BELMONTE BERMÚDEZ, LUIS. - Spanish poet and playwright, b. in Seville probably in 1587, d. around 1650. An imaginative and brilliant author of about 25 comedies (several of which appear to have been written in collaboration with Rojas Zorrilla, Castro, Vélez de Guevara and others), poems and short stories; he is at times skillful but often uneven and slovenly, capable of mystical attitudes and, at the same time, of satirical and moralizing motifs.
Among his dramas, special mention should above all be made of certain ones of a religious character, such as Las siete estrellas de Francia on St. Bruno, El mejor amigo el muerto written in collaboration with Rojas Zorrilla, and, particularly, El diablo predicador on a theme already treated by Lope de Vega in Fray Diablo.
In this comedy, which would offer suggestions for the Don Álvaro of the Duke of Rivas, the episodic and picaresque element almost stifles the supernatural one — that is, of Satan, who, in punishment for the persecutions to which he has subjected the religious of a convent, is condemned by God to become one of those friars, almoner and preacher. In the fine and lyrical comedy La renegada de Valladolid, in which one seems to glimpse a reflection of Tirso's Condenado por desconfiado, the figure of the protagonist is drawn with energy and vivacity: a woman who, though she has dared to defy God, follows her betrothed overseas, but there is taken prisoner with him by the infidels. Loved by the pasha, she ends up converting to Islam, but on the day when she meets her brother, who has landed shipwrecked on those shores, and her betrothed, she repents of having renounced her religion and forgotten her land and her family, and, having obtained a galley by deceit, flees with them toward her homeland and freedom.
Among his remaining works, two religious poems should be noted, namely the ten cantos of the Vida del Patriarca s. Ignacio and the Aurora de Cristo (1616), and two of a historical character, namely El cisne del Jordán on the events of Peru, and the Hispánica (1609), one of his best things, whose subject is the conquest of Seville by Ferdinand III. There is also generally attributed to him a Historia y descubrimiento de las regiones australes por el general d. Pedro Fernández de Quirós, whom he had accompanied as official chronicler. His short stories, about a dozen, have all been lost.
Bibliography2 works
Jole Scudieri Ruggieri