CANIZARES, JOSÉ de. - Spanish dramatist, born in Madrid on 4 July 1676 and died there on 14 Sept. 1750. In his prolific output (comedies, interludes, loas, zarzuelas, dances, etc.), in which reworkings of the finest dramatic creations of the preceding century are frequent, his skill in weaving plots and delineating types and characters, the ingenuity of his dialogue, and his vein of Gongorist lyricism bring out a picturesque sense of Madrid life, expressed in characteristic, mischievous, and burlesque forms, to which Goya was to give its most vivid interpretation decades later; not infrequently, however, the comedy becomes crude and harsh.
A perceptive sense of history and a sure intuition of the major figures of the national theatre enabled him aptly to bring together the two great mystics, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Jesus, in A cual mejor, confesada y confesor, as well as to revive the drama of Don Carlos (El príncipe don Carlos) and the vicissitudes of Enrique III (El rey Enrique III, llamado el enfermo). Noteworthy within his dramatic production are El dómine Lucas and El picarillo de España, señor de la Gran Canaria, an original fusion of truth and burlesque centred upon a character at once picaresque and chivalric, in which the boundaries between reality and fiction merge in an atmosphere of eighteenth-century grace. He also produced reworkings of works by Racine and Metastasio.