Íñigo de Mendoza, a gallant and a Franciscan, appears as a disciple of Mena and Gómez Manrique in his Vita Christi, which halts at the Massacre of the Innocents. Fray Íñigo is too prone to digressions, and to misplaced satire mimicked from Mingo Revulgo, yet his verses have a pleasing, unconventional charm in their adaptation to devout purpose of such lyric forms as the romance and the villancico. His fellow-monk, Ambrosio Montesino, Isabel's favourite poet, conveys to Spain the Italian realism of Jacopone da Todi in his Visitación de Nuestra Señora, and in hymns fitted to the popular airs preserved in Asenjo Barbieri's Cancionero Musical de los siglos xv. y xvi. This embarrassing condition, joined to the writer's passion for conciseness, results in hard effects; yet, at his best, he pipes "a simple song for thinking hearts," and, as Menéndez y Pelayo, the chief of Spanish critics, observes, Montesino's historic interest lies in his suffusing popular verse with the spirit of mysticism, and in his transmuting the popular forms of song into artistic forms.
Space fails for contemporary authors of esparsas, decires, resquestas, more or less ingenious; but we cannot omit the name of the Carthusian, Juan de Padilla (1468-?1522), who suffers from an admirer's indiscretion in calling him "the Spanish Homer." His Retablo de la Vida de Cristo versifies the Saviour's life in the manner of Juvencus, and his more elaborate poem, Los doce triunfos de los doce Apóstoles, strives to fuse Dante's severity with Petrarch's grace. Rhetorical out of season, and tending to abuse his sonorous vocabulary, Padilla indulges in verbal eccentricities and in sudden drops from altisonance to familiarity; but in his best passages—his journey through hell and purgatory, guided by St. Paul—he excels by force of vision, by his realisation of the horror of the grave, and by his vigorous transcription of the agonies of the lost. The allegorical form is again found in the Infierno del Amor of Garci Sánchez de Badajoz, who ended life in a madhouse. His presentation of Macías, Rodríguez del Padrón, Santillana, and Jorge Manrique in thrall to love's enchantments, was to the taste of his time, and a poem with the same title, Infierno del Amor, made the reputation of a certain Guevara, whose scattered songs are full of picaresque and biting wit. For the rest, Sánchez de Badajoz depends upon his daring, almost blasphemous humour, his facility in improvising, and his mastery of popular forms.
Of the younger poetic generation, Pedro Manuel de Urrea (1486-? 1530) is the most striking artist. His Peregrinación á Jersualén and his Penitencia de Amor are practically inaccessible, but his Cancionero displays an ingenious and versatile talent. Urrea's aristocratic spirit revolts at the thought that in this age of printing his songs will be read "in cellars and kitchens," and the publication of his verses seems due to his mother. His Fiestas de Amor, translated from Petrarch, are tedious, but he has a perfect mastery of the popular décima, and his villancicos abound in quips of fancy matched by subtleties of expression. Urrea fails when he closes a stanza with a Latin tag—a dubious adonic, such as Dominus tecum. He fares better with his modification of Jorge Manrique's stanza, approving his skill in modulatory effects. His most curious essay is his verse rendering of the Celestina's first act; for here he anticipates the very modes of Lope de Vega and of Tirso de Molina. But in his own day he was not the sole practitioner in dramatic verse.
A distinct progress in this direction is made by Rodrigo Cota de Maguaque (fl. 1490), a convert Jew, who incited the mob to massacre his brethren. Wrongly reputed the author of the Coplas del Provincial, of Mingo Revulgo, and of the Celestina, Cota is the parent of fifty-eight quatrains, in the form of a burlesque wedding-song, recently discovered by M. Foulché-Delbosc. But Cota's place in literature is ensured by his celebrated Diálogo entre el Amor y un Viejo. In seventy stanzas Love and the Ancient argue the merits of love, till the latter yields to the persuasion of the god, who then derides the hoary amorist. The dialogue is eminently dramatic both in form and spirit, the action convincing, clear, and rapid, while the versification is marked by an exquisite melody. It is not known that the Diálogo was ever played, yet it is singularly fitted for scenic presentation.
The earliest known writer for the stage among the moderns was, as we have already said, Gómez Manrique; but earlier spectacles are frequently mentioned in fifteenth-century chronicles. These may be divided into entremeses, a term loosely applied to balls and tourneys, accompanied by chorus-singing; and into momos, entertainments which took on a more literary character, and which found excuses for dramatic celebrations at Christmas and Eastertide. Gómez Manrique had made a step forward, but his pieces are primitive and fragmentary compared to those of Juan del Encina (1468-1534). A story given in the scandalous Pleito del Manto reports that Encina was the son of Pero Torrellas, and another idle tale declares him to be Juan de Tamayo. The latter is proved a blunder; the former is discredited by Encina's solemn cursing of Torrellas. Encina passed from the University of Salamanca to the household of the Duke of Alba (1493), was present next year at the siege of Granada, and celebrated the victory in his Triunfo de fama. Leaving for Italy in 1498, he is found at Rome in 1502, a favourite with that Spanish Pope, Alexander VI. He returned to Spain, took orders, and sang his first mass at Jerusalem in 1519, at which date he was appointed Prior of the Monastery of León. He is thought to have died at Salamanca.
Encina began writing in his teens, and has left us over a hundred and seventy lyrics, composed before he was twenty-five years old. Nearly eighty pieces, with musical settings by the author, are given in Asenjo Barbieri's Cancionero Musical. His songs, when undisfigured by deliberate conceits, are full of devotional charm. Still, Encina abides with us in virtue of his eclogues, the first two being given in the presence of his patrons at Alba de Tormes, probably in 1492. His plays are fourteen in number, and were undoubtedly staged. Ticknor would persuade us that the seventh and eighth, though really one piece, "with a pause between," were separated by the poet "in his simplicity." Even Encina's simplicity may be overstated, and Ticknor's "pause" must have been long: for the seventh eclogue was played in 1494, and the eighth in 1495. His eclogues are eclogues only in name, being dramatic presentations of primitive themes, with a distinct but simple action. The occasion is generally a feast-day, and the subject is sometimes sacred. Yet not always so: the Égloga de Fileno dramatises the shepherd's passion for Lefira, and ends with a suicide suggested by the Celestina. In like wise, Encina's Plácida y Vitoriano, involving two attempted suicides and one scabrous scene, introduces Venus and Mercury as characters. Again, the Aucto del Repelón dramatises the adventures in the market-place of two shepherds, Johan Paramas and Piernicurto; while Cristino y Febea exhibits the ignominious downfall of a would-be hermit in phrases redolent of Cota's Diálogo. Simple as the motives are, they are skilfully treated, and the versification, especially in Plácida y Vitoriano, is pure and elegant. Encina elaborates the strictly liturgical drama to its utmost point, and his younger contemporary, Lucas Fernández, makes no further progress, for the obvious reason that no novelty was possible without incurring a charge of heresy. As Sr. Cotarelo y Mori has pointed out, the sacred drama remains undeveloped till the lives of saints and the theological mysteries are exploited by men of genius. Meanwhile, Encina has begun the movement which culminates in the autos of Calderón.
In another direction, the Spanish version of Amadís de Gaula (1508) marks an epoch. This story was known to Ayala and three other singers in Baena's chorus; and the probability is that the lost original was written in Portuguese by Joham de Lobeira (1261-1325), who uses in the Colocci-Brancuti Canzoniere (No. 230) the same ritournelle that Oriana sings in Amadís. García Ordóñez de Montalvo (fl. 1500) admits that three-fourths of his book is mere translation; and it may be that he was not the earliest Spaniard to annex the story, which, in the first instance, derives from France. Amadís of Gaul is a British knight, and, though the geography is bewildering, "Gaul" stands for Wales, as "Bristoya" and "Vindilisora" stand for Bristol and Windsor. The chronology is no less puzzling, for the action occurs "not many years after the Passion of our Redeemer." Briefly, the book deals with the chequered love of Amadís for Oriana, daughter of Lisuarte, King of Britain. Spells incredible, combats with giants, miraculous interpositions, form the tissue of episode, till fidelity is rewarded, and Amadís made happy.
Cervantes' Barber, classing the book as "the best in that kind," saved it from the holocaust, and posterity has accepted the Barber's sentence. Amadís is at least the only chivalresque novel that man need read. The style is excellent, and, though the tale is too long-drawn, the adventures are interesting, the supernatural machinery is plausibly arranged, and the plot is skilfully directed. Later stories are mostly burlesques of Amadís: the giants grow taller, the monsters fiercer, the lakes deeper, the torments sharper. In his Sergas de Esplandián, Montalvo fails when he attempts to take up the story at the end of Amadís. One tedious sequel followed another till, within half a century, we have a thirteenth Amadís. The best of its successors is Luis Hurtado's (or, perhaps, Francisco de Moraes') Palmerín de Inglaterra, which Cervantes' Priest would have kept in such a casket as "that which Alexander found among Darius' spoils, intended to guard the works of Homer." Nor is this mere irony. Burke avowed in the House of Commons that he had spent much time over Palmerín, and Johnson wasted a summer upon Felixmarte de Hircania. Wearisome as the kind was, its popularity was so unbounded that Hieronym Sempere, in the Caballería cristiana, applied the chivalresque formula to religious allegory, introducing Christ as the Knight of the Lion, Satan as the Knight of the Serpent, and the Apostles as the Twelve Knights of the Round Table. Of its class, Amadís de Gaula is the first and best.
From an earlier version of Amadís derives the Cárcel de Amor of Diego San Pedro, the writer of some erotic verses in the Cancionero de burlas. San Pedro tells the story of the loves of Leriano and Laureola, mingled with much allegory and chivalresque sentiment. The construction is weak, but the style is varied, delicate, and distinguished. Ending with a panegyric on women, "who, no less than cardinals, bequeath us the theological virtues," the book was banned by the Inquisition. But nothing stayed its course, and, despite all prohibitions, it was reprinted times out of number. The Cárcel de Amor ends with a striking scene of suicide, which was borrowed by many later novelists.