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

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:

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):

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

breaks off into Afuera, afuera nublados, and resumes his song:

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: