SOURCE: Ferreira, Ana Paula. “Intersecting Historical Performances: Gil Vicente's Auto da India.” Gestos: Teoria y Practica del Teatro Hispanico 9, no. 17 (April, 1994): 99-113.

[In the following essay, Ferreira applies the principles of postmodern literary criticism to Vicente's play.]

There is more work in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things; and more books about books than any other subject; we do nothing but write glosses on one another.

Montaigne, Essais

In “The Classical Heritage of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theater,” Patrice Pavis argues that, with the advent of postmodernism, classical and modern dramatic texts “have both been emptied of meaning, or at least of any immediate mimetic meaning, of a signified already there, readily expressed on the stage.” This being so, then, “[a]ny search for the text's sociohistorical dimension, for its inscription in past or present history, is forbidden or at least delayed as long as possible: let her/him who can fictionalize!” (59) Such an appeal to the interpretative freedom of the reader/spectator, on whose imagination seems to rest entirely the production of meaning, is not so much directed at erasing or bypassing the thorny issue of referentiality as it is directed at its pluralization and simultaneous textualization or, if you will, “fictionalization.” Rather than a recuperable, transparent “real,” the sociohistorical would thus be conceived as any number of “depthless images” (Jameson) or “simulacra” (Baudrillard) which the reader/public may—or may not—consciously produce in the act of interpretation.

As Pavis' contention suggests, the collapse of the modern, open, Barthesian “text” and of what once would have been the classical “work” entails a necessary “crossing” of cultural signs and of theatrical codes in the staging or, more generally, postmodern reading of dramatic texts.¹ Leaving aside its dubious universal applicability, this concept of theatre may be instrumental in questioning why certain dramatic texts, formerly seen as classical historical works, lend themselves to the reaction against closure and totality and to demand for theoretical self-reflection which Pavis identifies as the main tendencies of the postmodern mise-en-scène (69-72). Specifically, what happens, when historical “meaning”—however consciously fictitious, “as if,” as it may be—is produced from a classical text within the mesh of conceptual, cultural and historical constraints informing a postmodern critical posture?

Taking Gil Vicente's Auto da India as a case in point, this essay explores one among several possible dynamics for this interpretative process, attending to the performative figuration of history at the intersection of late Medieval and postmodern conceptions of representation and of social theatricality. Three distinct, yet interrelated incursions into the making of meaning will be here discerned: first, an attempt to read the “text” of post-revolutionary Portugal in search of an epistemology which may invite an encounter with Gil Vicente's text; second, a re-construction or, better yet, re-invention of the historical “text” in which the play emerged as a cultural product; and, third, a perhaps postmodern recuperation of the characters' social roles which translate (and transculturate) the public performance of history in terms of the so-called private sphere.²

Gil Vicente's Auto da India, performed in 1509 in honor of King Manuel's mother, Queen Dona Leonor, has been considered either as a fierce critique of Portuguese expansionism or as an expression of carnivalesque counter-culture complicit with the reigning order.³ Regardless of the opinion espoused, the playlet has tended to be interpreted in function of its protagonist, a woman who revels in extra-marital affairs while her husband is away in the expedition to India led by Tristão da Cunha in 1506. Underlying both opinions is an attempt to hold up Dona Constança's “inconstancy” as truth, be it the allegorical truth of a nation gone astray due to the seduction of Oriental riches or of the popular laughter implicit in Woman's reported potential to subvert the Law due to her somehow “natural” propensity to lust, to greed and to feigning.⁴ In the latter, the play's apparent anti-exemplarity is seen to be in line with conventional European satire,⁵ and thus not in contradiction with the respect the playwright would have had for his “muito católica” patron queen.⁶ Yet, it is such an overcharged immorality, set at the meeting point of sexuality and of history, which seems to have been the springboard for either politically invested critical pronouncements or for what generally passes for neutral analysis of Vicentine comic genius.

Rather than refuting these interpretations or welcoming their logical co-existence on the grounds that, as Laurence Keats keenly observed (28-30), King Manuel and his descendant King João III would have welcomed the critical bent of traditional courtly entertainment, it is perhaps more productive to ask why the Auto da India has enjoyed an institutional and artistic revival, particularly during the last decade. Not only is the play included in the Portuguese secondary school curriculum, but it has been performed repeatedly by student, amateur, and professional groups.⁷ According to Manuel João Gomes, syndicated theatre reviewer for the Lisbon newspaper O Público, Auto da India was the most often performed Vicentine play during the 1991-92 season.⁸ If more mature plays by Portugal's first and still most respected playwright treat the onset of imperialism in more detail and apparently on a more encomiastic note—Nao d'Amores and Triunfo do Inverno, for example—, one is led to wonder what propelled such public fascination for the farcical playlet precisely during the period intent on the celebrating of what some call “The Meeting Between Two Worlds” and others, perhaps less attuned to political correctness, refer to as “The Age of Discoveries.”⁹

A culturally informed, if a bit too comforting, explanation might be found in the cherished argument that the Portuguese, by means of their literary and cultural products, have always condemned the social and moral consequences of expansionist adventures. The strongly anti-epic current paradoxically present in the national epic Os Lusiads (1572), Luiz de Camões' poetic rendition of Vasco da Gama's 1498 voyage to India, And Fernão Mendes Pinto's virtually picaresque account of Portuguese exploits in Asia, Peregrination (1614), are well-known examples of such a critical tendency.¹⁰ It would follow, then, that the study and the staging of Gil Vicente's play in contemporary times constitute a celebration, not of “Portuguese Discoveries” per se, but of the measure of self-consciousness that might redeem the country's colonial past, if nowhere else, at least in the domain of artistic representations.

The re-actualization of Gil Vicente's portrayal of early sixteenth-century mores must, however, respond to a more complex cultural phenomenon than the obvious need to exorcize a common, even if reluctantly-shared, historical memory. The choice of a bedroom farce as a provocative comment on past historical indecencies is likely to be dictated by the conditions experienced in a postcolonial nation “embarking on a new adventure” (Maxwell and Haltzel) of economic rebirth brought about in 1986 by the political stability of Mário Soares' civilian regime. Portugal's entry into the European Common Market and increased multinational investments account for, among other factors, the “success story” offered by the latest scholarly representations of contemporary Portugal.¹¹ As early as 1978 this success story was identified by Eduardo Lourenço as entailing a “gozo económico desenfreado” with which the increasingly widespread political right hoped to stifle the democratization process (182).

Aside from responding to the ideological and cultural ambiguities produced by an optimistic economic conjunture which, in some senses, evokes that of sixteenth-century Portugal, Gil Vicente's play may, however, also appeal to the philosophical and aesthetic grounds of a new episteme of representation. Of course, one can attribute such a new manner of conceptualizing knowledge to the contemporary crisis of Enlightenment values now affecting humanist modes of thinking in that undifferentiated geographical mass called the West.¹² But, if the death of Man, of History and of the Metaphysics of Presence borders on a new, abstract universalism, it can also be argued that each community paradoxically experiences and represents for itself the catastrophic trilogy in quite specific, discrete terms. In light of certain cultural products and practices, it is local histories, rather than remote ideas that establish the conditions of possibility under which one might wish to flaunt the term “Postmodernism.”

In the case of Portugal, the disruptive concepts that are normally associated with the term may be said to have been lived as concrete events—however theoretically naïve the phrase may sound—before and beyond any theoretical signifiers could categorize them. The April 25th, 1974 Revolution, a military coup which deposed a fifty-year-old fascist-colonialist government with the sole armament of red carnations and euphoric chants, brought about a fundamental loss of referentials among the great majority, who had been depoliticized by both illiteracy and violent government repression. Maps and history books, urban spaces and structures, homes and families, identities and beliefs turned out to be, all of a sudden, “wrong,” without a signified or anchoring point in either a transcendental or a material reality. This loss of referentials was soon to be monumentalized with the massive realization, after the successful counter-revolutionary coup of November 25th, 1975, that the Revolution had been a “mirage” or a “‘miracle’” (Lourenço, 185-86) or, more precisely, a feast of empty signs with only superficially transformative consequences.¹³

I would suggest that such a conjuncture, subsequently grounded in a post-capitalist boom economy, brought into being what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” (132) akin to postmodernist notions of representation. What is being revisited in Auto da India in the late eighties and early nineties is thus not Portuguese expansionism nor even the self-congratulatory reminder of its denouncement in the classical masterpieces but, rather, the figural, performative quality of the play's mode of historical interpretation.

Despite the obvious ontological differences between the medieval notion of figura and its postmodern equivalent, Jameson's depthless image and Baudrillard's simulacrum, both tropes maintain a close affinity which we would do well to remember in the present context.¹⁴ As historically specific strategies of representation, the figura and the simulacrum apparently evoke some literal event or a real world in order to stand as figurations of the same. Simultaneously, however, they also embody the promise (in the case of the first) or inscribe the absence (in the case of the second) of a historicity yet to be fulfilled. The referential meaning of figures or, on the other hand, of postmodern glossy images is not to be found in the external, non-symbolized reality that each, in its own way, evokes but, rather, on other figures, other images, in a virtually indefinite chain of resemblances (Foucault 17-34).

For Gil Vicente, imbued with the philosophical and aesthetic principles dominant until the end of the sixteenth century, the figura is ultimately validated by a transcendental historical (and religious) truth. For those attracted to his play in a city¹⁵ plunged into consumerist spectacles—the most visible being the lavishly postmodern Centro Comercial das Amoreiras—figures are nothing but surfaces with no truth or historical reason by which to be interpreted. For even capital has ceased to be a tangible reference point: contrary to signifying the postmodern image, which it buys, it “is” that image to such an extent that “money is everywhere and yet it is nowhere to be found.”¹⁶

The Auto da India's appeal to contemporary audiences appears to rest, then, on a phenomenon of cultural projection made possible by a historically concrete epistemological break with a certain face of modernity, a face that, for Portugal, is associated with representational truth claims, be they of fascist history or of socialist revolutionary promises. Gil Vicente's play “speaks” to the present precisely because it gestures toward the discursively constructed character of the Real, toward the provisional, “as if” status of every figuration; in short, toward its own theatricality as part and parcel of the theatricality of history.

Before discussing how the play constitutes an interpretative historical performance, however, it is important, that one envision the stage where the theatre of Portuguese maritime adventures was played. This imaginative re-construction will enable an understanding of how particular conditions of economic prosperity—the beginning of commerce with the Orient conjoining the scenery of the contemporary immersion into postcapitalism—enact representation as performance, as the socio-historical is presented primarily through the performance of national, gender and class identities.

As the place from which maritime ventures began and to which they returned in the form of material as well as symbolic goods, the city of Lisbon became converted during the early sixteenth century into a theatrical space for history making. The rhythms of life, both public and private, were set by ritualistic departures and returns of caravells to the Restelo Beach. Here, explorers and merchants returning from India divulged their travel accounts, which were to constitute the História Trágico-Marítima.¹⁷ Only a mirage of collective wealth could justify, grant transcendental meaning to these stories of perils and turmoils. This mirage was guaranteed by King Manuel himself whose magnificent embassy displaying Oriental riches (with an elephant and all) sent to the Pope in 1514 is no less than paradigmatic of his compulsion for complex and well-planned mises-en-scène boasting national wealth and power. The nineteenth-century historian Oliveira Martins concisely describes courtly life of the period as “um paraíso de delícias fáceis,” in short, “um teatro” (História 316).

It is not incidental that a political and economic order that privileged spectacle and that, moreover, violently forced a whole population of Jews to take on the mask and role of Christians, employed the services of a series of artists/artisans, Gil Vicente among them. Their works were sure to immortalize a national glory that King Manuel perhaps feared to be transient if not outright fake in its pompous display. As official court goldsmith and, simultaneously, master of courtly entertainment, playwright, director and actor (Teyssier, Gil Vicente 9-14), what was Gil Vicente to do but to take advantage of the theatrical, playful spirit of the environment he lived in? Considering his position in court, it is thus difficult to believe that the author would in any way want to antagonize his patrons by exposing some shameful situation that they, themselves, did not know or wished to ignore.

In fact, if Auto da India can be seen as a satirical microcosmos of the theatrical existence of a seafaring people as a whole, it is a satire within the best Classical tradition (of Diomedes and Horace, for example), which possibly survived either directly or indirectly throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance (Jones 5-7; 18-9). Although, as with Gil Vicente's other farces, the play exploits human vices and weaknesses, its intent seems to be much more the provocation of laughter than the forceful confrontation of moral guilt among the courtly audience.¹⁸

On the other hand, one must bear in mind that at a time when scenery and stage props were extremely rare in the Peninsula, the complex treatment of scenic space in Auto da India entails in itself an investment of time and, above all, money which could only answer to and be in line with the cultural expectations of the court as a whole, specifically with a social and political demand for theatrical effects.

Following the many stage directions integrated into the dramatic dialogue, Leif Sletsjoe has remarked how the play in question presupposes not only a basic division between the interior of a home and its surroundings but, also, possibly, a raised platform with a staircase leading to the home (in Parker 335-36). Since Auto da India stages the theatrical existence of a people who live suspended between the rituals of caravell departures and returns, such display of scenic apparatus is instrumental for Gil Vicente's figural (as different from representational) interpretation of history.¹⁹ The play opens with the delayed departure (off stage) of what would be the sixteenth-century version of a bourgeois “businessman” to India and ends with his equivocally glorious return three years later, with neither riches nor fame; only complacency towards his own and his wife's purported “constancy.” Far from a standstill of historical events or of the feigning that they impose at the seaport, the play presents, then, their necessary rallying act: the voyage to India played right in the inside of the home. As a “particular site of production of discourse,” the home thus encodes social identities that are translatable in terms of the public domain (Stallybrass and White 94-6). In other words, the farcical rendition of private conduct must be understood in terms of the characters' relationships to expansionist adventures.

The social, cultural, gender, even sexual performances of Dona Constança, her maid, her Castillian pretender, her Portuguese would-be lover and her husband are strictly defined in terms of the master signifier “Empire,” a signifier fantasized on the figure of the Master (King/master of the house) as impostor par excellence (Zizek 103). The exploratory/expansionist adventure continues within the boundaries of the private sphere by virtue of a fantasy of excess which, in fact, does not possess any ‘real’ existence outside the figural space that it occupies (be it the body of the King or of the individual India-bound man). Because every character has identified with and internalized this fantasy, their performances are solely conducted in terms of investments and returns; that is, each character hopes to bank on still absent profits without risking either a trip at sea or too much in advance.

Constança's two seducers—an eloquent, arrogant Spaniard who sells vinegar, and an enamored Portuguese erstwhile escudeiro who is now without work—attempt to rip off the profits from India by seeking to occupy an “available” body-space—woman/home. While the second pretender, the good-for-nothing Lemos, does not need to invest much effort in order to regain Constança's favors, Juan Çamora initially resorts to lofty, albeit demodé, courtly discourse as a way to impress whom he sees in more than one way as an estranged wife.

Considering his prominent role in the play, it is obvious that Çamora is presented as the rightful alternative to the absent (Portuguese) master. For this reason, even if Constança at first humiliates him—“Vós soys? Cuidei que era alguém” (69)—, he insists in conquering her. Placing himself in direct contrast with her marido, Çamora first condemns him for leaving her alone and not recognizing that she is the riches of India: “Qué más India que vós? / Qué más piedras preciosas? / Qué más alindadas cosas / que estardes juntos los dos?” (70). Vexed by her irony, he changes strategies, and boasts about his belligerent prowess at street-fighting (72). Later on, as he realizes Constança has made a fool of him after apparently accepting his courtship, as “um homem de verdad” (73), he threatens to “quemar la casa, … / después, quemar la ciudad” (78) “antes que pasen tres días” (79). Juan Çamora thus acts out not only the social role expected of an impassioned (sexual) pursuer but, what is more, this role is politically and culturally marked: he is the eminent conquistador ready to take hold of an unguarded land to which his country would have a historical right. Or, from another perspective, as a Spaniard, Juan Çamora is competing right “at home,” with the Portuguese (husband) for the overseas territories and trade routes that each country seeks for itself at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Yet, Constança is no mute, passive body-space for anyone's possession; she becomes, in a sense, the “luz de todo Portugal” (70) through her strategic manipulation of the role bestowed upon her by the absent marido. Not only is she consistently in control of her situation through the use of irony and rejection of poetic sweet-talk—“Se vós falais desbaratos, / em que falaremos nós?” (71)—but she confronts each pretender with his own ultimate aim while clearly setting her own conditions of acceptance: to the Castillian she remarks, “Vós querieis ficar cá? / é cedo ainda” (72); and, in face of a poverty-stricken Lemos, Constança asserts, “Vós querieis cá cear / e eu não tenho que vos dar” (75). In this manner, she keeps them both at bay so as not to lose the possible gains that each may bring her. Despite the fact that, according to the maid, the amo has left enough “trigo, azeite, mel e panos” for three years (67), Constança complains that he left her “sem cetil” (67). Her perception of need can be understood thus in terms of the social and national group that she represents. As in the case of her relatively well-to-do husband who embarks upon the overseas expedition, she too nourishes the kind of ambition that only India seems capable of fulfilling. But, in the meantime, she does not lose an opportunity to make her own “India” while guarding it securely from the Spaniard's always imminent occupation.²⁰

From the beginning of the play, the moça agrees to service Constança's transactions, but only under the agreement that she give her whatever luxury goods the master will bring back: “Ou quando ele vier / dia-me ua touca de seda” (67). Although her role as graciosa continually exposes and undermines the theatricality of the scenes she witnesses, the moça's performance of economic dependence is what, in every respect, permits the show, including the larger show of history, to go on. Even if repeatedly told to leave the scene—“Moça, vai àquele cão / que m'anda naquelas tigelas” (71); “Ide e vinde muit' em bo-hora” (73)—, she always returns too quickly and too soon. Her role as an accomplice-voyeuse is necessary inasmuch as she constitutes the eyes of the public who, regardless of their social and economic status, expect alvíssaras from the maritime voyages. Therefore it is in the maid's best interests, as in the best interests of everyone in that public, to actively and consciously perform whichever supporting roles may be opportune, either in the kitchen/bedroom or at the seaport, so as not to lose the opportunity of earning a share of the profits.

That such profits remain at the level of fantasy, never coinciding with the real value of the goods brought back (or not) from India, becomes manifest in the husband's account of his own história trágico-marítima. In answer to Constança's provocative statement concerning his gains in the sexual domain—“Lá há Indias mui fermosas; / lá faríeis vós das vossas” (84)—, the marido evokes the hardships, the deaths, the fights and perils which left the crew “destroçados, / pelados como formigas” (84). Rather than the rich man that Constança (and himself) had hoped for, he comes back feeling cheated: “Se não fora o capitão, / eu trouxera a meu quinhão / um millão, vos certifico” (84). Which, obviously, still leaves intact the mirage of becoming rich, if not as a capitão himself at least servicing a more honest one on another expedition. But, then, the marido's performance of sufferance and destitution may be as feigned as his—and his wife's—assurances of marital fidelity. At a moment when each one is out to grab what s/he can get, by whatever means, there are neither “lies” nor “truths” nor transcendental values; only what in postmodern parlance could be seen as “the cult of the simulacrum,” where the image does not hide but rather produces something like the “real” (Baudrillard, Simulations 8).

As the playlet that is performed between the two major public scenes of maritime expansionism (departures and returns), Gil Vicente's Auto da India can properly be regarded as a sort of entremés that alleviates the dramatic tension of the official play of history thereby ensuring its successful accomplishment. The play foregrounds in its farcical gestus the theatricality on which is based and which helps maintain expansionist ideology by appealing, ultimately, to the desire of individuals. Since the Empire signifies that which they do not have and which everyone demands beyond all need, it is desire, in the last instance, what propels the various historical performances to go on, generating the economic/libidinal surplus on which the new capitalist order is to be found. In this way, the socially most unprivileged, for example, the moça and the escudeiro, avail themselves of the type of cultural, social and gender masquerade that directly contributes to the nation's expansionist performance as a whole vis-à-vis, specifically, the Spanish competitor at sea and his forever threatening presence close to home.

In Simulations, Baudrillard points out that the loss of referentials in the postmodern epoch has led to “the hysteria of production, … [seeking] … the restoration of the real which escapes it” (44). If this is so, then it could be inferred that the “fictionalization” of history which Auto da India invites among a contemporary public is likely to be related to the need—not to say simply the trend—to (re)construct a national past in which the quasi trans-national present can recognize its image. This virtual identification, which necessarily entails a multiple “crossing” (Pavis) or intersecting of cultural, aesthetic and philosophical codes, is made possible by near-coincidental epistemological positionings related to two discrete moments of capitalist/imperialist production and respective economies of surplus.

Such positionings (Gil Vicente's and the postmodern reader's) dictate to a large extent the conceptualization and interpretation of the historical “real” in terms of performativity, of figural gestures that circumvent any demand for univocity, for a non-textual original “truth,” for, indeed, any clear-cut differentiation between the theatrical on a given stage and the theatrical on a given seaport/shopping plaza or, for that matter, in a given bedroom. Constança's “inconstancy” may, after all, have nothing to do with (sexual) immorality per se but, rather, with the instability of all meanings, with the relentless questioning of the glitter of Law not from a privileged position outside of it but from within one of its ever more disseminated and elusive sparks.

Notes

1. Patrice Pavis abides with Roland Barthe's distinction between “work” and “text”

2. I am indebted to Susan Well's discussion of the public and the private as hermeneutic categories for interpreting social representations dialectically, particularly as “figures of transformation and reversal” (166-171).

3. For views representing the first of these opinions see for example Saraiva (316), Rebello (42), and Roig (“Criticism and Satire”). Hart (23-25), Teyssier (“L'envers de l'épopée” 162-64), Suárez (155-59) are representative of the second.

4. For postmodern permutations of this Western, fundamentally Judeo-Christian notion of Woman, see, for example, Lacan and Derrida.

5. Although not focusing on the play in question, Hamilton Hope-Faria has studied Vicente's farces within this tradition (43-74 and 97-124). See also Keats (27-33) and, more specifically, Teyssier (679).

6. According to the “Argumento” at the beginning of Auto da India, the play was performed for the “muito católica rainha dona Lianor.” See Hart (64). All subsequent references to the play correspond to this edition, and will be indicated in parentheses in the body of the text.

7. This information was supplied by the renowned theater critic Carlos Porto in a telephone interview conducted on May 26, 1993.

8. Personal interview. Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressão Ibérica, Porto (Portugal). June 5, 1992.

9. It is curious to note, however, that in the Luso-Brazilian world, the terms “descobrimentos” and “descobertas” are used with no apparent negative connotations. One may mention, for example, the government-supported “Commissão Nacional Para a Celebração dos Descobrimentos Portugueses,” and the impressive volume Portugal-Brazil: The Age of Discoveries, which accompanied the exhibit held at the New York Public Library (June 2-September 1, 1990), under the main auspices of the Brazilian Cultural Foundation.

10. Teyssier discusses Auto da India and Peregrination as works representative of this tradition.

11. For interdisciplinary perspectives on the political, social, economic, and cultural state of affairs of post-1974 Portugal see the collections of essays by both Portuguese and non-Portuguese scholars, Portugal: Ancient Country, Young Democracy (1990) and The New Portugal: Democracy and Europe (1992).

12. A good exposé of this crisis is presented by the philosopher/psychoanalyst Jane Flax.

13. The frequent public speeches of various political leaders, the commonplace rhetoric that passed for political discussion, and the way the media was put to service of such “feixes de ‘mots pousse-à-jouir’” have been pointed out as partly responsible for the crisis of revolutionary ideals which soon overcame the short-lived euphoria of April 25, 1974 (Oliveira 16).

14. I am indebted to Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth for this comparison (175-184).

15. I am referring to Lisbon, for better of for worse still the center of political, intellectual, and artistic life in Portugal.

16. One of the most pervasive popular criticisms of the seemingly indecorous buying power in present-day Portugal is well expressed in the often evoked phrase, “há dinheiro em todo o lado e ninguém tem dinheiro nenhum.”

17. Bernardo Gomes de Brito, História Trágico-Marítima, em que se escrevem chronologicamente os naufrágios que tiveram as naus de Portugal, depois que se poz em exercício a navegaçao de India, Lisboa, na Officina da Congregação do Oratório, vol. I, 1954. Cited by Adrien Roig, “Tempestade sobre a Rota da India” (73; 79; 87).

18. The thirteen-century Galician-Portuguese (courtly) cantigas d'escárnio e de mal dizer are likely to be considered an intermediary form between the classical tradition of satire and Gil Vicente's farces. As the “Poética Fragmentária” inserted in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional suggests, these cantigas would have aimed at making the audience laugh, “mais non som cousas em que sabedoria nem outro bem aja …” (Lapa, Cantigas ix). Although Vicentine criticism tends to agree on characterizing his plays, both formally and conceptually, as still imbued with medievalism, this connection is still to be studied.

19. See p. 103 above for the relevant theoretical discussion on this point.

20. It may be noted that she keeps Çamora out in the street while dealing with Lemos, who awaits her in bed (“Quantas artes, quantas manhas, / que sabe fazer minha ama! / Um na rua, outro na cama!” (79). Constança takes advantage of the situation not only in the hopes of material returns but also for the jouissance that her games of teasing can afford her. Again, on this point, a comparison with the status of the dama in the medieval courtly love cantigas would be most profitable.

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