«Inocente estupidez»: La pata de cabra (1829), Grimaldi, and the regeneration of the spanish stage

David T. Gies

University of Virginia

Todo lo vence amor o La pata de cabra (1829; known as La pata de cabra) was the most popular play staged in Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century. It surpassed such Romantic hits as Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino¹, El trovador, and even Zorrilla's hugely successful (but not until past mid-century) Don Juan Tenorio² and earned its author substantial wealth and contemporary fame. That fame has faded, however, for Juan de Grimaldi -the man credited with the veritable renaissance of the Spanish stage in the 1820s and 1830s- is today largely underestimated or misunderstood.

José Alberich has correctly noted that

This is sadly true. The article by Frank Duffey⁴ and the unpublished thesis by Bernard Desfrétières⁵ are the only serious works on Grimaldi to date. Grimaldi remains one of those authors more alluded to than studied or appreciated.

Grimaldi (1796-1874) was a Frenchman who came to Spain with the troops of the Duque de Angulema in 1823 and remained in Madrid until 1836, when mysterious circumstances related to the political situation forced his hasty retreat to Paris. His adult life seems to split into two discrete segments. One segment covers the time he spent in Spain as theatrical impresario and stage director, years which are marked by his activity preceding the full flowering of Romanticism. The other covers the time he spent in Paris as a businessman, newspaperman and social figure. But the two segments intersect not in any point in time but rather in a posture -an attitude- for Grimaldi's divergent talents nearly always shared one common goal and one common denominator: his love for Spain. His attention to Spain focused upon few of the characteristics identified by other French observers. He cared little for the colorful «costumbrista» Spain courted and described by numerous French travelers to the peninsula and wasted no time searching for the flashing eyes and tambourine cadences which attracted so many northern Europeans to this stubbornly independent country. Instead of observing Spain he absorbed it. He imbibed its language, its literature, its politics, its social climate. Although his stay in the Iberian Peninsula was relatively short, he became, in many ways, more Spanish than French.

How was it that a foreigner, a soldier who came to Madrid with the invading forces of the French army in 1823, managed to carve out a place of such distinction in the Spanish theatrical and political worlds? Grimaldi did more than any other single individual to shape Spanish theater in the first half of the nineteenth century. When he got to Madrid he saw a business opportunity in the theater, although the recent history of Spanish theatrical endeavors should have warned him off such an enterprise⁶. He inherited a failing business. Spanish theaters were saddled with enormous costs and overhead expenses, stifled by an ignorant ecclesiastical censorship and destabilized by a contentious group of untrained and self-centered actors. The previous impresarios had gone bankrupt and the repertory consisted of re-hashed and rewritten «classics» of Golden-Age theater and silly imports. The city government, which owned the two principal theaters, the Cruz and the Príncipe, tried to protect everyone's interests (everyone but the impresario, that is): they needed to protect their financial investment, or at least try to minimize the drain on their resources that the theaters represented; they needed to protect the actors' retirement benefits; they needed to protect the public's morals; and they needed to protect national «glory» (whatever that was). The result was an over-regulated, under-developed theater which cost everyone money and pleased no one.

Grimaldi sought to change all that. He had an uncanny ability to seize an opportunity and to turn it to his own advantage. He immediately entered into disputatious negotiations with the municipality concerning his takeover of the theaters. He recognized that he would be forced to honor certain past commitments, but he insisted on several significant changes in the structure of theatrical regulation which he considered essential to the health of the enterprise. He realized that if he was to have good plays and quality translations he would have to commission them himself, and so over the years he enlisted the aid of Bretón de los Herreros, Ventura de la Vega, José María Carnerero, Antonio García Gutiérrez and Larra to write original plays and to translate the most popular French tragedies and melodramas being seen in Paris.

Grimaldi also realized that he would need to train the actors to perform in these plays⁷. His original idea of establishing an acting school never became a reality, although it had some influence upon the creation in 1831 of the Real Conservatorio de Música, where acting was taught by and to members of his company. Over the years he brought into his company and trained all of the luminaries of the Spanish Romantic stage: Concepción Rodríguez (whom he married in 1825), José García Luna, Antonio Guzmán, Carlos Latorre, Matilde Díez, Teodora and Bárbara Lamadrid, and Julián Romea. He created real repertory companies, groups of skilled actors and in-house dramatists and translators who worked together to make their enterprise into an exciting and successful venture. As early as 1825 his work was being hailed in Paris as «l'aurore de [la] résurrection dramatique» of Spain⁸.

Grimaldi was responsible for staging the most important plays of the Romantic period and he did so with a professionalism previously unknown in Spanish theaters. He improved not only the acting and the repertory but also the technical aspects of the theater -sets, lighting, stage machinery, interior design- which played key roles in the acceptance of Romantic dramas in the capital. By the time the colorful, often hysterical Romantic dramas reached the hands of the stage director, the actors and the theaters were prepared to perform them with seriousness and skill. Years of training actors for performance in translated French melodramas, years of practice with the complicated scenery of plays like La pata de cabra and years of preparing the audience to expect decent and interesting plays opened the way for the arrival of La conjuration de Venecia, Macias, Don Álvaro and El trovador (all staged by Grimaldi). For this reason he has been called «el empresario diligente y comprensivo, sin cuyo apoyo casi no se concibe el Romanticismo en el teatro español»⁹. Interestingly, although Grimaldi was not the impresario (meaning the individual in direct charge of the theaters) for the entire 1823-1836 period (he was more often stage manager), he is remembered as being the impresario, which gives evidence of his lasting impact on theatrical memory.

During his tenure at the Cruz and Príncipe (mostly the Príncipe) Grimaldi expanded the Spanish repertory to include historical dramas, continuations of the Moratinian comedy and the best of French theater. He even composed plays himself, some translated from his native French (La huérfana de Bruselas, 1825; Lord Dadvenant, 1826), one written in collaboration with his friends Bretón and Vega (1835 y 1836 o lo que es y lo que será, 1835), and one hybrid «adapted» translation which became the most popular play performed on the Spanish stage in the first half of the century. He perceived the problem of creating an audience as well as a repertory of plays and a good acting company. La pata de cabra was designed for that purpose and it surpassed even his own ambitious dreams.

His two translations and one circumstantial play provided scant proof of Grimaldi's talents as a playwright, but the same cannot be said about his 1829 adaptation of Cesar Ribie's and A. L. D. Martainville's Le pied de mouton, a three-act comedy first played in Paris in 1806¹⁰. La pata de cabra was first performed on February 18, 1829¹¹. From the outset, the newspapers recorded that this play had something special to offer Madrid audiences. Its sets, stage machinery and dance interludes would provide an agreeable evening «de grande espectáculo»:

It was not an instant hit. In fact, another «comedia de magia», Al asombro de Jerez, Juana la Rabicortona, enjoyed more performances than La pata over the next ten days, the last ten days of that season. But when the following season opened, on April 19, La pata took off and achieved a popular following unparalleled in the history of the Spanish stage. From the first day of this new season until May 8, La pata ran every day -(except for May 2, when both theaters were closed for the traditional patriotic holiday)- nineteen straight performances. The norm was a three -or four- day run; ten performances constituted a verifiable triumph and many never made it past one day. La pata's nineteen performances were not a record (El sí de las niñas ran for twenty-six performances in 1806), but soon it would eclipse every previous record set for stage performances. It ceased its initial run for three reasons. First, the actors were exhausted and demanded a rest. Second, the crowds which were descending on Madrid needed to be controlled: «La necesidad de dar algún descanso a los actores que están ejecutando la comedia de magia, el tener que disponer la salida de los que han venido de fuera... obligan a la empresa no repetir por muchos días la Pata de cabra, viéndose precisada por ahora a no poder dar al público de Madrid que tanto la favorece el gusto de que todos los aficionados puedan satisfacer su curiosidad», (Diario de Avisos, May 7, 1829). The third reason was the illness and eventual death of Queen Amalia (May 17), which forced the theaters to close completely until August 18¹³.

Once the theaters reopened and the summer holidays ended (September, 1829), La pata reappeared on the boards and ran an incredible forty-eight additional performances through Ash Wednesday, February 25, 1830. El Correo's guess that, had the theaters not been, forced to close in mid-1829, La pata «llevaba apariencia de no concluir sus proezas en un mes consecutivo» (July 31, 1829), was not far from the mark. It ran almost daily throughout October and every other day throughout November and December. The announcement in early November of the King's betrothal to his niece, the beautiful María Cristina de Borbón, stimulated the theaters to offer a special function in their honor. The play they selected? The very same Pata which had been playing steadily at the Príncipe:

When the impresario finally decided to offer a different play, an announcement appeared in the newspapers assuring the public that this was the last performance, but just «por ahora» (Diario de Avisos, November 11, 1829). The play was back on stage by December 23. In all, by mid-century, La pata de cabra had played more than two hundred seventy-seven times¹⁴ and was still garnering praise at the end of the century¹⁵.

People flocked from everywhere to see the play. Astonishingly, they even made trips into Madrid from the provinces for this purpose. In 1829, Fernando VII's political repression was still severe and it was not easy to cross provincial borders, which were treated at times as national boundaries. In fact, the government issued passports to those individuals wishing to cross a provincial border, and the passport cards were stamped with the nature of their business. This practice was not abandoned until two years after the King's death.

José Zorrilla's father had welcomed the French troops as they marched through Burgos in 1823 and was by 1829 Superintendent of Police in the capital. As such, he was in charge of security arrangements at all check points, and his responsibilities included signing the passports along with the reasons for the visitor's stay in Madrid. Many of those visitors came specifically to see Grimaldi's La pata de cabra. In his son's words, «estaba absolutamente prohibido a todos los españoles de las provincias venir a Madrid sin una razón justificada, y el Superintendente visó 72.000 pasaportes por esta poderosa e irrecusable razón, escrita en ellos a favor de sus portadores: "Pasa a Madrid a ver La pata de cabra"»¹⁶. Zorrilla does not specify the year or years, but it seems clear that his figure is not an exaggeration. It appears as though everyone wanted to see La pata de cabra. As reported in the Correo Literario (October 5, 1829), by October of the year of its debut it was already «famosa», and whenever performances were announced the box office was beseiged by people in search of a ticket. As reported, some people even preferred buying a ticket to the play to paying their daily bills:

Exact attendance and gate receipt figures are difficult to obtain for the years encompassing the 1829-1850 period. Three such sets of figures, however, available for October 1831, April through November 1832, and December 1832 through March 1833, are instructive and perhaps representative. In October 1831, a total of five thousand thirty-seven people saw La pata de cabra at the Príncipe and the average day's intake was six thousand four hundred twentyone reales. The Príncipe held a total of twelve hundred thirty-six spectators and a complete sell-out brought in nine thousand six hundred sixty-nine reales. This compared to an average of four thousand four hundred reales for the Golden-Age comedias and French translations being offered on the other days. Only the threeday run of Molière's El avaro (over eleven hundred people on average per night, and over nine thousand reales) and the performances of opera brought in more people and more money¹⁷. And it must be remembered that La pata was in its third year in repertory. The play was not shown from April 1832 until mid-November of that year, and the plays that were performed brought in little money for the companies. (Breton's A Madrid me vuelvo earned a mere one thousand three hundred twenty reales on June 30.) The following table provides some partial comparative data:¹⁸

These figures for plays (operas showed consistently higher returns) remain constant until November when La pata reappeared. Where previously the second day's receipts normally experienced a radical drop (see April 28, May 4, May 10, May 14, May 18 above), with La pata no such drop was noticeable and the receipts remained high throughout the run.

As is evident from the above sample, during the months when La pata was taken off the stage, the audience virtually disappeared. The same was true for December 1832 through March 1833, with the exception that La pata even triumphed over the exceedingly popular operas, bringing in an average of seven thousand three hundred reales per performance (nine thousand five hundred ninety-five on December 2) as compared with the opera's average of five thousand six hundred¹⁹. Small wonder that as early as October 1829, the newspapers were predicting that La pata de cabra would be a new «golden calf» for the impresario (Correo Literario, October 5, 1829).

There is no need to discount Zorrilla's «penchant for exaggeration»²⁰, for if these figures accurately reflect the audience's interest in La pata (and I believe they do), Zorrilla's guess that his father had signed 72, 000 passports for their bearers to see this play was hardly exaggerated. Based on gate receipts and performance schedules, it can be conservatively calculated that between 1829 and 1850 more than two hundred twenty thousand people saw La pata de cabra in Madrid, a city whose population scarcely surpassed two hundred fifty thousand inhabitants²¹. Documents prove that just in the five years between 1829 and 1833, La pata earned nearly one million reales²².

Why was the play so popular? What was in it that brought people into the theater in record numbers, even people who were certainly not in the habit of going to plays? The plot is a simple boy-meets-girl love story, but Grimaldi grafted onto it a series of spectacular magic tricks and stage illusions (thirty-five in all) and was fortunate to have the brilliant comedian Antonio Guzmán (who had been with Grimaldi's company for years) playing the comic lead. The story opens as the hero, don Juan, prepares to kill himself since he cannot marry his beloved Leonor, a rich Aragonese maiden who is kept locked away by her severe tutor, don Lope. In the very first scene, the pistols with which Juan intends to carry out his suicide fly magically out of his hands and discharge in the air. This opening effect is quickly followed by the appearance of Cupid from a tree trunk, trailed after by several genies who present the hapless Juan with a lucky charm -a goat's foot. The foot itself is obtained in a sequence of impressive staging: Cupid draws a circle on the ground and another in the air with one of his arrows, and the circles (representing the moon and a waterfall) turn blood red. Thunder, lightning and flames precede the appearance of the genies who place a goat inside a great cauldron which is incinerated by a bolt of lightning. All that remains is the goat's foot, which Cupid gives to Juan along with a promise of eternal happiness with Leonor. Juan journeys to Zaragoza to confront the suitor whom Lope has selected for Leonor, the bumbling don Simplicio Bobadilla de Majaderano y Cabeza de Buey (played by Guzmán). Simplicio is shown to be a coward and a buffoon, and when Juan goes to serenade Leonor the earth opens up and out march four musicians who transform themselves shortly thereafter into the four duennas which Lope uses to guard Leonor. Simplicio, who has witnessed the transformation, cannot convince anyone that the duennas are really musicians (or «demonios»), but he does finally convince Lope that Juan is hiding in the area. A trick mirror in Leonor's bedroom produces a hiding place for Juan, and the duennas undergo yet another on-stage transformation, this time into nymphs. Simplicio again witnesses the entire spectacle but by the time he calls don Lope into the room things have returned to their previous state.

Finally, Juan is captured and the lovers are taken away and locked in a tower, but at the end of act I Cupid passes by their prisons in an elegant flying carriage and «se desploma la torre, y queda[n] recogido[s] en el carro» (p. 35).

Act II is, taken up with Simplicio's frustrated efforts to capture the two lovers, and is replete with complicated stage tricks and scene changes: Simplicio pulls a four-yard long sword out of a sheath only three-quarters of a yard long; bread flies around a table, just out of Simplicio's reach; a startling reversal of balconies from the second to the first floor of Lope's house occurs; police officials are suspended three feet in the air; painted portraits yawn and spy on Simplicio; candles spontaneously relight; and in the most daring piece of stage business, the cap Simplicio is wearing inflates to the size of a hot-air balloon and carries him off into the sky. Act II ends with another rescue of Juan and Leonor by Cupid in his flying carriage.

Act III contains Simplicio's tale of his flight to the moon, but as he is about to return home the earth opens up and swallows him, planting him below ground in the forges of Vulcan. Vulcan decides to help Simplicio in his battle against Juan and Cupid and a number of transformations and tricks occur in the conflict between the antagonists, aided by their protective gods. Cupid changes a shell into a magnificent Greek ship, manned by a host of cherubs; the ship then changes into a frightful sea monster which belches flames. But true love predominates and Lope finally approves the don Juan-Leonor marriage. Even Simplicio, defeated, has no choice but to accede and recognize that «Todo lo vence amor» -with a little magical help (p. 96).

Many of the tricks employed by Grimaldi, tricks which served various functions in the play -suspense, surprise, humor- could be carried out simply (Juan disappears from behind the mirror, a magician appears from the prompter's shell, flames roar out of the trap door in the stage floor), but others required new and ingenious solutions if they were to be presented with any degree of credibility. Certainly, the transformation of the ship into a giant sea monster required a high degree of technical skill from the stagehands and actors, as well as a backstage full of sets and props. Likewise, the inflation to balloon size of Simplicio's cap and his subsequent levitation demanded quick work from all parties if the play was to have any surprise or amusement value. By all accounts, the workers, not accustomed to professional behavior (there are numerous reports of mishandling of sets by stagehands: noise off stage; trees being put up when a river scene was called for; scenery falling down, injuring spectators or actors), handled the stunts cleverly. And Juan Blanchard's sets were the marvel of Madrid, inciting admiration and curiosity in the populace. The action of the play demanded eleven different sets and twelve scene changes²³.

The multiple changes of sets and the complicated machinery needed to carry out the tricks were hard on the curtains and painted scenery, which deteriorated quickly with constant use. In 1831, performances of the play were temporarily suspended while new sets could be painted. New jokes and tricks were added as well; the performances were constantly evolving, reacting to the audiences' responses. Breton published two reviews of the play in the Correo Literario (September 2, 1831 and November 19, 1832), both of which provide detailed looks at what contemporary audiences were seeing and admiring. Blanchard and the man in charge of the stagehands, Mateo Sierra, were singled out for the «perfección» of their work. Bretón mentioned that some of the dialogues were somewhat «prolijos», but necessary in order to give the stagehands time to change the sets and prepare for the next series of magical effects, some of which were, as he recognized, «bastante complicados». The sets were not always handled with care nor were the tricks performed with professional skill, however. In 1840 (long after Grimaldi had left Spain), performances of this «inagotable» play, while still much more popular and more attended than new plays, had become sloppy. «La pata de cabra no ha podido ser ejecutada con más descuido y torpeza en la parte de maquinaria, baste decir, que las selvas se confundían con las salas, los escotillones no estaban corrientes, ni los trastos jugaban, asi que el público tuvo que hacer un pequeño obsequio a los que a tales cosas daban lugar»²⁴.

While La pata de cabra brought substantial sums of money into the theater's coffers, it was also relatively expensive to mount. The extra costs of mounting regular plays normally reached only eight or ten reales per performance, but La pata's special requirements raised the average additional per-performance cost to thirty-six reales²⁵. In addition, for a three-day run in mid-October 1831, numerous extra musicians had to be hired (at a cost of two hundred seventy reales, plus an additional ninety-six reales for eight performances by a guitar player). Forty-eight extra stagehands were put on duty when La pata was on the boards (ten men on the right side of the stage, nine on the left, fifteen in the back and another fourteen manning the curtain -at a total cost of four hundred sixty-eight, more reales). Additional actors had to be hired to play the parts of the cyclopes (twenty-two of them), furies, servants and peasants (four hundred thirty-five reales) and the rental of the bellows to inflate don Simplicio's cap. And lastly, the men who provided the fireworks for the stage charged another two hundred sixteen reales. Costs for the November 1832 performances were even higher, since new props had been made (tinplate items were in great abundance) and extras were paid a little more. Some extras were hired in lesser numbers -there were eighteen cyclopes instead of the twenty-two of the previous year, for example- while stagehands were demanded in greater numbers (seventy-five men handling the flies, sets, and curtains instead of forty-eight in 1831)²⁶. Other comedias de magia were not nearly so expensive (El mágico de Astracán, for example, cost a mere nine reales extra per performance) and only the high spectacle of the opera rivaled La pata for expense -but even they averaged no more than thirty reales per performance on the whole. Not every performance of La pata itself contained the requisite number of performers and supporting stagehands: one of the manuscripts, evidently used for performance practice, lists three duennas instead of four, the number which appears in the printed versions²⁷.

Don Simplicio is one of the great comic figures of the Spanish stage. Few other characters rival his blustery humor, his physical slapstick, or his good-natured buffoonery. He is a caricature of the false nobleman, a suave and valiant swordsman turned inside-out, and his constant hunger reminds us of the pícaro and the gracioso. His very name is an inspired piece of comic wordplay and allusion: Simplicio Bobadilla de Majaderano y Cabeza de Buey. Other than the obvious standard references to the comic past (Simplicio is a stock character in Italian literature and has a long history in German dramaturgy), Grimaldi might have been inspired by a similarly silly name attached by his friend José María Carnerero to the main character of his 1824 play, El pobre pretendiente -don Verecundo Corbera y Luenga-Vista. To play his own rich role, Grimaldi found an actor able to convey Simplicio's whole range of humor- from silly pratfalls to puns and self-mockery. Antonio Guzmán (who had played Carnerero's don Verecundo for Grimaldi in 1824) became don Simplicio and was associated with the role for years, even during his triumphs in the new Romantic dramas. He was so funny in the part that he was credited with making the normally dour Queen Amalia laugh in public for the first time in the court's recent memory: «Fernando VII quiso ver tanta maravilla, y con él asistió la corte de toda etiqueta. ¡Y cosa admirable! El famoso actor característico consiguió excitar la hilaridad de la reina Amalia, con grande asombro de los palaciegos, que nunca vieron a la desgraciada señora dar muestras ostensibles de regocijo»²⁸. Contemporary reports confirm that the play also buoyed the spirits of the King: «13 julio 1830. El rey ha resuelto salir sin formación, después de ir a La pata de cabra. ¡Muy bien!»²⁹. When Entreacto, a new theatrical journal begun in 1839 and edited by Gil y Zarate, García Gutiérrez and Molins, printed its first lithograph, it was a portrait of Guzman dressed in his don Simplicio costume (August 4, 1839).

The character of Simplicio became proverbial. Larra, for example, employed references to him in his attacks against the Carlists:

The role made other actors famous as well. The great Mariano Fernández first became notorious for stabbing himself in the groin during a scene in the first act of the play (they carried him off to the hospital but the play continued!³¹), then infamous as he adlibbed some unseemly political remarks³². His final public performance, a mere four days before his death in 1890, was as don Simplicio³³. Even the music became famous in Madrid and regularly played -especially a piece known popularly as «el de las Fraguas» from the scene in the forges of Vulcan- during musical entertainments at private tertulias³⁴.

Not everyone reacted so positively to the play's charms. A hilariously satirical letter appeared in the Correo Literario in November, 1829, purportedly written by a poet, D. Bobadillo Zarrambla y Monteginesuturruburraga, who, meditating on the popularity of animal parts in the contemporary theater, put forth a rhinoceros hoof as the protagonist of his next play. His title satirized the folly of Grimaldi's creation: instead of The Goat's Foot, his would be called The Rhino's Hoof, subtitled, «drama heroico, mímico, romántico, altisonante y pantomímico-mitológico, adornado con transparentes, reverberos, escotillones, vuelos, convulsiones, entierros, inundaciones, incendios y multitud de trasformaciones y aditamentos análogos; escrito en estilo culti-parli-metafórico para ejemplo de los vivientes y pasmo de los futuros: en 17 actos o jornadas, acompañadas de danzas de micos, orangutanes y camellos y cantos de gallos y serpientes»³⁵. He detailed the multiple transformations which his leading man would undergo and the spectacular stage effects to be included. The performance would conclude with an apocalyptic ending so «real» that «retiemble todo el edificio y los espectadores se zambaleen y peguen de encontrones en sus palcos y asientos. En la cazuela las mujeres se han de caer amontonadas unas sobre otras a impulsos de los vaivenes, y cuando más resuenen los chillidos producidos por el universal estremecimiento, el teatro... ¡qué prodigio!... se ha de cambiar exabruptamente en los campos Elíseos». If La pata's three acts enabled it to remain on stage for forty some days, El rinoceronte's seventeen acts -claimed its author- would promise it a run of seventeen months (Correo Literario, November 16, 1829).

Another detractor, Antonio Ferrer, found La pata to be, of all the comedias de magia he had seen, «la más sin gracia y sin moral»³⁶. Modern critics like Narciso Alonso Cortes have thought the play to be «una de las obras más anodinas que puede imaginarse»³⁷, while D. L. Shaw has characterized it as similar to the «absurd atrocities» satirized by Moratín in La comedia nueva³⁸.

What was it about this «donosísima, original y popular» play which could «despertar el apetito del público español y atraerle al teatro por espacio de meses»³⁹, this «concoction of absurdities [which] simply rocked Madrid, and much of the rest of Spain, too, with joy and laughter?»⁴⁰ As Bretón pointed out, the play contained, quite simply, everything: «En una palabra, esta es función para todos; es un cajón de sastre; una enciclopedia dramática, donde se saca muy bien el jugo a los reales y maravedíes que suelta un prójimo en la sobada ventanilla del despacho de billetes» (Correo Literario, September 2, 1831). Zorrilla credited Grimaldi with having discovered the pulse of Spain: «Grimaldi había comprendido perfectamente nuestro país en aquel tiempo, y le dio la tontería más adecuada a la ignorancia en que yacía, como base de un tratamiento higiénico a que se proponía someterle para nutrirle y regenerarle. La pata de cabra, intachable para la censura eclesiástica, comprensible para el vulgo, popular por la misma crítica de nuestro país, que el extranjero hacía de nosotros en don Simplicio Bobadilla Majaderano Cabeza de Buey»⁴¹. This «tontería» was imitated, satirized, continued and even converted into a zarzuela⁴². It was exported as well, enjoying long runs in Mexico⁴³.

La pata de cabra reflected a growing fascination with the dichotomies of modern life in Spain, the Manichaeanism of Spanish existence under Fernando VII, which would take deeper root and flourish following his death. The play was not a Romantic drama, but as Ermanno Caldera has pointed out in a recent study, it contained numerous Romantic elements⁴⁴. The plot itself -the happiness of two young lovers frustrated by a tyrannical relative- would become, with added ideological colorings, the basic Romantic plot. Grimaldi was not unmindful of the ideological underpinnings of his play, although he claimed that his sole purpose was to amuse the people and draw them into the theater: «proporcionar a la empresa de los teatros medios de llamar gente, y nadie por cierto negará que ha logrado su objeto»⁴⁵. The rather limp moral message issued by the magician in Act III, Scene VIII⁴⁶, may have reflected what Grimaldi thought he lived by, but it was overwhelmed in the long run by the play's farcical humor and glitzy spectacle.

Grimaldi's play was not exactly the wholly «original» creation he believed it to be («no por eso puede llamarse su obra traducción en el sentido que se da vulgarmente a esta voz;... es más original que muchas comedias que se venden por tales, pues casi todas las gracias que el público ha celebrado en el dialogo, y singularmente las que tanto ha hecho valer nuestro inimitable Guzmán, son originales, ya que no lo sea del todo el cuadro que las encierra» [Advertencia, pp. VI]) but it was something considerably more than a «simple plagio», as Antonio de los Reyes believes⁴⁷. In fact, Grimaldi made a number of significant modifications to his source play, elaborating sections to enhance the logical flow of the plot and expanding others for comic effect. He changed details in nearly every scene and added six wholly new scenes to his version (Act I, Scenes X, XIV; Act II, Scenes I, II, V, X). He polished and improved the dialogue while at the same time making the play more «Spanish» with the addition of refrains, verbal patter and allusions which were in keeping with his projected audience's knowledge and tastes. The most conspicuous improvement was in the figure of the comic hero, Simplicio. In Le pied du mouton, Niguadinos is a weak, stupid, passive fellow, but in La pata, the blustery foolishness and extravagant cowardice of Simplicio add real depth to his character. By tightening the structure of the scenes with Simplicio, Grimaldi was able to focus this main character more clearly and enable him to carry the weight of the play. In addition, Grimaldi changed the hero's side-kick from a vague squire-like character into a mute, who played against Simplicio's bluster with comic gestures by silently echoing his glib rationalizations. Grimaldi added dance sequences, too, integrating them into the action of the play (as when the three Graces tie up the cyclopes with garlands of flowers). By adding scenes and concentrating the action and logic of his source, Grimaldi created a play which was superior both in detail and in overall effect to the Ribié-Martainville original. His dramatic craftsmanship was keen.

The importance of Grimaldi and his play in the development of the theater in nineteenth-century Spain can hardly be overestimated. It may not have been «literature» (even he claimed that he did not aspire to «lauros literarios»⁴⁸), but its popularity brought money into the coffers of the theaters and helped to form an audience prepared for the extravagances of Romantic drama. Its strength lay in that it had (in abundance) what had always drawn audiences to the theater but what was in scant evidence in Spain during the Fernandine era: flashy spectacle, local color, stage tricks, topical humor, puns and jokes, knock-about comedy, wonderful acting, a fast-moving plot and suspense. It drew people into the theater in record numbers, even, as we have seen, people who had never before set foot inside a theater («La magia hizo las suyas y por turno iban llegando los moradores de los inmediatos pueblos para ver lo que tanto ruido metía: de Madrid no hablemos, pues gentes que nunca van al teatro dieron treguas a su inacción, y acudieron a ver los prodigios del caballero Majaderano Cabeza de Buey, y a instruirse en las fraguas de Vulcano». [Correo Literario, July 31, 1829]). As Zorrilla recognized,

A more contemporary witness -Bretón- confirmed that La pata was a «talismán de todas las empresas de tres años a esta parte para atraer a los espectadores, y no espectadores solamente de bota y garrote, que son los más inclinados a las comedias de magia, sino también de fraque y levita, y galones y plumas. Función es esta donde hay para contentar a todo el mundo» (Correo Literario, September 2, 1831). Grimaldi's light touch and deft humor created a thoroughly enjoyable confection which sparked the city's interest in theatrical spectacle. La pata de cabra «levant[ó] al teatro de su postración»⁵⁰ by generating excitement, ingenious solutions to difficult staging problems, employment for a host of actors and stagehands, considerable wealth for the author/director, and an audience hungry for spectacle⁵¹.