BELMONTE BERMÚDEZ, LUIS. – Spanish poet and dramatist, born in Seville probably in 1587, died around 1650. An imaginative and brilliant author of approximately twenty-five comedies (several of them written in collaboration with Rojas Zorrilla, Castro, Vélez de Guevara, and others), as well as poems and novellas; he is at times skillful but often uneven and careless, capable of mystical attitudes and, at the same time, of satirical and moralizing themes.
Among his dramas, several of a religious character deserve particular mention, such as Las siete estrellas de Francia, on St. Bruno; El mejor amigo el muerto, written in collaboration with Rojas Zorrilla; and, especially, El diablo predicador, on a theme already treated by Lope de Vega in Fray Diablo.
In this comedy, which would provide material for the duke of Rivas’s Don Álvaro, the episodic and picaresque element almost suffocates the supernatural one—that is, Satan, who, as punishment for the persecutions he has inflicted upon the religious of a convent, is condemned by God to become the almoner and preacher of those friars. In the fine and lyrical comedy La renegada de Valladolid, in which one seems to discern a reflection of Tirso’s Condenado por desconfiado, the figure of the protagonist is drawn with energy and vivacity: a woman who, although she has rebelled against God, follows her fiancé overseas, where she is captured by the infidels together with him. Loved by the pasha, she eventually converts to Islam; but on the day she meets her brother, shipwrecked on those shores, and her fiancé, she repents of having renounced her religion and forgotten her homeland and family, and, having obtained a galley by deceit, flees with them toward her homeland and freedom.
Among his remaining works, two religious poems deserve mention, namely the ten cantos of the Vida del Patriarca s. Ignacio and the Aurora de Cristo (1616), and two of a historical character, specifically El cisne del Jordán, on the events in Peru, and the Hispánica (1609), one of his finest works, whose subject is Ferdinand III’s conquest of Seville. He is also generally credited with a Historia y descubrimiento de las regiones australes por el general d. Pedro Fernández de Quirós, whom he had accompanied as official chronicler. His novellas, about a dozen in number, have all been lost.