Chapter 1

quotes St. Thomas, Solomon, Tully, the Book of Esther, and introduces Afonso V, King Duarte, the French duke Jean de Lançon, the Cid, Nun’ Alvarez, Moses, Fabricius, Joshua, and King Ramiro.

[182] He re-wrote the _Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses_ twice. João de Barros, who was inclined to slight earlier and contemporary historians, acknowledges his great debt to Zurara. Damião de Goes regards him less favourably.

[183] November 22, 1467 (_Coll. Liv. Ined._ iii. 3-5). There is also an affectionate letter from King Pedro of Aragon to Zurara, dated June 11, 1466, or 1460.

[184] Zurara, on the other hand, with feigned diffidence represents himself as ‘a poor scholar’, ‘a man almost entirely ignorant and without any knowledge’, and if he has any learning it is but the crumbs from King Afonso’s table (_Cr. D. Pedro_, cap. 2). He can rise to real eloquence, as in the beginning of cap. 25 of the _Cr. da Guiné_: _Oo tu cellestrial padre, que com tua poderosa maão, sem movimento de tu devynal essencia, governas toda a infiinda companhya da tua sancta cidade_, &c., or sober down into a Tacitean phrase such as that of cap. 26, describing the fate of natives of Africa brought to Portugal: _morriam, empero xraãos_ (they died, but Christians). He has a misleading trick of saying ‘The author says--_diz o autor_’, meaning himself.

[185] _Nunca me em ello quis leixar obrar segundo meu desejo_ (_Cr. D. Pedro_, cap. 1).

[186] His son Fernam de Pina became _Cronista Môr_ in 1523. The immediate successor of Zurara as _Cronista Môr_ was VASCO FERNANDEZ DE LUCENA, whose life must have coincided almost exactly with the sixteenth century. He represented King Duarte at the Council of Basel in 1435, and according to Barbosa Machado, who calls him _um dos varões mais famosos da sua idade assim na profundidade da litteratura como na eloquencia da frase_, he was still living in 1499. Unfortunately none of his works have survived. His manuscript translation of Cicero’s _De Senectute_ and other works were destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake (1755).

[187] Much later, in the first third of the seventeenth century, CASPAR DIAZ DE LANDIM wrote a _copiosa relação_ from a point of view unfavourable to D. Pedro and dedicated it to the Duke of Braganza: _O Infante D. Pedro, Chronica Inedita_, 3 vols. (1893-4).

[188] _Tudo o contheudo no siguiente trautado eu o uy e ouuy_ (1911 ed., p. 2).

[189] 1911 ed., p. 117: Ichoa (= Blind). The fact that no other name is given shows that then as now Basques were known by their nicknames. The same name figures in ‘Pierre Loti’s’ _Ramuntcho_ (1897): Itchoua. In the sixteenth century Martim Ichoa and João de Ychoa appear among the _moradores_ of King Manuel’s household (1518). The substantive _ichó_ (= _armadilha_), derived from _ostiolum_, is used by Diogo Fernandez Ferreira (_Arte da Caça_) and Garcia de Resende (_Cron. João II_).

[190] The extremely interesting list of his important library has been published in _Provas Genealogicas_, i. 544, in the 1842 ed. of _Leal Conselheiro_, and edited by Dr. T. Braga in _Historia da Univ. de Coimbra_, i. 209. It contained _O Acypreste de Fysa_ (= the Archpriest of Hita) and _O Amante_, i. e. the translation by Robert Payne, Canon of Lisbon, of Gower’s _Confessio Amantis_.

[191] p. 9, _Fiz tralladar em el alguus capitullos doutros livros_: the _Vita Christi_, St. Thomas Aquinas, Diogo Afonso Mangancha on Prudence, Cicero, _De Officiis_, St. Gregory.

[192] It contains papers written at various times (between 1428 and 1438). The date 1435 occurs p. 474. Cf. p. 169, King João I (†1433), _cuja alma Deos aja_.

[193] His modern editor, José Ignacio Roquette (1801-70), comments (p. 37) on the passage _he bem de lavrar e criarem_ as a great grammatical _discordancia_ and _erro_, but it is by no means certain that King Duarte did not omit one of the personal infinitives deliberately, for the sake of euphony, as the _-mente_ is omitted in the case of two or more adverbs.

[194] _Corregendo e acrecentando o que entendeo ser compridoiro acabou o liuro adeante scripto._

[195] Damião de Goes (_Cr. do Pr. D. Joam_, cap. 88) says 1476. His father Diogo Fernandez was _Reposteiro Môr_ at the Court of King Duarte, and his mother a half-sister of the Archbishop of Braga. One of his sons was the famous and unfortunate Viceroy of India (1505-9), D. Francisco de Almeida.

[196] Seventy-four black-letter double column folios, unnumbered, of fifty lines each. The colophon runs: _Acabouse do_ [so] _emprimir este lyuro chamado boosco delleytoso solitario p. Hermã de cãpos bombardeiro del Rey nosso Sẽhor cõ graça & preuilegio de sua alteza em ha muy nobrem_ [so] _& sempre leal çidad_ [so] _de lixboa cõ muy grande dilligencia. Ano da encarnaçã de nosso Saluador & Redentor jhesu x̃po. De mil & quinientos & quinze a vinte quatro de Mayo_ (_Bib. Nacional de Lisboa_, Res. 176 A [lacking f. 1]). Nicolás Antonio thus refers to the work (_Bib. Nova_, ii. 402): _Anonymus, Lusitanus, scripsit & nuncupavit Serenissimae Eleonorae Reginae Ioanis II Portugalliae Regis Coniugi librum ita inscriptum. Bosco deleitoso. Olisipone 1515._

[197] He can do _ho que lhe praz_; at sunrise he goes up _alguũ outeiro de boo & saaom aar_ far from the _delleytaçoões do mundo_, _arroydo do segre_ and _os auollimentos & trasfegos das çidades_.

[198] The _malauẽturado negociador que ̃qr seer rico tostemẽte_.

[199] See _Grundriss_, p. 249, and _Divi Lavrentii Ivstiniani Protopatriarchae Veneti opera Omnia_ (Coloniae, 1616), pp. 728-70: _De Vita Solitaria_.

[200] Cf. 1910 ed., pp. 1, 4. The writer claims to be only a compiler: _começo este livro nom como autor e achador das cousas em elle contheudas mas como simprez aiuntador dellas em huũ vellume_. It has been attributed to the Infante D. Pedro and to João I.

[201] e.g. p. 85: _Ca per entender entende o entendedor e per entender é entendido o entendido e o entendedor entende que elle mesmo é Deos._

[202] The title is simply _Ho Flos Sctõrȝ em lingoajẽ ̃porgueˢ_. The colophon says that it _se chama ystorea lombarda pero comuũmente se chama flos sanctorum_.

[203] _Aqui se começa ha payxam do eterno Principe christo Jhesu nosso Senhor & saluador segundo os sanctos quatro euangelistas._

[204] The only known copy exists in the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon. The colophon (in Spanish) gives the alternative title (_das tres virtudes_). The French original was also called _Trésor de la Cité des Dames_.

[205] See J. Leite de Vasconcellos, _Lições de Philologia Portuguesa_, p. 137.

§ 4

_The Cancioneiro Geral_

The silence that falls on Portuguese poetry after the early _Cancioneiros_ lasts for over a century, scarcely interrupted by the twilight murmurings of the later Galician poets, and is only broken for us by the publication of the _Cancioneiro Geral_ five years before the death of King Manuel. The native _trovas_ had no doubt continued to be written by many poets in a country where poetry is scarcely rarer than prose, far commoner than good prose. But no one had cared to preserve them in a collection corresponding to the _Cancionero de Baena_ in Spain. When Portuguese poetry again emerges into the clear light of day Spanish influence is in full swing and behind it looms that of Italian poetry, the natural continuation of one side of the _Cancioneiro da Vaticana_. No Spanish poet now writes in Portuguese, many Portuguese in Spanish. Popular poetry and royal troubadours have alike disappeared, leaving a narrow circle of Court rhymesters. It is to one of these that we owe the collection which embraces the poetry of the day, from the middle of the fifteenth century to the actual year of publication, 1516. Stout, good-natured GARCIA DE RESENDE (_c._ 1470-1536), a favourite alike with king and courtiers, often the butt of the Court poets’ wit--he is a tunny, a barrel, a wineskin, a melon in August--belonged to an old family which in the sixteenth century distinguished itself in literature. Born at Evora and brought up in the palace as page and then as secretary of King João II, he had every opportunity of observing the events which he so graphically describes in his _Vida de Dom João II_ (1545).[206] Talented and many-sided, Resende continued in high favour during the succeeding reigns: in 1498 as secretary he accompanied King Manuel to Castille and Aragon, and in 1514 was chosen for the much coveted post of secretary to Tristão da Cunha’s mission to Rome with wonderful presents for Pope Leo X. Resende not only drew and wrote verses but was a musician and an accomplished singer: _de tudo intende_ laughed his friend Gil Vicente. Perhaps it only required the stress of adversity to inspire to greatness this blunted, prosperous courtier--_fidalgo da casa del Rei_. He was not a great poet, although he excelled the Court poets of the fifteenth century. As historian he has been unjustly condemned. If in his Chronicle of João II he made use of Ruy de Pina’s manuscript chronicle, first published in 1792, it must be remembered that it was customary for the official historians to regard their predecessors as existing mainly for purposes of plagiarism. Herculano called Resende’s chronicle a poor bundle of anecdotes,[207] and no doubt Resende was not a Herculano nor a Fernam Lopez but a more limited Court chronicler. He is none the less delightful because he deals not in tendencies and abstractions but in concrete details and persons, Court persons. With an artist’s eye for the picturesque he makes his readers see the event described, and his chronicle is throughout singularly vivid and dramatic. He is certainly an attractive writer, and perhaps he is also instructive. The incident, for instance, of the Duke of Braganza being kept waiting while a scaffold of the latest Paris pattern is being erected for his execution (1483), which a grander historian might have omitted, is possibly not without its significance and shows _francesismo_ in action four centuries before Eça de Queiroz. Besides various minor works in prose Resende composed, not without misgiving,[208] a long survey of the events of his day in some 300 _decimas_: _Miscellania e Variedade de Historias_, which throws curious and valuable light on the times. His literary work was prompted by a real desire to serve his country. His delicate appreciation of the past appears in his remarkable and charming verses on the death of Inés de Castro; and wishing in so far as lay in his power to remedy the Portuguese neglect which had allowed so many poems and records and _gentilezas_ to perish, he collected what he could of past and present poets and published them in one great volume which he dedicated to the Infante João: _Cancioneiro Geral_ (1516), often known as the _Cancioneiro de Resende_ to distinguish it from the Spanish _Cancionero General_ (1511). Resende wrote to the poets of his acquaintance requesting them in verse to send him their poems, and they sent him answers, also in verse, accompanying their poems.[209] The receipt of these he would acknowledge as editor, promising, still in verse, to have them printed. Politeness no doubt induced him to include more than his judgement warranted, for his own poems are superior to those of most of his contemporaries. A large number of the _Cancioneiro’s_ poems--some 1,000 poems by between 100 and 200 poets--should scarcely have been included, for, however well they might answer their purpose as occasional verse, they were not intended as a possession for ever, and massed together produce an effect of dull and endless triviality. These love poems can indeed be as monotonous, the satiric poems as coarse, licentious, and irreverent, as those of the _Cancioneiro da Vaticana_. One of the poets, D. João Manuel, like King Alfonso X of old, does beseech his colleagues to cease singing of Cupid and Macias and turn to religious subjects. But it was not Garcia de Resende’s purpose to include religious verse. Poems recording great deeds and occasions he would gladly have printed in larger number, but, as he (among others) complained in his preface, it was characteristic of the Portuguese not to record their deeds in literary form. Satiric verses he included in plenty, satire being one of the recognized functions of the poet’s art: _per trouas sam castigados_.[210] But if we turn to the poems of his collection we are amazed by the pettiness of the subjects, and our amazement grows when we remember that this was the period in the world’s whole history most calculated to awe and inspire men’s minds with the thought of vast new horizons. While Columbus was discovering America, Bartholomeu Diaz rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama sailing to India, or Afonso de Albuquerque making desperate appeals for men and money to enable him to maintain his brilliant conquests, the Court poets were versifying on an incorrectly addressed letter, a lock of hair, a dingy head-dress, a very lean and aged mule, the sad fate of a lady marrying away from the Court in Beira, a quarrel between a tenor and soprano, a courtier’s velvet cap or hat of blue silk, a button more or less on a coat, the length of spurs, fashions in sleeves: themes, as José Agostinho de Macedo might say, ‘prodigiously frivolous’. When news reached Lisbon of the tragic death of D. Francisco de Almeida and of the defeat of Afonso de Albuquerque[211] and the Marshal D. Fernando de Coutinho before Calicut, with the death of the latter, Bras da Costa wrote to Garcia de Resende that at this rate he would prefer to have no pepper, and Resende answered that for his part he certainly had no intention of embarking. But, as a rule, such events received not even so trivial a comment, and no doubt the poets felt that the verse which served to pass the time at the _serões_ was inadequate to any great occasion. But the _trovador segundo as trovas de aquelle tempo_[212] had little idea of what subjects were suitable or unsuitable to poetry. A typical instance of the themes in which they delighted is an event which seems to have produced a greater impression than the discovery of new worlds: the return from Castille of a gentleman of the Portuguese Court wearing a large velvet cap. For over 300 lines of verse this cap is bandied to and fro by the witty poets. It must weigh four hundredweight, says one. Another advises him to lock it up _em arcaaz_ until he can turn it into a doublet; another bids him sell it in the Jews’ quarter. Small wonder, chimes in a fourth, that no galleys come now with velvet from Venice.[213] ‘I would not wear it at a _serão_, not for a million,’ says another. ‘A Samson could not wear it all one summer,’ is the comment of a sixth. Another remarks that he would rather read Lucan (or Lucian) (_antes leria por luçam_) in the heat of the day than wear it. ‘He will need a cart to bring it to the _serão_,’ says yet another. The wit, it will be seen, is not brilliant, although it may have effectively nipped this budding Castilian fashion and enlivened an evening. But there were duller contests. For score on score of pages the rival merits of sighing and of loving in silence are discussed by poet after poet (_O Cuidar e Sospirar_). Such a subject once started tended to accumulate verses like a snowball. But the _Cancioneiro_ also contains poems on serious topics, although they are rarer, as well as delicate, airy nothings (_sutiles nadas_) like Vimioso’s _vilancetes_.[214] There are two poems on the death of King João II, there is Luis Anriquez’ lamentation on the death of the Infante Afonso (1491), that of Luis de Azevedo on the death of the Infante Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, at Alfarrobeira, and a few poets, like Resende himself, stand out from the rest. Besides the elaborate Spanish poem by that noble prince the Constable D. Pedro we have several long poems dealing with high matters of the soul or the State. The sixty-one interesting stanzas by the querulous, satirical, intolerant ALVARO DE BRITO PESTANA treat of the condition of the city of Lisbon and the decay of morals. The correspondent of Gomez Manrique and contemporary of his nephew Jorge, in the metre of whose famous _Coplas_ he wrote, he was present at the battle of Alfarrobeira. His _trovas_ on the death of Prince Afonso, with the recurrent _choremos perda tamanha_, are wooden and artificial and his sixteen alliterative verses scarcely belong to literature, but at least he chose themes which were not concerned with passing Court fashions. The few simple lines written as he lay dying show him at his best.[215] His friend and distant relative FERNAM DA SILVEIRA, _o Coudel Môr_, is concerned with more mundane matters. A man of noble birth and high character, he was held in great honour by Afonso V and João II. The latter, a keen judge of men, had implicit confidence in the justice of this upright magistrate, who was also a soldier, a poet, and a finished courtier. He deals with affairs of State, writes an account in _trovas_ of six syllables of the _Cortes_ held by the king at Montemôr in 1477 and a short poem, on the appointment of various bishops in 1485. Or he sends a poem to his nephew Garcia de Mello with detailed instructions as to how he should dress and behave at Court. His _trovas_ are thoroughly Portuguese, vigorous, concise, and picturesque. He is less at home in the _trovas de poesia_ (i. e. _de arte mayor_) written on a journey from Évora to Thomar, but he could skilfully turn a short love poem, and for a wager of capons for Easter (with Álvaro de Brito) wrote a stanza containing as many rhymes as it has words. In fine he belonged to his age, but his poetry bears the impress of his strong character and his love of Portuguese ways. On the other hand, the younger brother of the Conde de Cantanhede, D. JOÃO DE MENESES (†1514), wrote indifferently in Portuguese or Spanish. He fought for many years in Africa, although his slight love poems, fluent and harmonious, give no sign of a life of action, and died in the expedition against Azamor.[216] Another soldier, courtier, and poet marked out by birth and ability was D. JOÃO MANUEL (_c._ 1460-99), son of the Bishop of Guarda. Legitimized in 1475 and brought up at Court with the prince Manuel, he continued to be a favourite after the latter’s accession, became Lord High Chamberlain, and was sent to the Court of Castille in 1499 to arrange the marriage of the king with the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. In Spanish octaves he had written a lament on the death of Prince Afonso, which both in feeling and technique excels the verses of Álvaro de Brito on the same subject. Towards the end of his poem he introduces the saying of St. Augustine that ‘our soul exists not where it lives but where it loves’, which in the following century was quoted by two writers so different as Ferreira de Vasconcellos and Frei Heitor Pinto and soon became a commonplace. In other works he shows a high seriousness, sometimes a sententious strain, combined with a very real poetical talent. His death during his mission to Castille was a loss for the Court and for Portuguese poetry. By another writer, FERNAM DA SILVEIRA (†1489), we have but a few poems, the principal of which is a lament for his own death, in the metre of Manrique, which he places on the lips of various ladies of the Court. His death was tragic, for, having succeeded his father as secretary to King João II, he took part in the ill-fated conspiracy of the Duke of Viseu. After lying hidden in the house of a friend he fled in disguise to Castille and thence to France, but, although he thus succeeded in prolonging his life for five years, the king’s justice relentlessly pursued and he was stabbed to death at Avignon. A favourite of João II, especially before his accession, was NUNO PEREIRA (fl. 1485), _homem galante, cortesão e bom trovador_, who married the daughter of the _Coudel Môr_ and valiantly sustained the part of _Cuidar_ against his relative Jorge da Silveira’s _Sospirar_ in the great literary tournament of the courtiers. Later, after serving as Governor (_Alcaide_) of the town of Portel, he retired to live in the country, and presents a happy picture of himself in the midst of harvesters and pruners. He finds, he says, more pleasure in his vines, in the chase, in digging and watering his garden, than in being a favourite at Court. He had not always thought thus, for when the lady he was courting married a rival he could devise no worse fate for her than to bid her go and die among the chestnut groves of Beira. He had, indeed, made a name for himself by his courtly satire, which he turned to good use in ridiculing those who came back from Castille with a supercilious disdain for everything Portuguese. It is pleasant to find him bidding them not speak their ‘insipid Castilian’ in his presence. DIOGO BRANDAM (†1530) of Oporto wrote an elaborate poem in octaves on the death of King João II. He also used the octosyllabic metre with breaks of single lines (_quebrados_) of four syllables, so familiar in Gil Vicente’s plays, and in his _Fingimento de Amores_ (27 verses of 8 octosyllabic lines), under Spanish-Italian influence, he touches a richer, more generous vein of poetry: the poet-lover descends into the region of Proserpine, the dominion of Pluto, and sees the torments of Love’s followers. His _vilancete_ to the Virgin is in the same metre with the difference that the verses have seven lines only (_abbaacc_). The spirit of Jorge de Manrique is absent from the stanzas written in the metre of his _Coplas_ by LUIS ANRIQUEZ on the fatal accident which ended the life of Prince Afonso in his teens. His lamentation on the death of King João II is written in octaves, as that of Diogo Brandam, which they resemble. Both poets invoke Death: _Ó morte que matas quem é prosperado_ (Brandam); _Ó morte que matas sem tempo e sazam_ (Anriquez). Other historical poems by Anriquez in the same metre are the verses written on the occasion of the transference of the remains of João II and thirty-five stanzas addressed to James, Duke of Braganza, when he left Lisbon with his fleet to attack Azamor in 1513. If we turn from these somewhat heavy pieces to Anriquez’ other poems we find a hymn in praise of the Virgin, written more in the manner of Alfonso X, and various love _cantigas_. The nephew of D. João de Meneses, Joam rroiz de saa, that is, JOAM RODRIGUEZ DE SÁ E MENESES (1465?-1576), studied in Italy as a disciple of Angelo Poliziano (†1594) and died a centenarian. He wrote a poem in _decimas_ describing the arms of the noble families of Portugal, and translated into _trovas_ three long letters from the Latin which by their spirit of _saudade_ appealed to Portuguese taste: Penelope to Ulysses, Laodamia to Protesilaus, and Dido to Aeneas. He was also versed in the Greek language, and for his noble character and courtly ways as well as for his learning and poetical talent was venerated by the younger generation into which he lived: Antonio Ferreira salutes him as the ‘ancient sire of the muses of this land’. The ‘most discreet’ D. FRANCISCO DE PORTUGAL, first Conde de Vimioso (†1549), although he did not live to be a centenarian, also survived most of the poets of João II’s reign and died towards the end of that of João III. Son of the Bishop of Evora and great-grandson of the first Duke of Braganza, he was created a count by King Manuel in 1515, and was equally renowned as soldier, statesman, courtier, and poet, ‘wise and prudent in peace and war’. His _Sentenças_ (1605), over one hundred of which are rhymed quatrains, were published by his grandson D. Anrique de Portugal. Some of these moral sayings have considerable subtlety, and they reveal a fine character and insight into the character of others.[217] Most of his poems, in Spanish and Portuguese, preserved in the _Cancioneiro_ are brief _cantigas_ which prove him to have been a skillful versifier and a typical Court poet. On the other hand, a feeling for Nature, a constant command of metre, and a certain passionate sadness mark out an earlier poet, DUARTE DE BRITO (fl. 1490), the friend of D. João de Meneses, from most of the other writers in Resende’s song-book. The _redondilha_ in his hands is no wooden toy but a living, moving instrument. His most celebrated poem, _em que conta o que a ele & a outro lhaconteçeo com huũ rrousinol & muitas outras cousas que vio_, is written after the fashion of Diogo Brandam’s _Fingimento de Amores_ and Garci Sanchez de Badajoz’ _Infierno de Amor_, in imitation of the Marqués de Santillana’s _El Infierno de los Enamorados_; but there is real feeling in these eighty verses of eleven lines (of which the eighth and eleventh are of four, the rest of eight syllables). The Italian influence, working through Spanish, was already present in Portuguese poetry in the fifteenth century, although Brito writes exclusively in _redondilhas_, as indeed does the introducer of the new style, Sá de Miranda, in the few and short poems which he contributed to the _Cancioneiro_ immediately before its publication. Duarte de Brito did not condescend to those artificial devices which give us in this _Cancioneiro_ a poem of sixty lines all ending in _dos_, alliterative stanzas, and other verbal tricks. The real business of the _serões_, so far as poetry was concerned, was _ouvir e glosar motes_. These _glosas_ and the similar _cantigas_ and _esparsas_, short poems of fixed form, often written with skill and spontaneous charm, were merely one of the necessary accomplishments of a courtier. Such a view of poetry could scarcely give rise to great poets, and these versifiers indeed styled themselves _trovadores_, reserving the name of poet for those who wrote, often but clumsily, in _versos de arte mayor, de muita poesia_. But, worse still, the poets of the _Cancioneiro_ were often scarcely Portuguese.[218] Many wrote in Spanish, and Spanish influence is to be found at every turn: that of Juan de Mena, Gomez and Jorge Manrique, Rodriguez de la Cámara, Macias, Santillana. Unlike Macias, who is but a name, Santillana is not mentioned, but his influence is constantly felt. On the other hand, King Dinis, unexpectedly introduced once as a poet by Pedro Homem (fl. 1490)--_invoco el rei dom Denis Da licença Daretusa_--is nowhere imitated. By method, subject, and foreign imitation, this Court poetry was thus inevitably artificial and uninspired. Perhaps in the whole _Cancioneiro_ the only poem marked by authentic fire is that of the obscure FRANCISCO DE SOUSA--the few lines beginning _Ó montes erguidos, Deixai-vos cair_. The contributions of Sá de Miranda, as those of three other famous poets, give no sign of the coming greatness of the contributor. The names of the other three are Bernardim Ribeiro, Cristovam Falcão, and the prince of all these poets, here the humblest of Cinderellas, Gil Vicente.

FOOTNOTES:

[206] _Historiadores Portugueses_ in _Opusculos_ (1907), ii. 27. The author of the _Theatrum_ has a similar verdict: _Scripsit Chronicam Ioannis II ut quidem potuit sed longe impar regis et rerum magnitudinis._

[207] _Sem letras e sem saber_, he says modestly, _me fui nisto meter._

[208] The book has as many titles as editions, that of 1545 being _Lyuro das Obras de Garcia de Resẽde que trata da vida e grãdissimas virtudes_, &c.

[209] Or he would seek to obtain them through a friend as in the case of _o Cancioneiro do abade frei Martinho_ of Alcobaça. It is improbable that Resende, who valued friendship above good poetry, altered the manuscripts he received, in spite of Francisco de Sousa’s permission: _as quaes podeys enmendar_.

[210] _Prologo._ ‘Had you forgotten that _trovas_ are still written in Portugal?’ asks Nuno Pereira of one of his victims; and of a dress it is said that it would be _certo de leuar Trouas de riso e mote_. Cf. the phrase _dar causa a trovadores_.

[211] Or Albuquerque would be mentioned in a game of _Porque’s_ (why’s) common among the _praguentos da India_: _Porque Afonso d’Albuquerque Dá pareas a el rey de Fez?_

[212] Zurara, _Cr. de D. Joam_, cap. 29.

[213] The _Cancioneiro_ contains many references to Venice. The _pimenta de Veneza_ mentioned in one of the poems must have sounded strange to Portuguese readers in 1516.

[214] e. g. _Meu bem, sem vos ver Se vivo um dia, Viver nam queria. Caland’ e sofrendo Meu mal sem medida, Mil mortes na vida Sinto nam vos vendo, E pois que vivendo Moiro toda via, Viver nam queria._

[215] _La t’arreda Satanas, Cristo Jesu a ti chamo, A ti amo, Tu Senhor me salvarás. O sinal da cruz espante Minha torpe tentaçam, Com devaçam Espero dir adiante._

[216] One of his poems has the heading: _Outro vilançete seu estãdo em Azamor antes ̃q se fynasse_.

[217] e.g. _A culpa de quem se ama doe mais & perdoase mais asinha, Nam pede louvor quem o merece, Da fee nace a rezam da fee_, &c.

[218] D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos goes so far as to call the Portuguese _Cancioneiro Geral_ a mere supplement or second part of the Spanish _Cancionero General_ (_Estudos sobre o Romanceiro_, p. 303).

III

The Sixteenth Century [1502-80]

§ 1

_Gil Vicente_

In Portugal a splendid dawn ushered in the sixteenth century. The discovery of the sea route to India, while it gave an impulse to science and literature, also increased religious fervour, since the Portuguese who contended against the Moors in India were but carrying on the work of their ancestors five centuries earlier in Portugal. Old-fashioned Portugal thus only gradually welcomed the Renaissance and stood firm against the Reformation. But in the reign of João III (1521-57) the University of Coimbra came to be one of the best-known universities in Europe. André de Gouvêa (†1548), whom Montaigne called ‘sans comparaison le plus grand principal de France’,[219] and Diogo de Teive returned from the Collège de Sainte-Barbe to inaugurate its studies, and many of its chairs were offered to distinguished Portuguese and foreign scholars, such as Ayres Barbosa (†1540) and George Buchanan (1506-82), as well as to Portuguese humanists such as Antonio de Gouvêa and Achilles Estaço (†1581). Nicholas Cleynarts or Nicolaus Clenardus (1493 or 1494-1542), Professor of Greek and Hebrew at Louvain, came to Portugal from Salamanca as tutor to the Infante Henrique in 1533, and from Portugal wrote some of his wittiest letters.[220] He found Coimbra a second Athens, and few great Portuguese writers of the century had not spent some years there or at the University before it was transferred to Coimbra from Lisbon in 1537. King João III and especially his son, the young prince João (1537-54), Cardinal Henrique (1512-80), and the many-sided Infante Luis (1506-55), _favorecedor de toda habilidad_, himself a poet of no mean order[221] and pupil of Pedro Nunez, eagerly patronized letters; the household of the accomplished Infanta Maria (1521-77) became the ‘home of the Muses’[222]; learned Luisa Sigea (†1560), of French origin, but born at Toledo and brought up in Portugal, wrote a Latin poem in praise of _Syntra_; her sister Angela, Joana Vaz, and Publia Hortensia de Castro were likewise noted for their learning, and D. Lianor de Noronha (1488-1563), daughter of Fernando, Marques de Villareal, did good service to Portuguese prose by her encouragement of translations. But Portuguese literature lost something by its latinization, and it is pleasant to turn back half a century to a time when it was humbler and more national. The ‘very prosperous’ Manuel I, Lord of the Ocean,[223] Lord of the East,[224] had been seven years king, Vasco da Gama had returned triumphantly from Calicut (1497-9), Cabral had discovered Brazil for Portugal (1500), Afonso de Albuquerque (†1515) stood on the threshold of his career of conquests and glory, the Portuguese Empire was advancing from North Africa to China,[225] the gold and spices were beginning to arrive in plenty from the East, and hope of honour and riches was drawing nobleman and peasant to Lisbon, when GIL VICENTE (_c._ 1465-1536?) introduced the drama into his

dear, dear land, Dear for its reputation through the world.

Dressed as a herdsman on the night of June 7, 1502, he congratulated the queen on the birth of the Infante, later King João III (born during the night of June 6), in a Spanish monologue of 114 lines. This speech gives promise of two qualities apparent in his later work: extreme naturalness (the embarrassed peasant wonders open-mouthed at the grand palace and his thoughts turn at once to his village) and love of Nature (mountain and meadow are aflower for joy of the new prince born). But, it may reasonably be asked, where is the drama? It consists principally in the _vaqueiro_, who is restless as one of the wicked in a Basque _pastorale_. He rushes into the queen’s chamber, has a look at its luxuries, turns to address the queen, declares that he is in a hurry and must be going, leaps in gladness, and finally introduces some thirty courtiers in herdsman’s dress who offer gifts of milk, eggs, cheese, and honey. There is little in this simple piece--the _Visitaçam_, or _Monologo do Vaqueiro_--to foreshadow the sovereign genius,[226] the Plautus, the Shakespeare[227] of Portugal that was Gil Vicente. His life is wrapped in obscurity, and the known existence of half a dozen contemporary Gil Vicentes makes research a risky operation. There was a page (1475) and an _escudeiro_ (1482) of King João II, an official at Santarem, a Santarem carpenter (†1500), there was a Gil Vicente in India in 1512,[228] and a Gil Vicente goldsmith at Lisbon. We know that the poet spoke of himself as near death (_visinho da morte_) in 1531, although apparently in good health. This would seem to place his birth a few years before 1470.[229] Unfortunately the _Auto da Festa_, in which he says that he is over sixty, is undated. As, however, it was written before the _Templo de Apolo_ (1526) we may place it probably about 1525. We are thus brought back to about the same date (_c._ 1465). Almost certainly he was not of exalted parentage.[230] Indeed, he would appear to have been slighted for his humble birth, and sarcastically spoke of himself as the son of a pack-saddler and born at Pederneira (Estremadura).[231] He may have been the son of Luis Vicente or of Martim Vicente, ‘said to have been a silversmith of Guimarães’ (Minho).[232] The frequent mention of the province of Beira is, however, noticeable in his plays. If it were only that his peasants use words such as _nega_, _nego_, which according to the grammarian Fernam d’Oliveira were peculiar to Beira (in 1536),[233] it might pass for a dramatic device, since Oliveira remarks that old-fashioned words will not be out of place if we assign them to an old man of Beira or a peasant.[234] Indeed, the grammarian seems to have had Gil Vicente especially in view (he mentions him in another connexion) since three of the six words that he notes--_abem_, _acajuso_, _algorrem_--occur in three successive lines of the _Barca do Purgatorio_, and another, _samicas_, is as great a favourite with Vicente as at first was _soncas_,[235] derived from Enzina. But it is impossible to explain all the references to Beira by the supposition that _beirão_ is equivalent to rustic and Beira to Boeotia, for Beira and the Serra da Estrella intrude constantly and indeed pervade his work. He shows personal knowledge of the country between Manteigas and Fundão, and we may suspect that it was in order to connect ‘Portuguese Fame desired of all nations’ with Beira ‘our province’ rather than with rusticity that he makes her keep ducks as a _mocinha da Beira_. We do not know when Vicente came to Lisbon, nor whether, as José de Cabedo de Vasconcellos, another (17th c.) genealogist, would have us believe, he became the tutor (_mestre de rhetorica_) of King Manuel, then Duke of Beja. Of his life at Lisbon our information is almost as meagre. We know, of course, that he accompanied the Court to Evora, Coimbra, Thomar, Almeirim, and other towns to set up and act in his plays, that besides acting in his plays he wrote songs for them and music for the songs. We know that he received considerable gifts in money and in kind both from King Manuel and from João III, in whose reign he complains of being penniless and neglected. Some hold that he married his first wife, Branca Bezerra, in 1512, that he owned the _Quinta do Mosteiro_ near Torres Vedras (a supposition no longer tenable), that the name of his second wife was Melicia Rodriguez, but we have no certainty as to this, nor as to the number of his children. The accomplished Paula became musician and lady-in-waiting to the Infanta Maria before the death of her father, whom she helped--runs the legend--in the composition of his plays,[236] as she helped her brother Luis in editing them in 1562. From a document concerning another brother, Belchior, we know that Gil Vicente (_seu pae que Deus haja_) died before April 16, 1540. There is some reason to believe that he died in the year of his last play (1536) or early in 1537. From his assertion that the mere collection of his works was a great burden to his old age[237] we might judge him to have been very old, but he may have been worn out with labour in many fields and his health had not always been good. He suffered from fever and plague, which brought him to death’s door in 1525, and he had grown stout with advancing age. An incident at Santarem on the occasion of the great earthquake of 1531, so vividly described by Garcia de Resende, shows him in a very attractive light, for by his personal prestige and eloquent words he succeeded in restraining the monks and quieting the half-maddened populace, and thus saved the ‘new Christians’ from ill-treatment or massacre.

We know a little more about him if we identify him with Gil Vicente, the goldsmith of Queen Lianor (1458-1525), sister of King Manuel and widow of King João II, whose most famous work is the beautiful Belem monstrance, wrought of the first tribute of gold from the East (from Quiloa or Kilwa).[238] The probabilities in favour of identity are so convincing that we are bound to assume it unless an insuperable obstacle presents itself. Our faith in manuscript documents and genealogies is not increased by the fact that one investigator, the Visconde Sanches de Baena (1822-1909), emerges with the triumphant conclusion that the two Gil Vicentes were uncle and nephew, while another, Dr. Theophilo Braga, declares that they are cousins. Perhaps we may be permitted to believe in neither and to restore Gil Vicente to himself. For indeed this was a singular instance of cousinly love. The goldsmith wrote verses; the poet takes a remarkable interest in the goldsmith’s art.[239] The goldsmith is appointed inspector (_vedor_) of all works in gold and silver at the convent of Thomar, the Lisbon Hospital of All Saints, and Belem. The poet is particularly fond of referring to Thomar,[240] and in its convent in 1523 staged his _Farsa de Inés Pereira_ (who lived at Thomar with her first husband), while at the Hospital of All Saints was played the _Barca do Purgatorio_ in 1518. The goldsmith was in the service of the widow of João II, Queen Lianor, who mentions two of his chalices in her will; the poet at the request of the same Queen Lianor wrote verses, probably in 1509, in a poetical contest about a gold chain and was encouraged by her to write his early plays.[241] The goldsmith was _Mestre da Balança_ from 1513 to 1517; the poet goes out of his way to refer to _os da Moeda_, familiarly but not as one of them, in 1521. He henceforth devoted himself more ardently to the literary side of his genius, speaks of himself as Gil Vicente who writes _autos_ for the king, and with an occasional sigh[242] that he can no longer afford to stage his plays as splendidly as of old (in King Manuel’s reign) produces them with increasing frequency. ‘Had Gil Vicente been a goldsmith and a goldsmith of such skill,’ said the late Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856-1912), ‘it would have been impossible for him to leave no trace of it in his dramatic works and for all the contemporary writers who speak of him to have kept complete silence as to his artistic talent.’[243] But his work is essentially that of an artist (Menéndez y Pelayo himself well calls him an _alma de artista_)[244]: involuntarily one likens his sketches to some rough terra-cotta figure of Tanagra or sculpture in early Gothic, and his lyrics are clear-cut gems, a thing very rare in Portuguese literature. Intensely Portuguese in his lyrism and his satire, he is almost un-Portuguese in the extreme plasticity of his genius. Concrete, definite images spring from his brain in contrast to the vaguer effusions of most Portuguese poets. And if Queen Lianor’s goldsmith, like the troubadour _ourives_ Elias Cairel, or, to come to the fifteenth century, like Diogo Fernandez and Afonso Valente of the _Cancioneiro de Resende_,[245] set himself to write verses, this would call for no comment. Every one wrote verses. Had a celebrated poet--say the Gil Vicente of 1520--wrought the _custodia_ his contemporaries might have recorded the fact, but Gil Vicente was not a famous poet when the _custodia_ was begun in 1503. Stress was therefore naturally laid on the plays of Gil Vicente the goldsmith, not on the art of Gil Vicente the poet. The historian Barros refers in 1540 to Gil Vicente _comico_,[246] and since 1517 he had certainly been more _comico_ than _ourives_. But the _comico_ who was dramatist and lyric poet, musician, actor, preacher in prose and verse, may also have been a goldsmith. His versatility was that of Damião de Goes a little later or of his own contemporary Garcia de Resende, with genius added. The fact that the official document in which _Gil Vicente lavrador da Rainha Lianor_ is appointed to his post in the Lisbon _Casa da Moeda_ (Feb. 4, 1513[247]) has above it a contemporary note _Gil Vᵗᵉ trouador mestre da balãça_ should in itself be conclusive evidence that the poet was the goldsmith of the queen. This modest but intimate position at Court accords well with what we know of the poet and with the production of his plays. The offerings at the end of the _Visitaçam_ seem to have suggested to Queen Lianor the idea of its repetition on Christmas morning, but Gil Vicente, considering its matter inappropriate, wrote a new play with parts for six shepherds. This _Auto Pastoril Castelhano_ is four times as long as the _Visitaçam_. The shepherds pass the time in dance and song, games, riddles, and various conversation (the dowry of the bride of one of them is catalogued in the manner of Enzina[248] and the Archpriest of Hita). To them the Angels announce the birth of the Redeemer, and they go to sing and dance before _aquel garzon_. The principal part, that of the mystic shepherd Gil Terron, ‘inclined to the life contemplative’, well read (_letrudo_) in the Bible, with some knowledge of metaphysics and perhaps of the _Corte Imperial_, devoted to Nature and the _sierras benditas_, was evidently played by Gil Vicente himself. A fortnight later, for the Day of Kings, he had ready the _Auto dos Reis Magos_ (1503), again at the request of Queen Lianor, who had ‘been very pleased’ with what Vicente himself called a _pobre cousa_. This brief interval of time limited the length of the new play. Its action is as slight. A shepherd enters who has lost his way to Bethlehem. He meets another shepherd and then a hermit, whom they ply with irreverent problems. To them enters a knight of Araby, and finally the three kings, singing a _vilancete_. The _Auto da Sibila Cassandra_ has been assigned to the same year, but is probably a later play (1513?). Nearly twice as long as the _Auto Pastoril Castelhano_, it combines the ordinary scenic display--_todo o apparato_--of a Christmas _representação_ with a presentment of the early prophecies now to be fulfilled, and introduces Solomon, Isaiah, Abraham, and Moses, who describes the creation of the world. The play includes a profane theme, since Cassandra in her mystic aversion from marriage realistically portrays the sad life of married women in Portugal. Although Cassandra appears as a shepherdess and her aunt Peresica as a peasant, they speak a purer, more flowing Castilian than the _toscos, rusticos pastores_ of the preceding _autos_, and the play is remarkable for the beauty of its lyrics--_Dicen que me case yo_, _Sañosa está la niña_, _Muy graciosa es la doncella_, and _A la guerra_. For the Corpus Christi procession of 1504 was provided, at short notice from Queen Lianor, the _Auto de S. Martinho_. The subject of this piece, merely ten dodecasyllabic _oitavas_ followed by a solemn _prosa_, is that of El Greco’s marvellous picture--St. Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar, whom Vicente treats with characteristic sympathy and insight:

¿Criante rocío, qué te hice yo[249] Que las hiervecitas floreces por Mayo Y sobre mis carnes no echas un sayo?

The _Auto dos Quatro Tempos_, of uncertain date, acted before the Court in the Lisbon palace of Alcaçova on Christmas morning in or after 1511, opens with a mystic ode on the Nativity and a _vilancete_ (_A ti dino de adorar_) and proceeds rapidly with snatches of song in a splendid rivalry between the four seasons. The praises of Spring are sung with a delightful freshness, as are Winter’s rages, while Summer in a straw hat appears sallow and fever-stricken. Jupiter comes with countless classical allusions and David with much Latin, and they all worship together the new-born King. Very different is the _Auto da Alma_, written for Queen Lianor and acted in King Manuel’s Lisbon palace of Ribeira on the night of Good Friday, 1518 (Snr. Braamcamp Freire’s plausible suggestion in place of the commonly accepted 1508). It represents the eternal strife between the soul and sin. The soul, slowly journeying in the company of its guardian angel, is alternately tempted by Satan with the delights of the world, with fine dresses and jewels, and exhorted by the Angel, till it arrives at the Church, the Innkeeper of Souls, and confesses its guilt, imploring protection (_Ach neige, du schmerzenreiche!_). Then, while Satan in a restless fury of disappointment makes a last effort to secure his victim, the ransomed soul is fortified with celestial fare served by St. Augustine and other _doutores_. The whole theme, to which the language rises fully adequate, is treated with great delicacy and with a mystic fervour.

In 1505 King Manuel and his Court in his Lisbon palace had witnessed the first of those _farsas_ in which Gil Vicente has sketched for all time Portuguese life in the first third of the sixteenth century. It rapidly became popular and went from hand to hand as a _folha volante_, receiving from the people the name of _Quem tem farelos?_ i.e. the first three words of the play. The plots of the twelve _farsas_ written from 1505 to 1531 are so slight that only one calls for detailed notice, the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_[250] (1523), which in its carefully defined characters and developed story more closely resembles a modern comedy. It tells how the hapless Inés, having rejected a plain suitor for a more romantic lover, a poor but deceptive _escudeiro_ presented to her by two Jewish marriage agents, learns by bitter experience the truth of the old proverb that ‘an ass that carries me is better than a horse that throws me’. But the types and persons in all these farces are etched with so much realism and humour that they bite into the memory and rank with the living malicious sketches of _Lazarillo de Tormes_. Who can forget the famished escudeiro Aires Rosado with his book of songs (_cancioneiro_) and guitar, continuing to sing beneath the window of his love while the curses of her mother fall thick as snowflakes on his head,[251] or the lady of his affections, vain and idle Isabel, or his servant (_moço_) Apariço who draws so cruel a picture of his master, or that other penniless _escudeiro_ who considers himself ‘the very palace’ and calls up his _moço_ Fernando at midnight to light the lamp and hold the inkstand while he writes down his latest verses?[252] Equally well sketched is the splendid poverty-plagued _fidalgo_ who walks abroad accompanied by six pages, but cannot pay his chaplain or his goldsmith; his ill-used, servile, ambitious chaplain[253]; the witch Genebra Pereira mixing the hanged man’s ear, the heart of a black cat, and other grim ingredients: _Alguidar, alguidar, que feito foste ao luar_[254]; the household of the Jewish tailor who delights in songs of battles-at-a-distance and is filled with pride when the _Regedor_ salutes him in the street[255]; M. Diafoirus’ lineal ancestors Mestres Anrique, Felipe, Fernando, and Torres[256]; the sporting priest[257]; the unfaithful wife of the Portuguese who has embarked for India with Tristão da Cunha; the vainglorious, grandiloquent Spaniard who takes the opportunity to pay his court to her.[258] They are all drawn from life with a master hand, even the more insignificant figures, the girl keeping ducks, the _moços_, the gipsy horse-dealers,[259] the old man amorous,[260] the carriers faring leisurely along with their mules, the braggart who disables six of his fourteen imaginary opponents, the Frenchman and Italian with their stock phrases _Par ma foi_, _la belle France_, _tutti quanti_,[261] the wily and impudent negro, the poor _ratinho_[262] Gonçalo, who loses his hare and capons and his clothes as well, the page of peasant birth ambitious to become a _cavaleiro fidalgo_, the roguish and pretentious palace pages. Side by side with these farces Vicente continued to write religious _autos_ as well as comedies and tragicomedies. The difference between these various pieces is less of kind than of the occasion on which they were produced, the _obras de devação_ on Christmas morning or other solemn day,[263] the _farsas de folgar, comedias_, &c., at the evening parties--those famous _serões_ of King Manuel’s reign to which the courtiers thronged at dusk, and which Sá de Miranda remembered with regret.[264] All provide us with realistic sketches since the background is filled with the common people, the real hero of Gil Vicente’s plays as it is of Fernam Lopez’ chronicles. Thus the _Auto da Mofina Mendes_ (Christmas, 1534), besides its heavenly _gloria_ with the Virgin, Gabriel, Prudence, Poverty, Humility, and Faith, has a very life-like peasant

## scene in which Mofina Mendes, personifying Misfortune, represents

a Portuguese version of _Pierrette et son pot au lait_. The _Auto Pastoril Portugues_ (Christmas, 1523) is a similar scene of peasant life, relating the cross-currents of the shepherds’ loves and the finding of an image of the Virgin on the hills. The _Auto da Feira_, acted before King João at Lisbon in 1527, is a more elaborate Christmas play. Mercury, Time, Rome, and the Devil attend a fair, and this furnishes opportunity for a vigorous attack upon the Church of Rome, with her indulgences for others and her self-indulgence, who has not the kings of the Earth but herself to blame if she is rushing on ruin, ruin that will be inevitable unless she mends her ways. But to the fair also come the peasants Denis and Amancio, as dissatisfied with their wives as their wives are dissatisfied with them (their conversation is most voluble and natural), and market-girls, basket on head, come down singing from the hills. Another Christmas play, the _Auto da Fé_, was acted in the royal chapel at Almeirim in 1510, and consists of a simple conversation between Faith and two shepherds. The _Breve Summario da Historia de Deos_[265] (1527) and the _Auto da Cananea_ (written for the Abbess of Odivellas in 1534) are both based on the Bible; the former, which contains the _vilancete_ sung by Abel (_Adorae montanhas_), outlines the story of the Fall, of Job, and of the New Testament to the Crucifixion, sometimes in passages of great beauty. The latter develops the episode of the woman of Canaan (Matt. xv. 21-8). The great trilogy of _Barcas_, which ranks among Vicente’s most important works, is of earlier date. The first part, _Auto da Barca do Inferno_, was acted before Queen Maria _pera consolação_ as she lay on her death-bed in 1517, the second, _Auto da Barca do Purgatorio_, at Christmas of the following year in Lisbon, and the _Auto da Barca da Gloria_ at Almeirim in 1519. The plot, again, is of the simplest: the Devil, combining the parts of Charon and Rhadamanthus, ferry-man and judge, invites Death’s victims to show cause why they should not enter his boat; and the interest is in the light thus thrown upon the earthly behaviour of nobleman, judge, advocate, usurer, fool, love-lorn friar, the cheating market-woman, the cobbler who throve by deceiving the people, the peasant who skimped his tithes, the little shepherdess who had seen God ‘often and often’, of Count, King,[266] and Emperor, Bishop, Cardinal, and Pope. The first part ends with a noble invocation to the knights who had died fighting in Africa, and the second begins with the mystic jewelled _romance_: _Remando vam remadores_.

The comedies and tragicomedies vary greatly. The _Comedia de Rubena_ (1521) is, like _A Winter’s Tale_, quite without unity of time or place (for this primitive humanist, although he might mention Plato, did not ‘reverence the Stagirite’), but is divided into three acts (called scenes) as in a modern play. Cismena, like Perdita born in the first scene, is conveyed by fairies to Crete, where she is wooed and won by the Prince of Syria. The _Comedia do Viuvo_ (1514) is much more compact and has a delicate charm. Don Rosvel, a prince in disguise, serves in the house of a widower at Burgos for love of his daughters. (He is in love with both, but his brother in search of him arrives and marries the second.) On the other hand, the _Comedia sobre a divisa da cidade de Coimbra_, acted before King João III in his ever-loyal city of Coimbra in 1527, is a lengthy, far-fetched explanation of the city’s arms, and the _Floresta de Enganos_ (played before the king at Evora in 1536) is a succession of scenes of pure farce--the deceit practised upon a merchant, the ludicrous predicament to which love reduced the grave old judge who had taken his degree in Paris--with a more serious theme, a Portuguese version of the story of Psyche and Eros. Of the ‘tragicomedies’ two, _Dom Duardos_ (1525?) and _Amadis de Gaula_ (1533), dramatize romances of chivalry: _Primaleon_, that ‘_dulce & aplacible historia_ translated from the Greek’,[267] and _Amadis_.[268] The work is done with skill, for Vicente succeeds here as always in being natural, and in this twilight atmosphere of garden flowers and romance keeps his realism.[269] Both plays contain passages of great lyrical beauty, and _Dom Duardos_ ends with the _romance_ beginning _Pelo mes era de Abril_. Thus in his latter age he successfully adapted himself to pastures new. In his letter dedicating _Dom Duardos_ to King João III he wrote: ‘Since, excellent Prince and most powerful King, the comedies, farces and moralities which I wrote for (_en servicio de_) the Queen your Aunt were low figures[270] in which there was no fitting rhetoric to satisfy the delicate spirit of your Highness, I realized that I must crowd more sail on to my poor bark.’ For us the words have a tinge of irony, and however much some readers may admire the hushed rapture of these idyllic scenes we miss the merry author of the _farsas_, and gladly turn to the _Romagem de Aggravados_ (1533) in which Vicente proves that his hand had lost none of its cunning. ‘This tragicomedy is a satire’ says the rubric, and it introduces us to the inimitable Frei Paço, the mincing courtier-priest with gloves, gilt sword, and velvet cap (one of Sá de Miranda’s _clerigos perfumados_), to the discontented peasant who brings his son to be made a priest, the talkative fish-wives, the hypocrite Frei Narciso scheming to be made a bishop, and awkward Giralda, the peasant Aparicianes’ daughter, whom Frei Paço instructs so competently in Court manners. This long play was written for a special occasion, the birth of the Infante Felipe. Gil Vicente for many years, as poet laureate, had celebrated great events at Court. When the Duke of Braganza was about to leave with the expedition against Azamor in 1513 he wrote the eloquent _Exhortaçam da Guerra_, which is introduced by a necromancer priest and ends with a rousing call to war (_soiça_):

Avante avante, senhores, Pois que com grandes favores Todo o ceo vos favorece; El Rey de Fez esmorece E Marrocos dá clamores.

When King Manuel’s daughter, the princess Beatrice, married the Duke of Savoy in 1521 Vicente wrote the _Cortes de Jupiter_, in which the Providence of God bids Jupiter, King of the Elements, speed her on her voyage, and the courtiers and inhabitants of Lisbon accompany her ship, swimming, to the mouth of the Tagus. The _Fragoa de Amor_ (1525) was written on the occasion of the betrothal of King João and Queen Catherina (who replaced Queen Lianor as Vicente’s protector and patron). Into the forge, to the sound of singing, goes a negro, and then Justice in the form of a bent old woman who is forced to disgorge all her bribes and reappears upright and fair. A similar play, _Nao de Amor_ (1527), in which courtiers caulk a miniature ship on the stage, was played before their Majesties in Lisbon two years later. The _Templo de Apolo_ (1526) was acted when another daughter of King Manuel left Lisbon to become the wife of the Emperor Charles V. The author introduces the play and excuses its deficiencies on the plea that he has been seriously ill with fever. He then relates the dream of fair women--_las hermosas que son muertas_--that he had seen in his sickness. Apollo then enters, and after declaring that he would have made the world otherwise mounts the pulpit and preaches a mock sermon. The world, Fame, Victory, come to his temple and bear witness to the greatness of the Emperor Charles V. A Portuguese peasant also comes and has more difficulty in obtaining admittance. The author called the play an _obra doliente_, and it was propped up by a passage from the earlier _Auto da Festa_ (1525?), edited by the Conde de Sabugosa from the unique copy in his possession. Its figures are Truth, two gipsies, a fool, and seven peasants. Their speech is markedly _beirão_ and the old woman closely resembles the _velha_ of the tragicomedy _Triunfo do Inverno_, written to celebrate the birth of Princess Isabel in 1529, as the _Auto da Lusitania_ celebrated that of Prince Manuel in 1532 and the _Tragicomedia Pastoril da Serra da Estrella_ that of Princess Maria in 1527. The latter is a whole-hearted play of the Serra with a _cossante_, a _baile de terreiro_ and _chacota_, and continual fragments of song: one of the most Portuguese of Vicente’s plays. The _Triunfo do Inverno_ contains some most effective scenes and a bewildering wealth of lyrics: before one is finished another has begun, and the whole long play goes forward at a gallop. The first triumph of Winter is on the hills, the Serra da Estrella (_serra nevada_); the second, on the sea, affords a telling satire against the pilots on India-bound ships. The pilot here begins by stating that the storm will be nothing, then he says that he is not to blame for Winter’s conduct, finally he falls to imploring the Virgin and St. George and St. Nicholas; and but for his incompetence the ship might have been lying safe at Cochin. The second part of the tragicomedy is the Triumph of Spring in the Serra de Sintra. Spring enters in a lyrical profusion singing

Del rosal vengo, mi madre, Vengo del rosale,

breaks off into _Afuera, afuera nublados_, and resumes his song:

A riberas de aquel rio Viera estar rosal florido, Vengo del rosale.

Enough has perhaps been said to suggest the variety of these plays, the glow of colour that pervades them, and to show how far their author, although his genius was never fully realized in his _autos_, had travelled from the first glimmerings of the drama in Portugal and from his first model, Enzina. Rudiments of dramatic art existed in the Middle Ages in the ceremonies provided by an essentially dramatic Church and in the mummeries and mimicking _jograes_ that delighted the people. Bonamis and his companion furnished some kind of extremely primitive play (_arremedillum_) for King Sancho I, and they were probably only the most successful of hundreds of wandering mimics and players. Mimicry and scenic display[271] were the principal ingredients of the _momos_ in which Rui de Sousa excelled[272] and the _entremeses_ for which Portugal was famous: they scarcely belonged to literature, although they might include a song and prose _breve_ such as the Conde do Vimioso’s, printed in the _Cancioneiro Geral_. Religious processions and Christmas, Epiphany, Passion, or Easter scenes[273] gave further scope for dramatic display, as also popular ceremonies such as that in which ‘Emperors’ and ‘Kings’--figures similar, no doubt, to those still to be seen in Spanish processions (e. g. at Valencia)--were carried in triumph to the churches, accompanied by _jograes_ who invaded the pulpit and preached profane sermons containing ‘many iniquities and abominations’, even while mass was in progress. The popular tendencies darkly suggested in the _Constituições_ are manifest in Vicente’s plays--the Christmas _representações_, the preaching of burlesque sermons, parodies of the mass, profane litanies, parodies and paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer. Like the _Clercs de la Bazoche_ in France, he represents the drama breaking its ecclesiastical fetters. 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 Court audience, and had mingled warning and instruction with amusement; and when, having lived and laughed and loved, he went his way, he was not only spared by a crowning grace from the wrath that was to come but left to his countrymen an heirloom more enduring than brass, more precious than all the gold of India, with a breath of that true Portugal in its simplicity, its mirth and jollity, the disappearance of which he had deplored. Portuguese literature was never so national again. A period of splendid achievement followed, but alike in subject and language it was too often a honeyed sweetness containing in itself the seeds of decay, and if for the time it swept away all memory of Gil Vicente, for us it only emphasizes his qualities by the contrast. In his directness, his close contact with the people,[298] his humanity, his quick observation, keen satire, love of laughter and malicious humour, in his unsurpassed lyrical gift and his natural delight in words, to be used not at haphazard but weighed and set cunningly as precious stones in the hands of an _ourives_, this great lyrical poet and charmingly incorrect playwright clearly foreshadowed dramatists so different as Calderón, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, and Molière. Yet we look in vain for a Vicentian school of great dramatists in Portugal. His fame had reached Brussels and thence Rome, and Erasmus is credited with having wished to learn Portuguese in order to read Vicente’s plays. Shakespeare, who was twenty-two when the second edition of Vicente’s plays appeared and who almost certainly read Spanish, may also have been tempted. It would have been strange if Erasmus had not heard of Vicente through his friend André de Resende, who in his Latin poem _Genethliacon_ declared that had not the comic poet Gil Vicente, actor and author, written in the vulgar tongue he would have rivalled Menander and excelled Plautus and Terence. In Portugal the number of plays written in the sixteenth century was large,[299] but none can be placed on a level with those of Vicente. One cannot say that he influenced Camões or Ferreira de Vasconcellos deeply, although they had evidently read him. In Spain Cervantes, who read everything, _aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles_, had read his plays (the _Farsa dos Fisicos_, _O Juiz da Beira_, the _Comedia de Rubena_ among others), Lope de Vega likewise, Calderón possibly. Lope de Rueda probably derived the idea of his _paso Las Aceitunas_ from the _Auto da Mofina Mendes_. Yet it is almost with amazement, if we forget the crowded history of Portugal and Portuguese literature in the sixteenth century, the introduction of the Inquisition, and the great changes in the language, that we find a Portuguese, Sousa de Macedo, a century after Vicente’s death, speaking of him as one ‘whose style was celebrated of old’,[300] and a Spaniard, Nicolás Antonio, declaring that his works were written in prose and knowing nothing of a collected edition.[301] It was with reasonable misgivings that Vicente just before his death wrote: _Livro meu, que esperas tu?_; ‘my book, what is in store for you?’ We know that it remained in manuscript for a quarter of a century, that a second edition in 1586 was so handled by the Censorship that it contains but thirty-five mutilated plays, and that for two and a half centuries no new edition was printed.

FOOTNOTES:

[219] _Essais_, 1. XXV.

[220] _Nicolai Clenardi Episiolarum libri duo._ Antuerpiae, 1561.

[221] Several fine sonnets have been ascribed to him (cf. _Fenix Renascida_, iii. 252, _Horas breves_, and, with more reason, iii. 253. _Á redea solta corre o pensamento_), as was also Gil Vicente’s _Dom Duardos_ and a manuscript _Tratado dos modos, proporções e medidas_.

[222] Duarte Nunez de Leam, _Descripção_, 2ᵃ ed. (1785), cap. 80: _Da habilidade das molheres portuguesas para as letras e artes liberaes._ Severim de Faria speaks of her _sancto desejo de saber_. The author of _Dos priuilegios & praerogatiuas q̃ ho genero femenino tem_ (1557) says (p. 9): _se pode estranhar esta hidade na qual as molheres não se aplicam aas letras e sciencias coma faziam as antigas Romanas e Gregas_.

[223] Gil Vicente, _Obras_ (1834), ii. 414.

[224] Ibid. iii. 350.

[225] Cf. João Rodriguez de Sá e Meneses in the _Cancioneiro Geral_: _De Çeita atee os Chijs_.

[226] M. Menéndez y Pelayo, _Antología_, vol. vii, p. clxiii.

[227] A. Herculano, _Historia da Inquisição_, 3ᵃ ed. (1879), i. 238. Cf. Camillo Castello Branco, _A Viuva do Enforcado_, _ad init._ No one of course thinks of comparing Gil Vicente with Shakespeare, but one may perhaps say that he resembles what Shakespeare might have been had he been born in the fifteenth century. The shipwreck in the _Triunfo do Inverno_ recalls the opening scene of _The Tempest_, as the mad friar recalls poor Tom, and the magnificent fidalgo Falstaff. In the _Farsa de Inés_ Pereira Inés, without being a shrew, is tamed by her husband, who says:

Se eu digo: Esto é novello Vos aveis de confirmalo.

[228] In 1513 Afonso de Albuquerque writes of ‘the son of Gil Vicente’ in India.

[229] It is customary in Portugal to fix the date of his birth in 1470 owing to the statement of the judge in the _Floresta de Enganos_ (1536) that he--the judge--was already sixty-six. It is a method which might lead to comical results if further pressed in the case of Vicente or other dramatists. Was Mello seventy-three when he wrote the _Fidalgo Aprendiz_?

[230] ‘A gentleman of good family’ (Ticknor); _hijo de ilustres padres_ (Barrera y Leirado); _na qualidade nobilissimo_ (Pedro de Poyares).

[231] iii. 275. Pederneira is mentioned again in ii. 390 and iii. 205.

[232] The authority is Cristovam Alão de Moraes in his manuscript _Pedatura Lusitana_ (1667) (No. 441 in the Public Library of Oporto). This genealogist, says Castello Branco, _era ás vezes ignorante e outras vezes mal intencionado_. He does not say that Martim Vicente exercised his alleged profession of silversmith at Guimarães, or that Gil was born there. What more probable than for Guimarães, proud of its poetical traditions, to invent a silversmith father for the famous poet-goldsmith? Pedro de Poyares, _Tractado em louvor da villa de Barcellos_ (1672), says that Gil Vicente, _em tempo de D. João o terceiro poeta celebre, foi natural de Barcellos e andam algumas cousas suas impressas_.

[233] _Grammatica_, ed. 1871, p. 118.

[234] Ibid., p. 81. See J. Leite de Vasconcellos, _Gil Vicente e a Linguagem Popular_, 1902. Feo, _Trattados Quadragesimais_ (1619), f. 10, mentions the _somsonete de pronunciação_ of the _ratinhos_.

[235] _Soncas_ occurs no less than seven times in the brief _Auto Pastoril Castelhano_. It occurs twice in the first twenty-eight lines of one of Enzina’s eclogues (_Cancionero de todas las obras_ (Çaragoça, 1516), f. lxxviii, and again f. lxxviii verso and lxxx).

[236] A. dos Reis, _Enthusiasmus Poeticus_ (_Corpus Ill. Poet. Lus._, tom. viii, pp. 18-19): _Quem iuvisse ferunt velut olim Polla maritum_. Manuel Tavares, _Portugal illustrado pelo sexo feminino_ (1734), calls her a _discretissima mulher_.

[237] _Com muita pena de minha velhice._ Ruy de Pina calls a man _mui velho_ whose father (King João I) would have been but ninety-one in that year (_Cr. de Afonso V_, cap. 105). Cf. Jorge Ferreira, _Ulysippo_, iii. 3: _velho se pode chamar pois vai aos cincoenta anos_.

[238] See Barros, _Asia_, 1. vi. 7. Beckford has glowing praise for ‘this gold custodium of exquisite workmanship’: ‘Nothing could be more beautiful as a specimen of elaborate Gothic sculpture than this complicated enamelled mass of flying buttresses and fretted pinnacles’ (_Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal_, Paris, 1834).

[239] Reference to gold, jewels, sapphires, pearls, rubies is frequent in his plays. The goldsmith in the _Farsa das Almocreves_ uses the technical word _bastiães_ which occurs in the _Livro Vermelho_ of Afonso V: _E porque alguns Ouriueses tem ora feita algũa prata dourada e de bastiães_. It occurs, however, in the _Cancioneiro Geral_ (_galantes bastiães_), in Resende’s _Miscellania_ (_bestiães_), and other writers.

[240] Cf. i. 127, 130; ii. 391, 488; iii. 151, 379.

[241] An unfortunate interpolation by the 1834 editors in the rubric of the _Auto da Sibila Cassandra_ was largely responsible for the belief that his patroness was not Queen Lianor but King Manuel’s mother D. Beatriz.

Yet the rubric of the _Auto dos Quatro Tempos_ says clearly that _a sobredita senhora_ is King Manuel’s sister.

[242] _Mas ja não auto bofé Como os autos que fazia Quando elle tinha com que_ (_Auto Pastoril Portugues_, i. 129).

[243] _Antología_, vii, p. clxvi. It should be said that Dr. Theophilo Braga, the late General Brito Rebello, and the late Dr. F. A. Coelho agree with Menéndez y Pelayo. Dr. Theophilo Braga even declares that he can prove an alibi. D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos opposed identity in 1894, and has not definitely expressed herself in its favour since. On the other hand, Snr. Braamcamp Freire is a convinced supporter of identifying poet and goldsmith.

[244] _Antología_, vii, p. clxxvi.

[245] And later Jeronimo Corrêa (†1660) at Lisbon, author of _Daphne e Apollo_ (Lisboa, 1624) and other prosaic verses, Xavier de Novaes (1820-69) at Oporto, and others. Perhaps the gold-beater of Seville, Lope de Rueda (1510?-65), whose _pasos_ are akin to Vicente’s _farsas_, was fired by his example and success.

[246] _Dialogo em lovvor de nossa linguagem_, 1785 ed., p. 222.

[247] Registers of the Chancellery of King Manuel (vol. xlii, f. 20 v.) in the Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.

[248] Cf. _Cancionero_, f. lxxxvi v.

[249] An effective instance of a line shortened by emotion. The long pause on _tardas_ in _Oo morte que tardas, quien te detien?_ is equally impressive, but the 1562 ed. has _de quien_ and Vicente may have written _Oo morte que tardas, di ¿quien te detien?_

[250] _Auto de Inés Pereira_ in the 1562 ed. So _Auto dos Almocreves_. It will, however, be convenient to call them _farsas_, since _auto_ is a more general term applicable to all the plays.

[251] _Quem tem farelos?_

[252] _O Juiz da Beira_, a continuation suggested by the success of the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_ and acted at Almeirim in 1525.

[253] _Farsa dos Almocreves_ (or _do Fidalgo Pobre_) acted at Coimbra (1525). It is curious to compare the sterner type of chaplain denounced in _Don Quixote_.

[254] _Auto das Fadas_ (1511).

[255] _Auto da Lusitania_ (1532) acted in honour of the birth of Prince Manuel (1531).

[256] _Farsa dos Fisicos_ (1512).

[257] _O Clerigo da Beira_ (1529?).

[258] _Auto da India_ (1509).

[259] _Farsa das Ciganas_ (or, in the 1562 edition. _Auto de hũas ciganas_), a very slight sketch acted in a _seram_ before the king at Evora (1521).

[260] _O Velho da Horta_ (1513).

[261] _Auto da Fama_ (Lisbon). Its date has been given as 1510, but internal evidence shows that it is later, probably 1515 or 1516 (although perhaps prior to the knowledge of Albuquerque’s death in India (December 16, 1515) since so splendid a paean in honour of the Portuguese victories would be out of place afterwards).

[262] = labourer from Beira. He figures in comedy as the slow-witted (or malicious) clod-hopper, to the delight of an urban audience.

[263] In the palace (at Lisbon, Almeirim, Evora) or in convents (Enxobregas, Thomar, Odivellas), once (as part of a procession) in a church (_Auto de S. Martinho_).

[264]

Os momos, os serões de Portugal Tam fallados no mundo, onde são idos, E as graças temperadas do seu sal?

[265] This play is written in lines of 10, 11, or 12 syllables with a break of a line of 5 or 6 syllables after every four lines. Most of Gil Vicente’s plays are in octosyllabic _redondilhas_ with or without breaks of a line of four syllables, as in the poems of Duarte de Brito and others in the _Cancioneiro Geral_. Lightness, grace, and ease mark this metre in Vicente’s hands.

[266] This splendour-loving king bears an unmistakable resemblance to King Manuel, before whom the play was acted, but in no other instance does Vicente allow his satire to touch the king or royal family: _cumpre attentar como poemos as mãos_ (_Cortes de Jupiter_).

[267] 1598 ed. (colophon). The date of the first edition is 1512.

[268] Montalvo’s _Amadis_ clearly. Vicente, who invariably suits his language to his subject, would have written in Portuguese had the text before him been Portuguese. If Montalvo’s _Amadis_ became fashionable in Portugal this was characteristic of the Portuguese, who would welcome foreign books while they despised and neglected their own.

[269] When Flerida meets D. Duardos disguised as a gardener she supposes that his ordinary fare is garlic.

[270] For the words _quanto en caso de amores_ the Censorship is evidently responsible.

[271] Cf. Zurara, _Cronica de D. João I_, 1899 ed., i. 116: _Alli houve momos de tão desvairadas maneiras que a vista delles fazia mui grande prazer_.

[272] _Cancioneiro Geral_, 1910 ed., i. 326.

[273] The Portuguese in the East in the sixteenth century maintained these customs. We read of Christmas _autos_ in India and a _representaçam dos Reis_ in Ethiopia. Cf. the Good Friday _centurios_ in Barros, II. i. 5.

[274] i. 103. The word was of course not new in the Peninsula. Cf. the thirteenth(?)-century _El Misterio de los Reyes Magos_.

[275] _Breve Summario da Historia de Deos_ (i. 309).

[276] In the _Pranto de Maria Parda_ ‘because she saw so few branches on the taverns in the streets of Lisbon and wine so dear and she could not live without it’.

[277] _Do macho rruço de Luys Freyre estando pera morrer._ See also Dr. H. R. Lang, C. G. C., pp. 174-8, note on the will of the Archdeacon of Toro; and the extract from a manuscript _testamento burlesco_ in J. Leite de Vasconcellos, _De Campolide a Melrose_ (1915).

[278] As neither of them is printed in his plays we cannot say whether they were two or one and the same, or whether the French of his song was more intelligible than the version preserved in Barbieri’s _Cancionero Musical_ (No. 429).

[279] For instance, the following lines and phrases of the _Cancioneiro Geral_: _Hirmee a tierras estrañas_, _Oo morte porque tardais_, _Vos soes o mesmo paço_, _E outras cousas que calo_, _O eco pelos vales_. The Portuguese fifteenth-century poet by whom he was most influenced was probably Duarte de Brito.

[280] They were published separately in the following century: Lisboa, 1649.

[281] Many writers note the large number of priests. The north of Portugal is _chea de muitos sacerdotes_ says Dr. João de Barros in his _Libro de Antiguidades_, &c., a book full of curious information collected by the author when he was a magistrate (_ouvidor_) at Braga, and written in 1549. [A different work, _Compendio e Summario de Antiguidades_, &c., variously attributed to Ruy de Pina and to Mestre Antonio, surgeon to King João II, appeared in 1606.] Gil Vicente was never in India, otherwise he would certainly have borne witness to the devotion and courage of monks and priests in the East and on the dangerous voyages to and from India.

[282] The anonymity may have been intentional, to emphasize the fact that there was no personal allusion to any of the poor _escudeiros_ who thronged the capital and Court.

[283] _Ep._ ii. 57.

[284] Letter from Evora, March 26, 1535.

[285] In the same play reappears Vicente’s Spaniard: _Castelhano muy fanfarrão_.

[286] According to the _Arte de Furtar_, _decimas_ and sonnets were written on the subject of a poor _fidalgo_ who was in the habit of sending his _moço_ to two shoemakers for a shoe on trial from each, since they would not trust him with a pair.

[287] If the _Dialogo da Resurreiçam_ be counted separately we have forty-four in all.

[288] Index of 1551. See C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, _Notas Vicentinas_, i (1912), p. 31. But here again the _Auto da Vida do Paço_ might be the _Romagem de Aggravados_.

[289] Cf. Barros, prefatory letter to _Ropica Pnefma_ (May 25, 1531): _falam tam solto como se estivessem em Alemanha nas rixas de Luthero_.

[290] _Notas Vicentinas_, p. 21, where the letter is given in the original Italian and in Portuguese. The Legate had lent a cardinal’s hat for the occasion, little realizing that it was to be worn by one of the actors in such a play (a witness to the realism with which Vicente’s plays were staged).

[291] His tolerant spirit, expressed in his letter to the King in 1531, was remarkable in an age not very remote from the day when Duarte de Brito wrote to Anton de Montoro (_c._ 1405-80) that he would have been burnt had he written in Portugal the blasphemous lines addressed to Queen Isabella of Spain:

Si no pariera Sanctana hasta ser nacida vos, de vos el hijo de Dios, rescibiera carne humana.

[292] As indeed they were to Milton: ‘Mombasa and Quiloa and Melind’. On the other hand, Garcia de Resende in one of the _decimas_ of his _Miscellania_ has twenty-six names: _Tem Ceita_, _Tanger_, _Arzilla_, &c., ordered rather for the rhyme than for harmony.

[293] He does not attack them without exception. There is much good sense in the _clerigo_ of Beira, and true charity in the _frade_ of the _Comedia do Viuvo_.

[294]

os lavradores Fazem os filhos paçãos, Cedo não ha de haver villãos: Todos d’ El Rei, todos d’ El Rei (_Farsa dos Almocreves_).

[295] Cf. the _balho vylam ou mourisco_ which cost Abul his gold chain in the _Cancioneiro Geral_, and Lopo de Almeida’s third letter, from Naples: _Mandaram bailar meu sobrinho com Beatriz Lopez o baylo mourisco e despois o vilão_. A century after Vicente the shepherds’ dances are but a memory: _as danças e bailios antigamente tão usados entre os pastores_ (Faria e Sousa, _Europa Portuguesa_, vol. iii, pt. 4).

[296] Cf. _Ulysippo_, iii. 6: _aquellas mayas que punhão, aquellas lampas, aquellas alvoradas_, and D. Francisco de Portugal, _Prisoens e Solturas de hũa Alma_: _Ines_ [of Almada] _moça de cantaro, a gabadinha dos ganhõis do lugar, requestada da velanao dos barbeiros, a cuja porta nunca faltou Mayo florido em dia de Santiago nem ramos verdes com perinhas no de S. João a que os praticos daquella noute chamão lampas._

[297] _Á morte d’ El Rei D. Manoel._

[298] His occasional coarseness is popular, rustic, and as a rule contrasts favourably with that of the _Cancioneiro Geral_.

[299] For a list containing about a hundred see T. Braga, _Eschola de Gil Vicente_, p. 545, or the _Diccionario Universal_, vol. i (1882), p. 1884, s.v. _Auto_.

[300] _Flores de España_, cap. 5.

[301] _Bib. Nova_, ii. 158. Elsewhere he speaks of him as _poetae comoediarum suo tempore celebratissimi_, and in the Appendix says: _cuius comoedias Lusitani admodum celebrant_. But after the sixteenth century Vicente was little more than a name. Faria e Sousa could say that his plays had been esteemed [_con_] _poquísima causa_ (the accidental omission of the _con_ led to the invention _poquísima cosa_); and a learned Coimbra professor, Frei Luis de Sotomaior, caught reading _as semsaborias de Gil Vicente, que em seus tempos foi mui celebrado_, felt bound to be apologetic: _Aurum colligo ex stercore_ (Francisco Soares Toscano, _Parallelos de Principes_ (Evora, 1623), f. 159).

§ 2

_Lyric and Bucolic Poetry_

The romantic story of Macias had not been given literary form, but it exercised a wide influence over the Portuguese poets of the sixteenth century. Together perhaps with Diego de San Pedro’s _Carcel de Amor_, the Spanish version of Boccaccio’s _Fiammetta_, and especially Rodriguez de la Cámara’s _El siervo libre de Amor_ (containing the _Estoria de los dos amadores Ardanlier e Liesa_), it must have been in the mind of BERNARDIM RIBEIRO (1482-1552) when he wrote that ‘gentle tale of love and languishment’ the book of _Saudades_, which is always known (like the first farce of Gil Vicente) from its first three words as _Menina e moça_. Yet it is not really an imitative work, being, indeed, remarkable for its unaffected sincerity, as the expression of a personal experience. Its passionate truth continues to delight many readers.[302] Almost all our information about Ribeiro’s life is derived from his writings, which are in part evidently autobiographical, and it shrinks or expands according to the degree of the critic’s wariness or ingenuity. His birthplace is declared to have been the quaint Alentejan village of Torrão. A passage in the eclogue _Jano e Franco_ says that Jano fled thence at the time of the great famine. The unhappy frequency of famines makes the date doubtful, but if the year of Ribeiro’s birth be correctly stated in an official document of May 6, 1642, as 1482, we may suppose--since Jano was twenty-one--that he left his native Alentejo for Lisbon in 1503. It is possible that he studied law and took his degree at the University (at Lisbon) a few years later (1507-11?),[303] and became secretary to King João III in 1524. As a _cavalleiro fidalgo_ he had his place at Court, as poet he contributed to the _Cancioneiro Geral_ (1516). A hopeless passion drove him from the Court, drove him perhaps to Italy, and finally deprived him of his reason, so that his last years were spent in the Lisbon Hospital de Todos os Santos.[304] Successive generations have busied themselves over the object of his passion. The romantic tradition that it was the Princess Beatriz, twenty-two years his junior, the daughter of King Manuel for whose marriage to the Duke of Savoy in 1521 Gil Vicente wrote the _Cortes de Jupiter_, is now definitely discarded. That it was Queen Juana la Loca of Castille no one except Varnhagen has ever imagined. But literary critics continue to be tempted by the transparent anagrams of Ribeiro’s novel (adopted evidently in order to make the story unintelligible to all except the inner circle of the Court). Dr. Theophilo Braga has an ingeniously fabricated theory that Aonia was Ribeiro’s cousin, Joana Tavares Zagalo. Lamentor at least can scarcely have been King Manuel, since he sends his daughter to the king’s Court. The scenery appears to be a combination of that of the Serra de Sintra near Lisbon with that of Alentejo. The story opens with an introductory chapter in which a young girl (_menina e moça_), who has taken refuge in the _serra_ far from all human society, announces her intention of writing down what she had seen and heard in a small book (_livrinho_), not for the happy to read but for the sad, or rather for none at all, seeing that of him for whom alone it is intended she has had no news since his and her misfortune bore him away to far-distant lands. Thus we have the thirteenth-century _amiga_ mourning for her lover. _Ai Deus! e u é?_ Presently, as she shelters from the noonday _calma_ beneath trees that overhang a gently flowing stream, a nightingale pours forth its song, and then dying with its song falls with a shower of leaves and is borne away songless by the silent stream.[305] She is still bewailing its fate when another, older but equally sad, lady (_dona_) appears, and the _menina_ becomes an almost silent listener to the end of the book while the _dona_ unfolds the tale which is its true subject, the history of two friends Narbindel and Bastião. But it begins with the love adventure of Lamentor and Belisa. It is only in the ninth chapter that the knight Narbindel arrives and falls in love with Belisa’s sister Aonia, adopting a shepherd’s life in order to be near her palace. It is in fact a romance of chivalry in pastoral garb. But Ribeiro might have introduced the pastoral romance without changing the fantastic features. It is in his singular combination of passion and realism that his true originality consists. His power of giving vivid expression to tranquil scenes--the whole of the first part has something of the quiet intensity of a background by Correggio, as well as his ‘softer outline’, and although there is no explicit indication of colour it is clearly felt by the reader--and his gentle love of Nature, or rather his love of Nature in its gentler aspects, cast over the book a strange charm. The softly flowing streams, the trees and birds and delicious shade, beautiful dawns, the birds seeking their nests at evening, the flowers _que a seu prazer se estendem_, the _mateiros_ going out to cut brushwood, the shepherds asleep round their fire at night, are described with great naturalness and truth, often with familiar words and colloquial phrases. The reason of the extreme intricacy of the plot was not the wish to conceal the author’s love story in a labyrinthine maze[306] in order to exercise the ingenuity of nineteenth-century professors, but to be true to life. In life events are not rounded and distinct but merge into and react on one another in an endless ravelled skein: _Das tristezas não se pode contar nada ordenadamente porque desordenadamente acontecem ellas_ (cap. 1). Ribeiro thus anticipates by four centuries the theory enunciated in Spain by Azorín that a novel, like life, should have no plot,[307] and his book has a certain modernity. We may refuse him the name of novelist, but many a novelist might envy his lifelike portrayal of scenes and sentiments. It has been doubted whether he wrote the second part of the story. It consists of fifty-eight short chapters, and opens with a new episode, the love of Avalor for Arima, daughter of Lamentor (cap. 1-24), and it is even more bewildering in its confusion than is Part I. The scenes are less idyllic, the tone more that of a conventional romance of chivalry, yet the realism is maintained. It is on no hippogriff that Avalor goes to the rescue of the distressed maiden: in fact, he had set out on his adventure in a rowing-boat and his hands blistered. If later there are mortal combats with wicked knights, with a bear, with giants, there are also scenes, as in chapters 9, 12, 23--of an impassioned _saudade_,[308] of dove and nightingale--which could only have been written by the author of Part I.[309] His own story, still related by the _dona_, is only resumed in