That Malara, or any one save Lope de Vega, "placed a thousand tragedies on the boards," is incredible; but by general consent his fecundity was prodigious. None of his plays survives, and we are left to gather, from a chance remark of the author's, that he wrote a tragedy entitled _Absalón_ and another drama called _Locusta_. His repute as a poet must be accepted, if at all, on authority; for his extant imitations of Virgil and renderings of Martial are mere technical exercises. For us he is best represented by his _Filosofía vulgar_ (1568), an admirable selection made from the six thousand proverbs brought together by Hernán Núñez, who thus continued what Santillana had begun. A contemporary, Blasco de Garay (fl. 1553), had striven to prove the resources of the language by printing, in his _Cartas de Refranes_, three ingenious letters wholly made up of proverbial phrases; and in our own day the incomparable wealth of Castilian proverbs has been shown in Sbarbi's _Refranero General_ and in Haller's _Altspanische Sprichtwörter_. But no later and fuller collection has supplanted Malara's learned and vivacious commentary. His friend, JUAN DE LA CUEVA DE GAROZA of Seville (?1550-?1606), matched Malara in productiveness, and perhaps surpassed him in talent. Little is known of Cueva's life, save that he had certain love passages with Brígida Lucía de Belmonte, and that he became almost insane for a short while after her death. He distinguishes himself by his independence of the Senecan example, which he roundly declares to be at once inartistic and tedious (_cansada cosa_), and by urging the Spanish dramatists to abjure abstractions and to treat national themes without regard for Greek and Latin superstitions. Incident, character, plot, situation, variety: these are to be developed with small regard for "the unities" of the classic model. And Cueva carried out his doctrines. Ignoring Carvajal, he took a special pride in reducing plays from five acts to four, and he enriched the drama by introducing a multitude of metrical forms hitherto unknown upon the stage. The cunning fable of the people—_la ingeniosa fábula de España_—is illustrated in his _Siete Infantes de Lara_, in his _Cerco de Zamora_ (Siege of Zamora), where he utilises subjects enshrined in _romances_ which half his audience knew by heart. It is literally true that he had been preceded by Bartolomé Palau, who, as far back as 1524, had written a play on a national subject—the _Historia de la gloriosa Santa Orosia_, published in 1883 by Fernández-Guerra y Orbe; but this was an isolated, fruitless essay, whereas Cueva's was a deliberate, well-organised attempt to shape the drama anew and to quicken it into active life. Nor did Cueva's mission end with indicating the possibilities of dramatic motive afforded by heroico-popular songs and legends. His _Saco de Roma y Muerte de Borbón_ exploits an historical actuality by dramatising Carlos Quinto's Italian triumphs (1527-30);