Background
As a dramatist GuillénGuillen de Castro belonged to that school which followed the precepts for the Spanish national theater laid down by Lope de Vega. Many of his approximately fifty dramas follow traditional Spanish ballad themes, and there are three which dramatize various parts of Cervantes' works. His best known drama, Las Mocedades del Cid ("The Youthful Exploits of the Cid," 1618), however, does not employ Lope's technique of transmuting the essential spirit of a single ballad into an entirely new dramatic expression. Castro, instead, organized and incorporated into his play many of the original ballads themselves. It was a process which at once assured him of historical and poetic success and communicated a certain unwieldiness to his dramatic organization. The Cid ballads that he used derive from a late 14th-century epic and are historically without foundation. As the dramatist tells the traditional story, the young untried Rodrigo, not yet possessor of his sobriquet of Cid, is forced for the sake of his father's honor to kill Count Lozano, the father of his beloved Jimena. His exploits against the Moors and his ultimate reconciliation with Jimena make up the body of this drama of physical and emotional conflict. Pierre Corneille, in 1636, used Las Mocedades as the basis for the first outstandingly successful French drama, Le Cid. Other Castro plays that employ ballad material according to this same formula are El Conde Alarcos, El Conde Dirlos, and Las Hazanas del Cid.