Leandro Fernandez de Moratin

Leandro Eulogio Melitón Fernández de Moratín y Cabo (Madrid, March 10, 1760-Paris, June 21, 1828) was a Spanish playwright and poet, the most important neoclassical playwright of the 18th century. Spanish.

Biography

He was born in Madrid on March 10, 1760, of a noble Asturian family on his father's side, also a poet, playwright and lawyer Nicolás Fernández de Moratín. His mother was Isidora Cabo Conde, with roots in Pastrana (Guadalajara). He grew up in an environment where literary discussions were frequent, since his father Nicolás de él was a man dedicated to letters and founder and regular social gathering of the Fonda de San Sebastián. At the age of four, he fell ill with smallpox, which affected his character, making him shy; He also became a compulsive reader of classical Spanish poetry, Quijote, Lazarillo and historical works such as that of Father Juan de Mariana and the Guerras de Granada by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. At first he followed the profession of jeweler of his paternal grandfather.

At the age of 19, in 1779, he had already won a second prize for poetry in the public contest organized by the Royal Spanish Academy with the heroic romance The Taking of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs and, in love Ever since he was a child of a neighboring bet, Sabina Conti and Bernascone, when the poet was twenty and she was barely fifteen, she nevertheless married her uncle, who was twice her age; Since then the poet has been plunged into melancholy and will harbor an antipathy towards the unequal marriages that he will express in his future dramatic creation. To make matters worse, his father died in 1780, economic hardships assailed him and Moratín had to take care of his mother. In 1782 he won this time the second prize of the Royal Academy with his Poetic Lesson. He satires against the vices introduced into Spanish poetry , a kind of manifesto of neoclassicism in lyrical poetry. In 1787, and thanks to the friendship of Jovellanos, he undertook a trip to Paris as secretary of the Count of Cabarrús, then in charge of a diplomatic mission that tried to advise Louis XVI on anti-revolutionary measures. The experience was very profitable for the young writer; for example, he met the neoclassical playwright Carlo Goldoni. Returning to Madrid, he founded a burlesque literary academy, that of the "Acalófilos or lovers of the ugly", which met at the home of his erudite friend Juan Tineo Ramírez (1767-1829), jurist and nephew of Jovellanos, and which also included the great polyglot and Arabist José Antonio Conde, a friend who in the future will marry his cousin Mariquita. This group was fundamentally a gathering of friends who dedicated themselves to reading and criticizing plays. The fall of Cabarrús does not affect him; It is even suspected that he writes in his defense the Letter on the trade in turnips from Fuencarral . Very Horatian, he obtained his first great success with the publication of the satire The defeat of the pedants and fell out with the scholar Cristóbal Cladera, who apparently inspired the character of Don Hermógenes in his piece La comedia nueva or El café, in which he criticizes popular theater and especially its most representative playwright, Luciano Francisco Comella, under another name. He reads to the Count of Floridablanca an imitation of the violinist of the royal chapel and tonadillero Marcolini, whom he was very fond of, where he hints that he wants to be abbot:

He just wants to be down. / What to ask so moderate / yours, if by venture / being down is to be something!

Floridablanca falls in love and then grants him the favor of a benefit of three hundred ducats on the archbishopric of Burgos; Moratín is ordained first tonsure by the Bishop of Tagaste, an essential requirement to be able to enjoy the benefit. Shortly after Godoy came to power, he achieved the protection of the favorite, who helped him premiere his comedies and increased his income with other ecclesiastical sinecures: three thousand ducats in a parishioner in Montoro and six hundred on the miter of Oviedo.

Cover The defeat of the rockers (1789). Madrid, at the Benito Cano Office

With these incomes he manages a discreet income that allows him to dedicate himself only to writing theater. Withdrawn in Pastrana, the birthplace of his mother, he edited La mojigata and El barón and wrote La comedia nueva o El café , a great review of the popular theater genres and their authors. Once the latter was released, he traveled with a scholarship or travel bag provided by Godoy for five years throughout Europe: France again, England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, returning to Madrid in 1797 to hold the position of secretary of interpretation. of Languages, which had become vacant due to the death of one of the Samaniego brothers. This allowed him to live without economic difficulties, although he would have wanted, on the contrary, the position of director of the theaters that would have allowed him to carry out a great reform of neoclassical principles.

The assault of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792

He had to go to England from France because of the French Revolution: he had been frightened by the assault on the Tuileries on August 10, 1792 and the formation of the Paris Commune. His Apuntas sueltas de Inglaterra (1792), a travel diary full of interesting costumbrist notes, are from that time. He takes the opportunity to study Shakespeare's theatre, although since he does not master English well he leans on the recastings of Jean-François Ducis, and translates Hamlet (printed in 1798). He then went to Belgium and Germany, where he lost his writings and feared being robbed and assassinated, to Switzerland and Italy, of which he also left an extensive diary (Voyage to Italy, 1793) and where he met so many friends and admirers (many of them Jesuits expelled from Spain in 1767) that they made him a member of the Arcadia Academy in Rome, with the nickname of Inarco Celenio. He embarked from Nice to return to Spain, on the ship La venganza , but the storms and his companions made him so dizzy that the trip was hell. Although they were marching to Cartagena, they had to deviate to Algeciras. In Madrid, opening his new position, he became friends with Francisco de Goya (Moratín had studied drawing as a young man), and with Francisca Muñoz, & # 34; Paquita & # 34;. They are his happiest years. He frequented the gathering of the literary critic and Hellenist Pedro Estala (who called him "the Molière of Spain" in 1794) and consolidated his friendship with the abbot and humanist Juan Antonio Melón (1758-1843), powerful censor of books, who talks about it in his memoirs, which bear the title Disordered and poorly digested notes. He has already written his pieces El barón and La prude , which he will be able to premiere, although not without the opposition of those who see in him a Frenchified character who has greatly benefited from the hated Valid Manuel de Godoy. In the end, as he wished, he was appointed a member of the Board of Directors and Reform of Theaters (1799), but his disagreements with the director of this body made him leave his position disappointed after three months. In that same year, his Aragonese friend Francisco de Goya painted the first of the two portraits he dedicated to him, to which the poet responded with a grateful silva; Less well known is that around the same time the dandy painter Luis Paret y Alcázar also made another good portrait of him as a handsome dude-faced fop, which is kept in the Museum of Navarra. In 1803 he premiered The Baron and in 1804 La prude, which were well received. But it was on January 24, 1806 when he obtained the greatest success of his career, one of the greatest successes in theater at the time, with the premiere, attended by Manuel Godoy, at the Coliseo de la Cruz, of El sí de las niñas, which is restocked for twenty days until the theaters close for Lent and of which there are four editions. But the political situation is not rosy: Godoy's protector hangs by a thread. In addition, his plans to marry Paquita go awry, probably because of the poet's indecision (who, according to the notes in his Diary, was a regular at mercenary love, like his father), and she marries another.

The riot in Aranjuez in 1808 led to the fall of Godoy; He fled to Vitoria and returned from there as Frenchified , for which reason his assets were confiscated. But José Bonaparte seizes power and in 1811 is appointed senior librarian of the Royal Library by the new monarch, who reigns under the name of José I. His contribution was to make a new catalog of loose files. In addition, he was named a knight of the Royal Order of Spain, which he called the "Order of the Pentagon", created by the monarch, who was a Freemason. In 1811 he wrote a prologue against the recently repealed Inquisition to lead an unsuccessful edition of fray Gerundio de Campazas ; He also reprinted, under a pseudonym, the Auto de fe celebrated in the city of Logroño on November 7 and 8, 1610, when the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo Bernardo de Sandobal y Roxas was the Inquisitor General. Second edition, illustrated with notes by Ginés de Posadilla, a native of Yébenes (1811):

An authority that, haunting the people and usurping the episcopal jurisdiction, threatened the throne itself, [...] stopped the progress of enlightenment, propagated absurd errors, ran over the formality of laws, the most sacred rights of men, punished crimes that it is impossible to commit and opposed invincible obstacles to the glory, power and stability of the great empire that governed

From then on he was branded as «Frenchified». At that time he began his translations of Molière, which are actually adaptations, and The School for Husbands was premiered in 1812 by his friend, the great actor Isidoro Máiquez, Frenchified like him and also portrayed by Goya.. With the vicissitudes of the Spanish War of Independence, a political change took place and he gradually had to take refuge in Valencia (after the battle of Bailén) where he sang some of the reforms of the French Marshal Suchet and collaborated in the French-language gazette Diario de Valencia (1812) together with his friend Pedro Estala; but the square does not hold and he has to flee first to Peñíscola, where he suffers a long and fierce siege, and then to Barcelona, where he is favorably welcomed by the Baron de Eroles. Although they have lifted the seizure of his assets, under the pretext of his Frenchification, the Church does not pay him the rents of Montoro, Burgos and Oviedo, he suffers from hunger and experiences a serious depression. However, he gets over it; translates Candido or optimism by Voltaire and gives the actor Felipe Blanco, Barcelona's leading funnyman, another adaptation of Molière, The Beaten Doctor, which opens there on December 5, 1814 successfully; the author will also dedicate a grateful sonnet to the portrait of this character; shortly after he finally achieved the restitution of his assets. He receives his correspondence in the name of Melitón Fernández, Joseph Sol or Francisco Chiner. In his letters he reports how his days go by:

I'm still doing the tont life here, with no other fun than reading for a while in the morning, spending an hour in the afternoon and nailing me to the window at night... I'm talking in Catalan with a rotten bolt..

Cover of the Prince edition The yes of the girls (Madrid, Imprenta de Villalpando, 1806)

In 1816 his cousin Mariquita married his friend, the scholar José Antonio Conde, and in 1817 fears of the Inquisition led him back to France under the pretext of taking the waters in Aix-en-Provence; then he goes to Montpellier, Paris and Bologna (Italy); in 1817 he had begun to prepare an edition of the Posthumous Works of his father much corrected by him.

The success of the pronouncement of the liberal Rafael del Riego in January 1820 re-established the Constitution of Cádiz and he returned hopefully to Barcelona at the end of 1820, where his friends got him the post of judge of printers. But the plague broke out in the city and Moratín fled to Bayonne in 1821; he will never return to Spain; In Barcelona, however, his edition of the Posthumous Works of his father was printed in that same year, in which the Royal Spanish Academy also named him a full member. He finally settles in Bordeaux with the family of Manuel Silvela, his faithful friend; there he meets Goya, who paints a second magnificent portrait of him. His letters from this period reflect more bitterness than nostalgia: a sonnet that he writes under the title La farewell is very revealing:

Docile, truthful, many offended, / of any offender, the beautiful Muses / my passion were, the honor my guide. / But if so the laws run over, / if for you the merits have been / faults, goodbye, ingrateful homeland of mine.

Although he suffered a stroke in 1825, he followed the Silvela family back to Paris, where he died on June 21, 1828. He left a granddaughter of Silvela himself as his heir. He was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, but his remains were transferred to Madrid on October 5, 1855 and now rest in a joint mausoleum with Goya, Donoso Cortés and Meléndez Valdés, the work of Ricardo Bellver, in the San Isidro Cemetery. from Madrid. In 1825 his Dramatic and Lyrical Works had been published in Paris. His essay Origins of Spanish theater (1830-1831) appeared posthumously. The Diarios de él (1968) and his Epistolario (1973) had to wait longer, edited by the Hispanist René Andioc.

Moratín was a man of theater in the broadest sense of the word. In addition to his condition as a playwright, we must add other lesser-known aspects, but which were just as important to him as this one and sometimes took more time, effort and dedication than his own works. Moratín was one of the founders of Spanish theater historiography. His Origins of Spanish Theater , a work that he left unpublished and which was published in 1830-1831 by the Royal Academy of History, is one of the first serious and documented studies of Spanish theater prior to Lope de vega. Also of great interest is the "Prologue" to the Parisian edition of his works in 1825, where he summarizes, from a classicist perspective, the history of Spanish theater of the century XVIII. Moratín was also an active promoter of the theater reform of his time. Related to the circles of power that were interested in this reform and heir to the ideas of his father, he did not stop promoting a renewal of the entire theatrical structure in force in Spain at the time. The new comedy is one of the landmarks of this campaign of reform undertaken by the intellectuals who moved around the government since the middle of the century when reforms were proposed by Ignacio de Luzán, Agustín de Montiano y Luyando, Blas Nasarre and Luis Jose Velazquez.

Works

Dramatic works

He is the most important playwright of the Spanish neoclassical school: all the subsequent high bourgeois comedy of the XIX century (Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, Manuel Eduardo Gorostiza, Ventura de la Vega, Manuel Bretón de los Herreros, Eugenio de Tapia...), even in the XX Jacinto Benavente, they owe you something. His maxims are: theater as delight and moral instruction (school of good manners) and an action that credibly imitates reality. Hence the attachment to the dramatic rules in all its facets, especially the rule of the three units: action (telling a single story), place (in a single location) and time (in no more than 24 hours)..

He separated the genres with such precision that he did not write tragedies, despite being a very popular genre in European neoclassicism. Her character led her to comedy, a genre that she defines by saying: «it paints men as they are, imitates existing national customs, common vices and errors, incidents of domestic life; and from these events, from those private interests, he forms a credible, instructive and pleasant fable.

Comedy theory

The most extensive and detailed exposition of his ideas on comedy is found in the "Prologue" which he composed to accompany the definitive edition of his plays published in Paris in 1825. Speaking of himself in the third person, the playwright provides, among many other doctrines about the theater, his definition of the comic genre:

«Imitation in dialogue (written in prose or in verse) of an event that occurred in a place and in a few hours between individuals, through which and of the timely expression of affections and characters, the vices and mistakes common in society, therefore recommended the truth and the virtue».

The old man and the girl

The first comedy written by Moratín was released on May 22, 1790, but its genesis and writing go back several years before, perhaps to 1783. The author's purpose is to condemn a union that should not have taken place, not only because of inequality in the age of the spouses, but above all because of the interest and deceit with which it was arranged.

Portrait of Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1824) by Francisco de Goya (Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao).

Eusebio Ribera's company premiered on February 7, 1792 at the Teatro del Príncipe The new comedy, accompanied by a finale by Ramón de la Cruz, El muñuelo. The comedy ran for seven days with a very acceptable admission, and was often revived in the following years. The comedy was finished in December 1791.

This is a masterpiece of theatrical satire. The issue is the premiere of a "new comedy", The Great Siege of Vienna, written by the naive and inexperienced in dramatic writing Mr. Eleuterio Crispín from Andorra. The name "new comedy" was given, as is logical, to a work that was published or performed for the first time, as opposed to the "old ones", that is, those of the Golden Age; and those of repertoire, premiered on a previous date. In the café where the action takes place, a lively discussion takes place between supporters and detractors of the comedy, which represents the type of theater that was triumphant on Madrid stages at the time. This is how Moratín manages, through a metatheatrical artifice, to give an idea of the absurdities and nonsense of the theater of his time.

In his comments on La comedia nueva, Moratín himself took care of meticulously documenting each and every one of the particularities of the heroic comedy of Don Eleuterio, from the very title, an imitation of so many comedies that narrated sieges and the taking of cities, to the scenes of false dialogues in the form of simultaneous soliloquies, going through the descriptions of terrifying famines, of which he cites significant examples of The destruction of Sagunto (1787), by Gaspar Zavala y Zamora, and The Site of Calés (1790) by Luciano Francisco Comella.

The first thing that stands out is that the work is written in prose. This was an unusual way of writing theater in the 1790s. Dramas such as Jovellanos's The Honest Delinquent are practically the only ones in prose written up to that time.

Coffee shops were one of the novelties of Spain in the 18th century, as they had been in the rest of Europe. This fashion found its reflection in the theater: Carlo Goldoni had written a comedy entitled La bottega del caffè, undoubtedly known by Moratín, since in La comedia nueva some situation is used of Goldon's work, such as the pedant's stopped clock.

The comedy is technically perfect, an example of adjusting to neoclassical norms. Units are rigorously followed. The coffee room is the only space where all the action happens. The unit of time is so perfect that it is one of the few works where the ideal of the representation lasting exactly the same as the dramatic action is fulfilled.

The Baron

In 1787 Moratín had received a commission that he could not help but fulfill. The Countess of Benavente, Doña Faustina, commissioned him to write a zarzuela. Grinding his heart out, he wrote El barón, a zarzuela with a La Mancha atmosphere in two acts that he sent to the countess. To the great joy of Moratín, it was never performed, but it was handwritten and during the trip to Italy an adaptation was made without the author's permission, which, with music by José Lidón, reached the stage. Moratín recovered the play and decided to turn it into a comedy. He did so. The play premiered around the year 1803 at the Teatro de la Cruz

The prude

Handwritten copies of this play also began to circulate from 1791. It was amended and rehearsed by the actors of the Ribera company, and finally performed at the Teatro de la Cruz on May 19, 1804. With The prude Moratín continued with his personal analysis of the problem of female education in its social repercussions.

The yes of the girls

The yes of the girls was premiered at the Coliseo de la Cruz on January 24, 1806. The comedy, in prose, takes place in an inn (place unit) at seven in the afternoon at five in the morning (temporal unit, to be credible) and tells a single story: how Doña Francisca (Paquita), a 16-year-old girl forced by her mother Doña Irene to marry Don Diego, a sensitive and wealthy 59-year-old gentleman years. However, he is unaware that Doña Francisca is in love with a young soldier, a certain "Don Félix", who is actually called Don Carlos, and is Don Diego's nephew. With this love triangle as an argument, the work develops, whose main theme is the oppression of girls forced to obey their mother and enter into an unequal marriage and in this case with a great age difference between the spouses.

The key to the work is found in the contradiction that characterizes Don Diego on the issue of youth education and the election of state: his practice, his performance, does not agree with the theory. He asks for freedom to choose a state (a freedom then denied to young people), he criticizes the false conception of authority on the part of parents: he understands that this false authoritarianism is the root of many evils; he wants Paquita to choose freely.

But in practice, Don Diego, who is the protector of his nephew Carlos, makes the same mistakes with him that he criticizes in theory. This contradiction between theory and practice is the thread that drives the theatrical plot.

The work had many problems to be released (several denunciations to the Inquisition for immoral; pressure from a minister; several examinations, notes, warnings and observations that were handwritten...), which were defeated by the protection of Manuel Godoy and it obtained a formidable success, one of the greatest of its time: it was repeated for twenty-six days and had to be interrupted because of the arrival of Lent. Four editions were made that same year, and it was taken to the provinces and private theaters shortly after.

The defeat of the pedants

Moratín's best-known prose work is The defeat of the pedants, an allegorical artifice, composed in the manner of Cervantes's Journey to Parnassus, the Republic literature by Saavedra Fajardo, or the Funerals of the Castilian language by Forner: the Muses, aided by good poets, throw bad writers off Parnassus. Many of his jokes go against the clichés and varieties of poets of all time, but many others are directed against specific authors who are cited or who, based on the data provided, can be easily recognized. Moratín's culture and artistic taste make the general judgments accurate definitions of him, but it is clear that some narrow interpretation of the taste of the time and the author's literary ideas cannot be missing; Thus, for example, among the books that are shot as "bad" are included the comedies of Cervantes, the "Art" of Gracián and not a few baroque poets, such as Jacinto Polo de Medina, Gabriel Bocángel, Villamediana and several others.

Poetic work

Moratin Tomb in the San Isidro Cemetery of Madrid.

Volume III of the Dramatic and Lyrical Works of 1825 is devoted to poetry. His work encompasses almost fifty years of dedication to poetry, which resulted in just over a hundred poems: one hundred and nine sure poems plus one attributed, collected by Pérez Magallón in his edition of Complete Poems (Barcelona: Sirmio, 1995) by Leandro. Moratín is the author of a hundred poetic compositions: nine epistles, twelve odes, twenty-two sonnets, nine romances, seventeen epigrams, "various compositions", consisting of eight lyric poems that deviate from traditional modalities, two translations and one elegy, the «Hendencasyllabic romance» or «epic song» in quatrains The taking of Granada, and nine translations of Horacio. A member of the Academy of Arcadia in Rome with the name of Inarco Celenio, Moratín, as a lyricist, cannot be considered a poet of originality and fantasy of the first rank. However, he certainly deserves to be ranked close to the two true lyrical poets of the Spanish XVIII century, Manuel José Quintana and Juan Meléndez Valdés, and not among the other poets of his time, fundamentally mediocre. His concerns in terms of form are expressive correctness, harmony and balance, in an atmosphere of neoclassical idealism, as is logical, but veined with a series of nuances of seclusion and melancholy that go back to Horace on the one hand, and, on the other, to certain moods of the author's historical and poetic moment. Leandro de Moratín was not a retarded poet of the Spanish 18th century, nor an anticipation of vague romantic tones, but a pure and faithful representative of that authentic resurgence of classical taste that coincides, in its fullness, with the dawn of romanticism.

• The take of Granada (1779) is a very brief little poem, in quartets not rimed, and in which the taking of Granada by the Catholic Kings is sung.

• La Sátira against vices. Where Moratin is revealed as a battlener is, in front of the poets of his time, in the Poetic Lesson. Sátira against the vices introduced in Castilian poetry (1782), composition of rimed endecaylates. La Sátira it recreates itself by pretending that it advises the poets to express themselves in the ways that, on the contrary, Moratín despises and rejects as typical of "barroca" poetry. And it does so as it develops and gives an overview of the topic of lyric, epic and dramatic. As for the lyrics, it stops in the vices of style, in the metaphors out of place, in the mixture of ridiculous arcaisms with the scooping of lexicon and syntax, in the abuses of latinisms as it has happened in Góngora, etc.; instead, it advises that Horatio be seen as a model. La Sátira offers the interest of being, more than an attempt at lyric poetry, a poetic program or, better said, aesthetic-critical: a kind of poetic, in the sense of fighting against all excesses, both of "contained" and of "form".

• The Epistles. The nine epistles are inspired by a wide range of subjects and circumstances. Three of them are addressed to the "Prince of Peace": the sincerity of Moratín's feeling of gratitude to Godoy frees the poet from any suspicion of adulation. Another, typically Horacean, is directed “to a minister, about the usefulness of history”. Another epistle, a friend, serves as a pretext to gather and mock a hundred verses of poets from the group of Manuel José Quintana. He has one in homage “to the Marquesa de Villafranca” for the birth of his firstborn, the count of Niebla, to whose early death Moratín would have to dedicate a wave later. He writes an epistle to Don Simón Rodrigo Laso, "redactor of the school of San Clemente de Bologna", which is typically timed by the subject of the character of men, always discontented with one's own destiny. It is also timetable that directs Jovellanos, from Rome, a city that the poet takes as a symbol of the expiration of human things. Undoubtedly, the happiest epistle of all, the one dedicated "A Claudio", carries the significant subtitle of "The Philosopher". It is inspired by the satirical temperament of Moratín and subjected to a fun caricature to an inopportune, Don Ermeguncio, halfway between the famous hourly opportune of Oda III and Don Hermosgenes that Moratín would create in The new comedy or the coffee.

• The odas. One of the happiest results of the imitation of Horacio in Spain is the set of the twelve waves of Moratín. They are already interesting of themselves because of the variety of versification, which goes from the solemn meters that make the classics think to the modern light meters. The range of topics is very wide. They are very close to the Hourly Spirit (“A Nísida”, “To the Colleges of Saint Clement of Bologna”. Other themes are loving, or simply gallant (such as "A Rosinda, histrionisa", and the beautiful actress María del Rosario Fernández, called "la Tirana". Finally, it also has waves inspired by other feelings, such as those dedicated to missing loved ones, for example to the father, or absent, like Jovellanos. Perhaps it may seem more cerebral than spontaneous the profession of faith that serves as a starting point to the most famous ode, "To the Virgin... in Lendinara (Venetian state", published precisely in this small Italian city in 1795, composed for Doña Sabina Conti, the lady of Madrid wife of the Italian literate Giovan Battista Conti.

• Translations of Horatio. In the translation of nine odes of Horacio, what is most surprising, apart from the obvious formal concern, which is also manifested in the selection of the meters, is the identity between the thought of the Latin poet and that of Moratín in the vision of human things: concordance whose suggestion is increased by the difference of expression between the solemn timetable and the eighteenth lightness of Moratín. Horatio is present, but it is warned that it is an Horatio transferred to a very different Spanish environment, for expressive purposes, to the most faithful Spanish interpreters of the Golden Age, from Fray Luis de León to Francisco de Medrano.

• Them sonnets. From the formal point of view, the sonnets corroborate Moratin's ability to ease and fluidity of versification. From the point of view of the themes it deals with, these poems cover a wide range, although a large part of them are inspired by things or theater people. Ora is the description of the beauty of a "histrionist", Clori. He prays for the death of the applauded and "inimitable" actor Isidoro Máiquez. Another praise of a dancer from the Bordeaux theater or the "saltatrix" Eliodora, who has a lot of money to keep a "hermosa of my life" like that. Or it is the presentation of the first funny of the theater of Barcelona, Felipe Blanco.

• Them romance. In the nine romances we again find a wide range of topics: politicians, literary polemics, personal affairs, and circumstances.

• Them epigrams. Many of the seventeen epigrams are saddles, sometimes fierce. Among the theatrical characters the object of their darts, Geroncio re-appears: the name of other low-lying bunks, like the one we just named, is significant. In turn, the titles of other epigrams are also significant, such as, for example, the three, very delicate and gallant, who dedicate «to Lesbia, modista», or that other «to a French lady».

• Miscellaneous compositions. Some of them touch historical themes, such as the one inspired by "The Shadow of Nelson". There are also translations, among them that of a "sonetto pastorale in dialogue" of the eighteenth Italian Paolo Rolli.

• La «I chose the muses»“The masterpiece of Moratín”, besides being more accomplished from the poetic point of view, is undoubtedly the most significant of these compositions. Fernando Lázaro Carreter states that in this last poem Moratín touches the summit of the Spanish lyric.

Travel books

England Single Scores

The Notes on England are made up of four notebooks in which the author explains his trip to London and other English cities (Portsmouth, Southampton, Winchester, Windsor, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, Kew, Brentford) in the late 18th century century. He is a great observer, attentive to customs (five o'clock tea, clubs, freedom of religion and other liberties, museums, the smell of coal, gardens, gazettes, the commerce, ways of being, etc. and, of course, the theaters: Covent Garden, the Opera House and the Haymarket, and English dramatic literature, to which he dedicates the entire fourth notebook). He admires the novelties of the time (animals new to him, like the kangaroo, which he observed in the Strand, etc.), but he also shows a certain anti-Semitism. He is surprised by the festivities and the fast and fast pace of the English, and he notes the depth of revolutionary ideas:

Tomás Payne had composed, a few months earlier, an intitulated book Human rights, the work of which was naturally deducted (conceding the principles in which it founded it) the need to alter the English Constitution, otherwise organize the Parliaments, strip the King of his authority, the nobles of his privileges, and alter the whole government of this country. He published this book, and spread with astounding speed everywhere, at a time when the French revolution was in the mood. The Government feared the impression that Thomas Payne's tops could be made in the public; he forbade his book, and filled a case against the author (who was in France), as a disturber of public order and tranquillity. It was his lawyer Mr. Erskine, a member of the House of Commons and one of those of the opposition party; he spoke with great eloquence for his client; those who attended to hear his claim filled him with praise and cheers, removed the horses from his car, and the people took him to his house, with great trouble and joy. In spite of this, the sentence was contrary to Thomas Payne, and he was imposed the punishment that he should suffer, as a libelist, tumultary, if he ever replaced England.

The Trip to Italy

The Trip to Italy, made with his friend "Narildo", nickname of Antonio Robles Moñino, nephew of the Count of Floridablanca, after the one to England and much more extensive (eight notebooks), actually includes his itinerary from Dover to Belgium (Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Leuven, Maastrich) and then through Germany and Switzerland (Cologne, Bonn, Frankfurt, Manheim, Offenburg, Kenzingen, Friborg, Schaffhausen, Eglisau, in whose river bathed, Zurich, Lucerne, Altorf, Ayrolles, Bellinzona and Lugano) seeing museums, monuments, architecture, landscapes, people, products, customs, trade, agriculture, inscriptions, works of art until arriving in Italy. In Italy he visited Like, Milan, Parma, Modena (whose theater he goes to and whose duke he gossips about), Bologna (where he is impressed by the painting of Judit and Holofernes by Caravaggio), Florence, Siena, Rome and Naples, city It is then four hundred thousand inhabitants where he stayed longer. He visits Parini and Bodoni and is surprised by the Duomo, the works of art, the enormous libraries (Ambrosiana, Laurenciana), the small theaters, the number and quality of artists, academies and works of art, and the archaeological excavations of Velleia. In Bologna he meets a large number of expelled Spanish Jesuits:

There were in Bologna six hundred and so many Spanish ex-Jeshuas; I saw among them Lasala, applied, scholar, of beautiful character, author of several cold tragedies, I read two that had just published, Don Giovanni Blancas and Don Sancio GarcíaAnd they seemed to me short-pity bombs. Colomés, author of the Inés de Castro and other estimable works, it is reduced to the greatest strashes, having to suffer the whims of a "nobile bolognese", to whom he serves as secretary; it is a pity that our government lacks news about the benemerit subjects of this extinct religion, and that it does not draw from them the usefulness that could, while improving their bad fortune. Don Manuel de Aponte has translated Iliada and the Odyssey in verse with admirable fidelity, illustrating his work with doctious notes; he has not printed it, nor will it be printed. The chair of the Greek language, which governs at the University, does not give to oil the candil, is a very educated man, of exquisite taste in poetry, modest, festive, kind, and is attached to the sad pension that is given to all

He fell in love with the beauty and intelligence of Aponte's disciple, the Hellenist and poet Clotilde Tambroni. In Florence he goes to see three plays of which only one does not make him angry; It is not the one that he most dislikes Federico II by Luciano Francisco Comella, translated and staged in Italian; he visits the monuments and also the tombs of Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. In Naples he is surprised by the dirt, the noise and a bustle greater than that of London and Paris; he is impressed by the rampant begging, delinquency, vice, the oppressive devoutness and the poverty of the lowest class. "Just as the Roman people needed panem et circenses, it is said that the people of Naples need farina, furca e festini".

It is easy to infer that, in a court full of tramps, thefts, violence and murders will be frequent. Naples has always been famous for the thieves and razors; and although the police have recently exercised little rigor against the evildoers of this species, and has partially contained these excesses, the cause still exists, and therefore its effects, although not so often. In a city like Naples there is no public light, the pharaols of some individuals, placed without order and where least needed, are insufficient, and there are streets and entire neighborhoods in the most horrible darkness. In the winter, at ten o'clock at night, the spectacles are finished, a deep silence reigns throughout the city, all the doors are closed, it doesn't seem like people on the street, and no one can go out without wearing a servant with a light, and even with all that it goes very exposed. The one who dares to go alone, surrounded by darkness at such hours, by long, narrow, twisted, lonely streets, where everything is danger and horror, is very exposed to paying with life his fear.

But he also attacks the foolish and idle nobility, whom he blames for everything:

The most illustrious and distinguished classes offer no less reason for dislike than they are closely observed. The infatuated nobility, like everywhere, with its shields of arms and its wrinkled scrolls, is so proud, so foolish, so ill-educated, so vicious, that in the eyes of a philosopher, of a man of good, is precisely the most despicable portion of the State. Luxury has come to excess in it; ignorance, frivolity, foolishness seem to be their special heritage, play, intemperance, dissolution are common vices, which are no longer admired or scandalized; or rather, these vices seem customs. What little honor is seen in the nobles, how easily they lack their word, with what shame they lend themselves to the most indecent actions, how little they care to run down decorum and justice for the interest...

He also severely criticizes the ineffectiveness of the judicial system. He approaches the palaces of Caserta and Portici and contemplates the works of art of Pompeii and Herculaneum, also visiting Pozzuoli and Bayas. He evokes and quotes Sannazaro, Virgilio and Marcial. He analyzes the Italian operatic theater and attends two of those pieces in Naples. He is left wanting to see something by Apostolo Zeno and the & # 34; immortal Metastasio & # 34;. He studies all the theaters in the city and also the genre of comic theater and the commedia dell'arte, of which he makes synthetic criticism of a large number of pieces; again he is against the popular theater, this time Italian (Francesco Cerlone). On the contrary, he praises the comedies of Carlo Goldoni.

He returns to Rome (where he stays longer this time), to Florence and to Bologna. He describes the architectural wonders of St. Peter's Basilica and its surroundings, the paintings by Raphael and Michelangelo, and so on. He visits the seventeen rooms of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Florence and spends four months in Bologna. From there he leaves for Ferrara (whose poet Ludovico Ariosto celebrates and where he meets his friend, Count Juan Bautista Conti), and leaves with him for Lendinara; then he goes alone to Verona (whose palaces seem to him smaller but more elegant than those of Florence); he celebrates his lapidary museum and goes to his theater to see an ugly comedy; Vicenza (where, among other things, he studied Andrea Palladio's Olympic Theater), Padua (where he visited the botanical garden and the machine cabinet of the university and met the physicist Stefano Gallini and the abbots and humanists Melchiorre Cesarotti and Alberto Fortis; for others, falls in love with a certain Bocucci) and, finally, enters a large barge with sixty other travelers in Venice:

A city located in the middle of the sea, where you can see nothing but water and superb buildings. I entered through the beautiful Canal de la Giudeca, and stayed where Enoch and Elias could stay very well, if the devil tempted them to come to this profane city [...] In Venice they get up late, eat late, eat late, and sleep late. In the mornings the ladies go out on their gondola with basquiña and cendal; the old ladies go to Mass and visit nuns, and the mosses with their husbands or their lovers to take a stroll through the Plaza de San Marcos, and spend a couple of hours at casinos in good company and have coffee, being to warn that in Venice they usually have coffee seven or eight or more times a day, well that the coffee is excellent. After the theater, they come together, or in the casinos or in the private houses, and lasts the conversation or the game all night, the sun rises and they go to bed, all this must be understood of the culta people and of good tone, because the channel has other hours and other styles.

Venice "is certainly not the best of possible republics: little more than two hundred families, which will make up barely 1500 individuals, are the ones that have in their power the political and civil government of the entire nation". There, he attended some fifty plays in different theaters, including some by Carlo Goldoni and one by Beaumarchais; each of them is carefully commented; The French theater seems to him the best, and the Italian follows in his opinion; The current Spanish seems very inferior to him. He is very impressed by Vittorio Alfieri's neoclassical tragedy; he returns to Ferrara and Bologna (where he comments about thirty plays); from there he went to Genoa and Nice, where he embarked for Mahón and on December 7, 1797 he embarked again for Cartagena, although a storm diverted them to Algeciras.

Honorary Distinctions

• Knight of the Royal Order of Spain