Part 13

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.