Four Plays of Gil Vicente

by Gil Vicente

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 sun[130]' 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 Portuguese[131]. 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 Enzina[132], 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 name[133]. 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 kingdom[134]. 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 Portuguese[136], 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 excelled[137], 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 metal[138].

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 romances[139], 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 Amador[140]. 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 literature[141]. 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 literature[142], 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 execution[143].' 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 shrew[144]. 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 play[145]. 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 Christ[146]). 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 Rueda[147]. 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 language[148]. 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 placer[149].

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 nineteenth[150] 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.