is known, Rueda was born in Seville and as a youth joined
a troupe of wandering actors performing at inns or other
venues permitted by town councils. He became an actor-
manager, performing before the future Philip II in 1551
and in plays staged in Philip’s honor in 1554. Rueda’s
works were published posthumously in three series
(1567–70). With one exception his several comedies are
in prose. Crudely constructed and with no attempt to de-
velop characterizations, they draw on Italian material. The
best, Eufemia, is based on a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron.
More important are his pasos, one-act farcical interludes
with realistic dialogue and stereotypical characters bor-
rowed from COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE: the fanfarrón (braggart),
rufián (pimp), gracioso (the wit, or comic servant), and
others. Twenty-four of some 40 pasos survive; about half
were written for interpolation in his own comedies. By the
end of Rueda’s life, acting acquired the status of a full-time
profession and permanent public theaters soon opened in
Madrid (Teatro de la Cruz, 1579), Seville, and other cities.
Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza, Juan (1580–1639)
Spanish dramatist
The son of a wealthy superintendent of mines, Alarcón
was born in Mexico City. He went to Spain, was educated
at Salamanca, and settled in Madrid (1611). Between 1615
and 1625 he wrote 25 plays, which established him as a
leading playwright of the SIGLO DE ORO. In the meantime
he was appointed to the Council of the Indies, an office he
held for the rest of his life.
As a hunchback Alarcón was mercilessly ridiculed by
literary rivals, such as Lope de Vega, Góngora, and
Quevedo. These attacks did nothing, however, to obscure
the outstanding quality of his plays, which were written
with much greater care than those of contemporaries, who
were accustomed to turning them out by the hundreds.
Most of his plays were collected for print during his life:
Parte primera de las comedias (1628) contained eight plays
and Parte segunda (1634), 13, including his best known,
La verdad sospechosa, concerning a hero incapable of
telling the truth. Alarcón’s subjects cover a wide range but
the plays dealing with contemporary manners have a
moral and comic subtlety, matched by a classical con-
struction and versification, that associates them more with
18th-century comedy than with the baroque style of
Counter-Reformation Spain.Russian Company See MUSCOVY COMPANYRustici, Giovanni Francesco (1474–1554) Italian
sculptor
Nothing is known about Rustici’s early years but that he
was born at Florence and as a young man became a close
friend of LEONARDO DA VINCI. His best-known works are
the three bronze figures of John the Baptist preaching,
flanked by a Levite and a Pharisee, over the north door of
the baptistery in Florence, begun in 1506 and installed in- A number of his marble statues, less assured than
his work in bronze, are now in the Bargello and the
Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; he also worked in terracotta
(statue of a victorious knight in the Museo Horne, Flo-
rence). Two paintings in the Uffizi, Florence, may be his;
his drawings have all been lost. In 1528 Rustici went to
France at the invitation of Francis I to work on an eques-
trian monument, which he never finished. He died in
Tours.
rutters Mariners’ charts. The English word derives from
the French routier. Rutters were mainly manuscript com-
pilations until the publication of Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer’s
Spieghel der Zeevaerdt (1584–85) introduced a more so-
phisticated kind of guide for pilots (see WAGGONERS).rruutttteerrss 4 42211