Portuguese literature
It was, however, from Spain that the idea of his _autos_ first came
to him, as the direct imitations of Juan del Enzina (1469?-1529?) in
Vicente’s early pieces and the explicit statement of Garcia de Resende
in his _Miscellania_ prove: he speaks of the _representações_ of very
eloquent style and new devices invented in Portugal by Gil Vicente,
and adds the qualifying clause that credit for the invention of the
_pastoril_ belongs to Enzina. But the wine of Vicente’s genius soon
burst the old bottles, and when his plays ceased to be confined to the
_pastoril_ he naturally turned elsewhere for suggestion. He himself
towards the end of his life called his religious plays _moralidades_,
and the real name of the play popularly known as the _Farsa da Mofina
Mendes_ was _Os Mysterios da Virgem_.[274] The introduction of Lucifer
as _Maioral do Inferno_ and Belial as his _meirinho_[275] may have
been derived from French _mystères_; the conception of his _Barcas_
certainly owed more to the _Danse macabre_ (probably through the
Spanish fifteenth-century _Danza de la Muerte_) than to Dante. The
burlesque _testamento_ of Maria Parda[276] is one of a long list
of such wills (of which an example is the mule’s testament in the
_Cancioneiro Geral_),[277] but in some of its expressions appears
to be copied from the _Testament de Pathelin_. His knowledge of
French was perhaps more fluent than accurate, like his Latin which,
albeit copious, did not claim to be ‘pure Tully’. But there are many
references to France in his plays, as there are in the _Cancioneiro
Geral_, and, although the _enselada_ from France with which the _Auto
da Fé_ ends (i. 75) and the French song (i. 92) _Ay de la noble ville
de Paris_[278] were no doubt some fashionable courtier’s latest
acquisition, Vicente in literary matters probably shared the curiosity
of the Court as to what was going on beyond the frontiers of Portugal.
The great majority of his songs are, however, plainly indigenous. His
knowledge of Italian certainly enabled him to read Italian plays and
poems. We know that he was a great reader--he mentions ‘the written
works that I have seen, in verse and prose, rich in style and matter’.
In Spanish he did not confine himself to Enzina. He read romances of
chivalry, imitated the _romances_ with supreme success, mentions Diego
de San Pedro’s _La Carcel de Amor_, had read the _autos_ of Lucas
Fernandez, the _comedias_ of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro probably,
and without doubt the Archpriest of Hita’s _Libro de Buen Amor_,
possessed by King Duarte, and the _Celestina_. Indeed, for some time
past barriers between the two literatures had scarcely existed and
Vicente enriched both. Celestina would have spoken many proverbs had
she foreseen that he would allow two men (_judeos casamenteiros_) to
take the bread out of her mouth, but he copies her in his Brigida Vaz,
Branca Gil, the formidable Anna Diaz, and the _beata alcoviteira_ of
the _Comedia de Rubena_, although he may also have had in mind the
_moller mui vil_ of King Alfonso X’s _Cantigas de Santa Maria_ (No.
64), with the spirit of which--their fondness for popular types and
satire--Vicente had more in common than with the _Cancioneiro Geral_,
compiled by his friend Resende. With this collection he was naturally
familiar, and must have heard many of its songs before it was published
in 1516. A line here and there in Vicente seems to be an echo of the
_Cancioneiro_,[279] although the fact that it mentions some of his
types (as in the _Arrenegos_[280] of Gregorio Afonso) merely means that
he drew from the life around him. His satire of doctors and priests,
although essentially popular and mediaeval--both are present in the
_Cantigas de Santa Maria_--was also due to his personal observation:
that is to say, he gave realistic expression to a satire of which the
motive was literary (since satire directed against priests had long
been one of the chief resources of comic writers in France, Italy,
Spain, and Portugal).[281] The type of the poor _fidalgo_ or famishing
_escudeiro_ on which Vicente dwells so fondly--we have the latter
as Aires Rosado in _Quem tem farelos?_ and anonymous in the _Farsa
de Inés Pereira_ and _O Juiz da Beira_[282]--is another instance of
literary tradition combined with observation at first hand. Of the
priest-satire Vicente was the last free exponent in Portugal. That
of the poor gentleman was even older and survived him. It dates from
Roman times. The _amethystinatus_ of Spanish Martial[283] reappears in
the _Cancioneiro da Vaticana_, in the Archpriest of Hita’s Don Furon,
in the _lindos fidalgos que viven lazerados_ of Alfonso Alvarez de
Villasandino, in the _Cancioneiro Geral_, and just before Vicente’s
death is wittily described, as the _raphanophagus purpuratus_, by
Clenardus,[284] and less urbanely in _Lazarillo de Tormes_. With no
Inquisition to crush him he continued to starve in literature--for
instance, in the anonymous later sixteenth-century play _Auto do
Escudeiro Surdo_ he and his _moço_ come on the scene in thoroughly
Vicentian guise: _a vossa fome de pam ... meio tostão gasto quinze dias
ha_[285]--as he starves in the real life of the Peninsula to-day.[286]
In a sense Gil Vicente no doubt borrowed widely; he was no sorcerer to
make bricks without straw, and straw, like poets, is not manufactured:
it has to be gathered in. But the _homens de bom saber_ who, as we know
from the rubric to the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_, doubted his originality
must have been very superficial as well as envious critics, for the
bricks were essentially his own. Indeed, every page of his _autos_ is
hall-marked as his, _ca non alheo_, and he could say with King Alfonso
X:
Mais se o m’eu melhoro faço ben
E non sõo per aquesto ladron.
Besides the _Auto da Festa_ we have 42 plays[287]: 12 _farsas_, 16
_obras de devaçam_, 4 _comedias_, 10 _tragicomedias_. Some of them
were staged with much pomp and _grande aparato de musica_ in the
spacious times of King Manuel, but they lose little in being merely
read. They contain a few scenes of dramatic insight and power, a
few touches of real comedy, but above all we value them for their
types and characters, the insight they afford us into man and that
particular period of man’s history, and for the lyrics and lyrical
passages, fragments of heaven-born poetry thrown out tantalizingly
at random as the dramatist passes rapidly, carelessly on. We do not
possess all Vicente’s plays. A farce which in a poem to the Conde de
Vimioso (?1525) he says that he had in hand, _A Caça dos Segredos_,
was perhaps never finished, or perhaps it was produced seven years
later as the _Auto da Lusitania_ (1532). Others were probably lost as
_folhas volantes_ before the edition of 1562 could collect them. Three
at least, the _Auto da Aderencia do Paço_, _Auto da Vida do Paço_, and
_Jubileu de Amor_ or _Amores_, were suppressed.[288] The latter, in
Spanish and Portuguese, was probably the cause of the loss of the two
other plays, for, having ventured far away from the natural piety of
Portugal, it was acted in Brussels on December 21, 1531, in the house
of the Portuguese Ambassador, D. Pedro de Mascarenhas, and in the
mind of the Nuncio, Cardinal Aleandro, who was among those invited,
this ‘manifest satire against Rome’ caused such commotion that, as
he wrote, he ‘seemed to be in mid-Saxony listening to Luther[289] or
in the horrors of the sack of Rome’.[290] Yet in 1533 impenitent,
the incorrigible Vicente is pillorying the Court priest, Frei Paço.
The fact is that in Portugal no one could suspect the sheep-dog, who
had for so long and so mordantly kept watch over the Court flock,
of turning wolf and encouraging the _seitas_ and _cismas_ against
which Alvaro de Brito had already inveighed. He was himself deeply,
mystically religious and perhaps cared the less for creeds and dogmas.
His mystic philosophy appears as early as 1502. Yet they do him a
poor service who represent him as a profound theologian, a great
philosopher, an authoritative philologist. His plays show us a man
lovable and human, tolerant of opinions, intolerant of abuses,[291]
a man of many gifts, with a passionate devotion to his country. We
have only to turn to the ringing _Exhortaçam da Guerra_ or the _Auto
da Fama_. The whole of the latter is written in a glow of pride and
patriotism at Portugal’s vast, increasing empire and the victories of
Albuquerque:
Ormuz, Quiloa, Mombaça,
Sofala, Cochim, Melinde.
Clearly the words to him are a sweet music.[292] From one point of view
Gil Vicente’s position exactly tallied with Herculano’s description
of the _bobo_. He was a Court jester, expected to render the idle
courtiers _muy ledos_. To this purpose he was compelled to saddle
his plays with passages which for us have lost their savour and
significance but almost every line of which must have elicited a smile
or a shout of laughter at the _serões_. We may instance _O Clerigo
da Beira_, which ends with the signs and planets under which various
courtiers were born, the _Tragicomedia da divisa da cidade de Coimbra_,
with the origins of various noble families, the malicious _catalogue
raisonné_ of courtiers in the _Cortes de Jupiter_, Branca Gil’s
comical litany in _O Velho da Horta_, the sixty-four puzzle verses
of the _Auto das Fadas_. But Vicente frequently had a deeper purpose
than to enliven a fashionable gathering. The abuse of indulgences,
the corruption of the clergy,[293] the subjection of married women,
the danger of appointing ignorant men to the responsible position of
pilot, the mingling of the classes--it was not so, he remarks, in
Germany or Flanders, France or Venice--the increasing tendency to
shun honest labour in order to occupy a position however humble at
Court,[294] the ignorance and presumption of the peasants, the false
display and false ambitions, the thousand new lies and deceits, the
decay of piety, the growth of luxury and corresponding diminution in
gaiety--these were matters which he sought not only to portray but to
correct, with much earnestness in his _iocis levibus_. But to the end
of his life he was never able to learn that religion and virtue must
be melancholy. In the introduction to the _Triunfo do Inverno_ (1529)
he complains of the loss of the joyous dances and songs of Portugal
and the disappearance in the last twenty years of the _gaiteiro_ and
his cheerful piping. He himself drew his inspiration from the people,
from Nature, and from the Scriptures, with which he had no superficial
acquaintance. In his love of Nature and his wide curiosity he studied
children and birds, plants and flowers, astronomy and witchcraft--those
myriad forms of sorcery in Portugal, some of which have fortunately
survived in the prohibitory decrees of the Church. He included in his
plays or alluded to many of the traditions, the songs and dances of old
Portugal--the ancient _cossantes_, the _bailes de terreiro_, _bailos
vilãos_,[295] _bailes da Beira_, _chacotas_, _folias_, _alvoradas_,
_janeiras, lampas de S. João_.[296] For he stood at the parting of
the ways. Desirous and capable of playing many parts, tinged unawares
by the new spirit of the Renaissance, but at the same time keenly
national, he linked the Middle Ages with the new learning and the old
traditions of Portugal with her ever-widening dominions, for which he
showed the wise enthusiasm of a true imperialist. But behind the new
glitter and luxury of Lisbon he constantly saw the growing misery of
the people of Portugal for which all the splendour of King Manuel’s
reign had been but a terrible storm[297]; and his latter sadness was
perhaps less personal than patriotic. He had done what he could, far
more than had been required of him. He had been expected to delight a