in Escogidas XXXII (Madrid, 1669). A manuscript-copy, with censura of 1755, in the Biblioteca Municipal de Madrid, also names Antonio de Huerta as the author (Cambronero, 315).

*LA CORONACIÓN DEL REY DE POLONIA.

Written in collaboration with José Navarro, this play was probably performed in the corrales in April or May 1698 (Varey and Shergold, Fuentes, IX, 88). The playwrights received 800 reales for this work (see Shergold and Varey, Fuentes, VI, 63, 268, 305). This comedia, which is not listed by La Barrera, is evidently no longer extant. Little is known about José Navarro except that he wrote Poesías varias (BN) and composed, c. 1666, a «Loa para la comedia de La fuerza del natural» by Moreto and Cáncer (La Barrera, 284).

CRIADA, AMANTE Y SEÑORA.

See Nadie pierde por servir, y criada amante y señora.

*LOS CUATRO PRODIGIOS DE AMOR.

Performed at the palace by the company of Agustín Manuel on 1 March 1688 (Varey and Shergold, Fuentes, IX, 90), this play is presumably the same work as Los cuatro milagros de amor, as ascribed to Lanini by Medel, Duran and García de la Huerta. Mira de Amescua also composed a play with this title (BN Ms. 15.252). Lanini's comedia (not listed by La Barrera) is apparently no longer extant.

CUMPLIR A UN TIEMPO QUIEN AMA CON SU DIOS Y CON SU DAMA.

Composed in collaboration with José de Cañizares (1676-1750), this play seemingly survives in a single autograph-manuscript (BN 16.965). The manuscript contains censuras, written at the end of Act I, by Don Juan Salvo and by Cañizares himself, dated 1 September 1714, which was doubtless the year in which the play was composed. Cañizares, who declares that he wrote half the play, shows no hesitation or embarrassment in approving unreservedly his own work for performance:

«Esta comedia Cumplir a un tiempo quien ama con su Dios y con su dama es mía la mitad, y no tiene en toda ella inconveniente...»12.

Cañizares composed Act I, which is in his handwriting (Paz, I, 132), and presumably half of either Act II or Act III. These acts are written in a distinctively neat hand, which is recognizably that of Lanini, as preserved in several signed autograph-manuscripts (e. g., El africano Nerón, Antonio Roca). La Barrera (70) wrongly attributes the entire drama to Cañizares. Ebersole mistakenly identifies the play with Clicie y el sol, a zarzuela by Cañizares¹³. The work was apparently never printed.

Though unattractively wordy, the drama's title accurately communicates its thought-content. Set in imperial Rome in the provincial city of Tarsis [sic], the play dramatizes, with inventive inaccuracy, the history of Saint Boniface IV, Pope from 608-15. He was given permission, by the Byzantine Emperor Phocas, to convert the Pantheon, a famous pagan temple in Rome, into a Christian Church (13 May 609), which was dedicated to the Virgin and Martyrs -Our Lady of the Rotunda. Apparently, the bones of martyred saints were brought to be venerated in this church. The dramatists seem to have confused, doubtless intentionally, events and circumstances associated with Pope Boniface IV, who died in monastic retirement, and the martyrdom of another Saint Boniface, the apostle of Germany who was beheaded in Frisia in 754. Bonifacio, a Christian, deeply loves and is passionately loved by Aglae, to whom he is betrothed. However, God's will and their religious belief convert their «amor mundano/en afecto santo y puro» (Act III). Bonifacio dies a martyr in Tarsis, tortured and beheaded for having defended and proclaimed the Christian Faith.

Miraculously, so it is reported by Valeriano, the martyr speaks after death, giving instructions that his body should be conveyed to Aglae, and into the Christian temple in Rome. Her lover's body is brought, therefore, to Aglae «triunfante y difunto»:

(Descúbrese BONIFACIO en lo superior del carro, degollado y rodeado de resplandores.)

Reverently, in accordance with his wishes, she receives her martyred lover's body into the Christian church, while she and other Christians recognize, with music and rejoicing, that «con Dios y con su dama / Bonifacio cumplir supo / amante y santo...». Curiously, Lanini and Cañizares make little use of tramoyas and apariencias, in which remarkable respect this play differs from other comedias de santos by the same dramatists. The ghost which appears to Aglae in Act II -«una sombra con un hacha negra en la mano»- creates almost the only supernatural event enacted on the stage. This messenger from God warns Aglae: «que en un altar no convienen / la imagen de la pureza / y el ídolo del deleite», but, more encouragingly, concludes with the prediction:

[...] pues no es imposible aunque lo pareciese que amores transmute quien almas convierte. (Vuela.)

This uncharacteristically theatrical restraint results perhaps from the dramatic interest principally taken in the love-relationship of Bonifacio and Aglae with its secular complications.

LA DAMA COMENDADOR.

There exists a partially autograph manuscript (BN 16.562), dated 30 September 1663. This comedia de capa y espada was, therefore, among Lanini's earliest compositions. According to La Barrera, the play was printed suelta. In discussing Lope's Más pueden celos que amor, Morley and Bruerton (215-16) mention Cotarelo's opinion that in its original version this play was entitled La dama comendador and that its heroine, in her disguise as a man, was comendador of the order of Santiago. They add, however, that: «Nothing similar occurs in the play [by Lope] as we have it». If Cotarelo's suppositions are correct, then Lanini's comedia, in which «sale Aurora vestida de hombre con hábito de Calatrava», could have been influenced by Lope's original Dama comendador.

Lanini develops his entertainingly complicated plot in an accomplished fashion reminiscent of Tirso. Deserted by her lover, Aurora dons male attiré and pursues him to Seville in order to avenge or restore her honour. The false identity which she assumes is that of her own brother Don Juan de Leiva, a comendador, whom, she has been told, she greatly resembles and of whom she has seen or heard nothing since he went to the Indies ten years previously. Predictably, the real Don Juan de Leiva soon appears on the scene, with predictably confusing consequences. Disguised as Don Juan, Aurora woos Casandra, to prevent the latter's marriage to Carlos, who is Aurora's disloyal lover. But Casandra already has another lover, who is Aurora's brother, the real Don Juan. Aurora is not the only character who conceals her true sex. The gracioso Mendrugo appears «vestido de mujer» at the beginning of Act III, and in a highly diverting scene attracts the amorous attention of another gradoso-manservant. Although Tirsian in plot-content, the play in its style is markedly Calderonian, containing a number of lengthily explanatory speeches. Aurora's monologue in Act I, in which she describes her first meeting with Carlos, is made poetically noteworthy through the culteranismo of passages such as the following:

Un caballero me vio que iba en un bruto morcillo por lo negro y lo ligero del viento y la noche hijo; todo un monte de azabache, de ébano el cabello en rizos, carbón que encendió su fuego y apagó su viento mismo, que es propio en los elementos ser contrarios siendo amigos.

The attributes which Aurora observes in the horse represent, of course, metaphorically the qualities which she admiresin its rider: the darkly handsome form, the urgent energy, the fire of passion. There is nearly a disastrous outcome to the intrigue. Casandra is almost killed by her father, and Don Juan, upon hearing that his sister has been dishonoured, wishes to take her life, but honour, lost or damaged, is satisfactorily restored in the end, through the marriage of Aurora to Carlos and of Casandra to the real Don Juan:

[...] y si acaso os agradase la dama comendador perdonad con yerros grandes.

DARLO TODO Y NO DAR NADA.

Published in Escogidas XXXVI (Madrid, 1671), this comedia burlesca is a fulllength parody of Calderón's play with the same title, which dramatizes the love for Campaspe of Apelles, favoured painter of Alexander the Great. Lope deals with the same subject in Las grandezas de Alejandro. Salvador Crespo Matellán (in La parodia dramática en la literatura española [Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1979], at p. 29), has noted briefly the close relationship between Calderón's comedia famosa and Lanini's comedia burlesca, in which figure Calderón's main characters: Alejandro, Campaspe, Apeles, Diogenes. In conclusion, Pedro Lanini playfully acknowledges his debt to the play of the other «Don Pedro»:

Con que acaba la comedia, Darlo todo y no dar nada, que un Don Pedro la escribió, cuando otra la disparata. [...]

Varey and Shergold (Fuentes IX, 61) assume that the play called Apeles y Campaspe performed at the palace in 1681,1684 and 1693 was Calderón's Darlo todo y no dar nada. However, Lanini's play might possibly have been staged on one or more of these occasions. A work called Darlo todo y no dar nada was known to audiences in Portugal in the 1720s (see Tomás Pinto Brandão, La comedia de comedias, ed. Mercedes de los Reyes Peña and Piedad Bolaños Donoso, in Criticón, XL [1987]; especially p. 143).

DEL ARADO A LA CORONA.

See Labrador, rey y monje.

EL DESEADO PRÍNCIPE DE ASTURIAS, Y JUECES DE CASTILLA.

The signed autograph manuscript (BN 14.775) reveals that Lanini composed the first two acts, and that the final act was written by Juan de la Hoz y Mota (1622- 1714), who was, like Lanini, both prolific playwright and censor de comedias. He completed the play on 2 November 1708. Probably Lanini's most popular work, it was performed twice in Valencia during the first half of the eighteenth century (see Juliá Martínez, «Preferencias teatrales», 127); was staged in Toledo (1771) and Seville (1771, 1772)¹⁴, and in Barcelona (1777, 1785)¹⁵; and during the 1780s, and into the early 1790s, was evidently performed in the principal theatres of Madrid. Coe (Catálogo, 65-66) gives details of performances in the capital, some of which, however, might have been performances of Moreto's play on the same subject (cf. below). A review in El Memorial Literario (1784), criticizes El deseado príncipe de Asturias for its failure to observe the unities, but its recreation of the style and customs of ancient Spain is admired. The Biblioteca Municipal, Madrid possesses a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century manuscript (1-39-6) and a suelta (n. p., n. d.), with a manuscript-censura, dated 1817, attributing the play to «un ingenio de esta corte». There are similarly anonymous and undated sueltas of this work in the Biblioteca Nacional (e. g. T 20145).

Arguably the best work which Lanini composed in collaboration, it is based on medieval events reported in Mariana's Historia general de España, and is derived from Moreto's Los jueces de Castilla (performed at the Pardo, 19 January 1651 -Varey and Shergold, Fuentes, IX, 139). Moreto's drama is itself evidently a refundición of an identically-named comedia, now lost, by Lope de Vega. Lanini and Hoz have incorporated into a single drama at least sufficient plot-material for two separate comedias -for they dramatize not only Prince Ramiro's conflict with his brother, Alonso and father, Ordoño II, but also the nomination and activities of Nuño Rasura and Lain Calvo, the «jueces de Castilla». Additionally, they have inserted invented material in liberal quantities: Ramiro assumes the identity of Diego Anzures, a dead man, whose physical appearance had greatly resembled that of Ramiro; Alonso, an unrecognized visitor to the cabin which Ramiro occupies with his wife, Geloira, causes Ramiro to believe, wrongly, that the visitor has offended his marital honour. The title chosen for the comedia is inadequately appropriate. The role played by the «jueces de Castilla» is insignificant compared with the prominence given to them in Moreto's original drama. As for «el deseado príncipe de Asturias», the son of Ramiro and Geloira, he is unborn in Acts I and II, and, as a precocious child of eight, takes only a minor part in Act III-though, admittedly, as heir to both Castile and León, he is an importantly symbolical figure. On the other hand, within the generally complicated and insufficiently structured plot are specific scenes of admirably developed conflict and tension. Also some of the characters are portrayed well, particularly the envious Alonso, whose feeble health causes both the nobility and the common people to prefer his younger brother as their ruler. Alonso's unpopularity is shown to aggravate his defects of moral character, and dangerously to stimulate his envious resentment of Ramiro, the drama's physically healthy and mentally stable protagonist. Elisa M.ª Domínguez de Paz includes a description, but without analysis, of El deseado príncipe de Asturias in La obra dramática de Juan de la Hoz y Mota (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1986), 73-77.

LA ENEAS DE LA VIRGEN Y PRIMER REY DE NAVARRA.

Written in collaboration with Francisco [de] Villegas, this play sometimes carries the third title, y famoso Iñigo Arista. A minor but not untalented playwright, active in the second half of the seventeenth century (La Barrera, 494), Francisco [de] Villegas also collaborated with Lanini, and others, in Vida, muerte y colocación de San Isidro (q. v.). La Eneas de la Virgen was published in Escogidas XLII (Madrid, 1676). There is a seventeenth-century manuscript-copy (BN 16.992), which lacks the authors' names. The play was printed suelta in Sevilla: Viuda de Francisco de Leefdael, n. d., and, correctly attributed, in Valencia: Viuda de Joseph de Orga, 1765. There is a Relación del primer rey de Navarra by Lanini (Sevilla: Manuel Nicolás Vázquez, n. d.) (see Francisco Aguilar Piñal, Impresos sevillanos del siglo XVIII [Madrid: CSIC, 1974], 259). An eighteenth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Municipal, Madrid (1-58-11) reveals that the play, which was staged twice in Valencia early in the eighteenth century (Juliá Martínez, «Preferencias teatrales», 130), was still being performed in Madrid in 1756. The manuscript which carries three censuras of that year, shows signs of some textual revision affecting mainly the part of the gracioso, Tropezón. Two of the censuras are sufficiently interesting to reproduce in full. A censura by Nicolás González [y] Martínez, dated Madrid, 23 October 1756, reads:

«Señor: Esta comedia de la Eneas de la Virgen, en el seguro de que para su composición, verían los ingenios que la decoraron alguna particular historia de la imagen de que traten, que no ha llegado a mi noticia, y siendo su episodio muy natural, y que está arreglado a lo verosímil, no encuentro el menor reparo que embarace la licencia, que para su representación se solicita; si bien es lástima, que en un caso tan pío, vicie lo que tiene de Historia, la novela que introducen del castillo encantado, concediendo honores de Don Belianís, al héroe Íñigo Arista. Y no obstante que este defecto de introducir una fábula, no puede ser motivo de prohibirla, por haber sido antes practicado por otros, no he querido dejarlo de advertir, porque aunque no se oponga a su ejecución, pudiera atribuirse a falta de noticia».

Antonio Pablo Hernández in his censura, dated Madrid, 24 December 1756, comments as follows:

«Señor: No hallo inconveniente con el permiso de V. S. en que se representase esta comedia, pues sus autores, Villegas y Sagredo, fueron muy arreglados en los principales casos, que escribieron; y es cierto, que en cuanto al castillo (que aquí se debe tomar como una incidencia) se deslizan a aventura de caballero andante, pero esta nota se salva a mi parecer, lo primero con saberse que es comedia; lo segundo que en muchas de nuestras historias corren semejantes pasajes con buena intención y sin embarazo por todo lo que soy de sentir salvo Vra que V. S. conceda la licencia que se solicita».

The main elements of the plot are derived from Spanish medieval history and pious legend. The protagonist Íñigo Arista, becomes «primer rey de Navarra» and, leads the Christians to victory against the Moors. This victory is largely accomplished through the miraculous intervention of the «Virgen del Peral», whose statue has been rescued from the Moors, by Doña Ana de Lara, «siendo Eneas de María» or «devota Eneas»; for she is «la Eneas de la Virgen» mentioned in the title. Incongruously inserted into this otherwise typical comedia de moros y cristianos is the markedly Arthurian episode to which González y Martínez justifiably objected. In Act I, probably the work of Villegas, the hero enters an enchanted castle where he finds a dagger embedded in a shield, with the message that whoever withdraws the weapon will become King of Aragón and Navarre. Íñigo Arista successfully removes the dagger. This episode was doubtless included for primarily theatrical reasons. The castle sensationally appears and disappears, made to revolve through the sophisticated operation of stage-machines. Stage-directions, which include references to «claraboya del patio» and «el frontis del teatro», indicate that this work was written for performance at court (cf. El hijo del carpintero; and see Shergold, Spanish Stage, 380). Alberto Lista (Lecciones de literatura española [Madrid, 1853], Vol. II) described El primer rey de Navarra as Lanini's best historical play, but Saber obligar a Dios (q. v.) is a distinctly superior work.

*EL FALSO PROFETA MAHOMA.

There is a manuscript of this play, which is not listed by La Barrera, in the Biblioteca Municipal de Madrid, with censuras of 1755 and 1762 (Cambronero, 357). A play called El profeta falso Mahoma -probably Lanini's play- was performed at the palace 14 June 1685, by the company of Manuel de Mosquera (Varey and Shergold, Fuentes IX, 193). Performances of a drama on this subject are recorded in Valencia in the early eighteenth century (Juliá Martínez «Preferencias teatrales», 149), in Barcelona in 1730 and in Toledo in 1773. Details are given by Josep M. Solà-Solé, «Los Mahomas de Rojas Zorrilla», in Sobre árabes, judíos y musulmanos y su impacto en la lengua y literatura españolas (Barcelona: Puvill, 1983), 105-28, esp. 105-06. Coe (Catálogo, 95) mentions a work El falso profeta Mahoma, a five-act tragedy, described, however, as a translation (doubtless Ledesma's translation of the work by Voltaire), which was performed in August 1794. Lanini's drama is possibly a refundición of the comedia by Rojas Zorrilla, El profeta falso Mahoma. A play called Vida y muerte del falso profeta Mahoma, different from Rojas Zorrilla's work, wrongly appeared under his name in Parte XXXIII de doce comedias famosas de varios autores (Valencia, 1642). Rojas Zorrilla's play, published in the Primera parte (Madrid: María de Quiñones, 1640) of his comedias, must have been written c. 1635, for it was performed on 6 May of that year, «en el salón» by the company of Roque de Figueroa (N. D. Shergold, J. E. Varey, «Some Palace Performances of Seventeenth-century Plays», BHS, XL [1963], 212-44, at 235). Solà-Solé (op. cit.) discusses Rojas' El profeta falso Mahoma (which, he says, was placed in the Index in 1776 [117]) and compares it with the anonymous Vida y muerte del falso profeta Mahoma. This critic is evidently unaware of the existence of Lanini's El falso profeta Mahoma.

EL GRAN CARDENAL DE ESPAÑA, FRAY FRANCISCO JIMÉNEZ DE CISNEROS.

This two-part drama was composed by Lanini in collaboration with Diamante. For critical comments on the work of this dramatist, see Ann L. Mackenzie, «Juan Bautista Diamante (1625-1687)», in Siete siglos de autores españoles (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1991), 191-95. The Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, possesses manuscript-copies of both parts of El gran cardenal de España. Whereas the late seventeenth-century manuscript of Part II (BN 15.693) is anonymous (the words «de Diamante» have been added in a modern hand), the manuscript of Part I (BN 17.042) attributes the work to Diamante and Lanini. This manuscript contains an interesting censura of Francisco Bueno, dated 30 November 1699, which reads as follows:

«[...] he visto esta comedia, primera parte de el Gran cardenal de España, y no sólo no hallo en ella que fiscalizar sino mucho que aplaudir a sus autores, que dieron a público teatro las hazañosas virtudes de tan eminentísimo varón, y merece licencia para representarse...».

The same censor warmly approved for performance Lanini's El africano Nerón (q. v.). In the Biblioteca Municipal (BMM 1-64-8) there are manuscript-copies of both parts. Two manuscripts of Part I, attributing it only to Lanini, give the play an additional title: El segundo Josué y gran cardenal de España, Fray Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. One of these manuscripts has censuras dated Madrid, 2 October and 3 October 1756, respectively written by Nicolás González Martínez and Antonio Pablo Hernández (cf. La Eneas de la Virgen, discussed above). González Martínez insists on changing certain lines, but does not oppose the play's performance: «pues si bien alguno de los sucesos prodigiosos de que el ingenio [sic] se vale, no constan de su historia, en el alto espíritu, virtud y religión de héroe tan grande, nada es inverisímil». Hernández in an exceedingly long censura, much of which is of doubtful relevance, reveals himself to be a dedicated admirer of the cardinal. He describes the comedia, which eulogizes Cisneros, as «un mínimo punto de el dilatado mapa de las sublimes acciones que tuvo y ejerció su magnánimo héroe, norma de religiosos, ejemplar de ministros, y regla de prelados, de quien nada se hace dudable, y cuanto puede decirse es admisible...». Known to have been staged in Madrid in 1756, the play was possibly also still popular in Valencia, at least during the first half of the eighteenth century. A work entitled La restauración de Orán, y gran cardenal de España, performed five times, which Juliá Martínez («Preferencias teatrales») believed was the play by Esclapés de Guilló, could have been the comedia composed by Lanini and Diamante. Both parts attributed to «un ingenio [de esta corte]», were published as sueltas (Madrid: Antonio Sanz, 1740 and 1741; Valencia: Joseph y Thomas de Orga, 1777), the first part with the title, Pluma púrpura y espada sólo en Cisneros se halla, y restauración de Orán. Luis Vélez de Guevara composed a play entitled La conquista de Orán (Escogidas XXXV [Madrid, 1671]), which deals with Cisneros, «el segundo Josué», and from which El gran cardenal is only partially derived (see F. E. Spencer, R. Schevill, The Dramatic Works of Luis Vélez de Guevara [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1937], 171-75). An anonymous comedia, also called La restauración de Orán, printed suelta (BN T 6191), possibly the work by Muñoz mentioned by La Barrera (282), deals with events unconnected with Cisneros. Historical sources possibly used by the collaborators include: Eugenio de Robles, Compendio de la vida y hazañas del cardenal don fray Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (Toledo, 1604) -see 243-56; and Fray Antonio Daza, Quarta parte de la Crónica General (Valladolid, 1611); see Part I, Chapters XVII-XXV.

Though secular elements -cloak-and-sword conflicts, problems of honour and intrigues of love- intrude repeatedly into this religious work¹⁶, its dramatic action is principally charged with miraculous happenings, caused by or associated with the cardinal-protagonist, Cisneros. His saintly humility, which has led him to reject the honours which Queen Isabel wishes to bestow upon him, is already rewarded in Act I, through divine intervention:

(Bajan en tres apariencias dos ángeles y una niña que hace la fe, cada uno con una corona que sirve de peaña; la niña trae las armas de la Inquisición, el ángel de la mano derecha un capelo de cardenal y el otro insignias de arzobispo.)

But the most noteworthy stage-miracle takes place in Act III. Cisneros calls upon the sun to stay its course to facilitate, before the close of day, the Spanish conquest of Orán:

[...] luciente antorcha del cielo ten de tu precipitada carrera el violento curso que si Josué a la instancia se paró la fe, mi fe es ahora quien te para.   (Va saliendo un sol. Se detenga cuando lo diga el verso.)

Part I ends in victory for the Christians:

[...] convidando si ésta agrada a la segunda, y pidiendo perdón de sus muchas faltas.

In Part II Cisneros dies in exemplary manner at the end of the second act, whereupon

(Córrese la cortina que cubrirá el santo, y subirá el alma en una apariencia, cantando los ángeles.)

He reappears, however, as a phantom in Act III, «a ser de los fieles / de Orán caudillo». On this occasion with divine assistance, he persuades the sun miraculously to rise three hours ahead of time, enabling the Spaniards successfully to defend the city against Moorish attack.

*LA GRAN PATRONA DE ESPAÑA.

La Barrera attributes a play of this title to Lanini, and says that it was printed suelta. This could be the same work as Nuestra Señora del Pilar which La Barrera also ascribes to Lanini (201). Both plays might be identical to El hijo del carpintero (q. v.).

EL GRAN REY ANACORETA, SAN ONOFRE.

The signed autograph-manuscript of this comedia de santos (BN 14.932), dated Madrid, 24 July 1674, was once the property of Manuel Pacheco, autor de comedias. The manuscript carries the aprobación of Francisco de Avellaneda, 12 October 1674, with a licencia (13 October) allowing the play to be performed. It was published in Escogidas, XLII (Madrid, 1676), the same volume which contains, among other plays by Lanini, Será lo que Dios quisiere (q. v.), a play also approved for performance by Avellaneda. The latter, like Lanini, was both playwright and censor of plays (see La Barrera, 18-19).

El gran rey anacoreta is a dramatically undistinguished work, similar, but inferior, to other religious plays by Lanini. Various tramoyas are utilized to illustrate the saintliness of Onofre, the ruler prepared to renounce his kingdom in order to serve God humbly as a hermit. The devil appears and operates in familiar disguises and by conventional methods: in Act I he takes possession of the body of Aurelio, recently deceased, in order to deceive and corrupt the latter's friend Alejandro (cf. El ángel de las escuelas and El hijo del carpintero); and in Act II he disguises himself as an angel of light, vainly attempting to lead Onofre into mortal sin. When the royal hermit dies his soul, in the form of a dove, is carried heavenwards, by angels. In the final lines Lanini alludes to his work as a refundición:

Y aquí da fin, senado discreto, el gran rey anacoreta, que os ofrece, quien ha vuelto hoy a escribirla, con más noticia, y menos aciertos.

Perhaps he himself composed an earlier version of El gran rey anacoreta. Possibly, however, he is acknowledging his debt to the comedia, attributed to Claramonte, entitled El gran rey de los desiertos, San Onofre (Paz, 1,234). A play called El santo rey anacoreta, possibly Lanini's work, is mentioned in a satire (1683-84) made up of «títulos de comedias» (J. B. Avalle-Arce, «Una nueva pieza en "títulos de comedias"», NRFE, I (1947), 148-65, at 154).

*GUZMÁN DE ALFARACHE.

A manuscript, evidently the only copy existing, attributed to Lanini, and with a censura, dated August 1767, is in the possession of the Biblioteca Municipal, Madrid (Cambronero, 370). The comedia is not listed by La Barrera.

HABLADME EN ENTRANDO.

The signed autograph-manuscript of this comedia de capa y espada (BN 15.126) is dated 1706. Still censor de comedias in that year, Lanini declined an instruction to review his own play, as a note (Madrid, 26 November 1706) on this manuscript reveals:

«[...] siendo obra mía, mal puedo ser censor de mí propio, remítome a que la vea el fiscal Don Joseph Cañizares, y si hallare alguna cosa indecente, o mal sonante, lo borre y enmiende, como es de su obligación...».

There follows Cañizares' censura (1 December 1706) in which he objects to «sólo tres versos que van tajados», finding that the play otherwise «está muy bien escrita y muy conforme a nuestra política y buenas costumbres», and recommends its performance. Unlike Lanini, evidently Cañizares had no objection to acting as censor of his own play (cf. Cumplir a un tiempo quien ama). The autor de comedias, Antonio Ruiz was given 500 reales for performing the comedia on 8 December 1706 (Shergold and Varey, Fuentes XI, 81). On the autograph-manuscript there is an allusion to «la compañía del Sr. Juan Baptista Chavarria, autor por su mag. año 1709», indicating that the work was staged again in that year. There is a cast-list written at the end of Act I. Two manuscript-copies are also in the Biblioteca Nacional (BN 15.341 and 14.496 [28] [Paz, I, 239]). The Archivo de la Cofradía de la Novena possesses another manuscript-copy and also music for the play (Varey and Shergold, Fuentes, IX, 126). According to Cambronero (370), there are two manuscripts in the Biblioteca Municipal, Madrid, with censuras of 1760 and 1774 respectively, of a comedia entitled Habladme en entrando, o Celos de amor y de honor ni aun a su padre perdonan. These manuscripts could be copies of Lanini's play-which was still being performed in Madrid in the 1780s-but might be versions of Tirso's comedia with the same titles (Paz, I, 239), staged by the company of Manuel Vallejo in October or November 1630 (N. D. Shergold, J. E. Varey, «Some Palace Performances», BHS, XL [1963], 227). Coe (Catálogo, 94) lists a performance of Habladme en entrando in the Corral del Principe, 15-17 May 1784, and quotes from an interesting review in El Memorial Literario, which comments that «el artificio y enredo de esta Comedia es más natural que el desenredo, que es violento y cansado», preferring Acts I and II to the final act. The play was evidently printed suelta (La Barrera, 201).

Lahini composed few plays of intrigue (cf. La dama comendador), for which, evidently, he had no special liking, and his talent for this genre is likewise unremarkable. Nevertheless, Golden-Age audiences doubtless were entertained by the confusions, conflicts and ramifications of the plot in Habladme en entrando. In particular, they must have enjoyed the opportune meeting of Don Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, newly returned to Oviedo after an absence of twenty years, with his son Diego and daughter Ana, of whose identity their father is initially unaware. Theatre-goers must also have delighted in Don Juan's dilemma, when, as governor of Oviedo, he is obliged to preside over his own son's trial -Diego having killed a man in defence of the family's honour. The comedia ends conventionally in marriages and reconciliations:

DIEGO. Y de este vulgar adagio de habladme en entrando, tenga fin la comedia.

TODOS. [...] logrando el que perdone sus faltas tan docto y ilustre senado.

EL HIJO DEL CARPINTERO.

The signed autograph-manuscript of this comedia de santos has survived (BN 14.811), to which La Barrera (201) assigns the date 1674. But at the beginning of Act II the date given appears to be 1694. The technically complicated operation of tramoyas might suggest that Lanini composed the work when he was well advanced into his career. However, La nueva maravilla de la gracia, which was composed in the 1670s (q. v.) likewise depends on elaborately exploited stageeffects. This comedia, which was published suelta, was apparently sometimes given the additional titles of El niño de Zaragoza and Nuestra Señora del Filar, which La Barrera (201) mistakenly lists as two different plays. There is a manuscript of an auto called Nuestra Señor del Filar, which is possibly by Felipe Sánchez (Paz, I, 396). A comedia by Villaviciosa, Matos and Moreto is entitled La Virgen del Filar or Nuestra Señora del Filar (Escogidas V [Madrid, 1653]); (Paz, I, 573). Antonio de Zamora wrote a play named Columna sobre columna: Nuestra Señora del Filar, and Duran attributes a work with these titles to Cañizares (Paz, I, 107).

Set in Zaragoza early in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, El hijo del carpintero dramatizes the extraordinary life-story of Domingo Manuel. Parallels are repeatedly, disturbingly, sensationally, created between the origins, experiences and fate of the saintly «Niño de Zaragoza» and the life and death of Christ. In this limited respect the comedia brings to mind Lope's El niño inocente de la Guardia, sometimes called El Santo Niño de la Guardia. Segundo Cristo (Paz, I, 503), in which the «Reyes Católicos» also figure, and which was imitated by Cañizares and Hoz y Mota in La viva imagen de Cristo. Santo Niño de la Guardia (see Paz, 1,577; Domínguez de Paz, op. cit., 116-20). Domingo resembles Christ in that he is also the son of a carpenter called Joseph and a woman of impeccable virtue named Maria. Like the child Jesus, when he discourses with the elders in the temple, Domingo discusses matters of religion with learned Jews and proves the superiority of Christian doctrine. In Act III Domingo is tempted by the devil in a manner deliberately reminiscent of the temptations undergone by Christ:

(El demonio le lleva [a DOMINGO] en una apariencia hasta la claraboya del patio y quedándose ambos pendientes de los alambres los cuerpos ladeados que puedan mirar a los panes del teatro y a la cazuela en el frontis del teatro se descubrirá un globo en que están pintados montes y ciudades y mares, y este globo mientras hablan se mueva al rededor.)

The allusion to «la claraboya del patio» is particularly noteworthy, for it indicates a roofed theatre, revealing that El hijo del carpintero was first composed for performance at the palace (Shergold, Spanish Stage, 380; Mackenzie, «Lanini», 145). There are similar allusions within stage-directions given in Será lo que Dios quisiere, La Eneas de la Virgen and El Lucero de Madrid (q. v.).

Besides its sensationally engineered stage-marvels, this comedia is chiefly remarkable for the anti-Jewish enmity in its actions and sentiments. The child-saint insistently opposes the presence of the Jews in Spain and endeavours to persuade the King and Queen to expel them. The Jews, for their part, hate Domingo and seek his destruction. In Act I Domingo is protected from his Jewish enemies through the directly miraculous intervention of the Virgen del Pilar. The same Virgin, in Act II, will also assist Domingo's virtuous mother, sending an angel to protect Maria's endangered honour. Eventually, in the final act, Domingo suffers the same cruelly undeserved punishment that the ancestors of his murderers had inflicted upon Christ. In a sensational re-enactment of the Crucifixion, the audience witnesses the martyrdom of Domingo suddenly «discovered» upon the stage:

(Ábrese la cortina por medio y corriéndose o levantándose aparece DOMINGO en una cruz. Ha de estar desnudo y la cruz ha de ocupar la mitad del teatro de género que parezca que está en el aire.)

In the agony of death Domingo begs the King to expel the Jews from Spain, predicting for Fernando, in return, the rich rewards of Naples, Navarre, and a New World in the Indies. The King undertakes the expulsion of the Jews, and Queen Isabel promises to found «un santo tribunal», designating her own confessor, Torquemada to be its first Inquisitor General. Domingo had asked pardon for his murderers, but after his saintly death the King orders them to be burned alive, declaring, in the fury of grief, his intention personally to supply wood for the bonfire:

REY. Y aquí, senado, da fin el hijo del carpintero cuyo cuerpo Zarargoza venera en su sacro arreo.

The tastelessly sensational similarities between the «Niño de Zaragoza» and Jesus of Nazareth, dramatically exploited in El hijo del carpintero, so far as is known, did not result in the prohibition of the comedia. Apparently it was officially better received, therefore, than Lo nueva maravilla de la gracia (q. v.), which was banned in toto by the Inquisition -possibly because of the comparisons dramatically made between the married, but still maiden, protagonist and the Virgin Mary. One might suspect that it was the play's anti-semitism, then lamentably fashionable, which persuasively inclined censores de comedias to suppress, instead of the drama, their professional reservations, and to overlook the doctrinally questionable aspects of El hijo del carpintero.