[210] Andrés Rey de Artieda was born in 1549 and died in 1613. His youth was one of rare promise. Though not yet fourteen years old when Gil Polo wrote the Diana enamorada, he is introduced to us as a poet in the Canto del Turia:—
y prometernos han sus tiernas flores
frutos entre los buenos los mejores.
This phrase may have been in Cervantes's mind when writing of his own play, La Confusa: "la cual, con paz sea dicho de cuantas comedias de capa y espada hasta hoy se han representado, bien puede tener lugar señalado par buena entre las mejores" (see the Adjunta al Parnaso).
Artieda graduated in arts at the University of Valencia in 1563, and studied later at Lérida and Tolosa, taking his degree as doctor of both civil and canonical law at the age of twenty. This brilliant academic success was received con aplauso y pronósticos extraños, and a great future seemed to await him. However, he was something of a rolling stone. He practised for a short while at the bar, but abandoned the profession in disgust and entered the army. Here, again, he seemed likely to carry all before him. In his first campaign he was promoted at a bound to the rank of captain, but his luck was now run out. Like Cervantes, he received three wounds at Lepanto. He was present at the relief of Cyprus, and served under Parma in the Low Countries. His intrepidity was proverbial, and he is said to have swum across the Ems in midwinter, his sword gripped between his teeth, under the enemy's fire. These heroic feats do not appear to have brought him advancement, and, in the Viaje del Parnaso (cap. iii.), Cervantes, who would seem to have known him personally, speaks of Artieda grown old as—
Más rico de valor que de moneda.
Artieda is said to have written plays entitled El Príncipe vicioso, Amadís de Gaula, and Los Encantos de Merlín: he is the author of a mediocre tragedy, Los Amantes (Valencia, 1581) which may have been read by Tirso de Molina before he wrote Los Amantes de Teruel. Artieda published an anthology of his verses under the pseudonym of Artemidoro: Discursos, epístolas y epigramas de Artemidoro (Zaragoza, 1605). Some passages in this collection express the writer's hostility to the new drama, and betray a certain pique at the success of his former friend, Lope de Vega. Lope, however, praises Artieda very generously in the Laurel de Apolo (silva ii.).
[211] Gaspar Gil Polo published the Diana enamorada at Valencia in 1564. The Priest in Don Quixote decided that it should "be preserved as if it came from Apollo himself": see vol. iii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1901), p. 51. It is unquestionably a work of unusual merit in its kind, but some deduction must be made from Cervantes's hyperbolical praise: he evidently succumbed to the temptation of playing on the words Polo and Apollo.
Gaspar Gil Polo is said by Ticknor to have been professor of Greek at Valencia. There was a Gil Polo who held the Greek chair in the University of that city between 1566 and 1574: but his name was not Gaspar. Nicolás Antonio and others maintain that the author of the Diana enamorada was the celebrated lawyer, Gaspar Gil Polo, who appeared to plead before the Cortes in 1626. This Gaspar Gil Polo was a mere boy when the Diana enamorada was issued sixty-two years earlier. He was probably the son of the author: see Justo Pastor Fuster, Biblioteca Valenciana de las escritores que florecieron hasta nuestros días (Valencia, 1827-1830), vol. i., pp. 150-155, and—more especially—Professor Hugo Albert Rennert, The Spanish Pastoral Romances (Baltimore, 1892), p. 31.
As already stated in note 91, Gil Polo contributed a sonnet to Girón y de Rebolledo's Pasión, which appeared a year before the Diana enamorada. Another of his sonnets is found in Sempere's Carolea (1560). In the Serao de Amor, Timoneda speaks of him as a celebrated poet; but, as we see from the Canto de Calíope itself, these flourishes and compliments often mean next to nothing. It is somewhat strange that Gil Polo, who is said to have died at Barcelona in 1591, did not issue a sequel to his Diana enamorada during the twenty-seven years of life which remained to him after the publication of the First Part in 1564. At the end of the Diana enamorada he promised a Second Part as clearly as Cervantes, after him, promised a Second Part of the Galatea: "Las quales (fiestas) ... y otras cosas de gusto y de provecho están tratadas en la otra parte deste libro, que antes de muchos días, placiendo á Dios, será impresa." Gil Polo is believed to have been absorbed by his official duties as Maestre Racional of the Royal Court in the Kingdom of Valencia. His Canto del Turia, inserted in the third book of the Diana enamorada, is one of the models—perhaps the chief model—of the present Canto de Calíope. Cervantes follows Gil Polo very closely.
[212] The dramatist, Cristóbal de Virués, was born in 1550 and died in 1610. Like Cervantes and Artieda, he fought at Lepanto. His Obras trágicas y líricas (Madrid, 1609) are more interesting than his somewhat repulsive Historia del Monserrate (Madrid, 1587-1588) which Cervantes praises beyond measure: see note 2.