Chapter 3

It was a year of famine and plague at Lisbon. The fact that the verses addressed by Vicente to the Conde de Vimioso inform us that Vicente's household was down with the plague and his own life in danger (III. 38) bind these verses to no particular date, the plague being then all too common a visitation. Indeed General Brito Rebello and Senhor Braamcamp Freire both attribute this poem to 1518. His complaints of poverty would thus have begun immediately after his resignation of the lucrative post of Master of the Mint and before he had received his pensions. 'He who does not beg receives nothing,' he says, and later on in the same poem 'If hard work and merit spelt success I would have enough to live on and give and leave in my will' (III. 382-3). The general tone of these verses is more in accordance with that of his later plays[71], and the occasion was more probably that in which he composed the _Templo de Apolo_, written when he was _enfermo de grandes febres_ (II. 371), and acted in January 1526[72]. In his verses he tells the Conde de Vimioso that 'I have now in hand a fine farce. I call it _A Caça dos Segredos_. It will make you very gay.' 'I call it'; but the name given by the author was more than once ousted by a popular title. This implied popularity of Gil Vicente's plays, acted before the Court and not published in a collected edition till a quarter of a century after his death, might seem unaccountable were it not for the fact that some of his pieces, printed separately, were eagerly read, and that the people might be present in fairly large numbers when his plays were represented in church or convent. We know too that plays were acted in private houses. The publication of Antonio Ribeiro Chiado's _Auto da Natural Invençam_ (_c._ 1550) by the Conde de Sabugosa throws much light on this subject. This _auto_, acted a few years after Vicente's death, contains the description of the presentation of a play in a private house at Lisbon. The play was to begin at 10 or 11 p.m., the actors having to play first at two other private houses. So great is the interest that not only is the house crowded and its door besieged but the throng in the street outside is so thick that the players have much difficulty in forcing their way through it. The owner of the house had given 10 cruzados for the play[73]. Vicente's _Auto da Festa_ was similarly acted in a private house. The most interesting of all the facts recorded by Chiado is the eagerness of the people. Uninvited persons from the crowd outside kept pressing in at the door. Thus we can easily understand how the people could give their own name to a play, fastening on words or incident that especially struck them. The Farce of the Poor Squire became _Quem tem farelos?_[74], the author's name for the _Auto da Mofina Mendes_ was _Os Mysterios da Virgem_ (I. 103), the _Clerigo da Beira_ was also known as the _Auto de Pedreanes_[75]. Therefore when we come upon a new title of a Vicente play unknown to us we need not conclude that it is a new play.

Of the seven Vicente plays[76] placed on the Portuguese _Index_ of 1551 four are known to us. The _Auto da Vida do Paço_ may be identified with some probability with the _Romagem de Aggravados_[77]. If we may not identify the _Jubileu de Amores_ with the _Auto da Feira_ its disappearance must be accounted for by the wrath of the Church of Rome, which fell upon it when produced at Brussels in 1531[78]. The remaining play _O Auto da Aderencia do Paço_ can scarcely be identified with the _Auto da Festa_ on the ground that the _vilão_ says (1906 ed., p. 123):

Quem quiser ter que comer Trabalhe por aderencia: Haverá quanto quiser. Vosoutros que andais no paço....

especially as there was scarcely anything for the Censorship to condemn: merely the mention of the _Priol's_ two sons (p. 111) and the ease with which the old woman obtains a Bull from the Nuncio (pp. 120, 124). There is far more reason, 'in my simple conjectures,' for believing that _A Caça dos Segredos_ altered its name before or after it was produced and became _A farsa chamada Auto da Lusitania_. In the burlesque passage concerning Gil Vicente in this play (III. 275-6) we learn that he was instructed for seven years and a day in the Sibyl's cave and informed by the Sibyl of the secrets which she knew about the past:

E ali foi ensinado Sete anos e mais um dia E da Sibila informado Dos segredos que sabia Do antigo tempo passado.

If the _Trovas ao Conde de Vimioso_ were written in 1525, the seven years during which Vicente hunted for secrets bring us to 1532, the date of the _Auto da Lusitania_. The necessary allusions to the birth of the Prince were inserted, but the play had been ready long before[79].

The _Auto da Festa_ was probably acted in a private house at Evora. It contains scarcely an indication as to its date[80], but it has passages similar to others in the _Farsa de Ines Pereira_ (1523), the _Fragoa de Amor_[81] (1524) and the _Farsa das Ciganas_ (1525?)[82]. That the play was prior to the _Templo de Apolo_ seems evident, and the author would be unlikely to copy from what he calls an _obra doliente_ (II. 373) with Portuguese passages introduced to prop up a play originally written wholly in Spanish (_ibid._). Nor need the anti-Spanish passages tell against the year of the betrothal of Charles V and the Infanta Isabel, for they are placed in the mouth of a _vilão_ and the play was performed in private. In the _Templo de Apolo_ the anti-Spanish atmosphere has not quite vanished, but the _vilão_ contents himself with saying that _Deos não é castelhano_, and even so Apollo feels bound to present his excuses:

Villano ser descortés No es mucho de espantar.

_Quem não parece esquece_, says Vicente in his _trovas_ to Vimioso. _Les absents ont tort_. After a quarter of a century he could no longer describe his _autos_ as a new thing and he was now confronted by the formidable novelty of the hendecasyllabic metre introduced by Sá de Miranda from Italy. He felt that he had his back against the wall[83]. He made a prodigious effort to vary the themes of his plays and to produce them with increasing frequency. The year 1527 is his _annus mirabilis_. The _Sumario da Historia de Deos_ and the _Dialogo sobre a Ressurreiçam_ are assigned, if not to this year, to the period 1526-8[84]. The _Nao de Amores_ celebrated the entry of Queen Catharina into Lisbon in 1527, and before the autumn[85] three plays, the _Divisa da Cidade de Coimbra_, the _Farsa dos Almocreves_ and the _Tragicomedia da Serra da Estrella_, had been presented before the Court at the charming old town of Coimbra which ten years later definitively became the University town of Portugal. His great efforts were not unrewarded, for in the following year he received a yet further pension of 12 milreis. On his way back from Coimbra to Santarem he fell among some Spanish carriers who took advantage of the new Queen's favour to fleece the poet, and he wrote some verses of comic complaint to the King (II. 383-4). The rubric assigns to the same year the famous _Auto da Feira_ (Lisbon: Christmas 1527) but Snr Braamcamp Freire[86] points out that King João did not spend Christmas of this year at Lisbon and assigns it to 1528, the year in which the celebrated Dialogues of Alfonso and Juan de Valdés saw the light. In April 1529 the _Triunfo do Inverno_ celebrated the birth of the Infanta Isabel. The author introduced the play in a long lament in verse over the forgotten jollity of earlier times and then, to show that his own hand had lost none of its cunning, he gave his audience a feast of lyrical passages in the Triumphs of Winter and Spring.

In 1527 Vicente seems clearly to have aimed his allusions to the sons of priests at Francisco de Sá de Miranda, whose father was a priest and who was born at Coimbra. And now in _O Clerigo da Beira_[87] we have a priest addressing his son Francisco and telling him that a priest's son will never come to any good. On his part the grave Sá de Miranda had protested against the introduction of scenes from the Bible into the _farsas_: the allusion to Vicente was clear although his treatment of such scenes was usually reverent. Vicente still had the ear of the Court and Sá de Miranda could only lament that the new style had at first so little vogue in Portugal. That the King, when he had leisure, consulted Vicente on weightier matters than the production of Court plays is proved by a passage[88] in the letter addressed to him by the poet from Santarem. A terrible earthquake shock on Jan. 26, 1531, followed by other severe shocks, kept the people in a panic for fifty days. _Terruerant satis haec pavidam praesagia plebem_, and to make matters worse the monks of Santarem, with an eye on the new Christians, spoke of the wrath of God and announced another earthquake as calmly as if they were giving out the hour of evensong. Vicente, who in his letter to the King[89] says, like Newman's Gerontius, 'I am near to death,' assembled the monks and preached them an eloquent sermon. The prestige of the Court poet restrained their zeal and probably avoided another massacre such as he had seen at Lisbon a quarter of a century before. It was in December of this year that the _Jubileu de Amores_ was acted in the house of the Portuguese Ambassador at Brussels, to the horror of Cardinal Aleandro, who almost persuaded himself that he was witnessing the sack of Rome four years earlier. It was perhaps before this that King João commanded Vicente to publish his works, but he could not be greatly perturbed that a play by Vicente had given offence to the Holy See, with which he was himself often in unpleasant relations at this time. At all events Vicente continued to produce his plays. In 1532 the birth of the long desired heir to the throne was celebrated at Lisbon, and Vicente presented the _Auto da Lusitania_, while two long plays, the _Romagem de Aggravados_ and _Amadis de Gaula_, belong to the following year. The former was acted at Evora in honour of the birth of the Infante Felipe (May 1533). _Amadis de Gaula_ perhaps shows some signs of weariness, and if he played the part of Amadis he would apply to himself the lines

Que ya veis que soy pasado A la vida de los muertos (II. 282).

The _Auto da Cananea_ was written at the request of the Abbess of Oudivellas and acted at that convent near Lisbon in 1534. It contains perhaps a reference to the earthquake of 1531 (I. 373). The _Auto da Mofina Mendes_ may have been written some years before it was acted in the presence of the King at Evora on Christmas morning 1534: it alludes to the capture of Francis I at Pavia (1525) and to the sack of Rome (1527). Vicente had returned to Evora at least as early as August 1535, and in 1536 he produced there before the King his last play, the _Floresta de Enganos_, which may well have been a collection of farcical scenes written at various periods of his career[90]. We know that he was dead on April 16, 1540. He did not follow the Court to Lisbon in August 1537 and his death may be assigned with some plausibility to the end of 1536 at Evora[91]. The children of his second marriage were almost certainly with him, Paula and Luis, who edited his works in 1562 and were now still in their teens, and the even younger Valeria. Paula seems to have inherited her father's versatility and his musical, dramatic and literary tastes. Tradition connects her closely with him and would even assign her a part in the composition of his plays. Another and a more reliable tradition says that he was buried in the Church of S. Francisco at Evora. His life had been full and strenuous and we leave him in this quiet little town _depois da vida cansada descansando_[92].

II. CHARACTER AND IDEAS

If we were limited to the information about Gil Vicente furnished by his contemporaries, we should but know that he had introduced into Portugal _representações_ of eloquent style and novel invention imitating Enzina's eclogues with great skill and wit[93], and that the mordant comic poet Gil Vicente, who hid a serious aim beneath his gaiety and was skilled in veiling his satire in light-hearted jests, might have excelled Menander, Plautus and Terence if he had written in Latin instead of in the vulgar tongue[94]. That is, we should have known nothing that we could not learn from his plays and it is to his plays that we must go if we would be more closely acquainted with his character and his attitude towards the problems of his day. King Manuel, says Damião de Goes, always kept at his Court Spanish buffoons as a corrective of the manners and habits of the courtiers[95]. The King may have had something of the sort in his mind in encouraging Gil Vicente, and probably he especially favoured his allusions to the courtiers; but we cannot for a moment consider that Vicente, friend and adviser of King João III, the grave town-councillor whose influence could check the fanaticism of the monks at Santarem--can we imagine them bowing before a mere mountebank, a strolling player?--was looked upon simply as a Court jester. The impression left by his plays is, rather, that of the worthy thoughtful face of Velazquez as painted in his _Las Meninas_ picture, a figure closely familiar with the Court yet still somewhat aloof, _apartado_. like Gil Terron. Vicente regards himself as a _rustico peregrino_ (III. 390), an _ignorante sabedor_ (I. 373) as opposed to the ignorant-malicious or ignorant-presumptuous of the Court. But Vicente was no ascetic, his was a genial, generous nature, he liked to have enough to spend and give and leave in his will. Kindly and chivalrous, he was a champion of the down-trodden but had first-hand knowledge of the malice and intrigues of the peasants and of the poor in the towns. Above all he was thoroughly Portuguese. He might place his scene in Crete but in that very scene he would refer to things so Portuguese as the _janeiras_ and _lampas de S. João_. Portugal is

Pequeno e muy grandioso, Pouca gente e muito feito, Forte e mui victorioso, Mui ousado e furioso Em tudo o que toma a peito,

and he appears to have shared the popular prejudice against Spain. Did he also share the people's hostility towards the priests and the Jews? It cannot be said that the priests presented in his plays are patterns of morality. As to the Jews he knows of their corrupt practices and describes them in a late play as _a mais falsa ralé_[96]. It was during the last ten years of Vicente's life that the question of the new Christians came especially to the front (from 1525). In earlier plays Vicente seems more sympathetic towards them and the pleasant sketch of the Jewish family in Lisbon is as late as 1532[97]. In 1506, the very year of the massacre of Jews at Lisbon, he had gone to the root of the question when he declared in his lay sermon that:

Es por demás pedir al judío Que sea cristiano en el corazón ... Que es por demás al que es mal cristiano Doctrina de Cristo por fuerza ni ruego[98].

And twenty-five years later he said to the monks at Santarem: 'If there are some here who are still strangers to our faith it is perhaps for the greater glory of God[99].' That is to say: if you force the Jews to become Christians you will only make them hypocrites; far better to treat them frankly as Jews and not expect figs from thistles. That Vicente himself was a devout Christian and Catholic and a deeply religious man such plays as the _Auto da Alma_, the _Barcas_, the _Sumario_, the _Auto da Cananea_ are sufficient proof. He had much of the Erasmian spirit but nothing in common with the Reformation. His irreverence is wholly external, it was abuses not doctrine that he attacked, the ministers of the Church and not the Church itself. He may have been in the secret of King João's somewhat stormy negotiations with the Holy See and he took the national and regalist view: in the _Auto da Feira_ Mercury addresses Rome as follows:

Nam culpes aos reis da terra, Que tudo te vem de cima (I. 166).

He wished to reform the Church from within. All are perversely asleep, a sleep of death[100]. Many prayers do not suffice without _almas limpas e puras_[101]. Men must be judged by their works[102]. In the _Auto da Fé_ (1510) we have a simple declaration of faith:

Fé he amar a Deos só por elle Quanto se pode amar, Por ser elle singular, Nam por interesse delle; E se mais quereis saber, Crer na Madre Igreja Santa E cantar o que ella canta E querer o que ella quer[103].

But four years earlier and ten before Luther's formal protest against the papal indulgences we find Vicente in his lay sermon referring to the question 'whether the Pope may grant so many pardons' and laughing at the hair-splitting of preachers: was the fruit that Eve ate an apple, a pear or a melon[104]? His own religion certainly had a mystical and pantheistic tendency[105]. It was as deep as was his love of Nature. He would have the hearts of men dance with jocund May[106]:

Hei de cantar e folgar E bailar c'os corações,

and he had an eye for the humblest flower that blows--chicory and camomile, hedge flowerets, honeysuckle and wild roses:

Almeirones y magarzas, Florecitas por las zarzas, Madresilvas y rosillas (I. 95. Cf. II. 29).

And he sympathized closely with what was nearest to Nature: peasants and children. Of the people of the towns he was probably less enamoured and he speaks of _a desvairada opinião do vulgo_ and of the folly of pandering to it[107]. At Court he certainly had many friends. A friendly rivalry in art and letters bound him to Garcia de Resende for probably over forty years and he was no doubt on excellent terms with the _dadivoso_ Conde de Penella (II. 511), the _muito jucundo_ Conde de Tentugal (III. 360) and the Conde de Vimioso. High rank was no certain shelter from the shafts of Vicente's wit, but when it was a case of princes he was more careful:

Agora cumpre atentar Como poemos as mãos,

as he ingenuously remarks[108]. King João II had seen to it that no class or individual should dispute the power of the throne, and now the King reigned supreme. Kings, says Vicente, are the image of God[109]. That was in 1533, when it might seem to him that the authority of the throne was more than ever necessary to cope with the confusion of the times. The King's power stood for the nation, that of a noble might mean mere private ambition or power in the hands of one unworthy, and Gil Vicente asks nobly:

Quem não é senhor de si Porqué o será de ninguem? (Who himself cannot control Why should he o'er others rule?)

He had witnessed many changes, and looking back as an old man his memory might well be overwhelmed by a period so crowded[110]. He had seen the provinces and capital of Portugal transformed by the overseas discoveries. We may be sure that he had watched with more interest than the ordinary _lisboeta_ the extension of the Portuguese empire and the deeds of the unfortunate Dom Francisco de Almeida ('Tomou Quiloa e Mombaça, Parece cousa de graça Ver de que morte acabou') and the redoubtable Afonso de Albuquerque, who snatched victories from defeat in the teeth of all manner of obstruction and indifference and placed Portugal's glory on a pinnacle scarcely dreamed of even in the intoxicating moment of Gama's first return to Belem in 1499:

Outro mundo encuberto Vimos então descubrir Que se tinha por incerto: Pasma homem de ouvir.

Meanwhile Vicente never lost sight of the fact that the nation's strength lay not in rich imports, however fabulous and envied, but in the good use of its own soil and capacities and in the vigour, energy and discipline of its inhabitants, and a note of warning sounded again and again in his plays as he saw the old simplicity sink and disappear before wave on wave of luxury, ambition and hollow display. He had felt the good old times, content with rustic dance and song, vanishing since 1510:

De vinte annos a ca Não ha hi gaita nem gaiteiro[111].

Now no one is content: _ninguem se contenta da maneira que sohia_[112]. _Tudo bem se vai ao fundo_[113]. He especially deplored the new confusion between the classes[114]. Shepherd, page and priest all wish to serve the King, that is, to become an official and to idle for a fixed wage while the land remained unploughed. The peasants do not know what they want and _murmuram sem entender_[115]. There is slackness everywhere (_todos somos negligentes_)[116]. Portugal was suffering from a crisis similar to that of four centuries later and men were inclined to leave their professions in order to theorize or in the hope of growing rich by a short cut or by chance instead of by hard, steady work; and the result was a period of upheaval and disquiet. Vicente suffered like the rest. He had embodied in his plays the simple pastimes of the Portuguese people, their delight in the processions, services and dramatic displays of the Church, in the mimicry of the early _arremedillos_, in the rich fancy-dress _momos_ which were an essential element at great festivities. But his drama was not classical, often it was not drama. Technically he is less dramatic than Lucas Fernández or Torres Naharro. He defied every rule of Aristotle and mingled together the grave and gay, coarse and courtly in a way faithful to life rather than to any accepted theories of the stage. While he continued to produce these natural and delightful plays all kinds of new conditions arose. It was the irony of circumstance that when the old Portuguese poetry held the field the taste of the Court for personal satire and magnificent show could scarcely appreciate at its true value the lyrical gift of Vicente; and later, after King Manuel's death, Vicente found himself confronted by a new school in which classicism carried the day, the long Italian metres superseded the merry native _redondilha_ of eight syllables, and the latinisers began to transform the language and shuddered like _femmes savantes_ at Vicente's barbarisms and uncouth _voquibles_. His attitude towards his critics was one of humility and good humour. It is at least good to know that Vicente with his _redondilhas_ continued to triumph personally in his old age and it was only the hand of death that drove him from the scene. Nor did he cease to point out abuses: the increase of _a falsa mentira_, the corruption of justice[117], the greed for money[118] and the growth of luxury[119]. He pillories the ignorance of pilots[120] by which so many ships were lost now and later, and he seems to doubt the wisdom of keeping women shut up like nuns both before[121] and after[122] marriage. If in many respects Vicente belonged to the Middle Ages, in his curiosity and many-sidedness he was a true child of the Renaissance. He dabbled in astrology and witchcraft, loved music (he wrote tunes for some of his lyrics), poetry, reading, acting and the goldsmith's art, and maintained his zest in old age: _Mofina Mendes_ was probably written when he was over sixty. Attempts to represent him as a Lutheran reformer, a deep philosopher or an authority in questions philological fall to the ground. He was a jovial poet and a keen observer who loved his country, and when he saw its inhabitants all at sixes and sevens he would willingly have brought them back to what he called _a boa diligencia_.

III. TYPES SKETCHED IN HIS PLAYS