On no department of Spanish literature did this circumstance produce so considerable an influence as it did on the drama. In 1583, the foundations for the two regular theatres that have continued such ever since were already laid; and from about 1590, Lope de Vega, if not the absolute monarch of the stage that Cervantes describes him to have been, was, at least, its controlling spirit. The natural consequences followed. Under the influence of the nobility, who thronged to the royal residence, and led by the example of one of the most popular writers and men that ever lived, the Spanish theatre rose like an exhalation; and a school of poets--many of whom had hastened from Seville, Valencia, and other parts of the country, and thus extinguished the hopes of an independent drama in the cities they deserted--was collected around him in the new capital, until the dramatic writers of Madrid became suddenly more numerous, and in many respects more remarkable, than any other similar body of poets in modern times. The period of this transition of the drama is well marked by a single provincial play, the “Comedia Jacobina,” printed at Toledo in 1590, but written, as its author intimates, some years earlier. It was the work of Damian de Vegas, an ecclesiastic of that city, and is on the subject of the blessing of Jacob by Isaac. Its structure is simple, and its action direct and unembarrassed. As it is religious throughout, it belongs, in this respect, to the elder school of the drama; but, on the other hand, as it is divided into three acts, has a prologue and epilogue, a chorus, and much lyrical poetry in various measures, including the _terza rima_ and blank verse, it is not unlike what was attempted about the same time, on the secular stage, by Cervantes and Argensola. Though uninteresting in its plot, and dry and hard in its versification, it is not wholly without poetical merit; but we have no proof that it ever was acted in Madrid, or, indeed, that it was known on the stage beyond the limits of Toledo; a city to which its author was much attached, and where he seems always to have lived.[496] [496] The “Comedia Jacobina” is found in a curious and rare volume of religious poetry, entitled “Libro de Poesía, Christiana, Moral, y Divina,” por el Doctor Frey Damian de Vegas (Toledo, 1590, 12mo, ff. 503). It contains a poem on the Immaculate Conception, long the turning-point of Spanish orthodoxy; a colloquy between the Soul, the Will, and the Understanding, which may have been represented; and a great amount of religious poetry, both lyric and didactic, much of it in the old Spanish measures, and much in the Italian, but none better than the mass of poor verse on such subjects then in favor.