Another element which he established in the Spanish drama was the comic underplot. All his plays, with the signal exception of the “Star of Seville,” and a few others of less note, have it;--sometimes in a pastoral form, but generally as a simple admixture of farce. The characters contained in this portion of each of his dramas are as much standing masks as those in the graver portion, and were perfectly well known under the name of the _graciosos_ and _graciosas_, or drolls, to which was afterwards added the _vegete_, or a little, old, testy esquire, who is always boasting of his descent, and is often employed in teasing the _gracioso_. In most cases, they constitute a parody on the dialogue and adventures of the hero and heroine, as Sancho is partly a parody of Don Quixote, and in most cases they are the servants of the respective parties;--the men being good-humored cowards and gluttons, the women mischievous and coquettish, and both full of wit, malice, and an affected simplicity. Slight traces of such characters are to be found on the Spanish stage as far back as the servants in the “Serafina” of Torres Naharro; and in the middle of that century, the _bobo_, or fool, figures freely in the farces of Lope de Rueda, as the _simplé_ had done before in those of Enzina. But the variously witty _gracioso_, the full-blown parody of the heroic characters of the play, the dramatic _pícaro_, is the work of Lope de Vega. He first introduced it into the “Francesilla,” where the oldest of the tribe, under the name of Tristan, was represented by Rios, a famous actor of his time, and produced a great effect;[434]--an event which, Lope tells us, in the Dedication of the drama itself, in 1620, to his friend Montalvan, occurred before that friend was born, and therefore before the year 1602.