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Of Vicente’s forty-four surviving plays, sixteen are in Portuguese, eleven are in Spanish, and seventeen are in both languages. Although Vicente apparently never journeyed outside Portugal, the Spanish connections of the Portuguese court and the belief that the two countries would soon be united under one throne because of a series of royal marriages between their respective ruling houses encouraged his use of the closely related—but nevertheless distinct—Spanish language. His Spanish is often peculiar; he uses the Portuguese “personal infinitive” when he writes in Spanish, and his rhymes in Spanish are often imperfect (such as parezca and cabeza, based on their Portuguese cognates pareça and cabeça). In his earliest plays, his shepherds speak the sayagués “dialect” invented or elaborated by Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández of the Salamancan school of Spanish drama. Sayagués, erroneously associated with Sayago to the north of Salamanca, is more correctly associated with the province of Salamanca itself, adjacent to the Portuguese province of Beira, possibly Vicente’s native area, which in turn allows the possibility of a childhood intimacy with a dialect very closely related to the sayagués that he placed in the mouths of his rustics.

Vicente uses language to distinguish many of his characters. While his shepherds speak sayagués, his blacks chatter in pidgin Portuguese, his Gypsies lisp, and in Auto de la fama, in which Fame is courted successively by a Frenchman, an Italian, and a Spaniard before she decides to pledge her troth to Portugal, Vicente makes an attempt to have each foreign suitor speak in his own language.

Although he picked up foreign words and mannerisms with ease, Vicente does not appear to have had much acquaintance of or even liking for fashions from beyond the Pyrenees. If he introduced a French song into one of his plays, he probably did so out of deference to the taste of the Portuguese court. Vicente was unaffected by the innovations of Giangiorgio Trissino and other Italian dramatists, and with his medieval appreciation of folkways and folk wisdom, he stood unswayed against the inevitable literary artificiality that followed the return to Portugal of Francisco Sá de Miranda with the hendecasyllabic line from Italy in 1526.

Although Vicente’s work lacks psychological depth by today’s standards, his plays reveal a grasp of characterization vastly superior to that of the medieval dramatists who preceded him. Indifferent to the rules of Aristotle, as a playwright he combined disparate elements in a way more faithful to life than to any theory of drama. Himself a man of the people, he refused to imitate the products of classical theater, choosing to absorb the critical spirit of the fast-approaching Renaissance without its erudition. In his religious toleration, he was spokesperson for the better men of his age and society. The embryonic genius in the drama of Vicente provides the modern critic with a strong temptation to hypothesize: Had he written fifty years later in the requisite Renaissance environment of freedom and sophistication, he might have surpassed Calderón and equaled Shakespeare.

Early Plays

After his first short plays, which were written between 1502 and 1504 in the pastoral manner of the Spaniards Encina and Fernández, several years passed before Vicente’s next work was staged. His first attempt at allegory, in which Faith, speaking Portuguese, explains the meaning of Christmas to peasants speaking Spanish, occurs in Auto da fé and is still much in the pastoral style of Encina and Fernández. Although his earlier plays are largely derivative, his distinctive personality soon began to emerge in his works. In 1512, Vicente wrote two plays with characters inspired by those in the Spanish play Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499, rev. ed. 1502 as Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea; commonly known as La Celestina; Celestina, 1631): O velho da horta (the farce of the old man in the orchard), which ridicules an old man who is in love with a young girl he sees in his orchard and who engages the services of the procuress Branca Gil, and the rather hilarious Auto dos fisicos (play of the doctors), which shows a love-stricken priest at the mercy of a series of outrageous doctors and a procuress, Brasias Dias. They give up on their patient and leave him to a priest-confessor, who confesses that he himself has been in love for many years and argues that since love is ordained by God, no shame need be felt for it. Later Vicente introduced other procuresses into his plays, such as Brigida Vaz in The Ship of Hell and Ana Gil of O juiz da Beira.

The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra

In 1513 or 1514, while he was under the influence of his Salamancan masters (lexically, especially Encina), Vicente wrote what is considered one of his masterpieces, The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra, which was probably performed before Queen Leanor after Christmas matins in the Convent of Enxobregas in Lisbon. In this work, Vicente skillfully blended peasant scenes and religious rhapsodies as well as love passages and biting satire, and interspersed refreshing letras para cantar (popular songs) in the play to signal dancing scenes.

Vicente’s immediate source was a fifteenth century Italian novel of chivalry, Guerin meschino (1473), translated into Spanish by Andrea da Barberino in 1512. The title translates as “Guerrino the wretched,” in reference to the hero’s wretched childhood slavery, above which he rises to discover his royal parentage, marry a princess, and die a saintly death. Cassandra, the name of one of the sibyls whom Guerrino encounters—but not the one sibyl in the Italian story intent on saving her virginity to become the mother of Christ—was a name already well-known to Vicente. The Erythean sibyl Erutea had appeared as well in a well-known pseudo-Augustinian sermon as one who foretold the coming of the Messiah, and in Vicente’s play, this Erythean sibyl recites a version of the Fifteen Signs of Judgment Day.

In Vicente’s version, Cassandra does not want to renounce her freedom for marriage. She is importuned by her handsome admirer Salomon; by her three aunts, the sibyls Erutea, Peresica, and Cimeria; and by Salomon’s three uncles, the prophets Abraham, Isaiah, and Moses. There is satire in Cassandra’s haughty disdain of marriage, as there is in Salomon’s presumption that Cassandra has no better choice than to marry him. She gives as her reason for spurning marriage the quarreling and the difficulties inherent in such a relationship, and it is only later that she discloses the real reason: She wants to be the virgin who bears the Son of God. At length, after the scriptural prophecies made by her aunts, a curtain is drawn aside and the real Virgin is revealed in the manger. Appropriately humbled, Cassandra begs to be forgiven for her presumption. The play ends with a cantiga (song) about the real Virgin’s beauty (“Tell me, sailor/ you who live in ships,/ if the ship or the sail or the star/ is as beautiful”) and, enigmatically for the modern reader, a terreiro, or call to arms (“To war,/ Ye gallant knights,/ Since the angels from heights/ Come to help us upon earth./ Go forth!”). This terreiro may be interpreted literally (especially in consideration of Portugal’s involvement in the North African religious wars) or allegorically, as symbolizing Cassandra’s acceptance of her role as both bride and soldier for Christianity. Another work written by Vicente at about the same time and continuing the theme of this final terreiro, Exhortation to War was probably performed for King Manuel I in Lisbon as a Portuguese expedition set out for Azamor in North West Africa in August, 1513.

Ships Trilogy

Vicente’s Ships Trilogy represents an apex in his dramatization of religious themes and indeed has been compared with Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). The first play of the trilogy, The Ship of Hell , in Portuguese, was presented to Queen Maria on her deathbed in 1516. This was followed by The Ship of Purgatory , also in Portuguese, which was performed on Christmas morning, 1518, before the new Queen Eleanor (who had married Manuel I), in the Hospital de Todos os Santos in Lisbon. The third, The Ship of Heaven , in Spanish, was presented to the Portuguese monarchs during Holy Week, 1519, at Almeirim. The first two ship plays are full of Aristophanic humor and irony and treat the fates of peasants and persons of middle rank as they are rewarded or punished on Judgment Day, and The Ship of Heaven deals with men of only the highest rank, representatives of church and state, including an emperor and a pope. This last play of the trilogy is the one based most clearly on the Spanish Dance of Death, an anonymous seventy-nine-stanza poem dating from approximately 1400, which achieves significant dramatic import by its antiphonal alternating of the victims’ pleas with Death’s implacable words of condemnation. The theme of death was a source of obsession in the European Middle Ages and in Vicente’s own century—a time of short life expectancy, apocalyptic visions, and millenarian yearnings—and had apparently evolved from a literal dance of the dying during the time of the Black Death to a dance-of-death motif in both art and literature, in which Death is grotesquely personified.

In Vicente’s version, the transgressions of each high-ranking person are tirelessly enumerated by the boatman of Hell, who presides as prosecutor, and their futures look bleak indeed until the Redeemer arrives to accept them. The Pope especially has been welcomed by the Devil as one of his own kind, one who has shone for his practice of simony and lust, and all of his repentant acts are ineffectual until the arrival of the Redeemer.

Auto da feira

The Papacy is again the target of Vicente’s satire in Auto da feira (play of the fair), written in Portuguese in 1528. At a fair, Time sets up a booth to sell virtuous wares (such as the fear of God). The Devil is there as well, hawking his evil wares (such as deceits of all kinds and hypocrisy). The Church of Rome appears and, as is her wont, goes first to the Devil’s booth. When she stops at Time’s booth, she tries to sell Time her indulgences: “Sell me the place of heaven, since I have power here below.” At length the Church of Rome repents of her errors, and the play ends optimistically as a group of dancing people praise the Virgin. As noted above, Vicente’s open contempt for the hypocrisy of the clergy should not be equated with the reforming spirit of Luther; rather, it reflects an elemental hostility long in evidence throughout medieval Europe toward a privileged class of men, the clergy, who, while disdainful of the ways of ordinary men, more than occasionally embraced those very ways in secret.

Farsa de Inês Pereira

Another play generally considered one of Vicente’s best is Farsa de Inês Pereira, performed in Portuguese before John III in the Monastery of the Knights of Christ in Tomar, in 1523, and inspired by the proverb, “Mais quero asno que me leve, que cavalo que me derrube” (“I prefer a donkey which will carry me to a horse which will throw me”). A woman named Inês marries the more impressive of two suitors, the stately horse rather than the solid donkey—a poor choice from which fate delivers her when her husband perishes at war, leaving her free to marry her first and more reliable suitor. The play is distinguished by its fine characterizations, its superior versification, and a unity of action that is rare in Vicente’s drama.

Tragicomédia de dom Duardos

Vicente realized before other writers the dramatic potential present in the romances of chivalry. Written entirely in Spanish, probably in 1522, and based on the Spanish novel Primaleon (1512), Tragicomédia de dom Duardos is Vicente’s longest play (2,054 lines) and displays the subtlest development and sustained lyricism to be found in his works. The play chronicles an English prince’s successful wooing of Princess Flérida of Constantinople by the ruse of his disguising himself as her gardener. When she falls in love with him after drinking from an enchanted cup which he has given her, she asks him to reveal his identity, but, romantically, he refuses to abandon his humble station until she accepts him as he is. The happy ending is punctuated by a ballad that has won the highest praise from all critics: Flérida bids a tender farewell to her homeland (“God keep you all, my flowers,/ Which once my glory were;/ I go to foreign lands/ Since fate has called me there”) and as she falls asleep in the arms of Dom Duardos to the gentle sound of rowing, the audience is cautioned, “All men who now draw breath/ Learn wisdom from my tale:/ O’er power of love and death/ There’s none that can prevail.”

Amadis of Gaul

In Amadis of Gaul, performed at Évora before John III in 1523, Vicente elaborated on one of the best episodes of the chivalric novel of the same name and converted it into a moving drama with characters that are more skillfully portrayed than those in the novel. The play deals with Oriana’s rejection of Amadis, and although in the novel Oriana does this heartlessly, Vicente gives to her an insightful soliloquy in which she wavers, so that when she revises her opinion, an immediate rapprochement is possible. Some critics have insisted on the ironic and satiric nature of Vicente’s treatment of the Amadis story, but at least one critic views it as a straight dramatization of a well-known story in which Vicente revivifies the conventions of courtly love, showing his audience that in this case these courtly lovers are dealing with deeply felt emotions. The satirization of Amadis would have to wait for the appearance of a Miguel de Cervantes.