ZORRILLA, JOSE (1817-1893), Spanish poet and drama tist, was born at Valladolid and read law at the University of Toledo, but of ter a year of idleness there, he fled to Madrid and started a paper which was suppressed by the Government. He then fell into great poverty, but was brought into notice by an elegiac poem, declaimed at Larra's funeral in Feb. 1837. His Cantos del trovador (1841), a collection of national legends versified with in finite spirit, secured for the author the place next to Espronceda in popular esteem. National legends also supply the themes of his dramas, though in this department Zorrilla somewhat compromised his reputation for originality by adapting older plays which had fallen out of fashion. For example, in El Zapatero y el Rey he recasts El montaiies Juan Pascual by Juan de la Hoz y Mota; in Don Juan Tenorio he adapts from Zamora's No hay denda que no se pague, y Convidado de piedra, and from the elder Dumas's Don Juan de Marana (which itself derives from Les Imes du purgatoire of Prosper Merimee). But his rearrangements usually
contain original elements, and in Sancho Garcia, El Rey loco, and El Alcalde Ronquillo he apparently owes little to any prede cessor. In 1855 he emigrated to Mexico where he was protected by the Emperor Maximilian. He returned in 1866 to find himself a half-forgotten classic. His old fertility was gone, and new standards of taste were coming into fashion. He was always poor, and for some 12 years after 1871 he was in the direst straits. A small pension secured him from actual want in his old age, and the reaction in his favour became an apotheosis. In 1889 he was publicly crowned at Granada as the national laureate.