and his _El Infamador_ (The Calumniator) not merely foreshadows the _comedia de capa y espada_, but gives us in his libertine, Leucino, the first sketch of the type which Tirso de Molina was to eternalise as Don Juan. It is certain that Cueva was often less successful in performance than in doctrine, and that his gods and devils, his saints and ruffians, too often talk in the same lofty vein—the vein of Juan de la Cueva. It is no less certain that he improvises recklessly, placing his characters in difficulties whence escape is impossible, and that he takes the first solution that offers—a murder, a supernatural interposition—with no heed for plausibility. But his bombast is the trick of his school, and, to judge by his epical _Conquista de la Bética_ (1603), he showed remarkable self-suppression in his plays. In his later years, after visiting the Western Indies, he seems to have abandoned the theatre which he had so courageously developed, and to have wasted himself upon his epic and the poor confection of old ballads which he published in the ten books entitled _Coro Febeo de Romances historiales_. Yet, despite these backslidings, he merits gratitude for his dramatic initiative. The Galician Dominican, Gerónimo Bermúdez (1530-89), apologises for his presentation in Castilian of the _Nise Lastimosa_, which he published under the name of Antonio de Silva in 1577. Bermúdez has seemingly done little more than rearrange the _Inez de Castro_ of the distinguished Portuguese poet, Antonio Ferreira, who had died eight years earlier. Though this "correct" play has tirades of remarkable beauty in the Senecan manner, its loose construction unfits it for the stage. All that it contains of good is due to Ferreira, and its continuation—the _Nise Laureada_—is a mere collection of incoherent extravagances and brutalities, conceived in Thomas Kyd's most frenzied mood.