“El Infamador,” or The Calumniator, sets forth, in a different tone, the story of a young lady who refuses the love of a dissolute young man, and is, in consequence, accused by him of murder and other crimes, and condemned to death, but is rescued by preternatural power, while her accuser suffers in her stead. It is almost throughout a revolting picture; the fathers of the hero and heroine being each made to desire the death of his own child, while the whole is rendered absurd by the not unusual mixture of heathen mythology and modern manners. Of poetry, which is occasionally found in Cueva’s other dramas, there is in this play no trace; and so carelessly is it written, that there is no division of the acts into scenes.[45] Indeed, it seems difficult to understand how several of his twelve or fourteen dramas should have been brought into practical shape and represented at all. It is probable they were merely spoken as consecutive dialogues, to bring out their respective stories, without any attempt at theatrical illusion; a conjecture which receives confirmation from the fact, that nearly all of them are announced, on their titles, as having been represented in the garden of a certain Doña Elvira at Seville.[46] [45] “El Infamador” is reprinted in Ochoa, Tom. I. p. 264. [46] One of the plays, not represented in the Huerta de Doña Elvira, is represented “en el Corral de Don Juan,” and another in the Atarazanas,--Arsenal, or Ropewalks. None of them, I suppose, appeared on a public theatre. The two plays of Joaquin Romero de Zepeda, of Badajoz, which were printed at Seville in 1582, are somewhat different from those of Cueva. One, “The Metamorfosea,” is in the nature of the old dramatic pastorals, but is divided into three short _jornadas_, or acts. It is a trial of wits and love, between three shepherds and three shepherdesses, who are constantly at cross purposes with each other, but are at last reconciled and united;--all except one shepherd, who had originally refused to love any body, and one shepherdess, Belisena, who, after being cruel to one of her lovers, and slighted by another, is finally rejected by the rejected of all. The other play, called “La Comedia Salvage,” is taken, in its first two acts, from the well-known dramatic novel of “Celestina”; the last act being filled with atrocities of Zepeda’s own invention. It obtains its name from the Salvages or wild men, who figure in it, as such personages did in the old romances of chivalry and the old English drama, and is as strange and rude as its title implies. Neither of these pieces, however, can have done any thing of consequence for the advancement of the drama at Seville, though each contains passages of flowing and apt verse, and occasional turns of thought that deserve to be called graceful.[47]