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
In Vicente's notes and sketches of the Portugal of his day we may see
the master hand of the goldsmith accustomed to set jewels. His
miniatures are so distinct and the types described are so various that
had we no other record of the first third of the sixteenth century in
Portugal we might form a very fair and singularly vivid estimate from
his plays. With a comic poet we have, of course, to be on our guard.
When Vicente introduces the _lavrador_ who steals his neighbour's land,
is he drawing from life or from Berceo's _mal labrador_ or from the
_Danza de la Muerte_ (_fasiendo furto en la tierra agena_) or from the
Bible: 'Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark'? When he
presents the poverty-stricken nobleman, the dissipated priest, rustics
from Beira, or negro slaves, for how much does the conventional satire
of the day stand in these portraits and how much is drawn from Nature?
Are they merely literary types? It is obvious that these themes were a
great resource for the satirists of that time but their value to the
satirist lay in their truth. The sad existence of the poor gentleman and
the splendour maintained by penniless nobles are all too well attested.
As to the priests, when we find King Manuel joining with King Ferdinand
of Spain in a protest to the Pope to the effect that the whole of
Christendom was scandalized by the dissolute life of the clergy and by
the traffic in Bulls[123], and grave ecclesiastics in Spain and friends
of grave ecclesiastics, like Franco Sacchetti[124] earlier in Italy,
using language even more violent than that of Vicente, we need not doubt
the truth of his sketches. He was perhaps more vivid than the other
critics and his satire penetrated deeply for the very reason that he was
a realist. There was no doubt some professional exaggeration in the
language of his _beirão_ rustics, but his sympathy with the peasants and
his wide knowledge of the province of Beira prove that his object was
not merely mockery: _zombar da gente da Beira_[125]. Many of his types
are foreshadowed in the _Cancioneiro Geral_, and especially in the
_Arrenegos_ of Gregorio Afonso, of the household of the Bishop of Evora:
the 'priest who lives like a layman,' 'the gentleman who has not enough
to eat,' 'the man of great estate and small income,' the _preciosos_,
the _borrachas_, the _fantasticos_, the _alcouviteira_, 'the peasants
placed in a position of importance.' In developing these figures Vicente
was always careful to keep close to Nature. Each speaks in his own
language, 'the negro as a negro, the old man as an old man.' This is
carried to such a length that the Spanish Queen in the lament on the
death of King Manuel is made to speak her few lines in Spanish, the rest
of the poem being in Portuguese[126].