Loading The Spanish Curate

by Maria Isabel Maza

PLOT OVERVIEW

The Spanish Curate follows two intertwined plot lines: one concerning a pair of brothers (Henrique and Jamie), and the other concerning a married couple (Bartolus and Amaranta).

Because Henrique and Violante, his wife, have no children, Jamie is set to inherit. To remove Jamie as his heir, Henrique reveals he had an illegitimate child named Ascanio with a woman named Jacinta before his marriage to Violante. With the help of Bartolus, a lawyer, Ascanio becomes Henrique’s heir, but Violante feels betrayed and plots with Jamie to kill Ascanio, Henrique, Jacinta, and Octavio (Ascanio’s pretended father). In the end, Jamie betrays Violante by revealing her plot, and brothers re-establish a friendly relationship.

The secondary plot follows Bartolus’ overbearing marriage to Amaranta. Jamie tells the desirous Leandro that Amaranta is said to be incredibly beautiful, but that Bartolus keeps her at home. Leandro disguises himself as a law student, and by tricking Lopez and Diego, the local curate and sexton, finds himself pretending to study law and living in Bartolus’ house. Other characters help trick Bartolus and he eventually realizes his overbearing nature. Despite Leandro’s lusty overtures, Amaranta remains faithful to Bartolus.

For a more detailed description of the plot, see the scene-by-scene plot summary.

AUTHORSHIP

The Spanish Curate was first published in the 1647 folio, which attributed all the plays within to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. However, scholars including Cyrus Hoy made the case that this play was a collaboration between Fletcher and a different contemporary playwright: Philip Massinger (Hoy, 1957). Hoy makes the case that Fletcher wrote the scenes focusing on Bartolus, Amaranta, and Leandro and that Massinger wrote the scenes depicting the familial intrigue between Jamie and Henrique. Scholars tend to agree that The Spanish Curate, among other plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio, was co-authored by Massinger.

SOURCES

The plot of The Spanish Curate was not invented for the play. Instead, the plot was borrowed from Poema trágico del español Gerardo, y desengaño del amor lascivo, written by the Spanish author Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and first published in Madrid in 1615. Poema tràgico del español Gerardo was translated into English by Leonard Digges and published in 1622 as Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard; or, a Pattern for Lascivious Lovers.

The play is very likely based on the translation, rather than on the Spanish text. As Robert Kean Turner noted, the contents of the letter written by Alonzo Tiveria to Lopez as printed in the folio edition is “identical” to the version that appears in the translation, except for a few minor variants (Turner, 1996).

EARLY PERFORMANCE

The Spanish Curate was first performed by The King’s Men in December 1622, the same year the play was written. The play was popular before 1640, and after the re-opening of the theaters in 1660, it was regularly performed. According to the London Stage Database, the play is known to have been performed thirteen times between 1661 and 1783.

EARLY PUBLICATION

The Spanish Curate was first published in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beavmont And Iohn Fletcher Gentlemen (1647, Wing B1581), the first folio edition of plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. The copy of the 1647 folio that serves as the base text for this edition contains annotations in a seventeenth-century hand. These notes appear in three plays, including The Spanish Curate. The manuscript notes seem related to performance, as they note upcoming entrances, the timing of those entrances, the ends of acts, and required props. For more about the annotations, please refer to About the Book. For a description of how these notes are handled in the encoding of the edition, please see Editorial Principles: The Spanish Curate.

The cross-hatched lines, seen above, mark a character’s entrance (3.4.13).

The manuscript note above reads “Henrique be ready” (1.1.100). These notes call attention to a character’s upcoming entrance onto the stage.

The manuscript note above, which reads “Dance” denotes a dance which could occur at this point in the scene (3.2.108). The 1679 folio inserts a song at this moment in the scene, which means the annotator knew of the possible inclusion of a song that was omitted from the 1647 folio’s copy of The Spanish Curate.

The manuscript mark above notes the end of Act 4 (4.7.104).

The second edition of The Spanish Curate appeared in the expanded second folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, Fifty Comedies and Tragedies. Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen (Wing B1582, 1679). While there are corrections to the spelling, grammar, and stage directions in throughout second edition of The Spanish Curate, the most noticeable changes are the addition of two songs within the playtext:

Added between 2.4.49-2.4.50 in 1679 folio

1
Dearest do not you delay me,
Since thou knowest I must be gone;
Wind and Tide 'tis thought doth stay me,
But 'tis wind that must be blown
From that breath, whose native smell
Indian Odours far excel.

2
Oh then speak thou fairest fair,
Kill not him that vows to serve thee,
But perfume this neighboring Air;
Else dull silence sure will starve me:
'Tis a word that's quickly spoken,
Which being restrain’d a heart is broken.

Added between 3.2.108-3.2.109 in 1679 folio

1
Let the Bells ring, and let the Boys Sing,
The young Lasses skip and play;
Let the Cups go round, till round goes the ground,
Our Learned old Vicar will stay.

2
Let the Pig turn merrily, merrily ah,
And let the fat Goose swim:
For verily, verily, verily ah,
Our Vicar this day shall be trim.

3
The stew'd Cock shall crow, Cock-a-loodle-loo,
A loud Cock-a-loodle shall he Crow;
The Duck and the Drake, shall swim in a lake
Of Onions and Claret below.

4
Our Wives shall be neat, to bring in our meat;
To thee our most noble adviser,
Our pains shall be great, and Bottles shall sweat,
And we our selves will be wiser.

5
We'll labour and swinck, we'll kiss and we'll drink,
And Tithes shall come thicker and thicker:
We'll fall to the Plow, and get Children enough,
And thou shalt be learned old Vicar.

The songs do not appear in the present edition.

The Spanish Curate was published in eighteenth-century editions of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Works (1711, 1750, 1778) and once as a stand-alone playbook (1718).

MAJOR THEMES

Class & Labor:

• Class identity is central to the plot of The Spanish Curate. Before Ascanio is revealed to be Henrique’s illegitimate son, upper-class male characters comment on Ascanio’s sweet and noble nature (1.1.47-1.1.59). When it is later revealed that he is of noble blood, at least on his father’s side (3.3.64-105), his behavior seems more fitting for his newfound class.
• Lopez and Diego, two men of the church, spend much of their time on stage complaining about their work and how little there is to do and thus how little money they’re making (2.1. 55-61). For example, they claim that due to all the men going to war, there have been no babies to baptize (2.1.62-69). However, they use their positions as curate and sexton to their advantage whenever they can.
• Bartolus, a lawyer, is seen to employ false witnesses to help with Henrique’s case. However, his success rate, probably due to his breaking of rules, is well-known in the community. These characters establish a bad sense of work-ethic within the play.
• Titles are used fairly consistently throughout the play. Violante and Amaranta are often referred to as Ladies, while Henrique and Jamie often have the title “Don” attached to their names. Some characters refer to others as “Sir” while other characters are called by their given name. The servants (apart from Andrea and Egla), parishioners, and witnesses are both nameless and title less. Considering how characters refer to one other can tell us a lot about the class structure in the play.

Gender & Family:

• Amaranta and Bartolus’ relationship is presented as unhealthy. Bartolus insists on keeping Amaranta at home, claiming that she is more beautiful that way because she is so rarely seen that her presence becomes more valuable when she is out of the house (2.2.1-9) He fears that men will attempt to seduce Amaranta, but quickly forgets about his fears when Leandro offers to pay Bartolus to study with him. Bartolus, here, like in other moments of the play, is convinced by money. Despite Bartolus’ fears, Amaranta is able to hold her own against Leandro’s plot to seduce her, and at the end of the play, shows herself to be a faithful wife.
• Another driving force in the plot is the revelation of Ascanio’s true parentage. Violante is sure that because Henrique had a child before he married her, he came to their marriage bed less able to produce a child (4.1.8-11). Before the truth is revealed, Violante cannot understand why she and Henrique have not had children. Violante’s inability to conceive is reasoned, in the play, to have to do with God and heaven, rather than any biological reason (1.3.1-7). At the end of the play, when Violante’s scheme to murder her husband (5.1.87-94) is revealed the Assistant warns the men on stage to not be weak in comparison to women, as they will surely suffer if they do (5.3.154-155).
• Amaranta and Violante are foils in this play. Everywhere that Violante is aggressive and petty, Amaranta is patient and mild. However, both women are in relationships where their partners seek to control them. The conclusion of the play states that there are wrong and right women to marry. More specifically, makes the case that heterosexual relationships should be run by men, as if women make the decisions, things can fall apart. In short, women tend to cause issues in the relationship, not the men.

FURTHER READING

There is very little scholarship on The Spanish Curate. Articles that take The Spanish Curate as a central focus mostly focus on questions of authorship, broadly speaking. For example, Edward M. Wilson’s “Did John Fletcher Read Spanish?” uses the play as a way to study Fletcher’s linguistic abilities, which Wilson believes were not developed to the point of being a Spanish reader (Wilson 1948, 187). Jeffrey Kahan’s “The Double Falshood and The Spanish Curate: A Further Fletcher Connection” considers the possibility that The Spanish Curate could tell us something new about a lost Shakespeare play (Kahan 2007, 34-35). While Kahan analyzes names and some of the plot in the short article, the general treatment of The Spanish Curate is in service to Kahan’s argument on Double Falshood. In short, The Spanish Curate has not garnered the same attention as other plays published in the 1647 folio.

An old-spelling edition of The Spanish Curate, edited by Robert Kean Turner, appears in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. 10 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 295-424.

REFERENCES

Hay, Cyrus. “The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (II).” Studies in Biography, Vol. 9, University of Virginia, 1957.

Kahan, Jeffry. “The Double Falshood and The Spanish Curate: A Further Fletcher Connection.” ANQ. Vol 20, 2007, 34-36.

Turner, Robert Kean. “Textual Introduction.” in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. ed. Fredson Bowers, Cambridge, 1996, 295.

Wilson, Edward M. “Did John Fletcher Read Spanish?”. Philological Quarterly, Iowa City, Vol. 27, 1948, 187-190.