This is one of the most famous of those lively farces with which Gil Vicente for a quarter of a century delighted the Portuguese Court and which still hold the reader by their vividness and charm. Its fame rests on the portraiture of the poverty-stricken but magnificent nobleman who has been a favourite object of satire with writers in the Peninsula since the time of Martial, and who in a poem of the Cancioneiro Geral is described in almost the identical words of Vicente's prefatory note:
o gram estado
e a renda casi nada
(Arrenegos que que fez Gregoryo Affonsso).
An alternative title of the play is Auto do Fidalgo Pobre, but the extremely natural presentment of the two carriers in the second part justifies the more popular name. The Court, fleeing from plague at Lisbon, was in the celebrated little university town of Coimbra on the Mondego and here Gil Vicente in the following year staged his Divisa da Cidade de Coimbra, the Farsa dos Almocreves, and (in October) the Tragicomedia da Serra da Estrella and Sá de Miranda, in open rivalry, produced his Fabula do Mondego. But Gil Vicente was not to be silenced by the introduction of the new poetry from Italy and to these two years, 1526 and 1527, belong no less than seven (or perhaps eight) of his plays. Yet what a difference in his own position and in the state of the nation since his first farce—Quem tem farelos? twenty years before! The magnificent King Manuel was dead, and his son, the more care-ridden João III, was on the throne:
tão ocupado
co'este Turco, co'este Papa
co'esta França.
There was plague and famine in the land. The discovery of a direct route to the East and its apparently inexhaustible wealth had not brought prosperity to the Portuguese provinces. There the chief effect had been to make men discontented with their lot and to lure away even the humblest workers to seek their fortune and often to find death or a far less independent poverty:
até os pastores
hão de ser d'el-Rei samica.
The result was that the old rustic jollity which Vicente had known so well in his youth was dying out, and the very songs of the peasants took a plaintive air:
E no mais triste ratinho
s'enxergava hũa alegria
que agora não tem caminho.
Se olhardes as cantigas
do prazer acostumado
todas tem som lamentado,
carregado de fadigas,
longe do tempo passado.
O d' então era cantar
e bailar como ha de ser,
o cantar pera folgar,
o bailar pera prazer,
que agora é mao d'achar[154].
Nor could it be expected that the rich parvenu, the mushroom courtier, the fidalgo 'que não sabe se o é,' the palace page fresh from keeping goats in the serra, the Court chaplain anxious to hide his humble origin, would greatly relish Vicente's plays which satirized them and in which rustic scenes and songs and memories appeared at every turn. It was much like mentioning the rope in the house of the hanged, and these dainty and sophisticated persons would turn with relief to the revival of the more decorous ancient drama inaugurated by Trissino in Italy and in Portugal by Sá de Miranda.