Four Plays of Gil Vicente Part 5

[95] _Chronica do fel. Rey Dom Emanvel_, Pt IV. cap. 84 (1619 ed., f.

341): Trazia continuadamente na sua corte choquarreiros castelhanos, com os motes & ditos dos quaes folgaua, nam porque gosta.s.se tanto do ~q diziam como o fazia das dissimuladas reprehenses [_jocis perstringere mores_] ~q com geitos e palauras trocadas dauam aos moradores de sua casa fazendolhes conhecer as manhas, vicos & modos que tinho, de que se muitos tirauam & emmendauam, tomando o ~q estes trues diziam com gracas por espelho do que aviam de fazer.

[96] _Auto da Cananea_ (1534).

[97] _Auto da Lusitania_.

[98] _Sermo_ (III. 346).

[99] _Carta_ (III. 388).

[100] _Auto da Mofina Mendes_ (I. 120, 121).

[101] _Auto da Cananea_ (I. 365).

[102] _Sumario da Historia de Deos_ (I. 338).

[103] I. 69. His own knowledge of the Bible was extensive and he often follows it closely, e.g. _Auto da Sibila Ca.s.sandra_ (I. 47, 48 = Genesis i.).

[104] III. 337, 338. His quarrel with the monks was that they did not serve the State. Cf. _Fragoa de Amor_ (II. 345); _Exhortaco da Guerra_ (II. 367).

[105] Cf. the pa.s.sage in the _Sumario da Historia de Deos_ in which Abraham complains that men wors.h.i.+p stocks and stones and have no knowledge of G.o.d, _criador dos spiritos, eternal spirito_ (I. 326).

[106] III. 284. A critic upbraided Wordsworth for saying that his heart danced with the daffodils--no doubt Southey's 'my bosom bounds' was more poetical--yet Shakespeare and Vicente had used the phrase before him.

[107] _Carta_ (III. 388).

[108] _Cortes de Jupiter_ (II. 405).

[109] _Romagem de Aggravados_ (II. 507).

[110] The preparation of his plays for the press was, he says, a burden in his old age. Some of the plays had been acted in more than one year, others had been composed years before they were acted, others had been printed separately. Hence the uncertainty of some of the rubric dates.

[111] _Triunfo do Inverno_ (1529), II. 447.

[112] _Romagem de Aggravados_ (1533), II. 524-5.

[113] _Auto Pastoril Portugues_ (1523), I. 129.

[114] _Farsa dos Almocreves_ (1527), III. 219.

[115] _Triunfo do Inverno_ (1529), II. 487.

[116] _Auto da Feira_ (1528), I. 175.

[117] See the _Fragoa de Amor_ and the _Auto da Festa_.

[118] III. 289 (1532).

[119] II. 363 (as early as 1513).

[120] II. 467-75.

[121] III. 122.

[122] III. 148 (cf. I. 40, III. 41).

[123] Goes, _Chronica do fel. Rey Dom Emanvel_, Pt I. cap. 33 (1619 ed., f. 20).

[124] E.g. _Novella_ 35: sotto apparenza onesta di religione ogni vizio di gola, di lussuria e degli altri, como loro appet.i.to desidera, sanza niuno mezzo usano; _Novella_ 36: hanno meno discrezione che gli animali irrazionali.

[125] _Auto da Festa_, ed. 1906, p. 115.

[126] Vicente, who could write such pure and idiomatic Portuguese, often used peculiar Spanish, not perhaps so much from ignorance as from a wish to make the best of both languages. Thus he uses the personal infinitive and makes words rhyme which he must have known could not possibly rhyme in Spanish, e.g. _parezca_ with _cabeza_ (Portug. _pareca_--_cabeca_).

So _mucho_ rhymes with _fruto_, _demueno_ with _sueno_.

[127] The miser, _o verdadeiro avaro_ (III. 287), is barely mentioned.

Perhaps Vicente felt that he would have been too much of an abstract type, not a living person.

[128] The boastful Spaniard appears (in Goethe's _Italienische Reise_) in the Rome Carnival at the end of the eighteenth century.

[129] There are abundant signs of the cosmopolitanism of Lisbon: A Basque and a Castilian tavernkeeper, a Spanish seller of vinegar and a red-faced German friar are mentioned, while Spaniards, Jews, Moors, negroes, a Frenchman, an Italian are among Vicente's _dramatis personae_.

[130] It is very curious to find echoes of Enzina in Vicente's apparently quite personal prose as well as in his poetry. _No ay cosa que no este dicha_, says Enzina, and Vicente repeats the wise quotation and imitates the whole pa.s.sage. Enzina addressing the Catholic Kings speaks of himself as _muy flaca para navegar por el gran mar de vuestras alabanzas_. Vicente similarly speaks of 'crowding more sail on his poor boat.' Enzina, in his dedication to Prince Juan, mentions, like Vicente, _maliciosos_ and _maldizientes_.

[131] In this play the French _tais-toi_ is written _tetoi_. In an age of few books such phonetic spelling must have been common. It has been suggested that the _vair_ (grey) of early French poetry was mistaken for _vert_ (green). The green eyes of the heroines in Portuguese literature from the _Cancioneiro da Vaticana_ to Almeida Garrett would thus be based not on reality but, like Cinderella's gla.s.s slippers, on a confusion of h.o.m.onyms (see Alfred Jeanroy, _Origines de la poesie lyrique en France_, p. 329).

[132] See his _Arte de Poesia Castellana_, ap. Menendez y Pelayo, _Antologia_, t. 5, p. 32.

[133] _Os autos de Gil Vicente resentem-se muito dos Mysterios franceses_. This was, in 1890, the opinion of Sousa Viterbo (_A Litteratura Hespanhola em Portugal_ (1915), p. ix), but surely Menendez y Pelayo's view is more correct.

[134] In Resende's _Miscellanea_ the line _n hos quer deos jutos ver_ (1917 ed., p. 16) reads in the 1752 ed., f. 105 v. _ja hos quer_.

[135] Cf. _Tratado tercero: llevandolo a la boca comenco a dar en el tan fieros bocados_ (1897 ed., p. 50) and _Quem tem farelos?: e chanta nelle bocado coma co_ (i. 7).

[136] The _Canc. Geral_ has a _Pater noster grosado por Luys anrryquez_, vol. III. (1913), p. 87.

[137] _Antologia_, t. 7, pp. clxxii, clxxiv.

[138] _Antologia_, t. 2, p. 6.

[139] I. 298. _Vuelta vuelta los Franceses_ from the _romance Domingo era de Ramos, la Pasion quieren decir_.

[140] _Comedia de Rubena_, II. 40. The earliest known edition of the Spanish version of Jacopo Caviceo's _Il Pellegrino_ (1508) is dated 1527 but that mentioned in Fernando Colon's catalogue (no. 4147) was no doubt earlier. In 1521 Vicente can already bracket the Spanish translation with the popular _Carcel de Amor_ printed in 1492, and indeed it ran to many editions. Its full t.i.tle was _Historia de los honestos amores de Peregrino y Ginebra_. Valdes (_Dialogo de la Lengua_) ranks _El Pelegrino_ as a translation with Boscan's version of _Il Cortegiano: estan mui bien romancados_.

[141] E.g. the _Nao de Amor_ of Juan de Duenas.

[142] The Everyman-Noman theme in the _Auto da Lusitania_ is, like that of _Mofina Mendes_, common to many countries and old as the hills.

[143] Henry Hallam, _Introduction to the Literature of Europe_ (Paris, 1839), vol. I. p. 206.