[SN: _The first beginnings of the religious plays._]
There was little in the mediæval literature of Spain to give promise of its drama of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. Spaniards had mysteries, and they dramatised the lessons of the Church as other nations did; but they had less of this than most of their neighbours, and very much less than the French. In the earlier years of the sixteenth century there was a perceptible French influence at work in Spain.[27] The _San Martinho_ of Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who wrote both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is a moral play like many in mediæval French literature. It is on the well-known story of Saint Martin and the beggar, is written in flowing verse, and breaks off abruptly with a note that the performers must end with psalms, for he had been asked to write very late, and had no time to finish. The _Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja_, which, from a reference to the spread of the Lutheran heresy, seems to belong to the years about 1520, betrays a French model by its very title. Farce had not the meaning it acquired later. The personages are Labour, Peralforja, his son, Teresa Jugon, Peralforja’s sweetheart, the Church, and Holy Writ. The subjects are the foolish leniency of Labour to his son, and its deplorable effects (a favourite theme with French writers of _farses_ and moralities), the sorrows of the Church, who is consoled by Holy Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his weakness, and induce Peralforja to amend his ways. There is nothing here particularly Spanish--nothing which might not be direct translation from the French. The religious play was destined to have a history of its own in Spain; but its earlier stage is marked by little national character. Even the _Oveja Perdida_ (the Lost Sheep), written, or at least revised and recast, by Juan de Timoneda about 1570, which long remained a stock piece with the strolling players, is a morality on the universal mediæval model. The Lost Sheep is of course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite, and rescued by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other characters are Saint Peter, the Archangel Michael, and the Guardian Angel. Except that it has an elaborate introduction, divided between an _Introit_ to Ribera, the Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, before whom it was played, and an _Introit_ to the people, it does not differ from the _San Martinho_ or the _Farsa Sacramental de Peralforja_.