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:
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:
[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).
[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:
[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.
[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).