[368] C. Pellicer, Orígen del Teatro, Madrid, 1804, 12mo, Tom. I. pp. 142-148. Plays were prohibited in Barcelona in 1591 by the bishop; but the prohibition was not long respected, and in 1597 was renewed with increased earnestness. Bisbe y Vidal, Tratado de las Comedias, Barcelona, 1618, 12mo, f. 94;--a curious book, attacking the Spanish theatre with more discretion than any other old treatise against it that I have read, but not with much effect. Its author would have all plays carefully examined and expurgated before they were licensed, and then would permit them to be performed, not by professional actors, but by persons belonging to the place where the representation was to occur, and known as respectable men and decent youths; for, he adds, “when this was done for hundreds of years, none of those strange vices were committed that are the consequence of our present modes.” (f. 106.) Bisbe y Vidal is a pseudonyme for Juan Ferrer, the head of a large congregation of devout men at Barcelona, and a person who was so much scandalized at the state of the theatre in his time, that he published this attack on it for the benefit of the brotherhood whose spiritual leader he was. (Torres y Amat, Biblioteca, Art. _Ferrer_.) It is encumbered with theological learning; but less so than other similar works of the time. Lope was compelled to accommodate himself to this new state of things, and seems to have done it easily and with his accustomed address. He had, as we have seen, early written _religious plays_, like the old Mysteries and Moralities; and he now undertook to infuse their spirit into the more attractive forms of his secular drama, and thus produce an entertainment which, while it might satisfy the popular audiences of the capital, would avoid the rebukes of the Church. His success was as marked as it had been before; and the new varieties of form in which his genius now disported itself were hardly less striking. His most obvious resource was the Scriptures, to which, as they had been used more than four centuries for dramatic purposes, on the greater religious festivals of the Spanish Church, the ecclesiastical powers could hardly, with a good grace, now make objection. Lope, therefore, resorted to them freely; sometimes constructing dramas out of them which might be mistaken for the old Mysteries, were it not for their more poetical character, and their sometimes approaching so near to his own intriguing comedies, that, but for the religious parts, they might seem to belong to the merely secular and fashionable theatre that had just been interdicted.