Los Amantes de Teruel | Page 4

of its continued popularity. Besides these many editions of the play, numerous novels, poems, and operas have appeared from time to time. For the most complete bibliography down to 1907 the reader is again referred to that of the official historian of Teruel, Gascón y Guimbao. We must now turn our attention to the author of the best dramatic treatment of the legend.
#IV. Life of Hartzenbusch#. Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, born in 1806, was the only son of a German cabinet-maker who had wandered to Spain from his home near Cologne, married a Spanish girl, and opened up a shop in Madrid. The son inherited from his German father and Spanish mother traits of character that were exemplified later in his life and writings. From his father he received a fondness for meditation, conscientious industry in acquiring sound scholarship, and the patience needed for the continual revision of his plays; from his mother came his ardent imagination and love of literature. Childhood and youth were for him a period of disappointment and struggle against adversity. Less than two years old when his mother died after a short period of insanity caused by the sight of bloodshed in the turbulent streets of Madrid in 1808, he was left to the care of a brooding father who had little sympathy with his literary aspirations, but who did wish to give him the best education he could afford. He received a common school education and was permitted to spend the four years from 1818 to 1822 in the College of San Isidro. As a result of the political troubles in Spain in 1823, the father's business, never very prosperous, fell away and the son had to leave college to help in the workshop. He was thus compelled to spend a large part of his time in making furniture, although his inclination was toward literature.
His leisure was given to study and to the acquirement of a practical knowledge of the dramatic art, gained for the most part from books, because of his father's dislike of the theater and because of the lack of money for any unnecessary expenditure. He translated several French and Italian plays, adapted others to Spanish conditions, and recast various comedias of the Siglo de Oro, with a view to making them more suitable for presentation. He tried his hand also at original production and succeeded in getting some of his plays on the stage, only to have them withdrawn almost immediately. Undiscouraged by repeated failure, he continued studying and writing, more determined than ever to become a successful dramatist and thus realize the ambition that was kindled in him by the first dramatic performance that he had witnessed when he had already reached manhood.
At the time of his marriage in 1830 he was still helping his ailing and despondent father in the workshop; more interested undoubtedly in his literary pursuits, but ever faithful to the call of duty. Until success as a dramatist made it possible for him to gain a living for his family by literature, he continued patiently his manual labor. At his father's death he closed the workshop and for a short time became dependent for a livelihood on stenography, with which he had already eked out the slender returns from the labor of his hands.
Meanwhile, during these last years of apprenticeship in which Hartzenbusch was gaining complete mastery of his art by continual study and practice, the literary revolution known as Romanticism was making rapid progress. The death of the despotic Ferdinand VII in 1833 removed the restraint that had been imposed upon literature as well as upon political ideas. The theories of the French and English Romanticists were penetrating Spanish literary circles, to be taken up eagerly by the younger dramatists; political exiles of high social and literary prestige, such as Martínez de la Rosa and the Duque de Rivas, were returning to Spain with plays and poems composed according to the new theories; the natural reaction from the logical, unemotional ideals of the Classicists was developing conditions favorable to the revolution. The first year of the struggle between the two schools of literature, 1834, gave the Romanticists two important victories in the Conjuración de Venecia of Martinez de la Rosa, and the Macías of José de Larra, two plays that show clearly Romantic tendencies but that avoid an abrupt break with the Classical theories. They served to prepare the way for the thoroughly Romantic play of the Duque de Rivas, Don álvaro o la fuerza del sino, a magnificent, though disordered, drama that gained for the Romanticists a decisive victory in 1835, a victory over Classicism in Spain similar to that gained in Paris five years earlier by the famous Hernani of Victor Hugo, leader of the French Romanticists. In 1836 the equally successful performance