[In the following excerpt, Parker contends that Vicente's work displays none of the features of Renaissance drama and is, in fact, firmly rooted in the medieval tradition.]

There has been a good deal of discussion in recent years as to whether Gil Vicente was completely «medieval» or whether he stood at the threshold of the new, the Renaissance, which during his lifetime was slowly entering Portugal under Italian influence. Sá de Miranda, it is to be remembered, was the main proponent of the new school of poetry, replacing the trovas de medida velha with the versos de medida nova through his imitation of Dante, Petrarch and other Italian Greats.

The competent Portuguese critic António José Saraiva declared in 1942 in Gil Vicente e o fin do teatro medieval² that Gil Vicente was intimately linked with what preceded him, and not with what was to come after (except in the sense that his influence was considerable on the later Spanish Comedia especially, and on later poetry of a popular nature in the Iberian Peninsula). Saraiva modified this rigid position to some extent in later years, in his História da cultura em Portugal³, for example, looking upon Gil Vicente as «a reflection of the crisis» between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Other critics, such as Albin Éduard Beau, in his article on «Gil Vicente: O aspeto ‘medieval’ e ‘renascentista’ da sua obra»⁴, hold a similar view.

However, I still rigidly maintain the position which I put forward in the Twayne volume of 1967 that Gil Vicente was thoroughly medieval, and that, untouched by the Renaissance, he continued medievalism in its best sense in all of his literary activities⁵. In fact here I have the support of Gino Saviotti, who declared after careful consideration that «Gil Vicente was not ignorant of [the new theatrical current of the Renaissance] even before Sá de Miranda's return to Portugal [from Italy] in 1526.» «We have—concludes Saviotti—quite a few indications to think that Gil Vicente purposely rejected [the new current]»⁶.

At this point a little chronology is worth remembering. Arriving at Court out of obscure origins in the last decade of the fifteenth century, Gil Vicente began his dramatic career by 1502, with his Monólogo do vaqueiro, to honor the Spanish-born Queen María on the occasion of the birth of an heir to the throne of Portugal, the later João III. Great debate there has been as to what part of Portugal Gil Vicente was born in; as to his education; as to whether he was one and the same with the famous Gil Vicente, the goldsmith, whose monstrance made from the first gold from the Far East can still be seen on exhibit in Lisbon (unless recent changes in that country have caused it to be moved from the National Ancient Art Museum). Whether Gil Vicente came from Barcelos, Guimarães, the province of Beira …, most critics are of the opinion that he was certainly country-born and raised, for the pastoral qualities of his plays exhibit much too intimate an acquaintanceship with rural life to permit the belief that he was a city man who came, let us say, from Lisbon.

Much more to the point regarding Gil Vicente the medievalist (or the Renaissance man, as some would claim, but wrongly, I repeat) is the question of his exposure or nonexposure to incipient Humanism. Aubrey Fitz Gerald Bell, who did so much on and for our dramatist, constantly held the opinion that any formal training was very superficial. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos shared that view, as she too rejected any suggestion that Gil Vicente was a reader of Latin classics and the humanists of the Renaissance⁷. Joaquim de Carvalho, in his Estudos sôbre a cultura portuguesa do século XVI, has argued that Gil Vicente must have read widely in patristic literature, and has even suggested that the dramatist might have studied at a university in Portugal, in Spain, or in France⁸. Thomas R. Hart, in his edition of Gil Vicente's Obras dramáticas castellanas, puts forth the idea that the dramatist may have studied at the University of Salamanca⁹. The Carvalho-Hart view of Gil Vicente's «education» has been completely rejected by I. S. Révah, as he supported Bell and Michaëlis de Vasconcelos¹⁰. Révah's insistence is that Gil Vicente's learnings, as revealed in his writings, arose from knowledge of the day, common to all, from books of devotion in Portuguese and in Spanish and from Vicente's activities as a goldsmith well versed in the religious iconography of the times. There is a lack of documentary proof and a tremendous gap in our knowledge of the early Gil Vicente. However, John Lihani has done extremely well, following «intuitive insights,» in bringing forth some probabilities about Vicente's life in his Hispanic Review article of 1969¹¹, and in his 1973 Twayne volume on Lucas Fernández.

It is a fact that Gil Vicente in his dramatic début was certainly influenced by Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández of Spain. John Lihani has pointed out, very logically, that the Portuguese dramatist may very well have been in the retinue of King Manuel of Portugal and his bride Isabel of Castile when, following their marriage of 1497, they went on a grand tour of Spain and, in 1498, in a ceremony in Toledo swore their vows as heirs to the crowns of Castile and León. The visit of the Royal Couple to the palace of the important Duke of Alba would have brought Gil Vicente into contact with Juan del Encina and Fernández in the Salamancan regions (if they had not already met in Toledo); and during a subsequent reciprocal visit to Portugal on the part of the Duke of Alba, it is probable enough that Encina and Fernández were there—perhaps to have a Lucas Fernández play performed in Portugal, at the wedding of King Manuel to another daughter of the Reyes Católicos, María, in October of 1500. John Lihani argues very strongly and effectively for these fruitful international dramatic contacts, noting that the Auto pastoril castelhano may be interpreted in its details as proof of «the mutual awareness, the personal contacts, and furthermore the friendships that existed among the three primitive peninsular dramatists: Lucas Fernández, Gil Vicente, and Juan del Encina»¹².

These initial influences from Spain upon the Monólogo do vaqueiro (June, 1502), the Auto pastoril castelhano (Christmas, 1502), and upon the Auto dos Reis Magos (Epiphany, 1503) were all in the tradition of the medieval lay or religious performance. There surely existed, both in Portugal and Spain, more primitive drama in the Middle Ages than we generally know about, of a farcical and religious nature; and these modes of medieval entertainment are the kinds which Gil Vicente started with and continued with throughout his whole career. He never, for example, picked up Renaissance experimentation such as Juan del Encina's Égloga de Plácida y Victoriano, in which the Spanish dramatist revealed an increasing sophistication and refinement in the Italianate «classical» sense.

I believe that it is sufficient to look at «groupings» of Gil Vicente's works to note that medieval farce, medieval moralities and allegories, and medieval romances were constantly in his mind. Dom Duardos and Amadis de Gaula, for example, are among Gil Vicente's most complicated and highly developed dramatic efforts and are both rooted in the medievalism of their sources: the Spanish books of chivalry. Covering some chapters of the Primaleón, Book II, which had an edition in Salamanca in 1512, and one in Seville in 1524, Dom Duardos relates the successful wooing of Princess Flérida of Constantinople by Prince Edward of England, and is Gil Vicente's longest play, of some 2,054 lines. It ends in beautiful versos de romance, in the medieval tradition of the old romances tradicionales antiguos. And in this connection it is worth remembering that a favorite verse form of Gil Vicente's is the medieval line of broken fot, the versos de pie quebrado, as we know them in Jorge Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre. For songs Vicente used the old Portuguese cossante and, among others, the serranilla as we know it in the Libro de buen amor and in the hands of the Marqués de Santillana. In the use of all these verse forms, in a very lyric theater, Gil Vicente stood firm in his unsophisticated, medieval position, to combat the growing literary artificialities at Court which were arriving from Italy and which were especially strong with the return of Sá de Miranda from that country in the mid 1520's.

Dom Duardos has drawn the attention of a good many modern critics, such as Dámaso Alonso, Thomas Hart, Elias Rivers and Bruce Wardropper. Courtly love is strong within it, and on this point Hart has written that «The play is deeply indebted to the traditional presentation of courtly love, familiar to Vicente and to his readers from the Cancioneros and the romances of chivalry»¹³.

For Amadis de Gaula the job done by Vicente in his dramatic adaptation of portions of the source novel is a good one, as has been pointed out by T. P. Waldron in his edition of the Tragicomedia de Amadís de Gaula (Manchester, 1959). Here again we have a deep involvement with courtly love, and a medieval presentation springing from Gil Vicente's recent readings in Spanish chivalrous literature.

If we pick up the several moralities and mysteries, the three Ships, The Soul's Journey, The History of God, The Dialogue on the Resurrection and The Play of the Canaanite Woman, we find that they are splendid treatments of the theology which belonged to the Christian Middle Ages and which was continuing firmly and strongly in Portugal in Gil Vicente's day. To repeat, allegories and moralities such as these must have been presented in some rudimentary fashion under Church auspices in the centuries previous to Gil Vicente, and Gil Vicente was using his superior dramatic abilities to please the Court and the public, through old-time and well-tested materials, for the entertainment and enlightenment of his audiences, as well as for the reinforcement and enhancement of the Faith. True it is that within these plays there is a good deal of the anticlericalism of the Middle Ages, and Vicente's intention was to provide a salutary effect.

Medieval philosophy and theology, in the widest of terms and in the best of senses, are shared by Gil Vicente and preceding works which he may have known, such as the Danza de la muerte, the Dialogue of the Dead (of Lucian of Samosata), the Vita Christi (of Ludolphus of Saxony), the Coplas (of Jorge Manrique) and Dante's Divine Comedy (the Inferno has a Spanish translation of Burgos, 1515, for example). In addition, Georges Le Gentil believes that Gil Vicente must have known in some way medieval French mystery plays—the Picard texts of mystères—and made use of them in writing these dramatic productions of a religious nature¹⁴. At any rate, Gil Vicente did make good use of whatever medieval material came to hand, to bring forth very satisfying works in the religious genre.

It has been said that King João III was guilty of turning Gil Vicente away from these religious interests when he came to the throne of Portugal in 1521, to meet the ever-continuing demands of an entertainment-loving Court. However that may be, farce, in the medieval tradition, flowed from Gil Vicente's pen throughout his dramatic career. It is only necessary to conjure up the «popular» entertainment in a courtyard or square of a medieval town to connect it with Gil Vicente's many slapstick plays, whether they be Quem tem farelos?, the Farsa das ciganas, the Auto dos físicos, the Farsa do velho da horta, the Comédia do viuvo, the Farsa de Inês Pereira, the Farsa do Juiz da Beira or the Farsa dos almocreves,

Looking over Gil Vicente's whole dramatic production, one can argue for Renaissance elements therein on occasion—it is a matter of interpretation—, but I do not think that they really exist. I cannot agree with Charlotte Stern, for example, who in her review of Zamora Vicente's edition of the Comedia del viudo asks: «Could it indeed be a transitional work, combining the static monologue-type play or farce of the Middle Ages (first 388 lines) with the livelier, structurally more complex, comedia a fantasía of Torres Naharro (lines 389-1056) and, consequently, written around 1521, perhaps before the Rubena?»¹⁵. I see it all to be medieval; and I would adapt some words of John Lihani's concerning Encina and Lucas Fernández for the Vicente position: «Shergold [History of the Spanish Stage] has pointed out that Lucas was conscious of the new Italian drama and attempted to associate some of his plays with it by giving them the name farsa o cuasi comedia; yet in spite of this awareness of the variegated offering of the flourishing Italian theater, his own remained focused on the pastoral tradition as did that of Encina»¹⁶. But I would not apply a following sentence of Lihani's to Gil Vicente: «It seems therefore that Fernández and Encina preferred this tradition and yet had some indebtedness to the Italian comedy.» I feel that the Vicentine indebtedness to the latter is nil.

To insist upon Gil Vicente's thorough medievalism may not be doing him a favor as far as his posthumous fame goes, for perhaps he could and should have put his hands on something of the new, to his advantage in drama. Yet the best of medievalism is in him, and that dramatic medievalism has left him with some very interesting characteristics: a great deal of variety of movement without a really dramatic action; a varied and multifold interrelationship of persons with not any real conflict in the modern sense; plenty of surprises without dramatic tension; and a plethora of many perfect small scenes in a structurally undramatic whole. And in addition, Gil Vicente was a very successful stager of plays, for he was one who instinctively handled stagecraft, very well. He had the knack of drawing his audience close to the action, and he had a lot to hand on to those who followed after him, especially in Spain.

Leif Sletsje published in 1972 an article with the intriguing title «O teatro vicentino: Una criação Ex-nihilo?»¹⁷. Of course Sletsje does not believe that Gil Vicente created his theater out of nothingness. There were materials before him, and he had an amazing ability to observe and assimilate. Charlotte Stern, in reviewing Thomas Hart's edition of Gil Vicente's Farces and Festival Plays, reminds us that Hart «emphasizes the myriad sources for Vicente's theater»¹⁸. With enormous versatility and innate dramatic good sense, and imitating exceptionally well, Gil Vicente maintained and enhanced all of the medieval tradition he could get his hands on, at home and abroad. His materials and ways were old, but his approach and treatment were refreshingly spontaneous and new. «Owing to his genius—to use Bell again—Portugal, with a literature essentially undramatic and lyrical, may claim a very important place in the history of the drama»¹⁹.

Notes

1. This article was read in a preliminary form as a paper at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, April, 1976.

2. Lisbon, p. 129, et passim.

3. II (Lisbon, 1955), p. 231.

4. Estudos, I (Coimbra, 1959), 73-158.

5. J. H. Parker, Gil Vicente (New York, 1967), pp. 144-46, et passim.

6. «Gil Vicente, poeta cómico,» Bulletin d'Histoire du Théâtre Portugais, 2 (1951), 201. (Article, pp. 181-211.)

7. Notas vicentinas, IV. Cultura intelectual e nobreza literária (Coimbra, 1922), p. 234.

8. II (Coimbra, 1948), pp. 205-339. (This study bears the title Os sermões de Gil Vicente e a arte de pregar.)

9. Madrid, 1962, p. xiii.

10. Les Sermons de Gil Vicente. En marge d'un opuscule du professeur Joaquim de Carvalho (Lisboa, 1949).

11. «Personal Elements in Gil Vicente's Auto pastoril castellano,» Hispanic Review, 36 (1969), 297-303.

12. Lucas Fernández (New York, 1973), p. 44.

13. «Courtly Love in Gil Vicente's Dom Duardos,» Romance Notes, 2 (1960-61), 103-06. Dámaso Alonso has an edition of Madrid, 1942; Elias Rivers has written on «The Unity of Don Duardos,» Modern Language Notes, 76 (1961), 759-66; and Bruce Wardropper, treating both chivalric dramas, has published «Approaching the Metaphysical Sense of Gil Vicente's Chivalric Tragicomedias,» Bulletin of the Comediantes, 16, 1 (Spring, 1964), 1-9.

14. «La Cananeia de Gil Vicente et les mystères français,» Bulletin Hispanique, 50 (1948), 353-69.

15. Hispanic Review, 31 (1963), 361.

16. Lucas Fernández (New York, 1973), p. 140.

17. Ocidente, 82 (1972), 241-47.

18. Hispanic Review, 43 (1975), 84. The volume was published in Eugene, Oregon, 1972.

19. Aubrey F. G. Bell, Gil Vicente (Oxford, 1921), p. 63.