IV Originality and Influence
In 1523 the ‘men of good learning’ doubted Vicente’s originality. They might point to the imitations of Enzina or to the resemblance between the trilogy of Barcas and the Danza de la Muerte or they might reveal the origin of many a verse and phrase used by Vicente in his plays and already familiar in the song-books of Spain and Portugal. Vicente could well afford to let his critics strain at these gnats. He had the larger originality of genius and while realizing that ‘there is nothing new under the sun130’ he could transform all his borrowings into definite images or lyrical magic. (There are flashes of poetry even in the absurd ensalada of III. 323-4.) He was the greatest lyrical poet of his day and, in a strictly limited sense, the greatest dramatist. He is Portugal’s only dramatist, without forerunners or successors, for the playwrights of the Vicentian school lacked his genius and only attain some measure of success when they closely copy their master, while the classical school produced no great drama in Portugal: it is impossible to except even Antonio Ferreira’s Ines de Castro from this sweeping assertion. But that is not to say that Vicente stands entirely isolated, self-sufficing and self-contained. Genius is never self-sufficing. Talent may live apart in an ivory palace but genius overflows in many relations, is acted on and reacts and has the generosity to receive as well as to give. The influences that acted upon Gil Vicente were numerous: the Middle Ages and the humanism of the first days of the Renaissance, the old national Portugal with its popular traditions and the new imperial Portugal of the first third of the sixteenth century, the Bible and the Cancioneiro de Resende, the whole literature of Spain and Portugal, the services of the Church, the book of Nature. But before examining how these influences work out in his plays it may be well to consider whether their sources may be yet further extended.
Court relations between Portugal and France had never entirely ceased and the 1516 Cancioneiro contains many allusions to the prevailing familiarity with things French. But Vicente’s genius was not inspired by the Court: it would be truer to say that, while he was encouraged by Queen Lianor and the King, the Court’s taste for new things, superficial fashions and personal allusions tended to thwart his genius. When he introduces a French song in his plays this does not imply any intimate acquaintance with the lyrical poetry of France but rather deference to the taste of the Court. He would pick up words of foreign languages with the same quickness with which he initiated himself into the way of witch or pilot, fishwife or doctor, but we have an excellent proof that his knowledge of neither French nor Italian was profound. We know how consistently he makes his characters speak each in his own language. Yet in the Auto da Fama, whereas the Spaniard speaks Spanish only, the Frenchman and Italian murder their own language and eke it out with Portuguese131. Vicente read what he could find to read, but we may be sure that his reading was mainly confined to Portuguese and Spanish. The very words in his letter to King João III in which he speaks of his reading are another echo of Enzina132, and although it cannot be asserted that he was not acquainted with this or that piece of French literature and with the early French drama, it may be maintained that whatever influence France exercised upon him came mainly through Spain, whether the connecting link is extant, as in the case of the Danza de la Muerte, or lost, as in that of the Sumario da Historia de Deos. Probably Vicente knew of French mystères little more than the name133. As to the literature of Greece, Rome and Italy the conclusion is even more definite. Vicente had not read Plautus or Terence, his knowledge of el gran poeta Virgilio (III. 104) does not extend beyond the quotation omnia vincit amor. Aristotle is a name et praeterea nihil. With the classical tragedy of Trissino and others he had nothing in common, and if he lived to read or see Sá de Miranda’s Cleopatra he probably had his own very marked opinion as to its value. Dante was, of course, a closed book to him as to most of his contemporaries. With Spanish literature the case is very different. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the most Spanish period of Portuguese literature. The Cancioneiro de Resende is nearly as Spanish as it is Portuguese. Portuguese poets were, almost without exception, bilingual. The horsemen stationed to bring the news of the wedding from Seville to Evora in 1490 were emblematic of the close relations between the two countries. Men were in continual expectation that they would come to form one kingdom134. King Manuel’s infant son was heir to Spain and Portugal and the empires in Africa and America.
Vicente’s close acquaintance with Spanish literature shows itself at every turn, and if we examine his plays we find but slight traces of the influence of any other literature. His first pieces were written in Spanish, and the Spanish is that of Enzina. Lines and phrases are taken bodily from the Spanish poet and words belonging to the conventional sayagués (in which there was already a Portuguese element: cf. ollos for ojos) placed on the lips of charros by Enzina are transferred from Salamanca to Beira. The Enzina eclogues imitated by Vicente were based on those of Virgil, but in Vicente’s imitation there is no vestige of any knowledge of the classics. The only Latin that occurs is the quotation by Gil Terron of three lines from the Bible. A little later the hungry escudero of Quem tem farelos? was in all probability derived from Spanish literature, either from the Archpriest of Hita’s Libro de Buen Amor or from some popular sketch such as that contained later in Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)135. The only French element in the Auto da Fé is the fatrasie or enselada ‘which came from France,’ but its text is not given. The classical allusions to Virgil and the Judgment of Paris in the Auto das Fadas are perfectly superficial. A little medical Latin is introduced in the Farsa dos Fisicos. O Velho da Horta, which opens with the Lord’s Prayer, half in Latin, half in Portuguese136, is written in Portuguese with the exception of the fragment of song and the lyric ¿Cual es la niña? There is a reference to Macias, a name which had become a commonplace in Portuguese poetry as the type of the constant lover. Spanish influence is shown in the introduction of the alcouviteira Branca Gil, probably suggested by Juan Ruiz’ trotaconventos or by Celestina. The Exhortação da Guerra begins with humorous platitudes, perogrulladas, after the fashion of Enzina. Gil Terron has increased his classical lore, and Trojan and Greek heroes are brought from the underworld, the dramatis personae including Polyxena, Penthesilea, Achilles, Hannibal, Hector and Scipio. The influence of Enzina is still evident in the Auto da Sibila Cassandra, the bellíssimo auto wherein Menéndez y Pelayo saw the first germ of the symbolical autos in which Calderón excelled137, and in the Auto dos Quatro Tempos. The immediate influence on the Barcas is plainly Spanish, this being especially marked in the Barca da Gloria. When the Diabo addresses the King:
Nunca aca senti
Que aprovechase aderencia
Ni lisonjas, crer mentiras
... Ni diamanes ni zafiras (i. 285)
he is copying the words of Death in the Danza de la Muerte:
non es tiempo tal
Que librar vos pueda imperio nin gente
Oro nin plata nin otro metal138.
Vicente’s Devil taxes the Archbishop with fleecing the poor (i. 294) in much the same words as those of the Spanish Death to the Dean (t. 2, p. 12). The Devil in the Barca do Purgatorio (i. 251) and Death (t. 2, p. 17) both reproach the labrador with the same offence: surreptitiously extending the boundaries of his land. It must be admitted that these signs of imitation are more direct than the French traces indicated in the introduction of the 1834 edition of Vicente’s works. The whole treatment of the Barcas closely follows the Danza de la Muerte. The idea of a satirical review of the dead is of course nearly as old as literature. In the Barca da Gloria Vicente begins to quote Spanish romances139, and this is continued on a larger scale in the Comedia de Rubena (cf. also the Spanish songs in the Cortes de Jupiter) and in Dom Duardos, in which reference is also made to two Spanish books, Diego de San Pedro’s Carcel de Amor and Hernando Diaz’ translation El Pelegrino Amador140. Maria Parda’s will was probably suggested rather by such burlesque testaments as that of the dying mule in the Cancioneiro de Resende than by the Testament de Pathelin. The criticism of the homens de bom saber seems to have turned Vicente to more peculiarly Portuguese themes in the Farsa de Ines Pereira and the Auto Pastoril Portugues, and in the Fragoa de Amor, written for the new Queen from Spain, he presents national types: serranas, pilgrims, nigger, monk, idiot. In the Ciganas we have a passing reference to ‘the white hands of Iseult,’ a lady already well known in Spanish and Portuguese literature. Dom Duardos is of course based entirely on a Spanish romance of chivalry. In O Juiz da Beira he returns to the escudeiro and alcouviteira; the figures are, however, thoroughly Portuguese with the exception of a new Christian from Castille. The title of the Nao de Amores already existed in Spanish literature141. After this we have a group of thoroughly Portuguese plays, those presented at Coimbra, the anticlerical Auto da Feira, the Triunfo do Inverno, O Clerigo da Beira. It is not till Amadis de Gaula that Vicente again has recourse to Spanish literature142, and we may be sure that if he had known of a Portuguese text he would have written his drama in Portuguese.
Although Vicente owed much to Spanish literature we have only to compare his plays with those of Juan del Enzina or Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, or his first attempts with his later dramas to realize his genius and originality. The variety of his plays is very striking and the farce Quem tem farelos? (1508?), the patriotic Exhortação (1513), the Barca trilogy (1517-9), the religious Auto da Alma (1518), the three-act Comedia de Rubena (1521), the character comedy Farsa de Ines Pereira (1523), the idyllic Dom Duardos (1525?) mark new departures in the development of his genius. No doubt his plays are ‘totally unlike any regular plays and rude both in design and execution143.’ Vicente divided them into religious plays (obras de devaçam), farces, comedies and tragicomedies, but the kinds overlap and there is nothing to separate some of the comedies and tragicomedies from the farces, while some of the farces are religious both in subject and occasion. How artificial the division was may be seen from the rubric to the Barca do Inferno, which informs us that the play is counted among the religious plays because the second and third parts (Barca do Purgatorio and Barca da Gloria) were represented in the Royal Chapel, although this first part was given in the Queen’s chamber, as though the subject and treatment of the three plays were not sufficient to class them together. Again, the rubric of the Romagem de Aggravados runs: ‘The following tragicomedy is a satire.’ Really only its length separates it from the early farces. Vicente’s plays were a development of the earlier Christmas, Holy Week and Easter representaciones, religious shows to which special pomp was given at King Manuel’s Court. When he began to write the classical drama was unknown and it is absurd to judge his work by the Aristotelean theory of the unities of time and place. His idea of drama was not dramatic action nor the development of character but realistic portrayal of types and the contrast between them. His first piece, Auto da Visitaçam, has not even dialogue—its alternative title is O Monologo do Vaqueiro—and for comic element it relies on the contrast between Court and country as shown by the herdsman’s gaping wonder. The Auto Pastoril Castelhano contains six shepherds and contrasts the serious mystical Gil with his ruder companions.
The action of the Auto dos Reis Magos is as simple as that of the two preceding plays. Quem tem farelos? however is a quite new development. ‘The argument,’ says the rubric, ‘is that a young squire called Aires Rosado played the viola and although his salary [as one of the Court] was very small he was continually in love.’ He is contrasted with another penniless escudeiro who gives himself martial airs and willingly speaks of the heroic deeds of Roncesvalles, but runs away if two cats begin to fight. Only five persons appear on the stage, but with considerable skill Vicente enlarges the scene so as to include a vivid picture of the second squire as described by his servant as well as the barking of dogs, mewing of cats and crowing of cocks and the conversation of Isabel with Rosado, which is conjectured from his answers. No doubt the two moços owe something to Sempronio and Parmeno of the Celestina, but this first farce is thoroughly Portuguese and gives us a concrete and living picture of Lisbon manners. Not all the farces have this unity. The Auto das Fadas loses itself in a long series of verses addressed to the Court. The Farsa dos Fisicos has no such extraneous matter: it confines itself to the lovelorn priest and the contrast between the four doctors. The Comedia do Viuvo is not a farce and only a comedy by virtue of its happy ending. A merchant of Burgos laments the death of his wife and is comforted by a kindly priest and by a friend who wishes that his own wife were as the merchant’s (the simple mediaeval contrast common in Vicente). Meanwhile Don Rosvel, Prince of Huxonia, has fallen in love with both the daughters of the merchant, whom he agrees to serve in all kinds of manual labour as Juan de las Brozas. His brother, Don Gilberto, arrives in search of him and a quaintly charming and technically skilful play ends with a double wedding (the Crown Prince of Portugal, present at the acting of this play, had to decide for Don Rosvel which daughter he should marry).
The Auto da Fama is Vicente’s second great hymn to the glory of Portugal. Portuguese Fame, in the person of a humble girl of Beira, is envied and wooed in vain by Castille, France and Italy—England and Holland were then scarcely in the running—and narrates in ringing verses the deeds of the Portuguese in the East, without, however, mentioning the great name of Albuquerque, a name which inspired many of the courtiers with more fear than affection. The Auto dos Quatro Tempos is a pastoral-religious play, the main theme being, as its title indicates, a contrast between the four seasons. David appears as a shepherd and Jupiter also takes a considerable part in the conversation. Action there is none.
Vicente’s satirical vein found excellent occasion in the ancient theme of scrutinizing the past lives of men as Death reaps them, high and low, but his profoundly religious temperament raises the Barcas into an atmosphere of sublime if gloomy splendour, which is surpassed in the Auto da Alma, the most perfect and consistent of his religious plays—even the symbolical character of the latter part can hardly be called a defect. In the Comedia de Rubena the development of Vicente’s art is perhaps more superficial than real. It is divided into three long scenes or acts and is thus more like a regular comedy than his other plays. The acts, however, are isolated, the action occupies fifteen years and occurs in Castille, Lisbon and Crete. English readers of the play must be struck by its resemblance to Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Written fifty-five years before Lawrence Twine’s The Patterne of Painful Adventures (1576) and eighty-seven before George Wilkins and William Shakespeare produced their play (1608), the Comedia de Rubena is in fact a link in a long chain beginning in a lost fifth century Greek romance concerning Apollonius of Tyre and continued after Gil Vicente’s death in Timoneda’s Tarsiana and in Pericles. Vicente, however, in all probability did not derive his Cismena, cold and chaste predecessor of Marina, from the Gesta Romanorum or the Libro de Apolonio but from the version in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, of which a translation, as we know, was early available in Portugal. After an exclusively Court piece, the Cortes de Jupiter, Vicente wrote the Farsa de Ines Pereira, in which there is more action and development of character than in his preceding, or indeed his subsequent, plays. He represents the aspirations and repentance of Ines, the ‘very flighty daughter of a woman of low estate.’ Despite the warnings of her sensible mother she rejects the suit of simple and uncouth Pero Marques for that of a gentleman (escudeiro) whose pretensions are far greater than his possessions. The mother gives them a house and retires to a small cottage. But the escudeiro married confirms the wisdom of the Sibyl Cassandra (i. 40). He keeps his wife shut up ‘like a nun of Oudivellas.’ The windows are nailed up, she is not allowed to leave the house even to go to church. Thus the hopes and ambitions of Ines Pereira de Grãa are tamed, although she was never a shrew144. Presently, however, the escudeiro resolves to cross over to Africa to win his knighthood:
ás partes dalem
Vou me fazer cavaleiro,
and he leaves his wife imprisoned in their house, the key being entrusted to the servant (moço). Ines, singing at her work, is declaring that if ever she have to choose another husband on ne m’y prendra plus when a letter arrives from her brother announcing that her husband, as he fled from battle towards Arzila, had been killed by a Moorish shepherd. The faithful Pero Marques again presses his suit. He is accepted and is made to suffer the whims and infidelity of the emancipated Ines. The question of women’s rights was a burning one in the sixteenth century.
Vicente’s versatility enabled him to laugh at his critics to the end of the chapter. In Dom Duardos he gave them an elaborate and very successful dramatization of a Spanish romance of chivalry. The treatment has both unity and lyrical charm. It was so successful that the experiment was repeated in 1533 with the earlier romance of Amadis de Gaula (1508), out of which Vicente wrought an equally skilful but less fascinating play145. But Vicente had not given up writing farces and the sojourn of Ines Pereira’s husband in town enables the author to introduce various Lisbon types in O Juiz da Beira. It indeed completely resembles the early farces, while the Auto da Festa with its peasant scene and allegorical Verdade is of the Auto da Fé type but adds the theme of the old woman in search of a husband. The Templo de Apolo, composed for a special Court occasion, shows no development, but in the Sumario we have a fuller religious play than he had hitherto written. It proves, like Dom Duardos, his power of concentration and his skill in seizing on and emphasizing essential points in a long action (the period here covered is from Adam to Christ146). It is closely moulded on the Bible and contains, besides an exquisite vilancete (Adorae montanhas), passages of noble poetry and soaring fervour—Eve’s invocation to Adam:
Ó como os ramos do nosso pomar
Ficam cubertos de celestes rosas (i. 314);
Job’s lament ‘Man that is born of woman’ (i. 324); the paraphrase or rather translation of ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ (i. 322). Nothing here, surely, to warrant the complaints of Sá de Miranda as to the desecration of the Scriptures. This play was followed by the Dialogo sobre a Ressurreiçam by way of epilogue; it is a conversation between three Jews and is treated in the cynical manner that Browning brought to similar scenes. The Sumario or Auto da Historia de Deos was acted before the Court at Almeirim and must have won the sincere admiration of the devout João III. If the courtiers were less favourably impressed they were mollified by the splendid display of the Nao de Amores with its much music, its Prince of Normandy and its miniature ship fully rigged. Vicente was now fighting an uphill battle and in the Divisa da Cidade de Coimbra he attempted a task beyond the strength of a poet and more suitable for a sermon such as Frei Heitor Pinto preached on the same subject: the arms of the city of Coimbra. Even Vicente could not make this a living play; it is, rather, a museum of antiquities and ends with praises of Court families. It is pathetic to find the merry satirist reduced to admitting (in the argument of this play) that merely farcical farces are not very refined. Yet we would willingly give the whole play for another brief farce such as Quem tem farelos?:
Ya sabeis, senhores,
Que toda a comedia começa em dolores,
E inda que toque cousas lastimeiras
Sabei que as farças todas chocarreiras
Não sam muito finas sem outros primores (ii. 108).
Fortunately he returned to the plain farce in Os Almocreves, the Auto da Feira and O Clerigo da Beira (which, however, ends with a series of Court references) with all his old wealth of satire, touches of comedy and vivid portraiture. He also returned to the pastoral play in the Serra da Estrella, while his exquisite lyrism flowers afresh in the Triunfo do Inverno, a tragicomedy which is really a medley of farces. It is not a great drama but it is a typical Vicentian piece, combining vividly sketched types with a splendid lyrical vein. Winter, that banishes the swallows and swells the voice of ocean streams, first triumphs on hills and sea and then Spring comes in singing the lovely lyric Del rosal vengo in the Serra de Sintra. The play ends on a serious and mystic note, for Spring’s flowers wither but those of the holy garden of God bloom without fading:
E o santo jardim de Deos
Florece sem fenecer.
The Auto da Lusitania is divided into two parts, the first of which is complete in itself and gives a description of a Jewish household at Lisbon, while the second is a medley which contains the celebrated scene of Everyman and Noman: Everyman seeks money, worldly honour, praise, life, paradise, lies and flattery; Noman is for conscience, virtue, truth. In the Romagem de Aggravados the fashionable and affected Court priest, Frei Paço, is the connecting link for a series of farcical scenes in which a peasant brings his son to become a priest, two noblemen discourse on love, two fishwives lament the excesses of the courtiers, Cerro Ventoso and Frei Narciso betray their mounting ambition, civil and ecclesiastic, the poor farmer Aparicianes implores Frei Paço to make a Court lady of his slovenly daughter, two nuns bewail their fate and two shepherdesses discuss their marriage prospects. The Auto da Mofina Mendes is especially celebrated because Mofina Mendes, personification of ill-luck, with her pot of oil is the forerunner of La Fontaine’s Pierrette et son pot au lait: it was perhaps suggested to Vicente by the tale of Doña Truhana’s pot of honey in El Conde Lucanor; the theme of counting one’s chickens before they are hatched also forms the subject of one of the pasos, entitled Las Aceitunas, of the goldbeater of Seville, Lope de Rueda147. Vicente’s piece consists, like some picture of El Greco, of a gloria, called, as Rueda’s scenes, a passo, in which appear the Virgin and the Virtues (Prudence, Poverty, Humility and Faith) and an earthly shepherd scene. It is thus a combination of farce and religious and pastoral play. Vicente’s last play, the Floresta de Enganos, is composed of scenes so disconnected that one of them is even omitted in the summary given after the first deceit: that in which a popular traditional theme, derived directly or indirectly from a French (perhaps originally Italian) source, Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, is presented, akin to that so piquantly narrated by Alarcón in El Sombrero de Tres Picos in the nineteenth century, the judge playing the part of the Corregidor and the malicious and sensible servant-girl that of the miller’s wife.
In these last plays we see little or no advance: there is no attempt at unity or development of plot. We cannot deny that the creator of the penniless-splendid nobleman and the mincing courtier-priest and the author of such touches as the death of Ines’ husband or the sudden ignominious flight of the judge possessed a true vein of comedy, but he remained to the end not technically a great dramatist but a wonderful lyric poet and a fascinating satirical observer of life. His influence was felt throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Portugal, by Camões and in the plays of Chiado, Prestes and a score of less celebrated dramatists, as well as in a considerable number of anonymous plays, but confined itself to the auto, which, combated by the followers of the classical drama and the Latin plays of the Jesuits, soon tended to deteriorate and lose its charm. In Spain his influence would seem to have been more widely felt, which is not surprising when we remember how many of his plays were Spanish in origin or language148. We may be sure that Lope de Rueda was acquainted with his plays and that several of them were known to Cervantes—the servant Benita insisting on telling her simple stories to her afflicted mistress is Sancho Panza to the life:
Benita. Diz que era un escudero....
Rubena. O quien no fuera nacida:
¿Viendome salir la vida
Paraste a contar patrañas?
Benita. Pues otra sé de un carnero....
Lope de Vega was likewise certainly familiar with some of Vicente’s plays. If we consider these passages in El Viaje del Alma, the representación moral contained in El Peregrino en su Patria (1604), we must be convinced that the trilogy of Barcas, the Auto da Alma, and perhaps the Nao de Amores were not unknown to him:
Alma para Dios criada
Y hecha a imagen de Dios, etc.;
Hoy la Nave del deleite
Se quiere hacer a la mar:
¿Hay quien se quiera embarcar?;
Esta es la Nave donde cabe
Todo contento y placer149.
The alleged imitation by Calderón in El Lirio y la Azucena is perhaps more doubtful. Vicente was already half forgotten in Calderon’s day. In the artificial literature of the eighteenth century he suffered total eclipse although Correa Garção was able to appreciate him, nor need we see any direct influence in that of the nineteenth150 except that on Almeida Garrett: the similar passages in Goethe’s Faust and Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius were no doubt purely accidental. Happily, however, we are able to point to a certain influence of the great national poet of Portugal on some of the Portuguese poets of the twentieth century. The promised edition of his plays will increase this influence and render him secure from that neglect which during three centuries practically deprived Portugal and the world of one of the most charming and inspired of the world’s poets.
Footnotes
6 Falamos do nosso Shakespeare, de Gil Vicente (A. Herculano, Historia da Inquisição em Portugal, ed. 1906, vol. I. p. 223). The references throughout are to the Hamburg 3 vol. 1834 edition.
7 See infra Bibliography, p. 86, Nos. 42, 62, 79.
8 Bibliography, Nos. 21, 24, 25, 26, 30, 51, 52, 59, 89.
9 Bibliography, Nos. 29, 48, 57, 66, 83, 95.
10 Bibliography, Nos. 53, 73, 82, 88, 97.
11 Bibliography, Nos. 44, 84, 90, 101, 102.
12 Guerra Junqueiro, Os Simples.
13 Cf. André de Resende, Gillo auctor et actor. (For the accurate text of this passage see C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Notas Vicentinas, I. p. 17.)
14 Os livros das obras que escritas vi (Letter of G. V. to King João III).
15 ‘E assi mandou de Castella e outras partes vir muitos ouriveis para fazerem arreos e outras cousas esmaltadas.’ (Garcia de Resende, Cronica del Rei D. João II, cap. 117.)
17 He argues that Vicente was not old enough to be King Manuel’s tutor, but in other passages he is clearly in favour of the date 1460 or 1452. He is born ‘considerably before’ 1470 (Revista de Historia, t. 21, p. 11), in 1460? (ib. p. 27), in 1452? (ib. pp. 28, 31, and t. 22, p. 155), ‘about 1460’ (t. 22, p. 150), he is from two to seven years younger than King Manuel, born in 1469 (t. 21, p. 35). He is nearly 80 in 1531 (ib. p. 30). His marriage is placed between 1484 and 1492, preferably in the years 1484-6 (ib. p. 35).
18 Gil Terron in the same year is alegre y bien asombrado (I. 12).
19 Cf. Nao de Amores (1527), Viejo, vuestro mundo es ido, and II. 478 (1529).
20 See A. Braamcamp Freire in Revista de Historia, t. 26, p. 123.
21 Grandes baxillas y pedraria (Canc. Geral, vol. III. (1913), p. 57).
22 Cf. Canc. Geral, vol. I. (1910), p. 259:
Vejam huns autos Damado,
Huũ judeu que foi queimado
No rressyo por seu mal.
23 There is a slight confusion. The ‘second night of the birth’ of the rubric may mean the night following that of the birth (June 6-7), i.e. the evening of June 7, or the second night after the birth, i.e. the evening of June 8; but the former is the more probable.
24 Damião de Goes, Chronica do felicissimo Rey Dom Emanuel, Pt I. cap. 69.
25 See A. Braamcamp Freire in Revista de Historia, vol. XXII. (1917), p. 124 and Critica e Historia, vol. I. (1910), p. 325; Brito Rebello, Gil Vicente (1902), p. 106-8.
26 Antología de poetas líricos castellanos, t. 7, p. clxiii.
27 Orígenes de la Novela, t. 3, p. cxlv.
28 Antol. t. 7, p. clxvi.
29 Ib. p. clxxvi.
30 Ib. p. clxiv.
31 Especially that of Garcia de Resende, who in one verse (185) of his Miscellanea mentions the goldsmiths and in the next verse the plays of Gil Vicente.
33 Cf. his earlier studies, in favour of identity, with his later works, maintaining cousinhood.
34 Cf. Obras, I. 154 (Jupiter is the god of precious stones), I. 93, 286; II. 38, 46, 47, 210, 216, 367, 384, 405; III. 67, 70, 86, 296, etc. Cf. passages in the Auto da Alma and especially the Farsa dos Almocreves. Vicente evidently sympathizes with the goldsmith to whom the fidalgo is in debt, and if the poet took the part of Diabo in the Auto da Feira (1528) the following passage gains in point if we see in it an allusion to the debts of courtiers to him as goldsmith:
Eu não tenho nem ceitil
E bem honrados te digo
E homens de muita renda
Que tem divedo comigo (I. 158).
35 The MS. note by a sixteenth century official written above the document appointing Gil Vicente to the post of Mestre da Balança should be conclusive as to the identity of poet and goldsmith: Gil Vte trouador mestre da balança (Registos da Cancellaria de D. Manuel, vol. XLII. f. 20 v. in the Torre do Tombo, Lisbon).
36 Garcia de Resende († 1536) was of opinion that it had no rival in Europe:
nam ha outra igual
na Christamdade no meu ver.
(Miscellanea, v. 281, ed. Mendes dos Remedios (1917), p. 97.)
It contained 5000 moradores (ibid.). In the days of King Duarte (1433-8) the number was 3000.
37 Cf. the dedication of Dom Duardos (folha volante of the Bib. Municipal of Oporto, N. 8. 74) to Prince João: ‘Como quiera Excelente Principe y Rey mui poderoso que las Comedias, Farças y Moralidades que he compuesto en servicio de la Reyna vuestra tia....’
38 The date 1509 is not barred by the reference to the Sergas de Esplandian, which certainly existed in an earlier edition than the earliest we now possess (1510). A certain Vasco Abul had given a girl at Alenquer a chain of gold for dancing a ballo vylam ou mourysco and could not get it back from the gentil bayladeyra. Gil Vicente contributes but a few lines: O parecer de gil vycente neste proceso de vasco abul á rraynha dona lianor.
39 It is absurd to argue that during the years of his chief activity as goldsmith he had not time to produce the sixteen plays that may be assigned to the years 1502-17.
40 Gil Vicente (1912), p. 11-13.
41 The dates in the rubrics are given in Roman figures and the alteration from MDV to MDIX is very slight.
42 Cf. Bartolomé Villalba y Estaña, El Pelegrino Curioso y Grandezas de España [printed from MS. of last third of sixteenth century]. Bibliófilos Españoles, t. 23, 2 t. 1886, 9, t. 2, p. 37: ‘Almerin, un lugar que los reyes de Portugal tienen para el ynvierno, con un bosque de muchas cabras, corzos y otros generos de caza.’
43 See A. Braamcamp Freire in Revista de Historia, vol. XXII. p. 129.
44 A. Braamcamp Freire in Rev. de Hist. vol. XXII. p. 133-4.
45 Luis Anriquez in Canc. Geral, vol. III. (1913), p. 106.
46 See Rev. de Hist. vol. XXII. p. 122; vol. XXIV. p. 290.
47 E.g. the words ahotas and chapado and the expression en velloritas (I. 41), cf. Enzina, Egloga I.: ni estaré ya tendido en belloritas = in clover, lit. in cowslips: belloritas de jacinto (Egl. III.).
48 A. Braamcamp Freire in Rev. de Hist. vol. XXIV. p. 290.
49 There are, however, several such psalms in the works of Enzina.
50 Cf. I. 85: huele de dos mil maneras with Enzina, Egloga II: y ervas de dos mil maneras. In the Auto da Alma, probably written about this time, there are imitations of Gomez Manrique (c. 1415-90). Cf. the passage in the Exhortação.
51 That the illness of the Queen would not prevent the entertainment is proved by the fact that in the month before her death King Manuel was present at a fight between a rhinoceros and an elephant in a court in front of Lisbon’s India House. We do not know if Vicente was present nor what he thought of this new thing.
52 In December 1517 El Bachiller de la Pradilla published some verses in praise of la muy esclarecida Señora Infanta Madama Leonor, Rey[na] de Portugal (v. Menéndez y Pelayo, Antología, t. 6, p. cccxxxviii).
53 He argues that such a form as MD & viii was never used and must be a misprint for MDxviii.
54 Cf. also the resemblance of certain passages in the Auto da Alma and in the Auto da Barca da Gloria (1519). They must strike any reader of the two plays.
55 Goes, Chronica, IV. 34.
56 Garcia de Resende, Hida da Infanta Dona Beatriz pera Saboya in Chronica...del Rey Dom Ioam II, ed. 1752, f. 99 V.
57 Gil Vicente, Á morte del Rei D. Manuel (III. 347).
58 Gil Vicente, Romance (III. 350).
59 Goes says generally that King Manuel foi muito inclinado a letras e letrados (Chronica, 1619 ed., f. 342. Favebat plurimum literis, says Osorio, De rebus, 1561, p. 479).
60 II. 4: Foi feita ao muito poderoso e nobre Rei D. João III. sendo principe, era de MDXXI (rubric of Comedia de Rubena).
61 II. 364. Although ‘good wine needs no bush’ the custom of hanging a branch above tavern doors still prevails.
62 A. Braamcamp Freire in Rev. de Hist. vol. XXII. p. 162.
63 Id. ib. vol. XXIV. p. 307. It is astonishing how slight errors in the rubrics of Vicente’s plays have been permitted to survive, just as Psalm LI, of which Vicente perhaps at about this time wrote a remarkable paraphrase, still appears in all editions of his works as Ps. L.
64 Ib. vol. XXIV. p. 312-3.
65 Th. Braga, Historia da Litteratura Portuguesa. II. Renascença (1914), p. 85.
66 J. I. Brito Rebello, Gil Vicente (1902), p. 64.
67 H. Thomas, The Palmerin Romances (London, 1916), p. 10-12.
68 M. Menéndez y Pelayo, Antología, t. 7, p. cci; Oríg. de la Novela, I. cclxvii: toda la pieza es un delicioso idilio.
69 Rev. de Hist. vol. XXIV. p. 315.
70 It should be noted that the lines in Dom Duardos (II. 212):
Consuelo vete de ahi
No perdas tiempo conmigo
are from the song in the Comedia de Rubena (1521):
Consuelo vete con Dios (II. 53).
71 Cf. O Clerigo da Beira: não fazem bem [na corte] senão a quem menos faz (III. 320); Auto da Festa: os homens verdadeiros não são tidos nũa palha, etc.
72 Vejo minha morte em casa say the verses to the Conde de Vimioso; La muerte puesta a mis lados says the Templo de Apolo.
73 Auto da Natural Invençam (Lisboa, 1917), pp. 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 88, 89.
74 Este nome pos-lho o vulgo (III. 4). Cf. the title Os Almocreves.
75 Rol dos livros defesos (1551) ap. C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Notas Vicentinas, i.. p. 31. We might assume that the second part of O Clerigo da Beira (III. 250-9) was printed separately under the title Auto de Pedreanes but for the words por causa das matinas.
76 Ib. p. 30-1.
77 The probability is shown by the fact that the idea of their identity had occurred to me before reading the same suggestion made by Snr Braamcamp Freire in the Revista de Historia.
78 See Notas Vicentinas, I. (1912). The Auto da Feira answers in some respects to Cardinal Aleandro’s description of the Jubileu de Amores, and Rome (the Church, not the city) might conceivably have been crowned with a Cardinal’s hat, but Aleandro’s letter refutes this suggestion: uno principal che parlava... fingeasi Vescovo. Rome in the Auto da Feira (I. 162) is a senhora. One can only say that the Auto da Feira may perhaps have been adapted for the occasion, with an altered title, Spanish being added, to suit the foreign audience.
79 E como sempre isto guardasse Este mui leal autor Até que Deos enviasse O Principe nosso senhor Nam quis que outrem o gozasse (III. 276).
80 The familiarity with which the Nuncio is treated would be more suitable if he was the Portuguese D. Martinho de Portugal, but then the date would have to be after 1527.
81 Cf. II. 343: Salga esotra ave de pena... Son perdices and Auto da Festa, p. 101. The latter text is corrupt (penitas for peitas, and cousas fritas has ousted the required rhyme juizes).
82 The line nega se m’eu embeleco occurs here and in the Serra da Estrella (1527). Arguments as to date from such repetitions are not entirely groundless. Cf. com saudade suspirando (Cortes de Jupiter, 1521) and sam suspiros de saudade (Pranto de Maria Parda, 1522); Que dirá a vezinhança? III. 21 (1508-9), A vezinhança que dirá? III. 34 (1509); Ó demo que t’eu encomendo, III. 99 (1511), Ó diabo que t’eu encomendo, II. 362 (1513). The Exhortação (1513), which has passages similar to those in the Farsa de Ines Pereira (1523) and the Pranto de Maria Parda (1522), probably became a kind of national anthem and was touched up for each performance. Curiously, the mention of a pedra d’estrema in the Pranto and in the Auto da Festa might correspond to a first (1521) and second (1525) revision of the Exhortação.
83 The very success of his plays incited emulation. A play written in Latin, Hispaniola, was acted at the Portuguese Court before his death (Gallardo, ap. Sousa Viterbo, A Litt. Hesp. em Portugal (1915), p. xxiv).
84 See A. Braamcamp Freire in Rev. de Hist. vol. XXIV. p. 331.
85 Francisco Alvarez arrived at the Court at Coimbra in the late summer of 1527 and he says: nam se tardou muito que el Rey nosso senhor se partisse com sua corte via dalmeirim. Verdadeira Informaçam (1540), modern reprint, p. 191.
86 Rev. de Hist. vol. XXV. p. 89.
87 According to Snr Braamcamp Freire this play must be assigned to the months between September 1529 and February 1530.
88 O mandei a V. A. por escrito até lhe Deos dar descanso e contentamento... pera que por minha arte lhe diga o que aqui falece (III. 388).
89 In this letter, written in the very year of the first Bull for the introduction of the Inquisition into Portugal, Vicente uses the expression ‘May I be burnt if.’
90 The line A quien contaré mis quejas (II. 147) is repeated from the Trovas addressed to King João in 1527. It is taken from a poem by the Marqués de Astorga printed in the Cancionero General (1511):
¿A quien contaré mis quexas
Si a ti no?
Cf. Comedia de Rubena (II. 6): ¿A quien contaré mi pena? The comical rôle of the Justiça Maior may have been taken by Garcia de Resende, who added acting to his other accomplishments. He was 66, and he died at Evora in this year.
91 See A. Braamcamp Freire in Rev. de Hist. vol. XXVI. p. 122-3.
92 From Gil Vicente’s epitaph written by himself.
93 Garcia de Resende (1470-1536), Miscellanea, 1752 ed., f. 113.
94 André de Resende, Genethliacon Principis Lusitani (1532), ap. C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Notas Vicentinas, I. (1912), p. 17.
95 Chronica do fel. Rey Dom Emanvel, Pt IV. cap. 84 (1619 ed., f. 341): Trazia continuadamente na sua corte choquarreiros castelhanos, com os motes & ditos dos quaes folgaua, nam porque gostasse tanto do q̃ diziam como o fazia das dissimuladas reprehensões [jocis perstringere mores] q̃ com geitos e palauras trocadas dauam aos moradores de sua casa fazendolhes conhecer as manhas, viços & modos que tinhão, de que se muitos tirauam & emmendauam, tomando o q̃ estes truães diziam com graças por espelho do que aviam de fazer.
96 Auto da Cananea (1534).
97 Auto da Lusitania.
98 Sermão (III. 346).
99 Carta (III. 388).
100 Auto da Mofina Mendes (I. 120, 121).
101 Auto da Cananea (I. 365).
102 Sumario da Historia de Deos (I. 338).
103 I. 69. His own knowledge of the Bible was extensive and he often follows it closely, e.g. Auto da Sibila Cassandra (I. 47, 48 = Genesis i.).
104 III. 337, 338. His quarrel with the monks was that they did not serve the State. Cf. Fragoa de Amor (II. 345); Exhortação da Guerra (II. 367).
105 Cf. the passage in the Sumario da Historia de Deos in which Abraham complains that men worship stocks and stones and have no knowledge of God, criador dos spiritos, eternal spirito (I. 326).
106 III. 284. A critic upbraided Wordsworth for saying that his heart danced with the daffodils—no doubt Southey’s ‘my bosom bounds’ was more poetical—yet Shakespeare and Vicente had used the phrase before him.
107 Carta (III. 388).
108 Cortes de Jupiter (II. 405).
109 Romagem de Aggravados (II. 507).
110 The preparation of his plays for the press was, he says, a burden in his old age. Some of the plays had been acted in more than one year, others had been composed years before they were acted, others had been printed separately. Hence the uncertainty of some of the rubric dates.
111 Triunfo do Inverno (1529), II. 447.
112 Romagem de Aggravados (1533), II. 524-5.
113 Auto Pastoril Portugues (1523), I. 129.
114 Farsa dos Almocreves (1527), III. 219.
115 Triunfo do Inverno (1529), II. 487.
116 Auto da Feira (1528), I. 175.
117 See the Fragoa de Amor and the Auto da Festa.
118 iii. 289 (1532).
119 ii. 363 (as early as 1513).
120 ii. 467-75.
121 iii. 122.
122 iii. 148 (cf. i. 40, iii. 41).
123 Goes, Chronica do fel. Rey Dom Emanvel, Pt i. cap. 33 (1619 ed., f. 20).
124 E.g. Novella 35: sotto apparenza onesta di religione ogni vizio di gola, di lussuria e degli altri, como loro appetito desidera, sanza niuno mezzo usano; Novella 36: hanno meno discrezione che gli animali irrazionali.
125 Auto da Festa, ed. 1906, p. 115.
126 Vicente, who could write such pure and idiomatic Portuguese, often used peculiar Spanish, not perhaps so much from ignorance as from a wish to make the best of both languages. Thus he uses the personal infinitive and makes words rhyme which he must have known could not possibly rhyme in Spanish, e.g. parezca with cabeza (Portug. pareça—cabeça). So mucho rhymes with fruto, demueño with sueño.
127 The miser, o verdadeiro avaro (iii. 287), is barely mentioned. Perhaps Vicente felt that he would have been too much of an abstract type, not a living person.
128 The boastful Spaniard appears (in Goethe’s Italienische Reise) in the Rome Carnival at the end of the eighteenth century.
129 There are abundant signs of the cosmopolitanism of Lisbon: A Basque and a Castilian tavernkeeper, a Spanish seller of vinegar and a red-faced German friar are mentioned, while Spaniards, Jews, Moors, negroes, a Frenchman, an Italian are among Vicente’s dramatis personae.
130 It is very curious to find echoes of Enzina in Vicente’s apparently quite personal prose as well as in his poetry. No ay cosa que no esté dicha, says Enzina, and Vicente repeats the wise quotation and imitates the whole passage. Enzina addressing the Catholic Kings speaks of himself as muy flaca para navegar por el gran mar de vuestras alabanzas. Vicente similarly speaks of ‘crowding more sail on his poor boat.’ Enzina, in his dedication to Prince Juan, mentions, like Vicente, maliciosos and maldizientes.
131 In this play the French tais-toi is written tétoi. In an age of few books such phonetic spelling must have been common. It has been suggested that the vair (grey) of early French poetry was mistaken for vert (green). The green eyes of the heroines in Portuguese literature from the Cancioneiro da Vaticana to Almeida Garrett would thus be based not on reality but, like Cinderella’s glass slippers, on a confusion of homonyms (see Alfred Jeanroy, Origines de la poésie lyrique en France, p. 329).
132 See his Arte de Poesía Castellana, ap. Menéndez y Pelayo, Antología, t. 5, p. 32.
133 Os autos de Gil Vicente resentem-se muito dos Mysterios franceses. This was, in 1890, the opinion of Sousa Viterbo (A Litteratura Hespanhola em Portugal (1915), p. ix), but surely Menéndez y Pelayo’s view is more correct.
134 In Resende’s Miscellanea the line nõ hos quer deos jũtos ver (1917 ed., p. 16) reads in the 1752 ed., f. 105 v. ja hos quer.
135 Cf. Tratado tercero: llevandolo a la boca començó a dar en el tan fieros bocados (1897 ed., p. 50) and Quem tem farelos?: e chanta nelle bocado coma cão (i. 7).
136 The Canc. Geral has a Pater noster grosado por Luys anrryquez, vol. iii. (1913), p. 87.
137 Antología, t. 7, pp. clxxii, clxxiv.
138 Antología, t. 2, p. 6.
139 i. 298. Vuelta vuelta los Franceses from the romance Domingo era de Ramos, la Pasion quieren decir.
140 Comedia de Rubena, ii. 40. The earliest known edition of the Spanish version of Jacopo Caviceo’s Il Pellegrino (1508) is dated 1527 but that mentioned in Fernando Colón’s catalogue (no. 4147) was no doubt earlier. In 1521 Vicente can already bracket the Spanish translation with the popular Carcel de Amor printed in 1492, and indeed it ran to many editions. Its full title was Historia de los honestos amores de Peregrino y Ginebra. Valdés (Dialogo de la Lengua) ranks El Pelegrino as a translation with Boscán’s version of Il Cortegiano: estan mui bien romançados.
141 E.g. the Nao de Amor of Juan de Dueñas.
142 The Everyman-Noman theme in the Auto da Lusitania is, like that of Mofina Mendes, common to many countries and old as the hills.
143 Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe (Paris, 1839), vol. i. p. 206.
144 Cf. the story del mancebo que casó con una mujer muy fuerte et muy brava in Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (c. 1535). Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was written exactly a century after Ines Pereira; the anonymous Taming of a Shrew in 1594.
145 The author of a sixteenth century Spanish play published in Biblióf. Esp. t. 6 (1870) declares that, in order to write it, he has ‘trastornado todo Amadis y la Demanda del Sancto Grial de pe a pa.’ The result, according to the colophon, is ’un deleitoso jardin de hermosas y olientes flores,’ a description which would better suit a Vicente-play.
146 Cf. the twelfth century Représentation d’Adam. The Sumario has 18 figures. The Auto da Feira has 22, but over half of these consist of a group of peasants from the hills.
147 Obras (1908), t. 2, p. 217-24.
148 The anonymous Tragicomedia Alegórica del Paraiso y del Inferno (Burgos, 1539) followed hard upon his death. It is not the work of Vicente, who, although in his Spanish he used allen, would not have translated nas partes de alem into an African town: en Allen.
149 3a impr. (Madrid, 1733), p. 35; p. 37 (the 1733 text has Oi and Ai); p. 39.
150 As late as 1870 Dr Theophilo Braga could say ‘Nobody now studies Vicente’ (Vida de Gil Vicente, p. 59).
COPILACAM
DE TODALAS OBRAS
DE GIL VICENTE, A QVAL SE
reparte em cinco Liuros. O Primeyro he de todas suas
cousas de deuaçam. O segundo as Comedias. O terceyro
as Tragicomedias. No quarto as Farsas.
No quinto, às obras
meudas.
(;)
¶Vam emmendadas polo Sancto Officio,
como se manda no Cathalogo
deste Regno.
¶
¶Foy impresso em a muy nobre & sempre leal Cidade de Lixboa, por Andres Lobato.
Anno de M. D. Lxxxyj
¶Foy visto polos Deputados da Sancta Inquisiçam
COM PRIVILEGIO REAL.
(⁂)
¶E la taxado em papel a reis
TITLE-PAGE OF THE SECOND (1586) EDITION OF GIL VICENTE’S WORKS