[In the following excerpt, Tomlins discusses how the conquest of India affected Vicente's writing.]

Gil Vicente has likely given to the modern world the first literary reflection of India outside the Portuguese chronicles themselves, which—owing to their very nature—came to light after the poet-playwright's death, generally conceded to have occurred in the year 1536. The specific mention of the conquest of India and of its effects on the metrópole is to be found in two farces, so denominated by the goldsmith's son, Luís Vicente, in his cavalier categorization of his father's theatrical pieces in the Copilaçam de todalas obras de Gil Vicente of 1562.¹ The farces bore the titles Farsa chamada Auto da Índia and Farsa chamada Auto da Fama. The first title has the distinction of being Gil Vicente's earliest preserved farce (1509), and the second holds special interest in that it is, in reality, a farce-allegory and dates from 1520 (and not 1510, as Luís Vicente erroneously surmised).² The eleven-year separation of dates of composition and presentation at court stands for the maturation of the playwright's conception of the meaning of the Portuguese discovery of the Orient.

Basically, the earlier playlet—the Auto da Índia of 1509—gives us a glimpse into a humble Lisbonese household, from whose hearth the husband is absent because he has enlisted in the fleet that departed for India under the Capitão-Mor Tristão da Cunha in 1506. Thus the presentation of the auto before the dowager queen Dona Leonor, sister of the reigning monarch, Manuel I, provided the court playwright his first opportunity to face the sad situation of Portuguese manhood in the service of God and country, along with the glad situation of the return of the same—which, as a matter of fact, did indeed coincide with the bounteous return of the Capitão-Mor's fleet in 1509. Gil Vicente turned to a plot at least as old as that of Aesop's urban and rustic rodents to prove once again that while the cat is away, the mouse will play. The bereaved wife is named Constance, and her grief is only doubled when she learns that there has been an unexpected delay in the armada's departure. Gloom changes to exultation, however, when she learns that the caravels have at last sailed down the Tagus and out to sea. Her housemaid slyly suggests that Constance will have to resort to some manner of work, since her adventuring husband has left her so ill-provided. Constance requires no instruction:

Est'era bem graciosa,
quem se ve moça e fermosa
esperar pola ira má.
Hi se vai elle a pescar
Meia legoa polo mar,
isto bem o sabes tu;
quanto mais a Calecu:
quem ha tanto d'esperar? […]
Partem em Maio daqui,
quando o sangue novo atiça:
parece-te que he justiça?
Melhor vivas tu amen,
e eu comtigo tambem.—
Quem sobe por essa escada?(3)

[V, 93-94]

The newcomer on the staircase is the braggart and boorish Castilian who has come to court the abandoned Constance, soon to be joined by the loutish but love-sick squire Lemos serenading from the street below and promising to provide a sumptuous feast. The servant girl is amazed at her mistress's talents:

Quantas artes, quantas manhas,
que sabe fazer minha ama!
Hum na rua, outro na cama!

[V, 107]

Time passes fast in farce and dalliance, and the servant announces that it has been three years since the departure of Tristão da Cunha. In other words, it is now 1509. Constance reacts with notable lack of enthusiasm:

Mas que graça, que seria
se este negro meu marido
tornasse a Lisboa vivo
pera a minha companhia!
Mas isto nao pode ser
qu'elle havia de morrer
sómente de ver o mar.
Quero fiar e cantar,
segura de o nunca ver.

[V, 109]

But he is even then on the staircase, home from India. When he enters. Constance lies expertly about her solitude and sadness and immediately inquires of the riches he has brought from the Orient. The cuckold answers that had the capitão not taken his lion's share first, he would have brought home at least a million cruzados. And the pious Constance:

Pois que vós vivo viestes,
que quero eu de mais riqueza?
Louvada seja a grandeza
de vós, Senhor, que m'o trouxestes.

[V, 115]

Her next line gives her the lie and virtually closes the farce: “A nao vem bem carregada?” [V, 116].

In this first farce, then, the outcome of the Indian conquest and its concomitant commerce is reduced by the comic playwright to marital infidelity, bedchamber slapstick as one suitor is played off against the other, parody of the Castilian swain, and the vaguest hint that the promise of great riches holds at least the possibility of inducing the populace to venality. This was, of course, an early play; Vasco da Gama had not been too long back from his second voyage to India. We are witnessing here a kind of farcical dawn.

The same is not true of the second Indian piece, the Auto da Fama of 1520,⁴ where boudoir hijinks are transformed into whimsical allegory. Portugal by then was beginning to feel the full import of commercial and political power. The monumental outcome of years of pioneering maritime feats swelled the nation with pride.⁵ Little Portugal and its once meager Fame, now represented by a simple farm girl from the province of Beira herding her ducks in the company of a village simpleton named Joane, is courted by the great powers of the West, allegorically represented by three amorous suitors: a Frenchman, an Italian, and a Castilian, the first two speaking in a rough approximation of French and Italian. All are rebuffed by the country maid, who feels no need for their empty show of affection now that beiroa has become Fama Portuguesa. She recognizes the covetous nature of her admirers, refuses their gifts since Portugal's empire is so much more splendid, sends them on their way, and is finally awarded by the appearance of the virtues Faith and Fortitude, who crown the peasant girl with the laurel and carry her away on a triumphal cart to the sound of music. Faith entones three strophes, in arte maior, elevating Portuguese Fame above Trojan and Roman, for the Christian faith has not only spread the doctrine of Christ but has routed the heathen and brought prestige and amplitude to Lusitania. This is farce of a more serious nature in 1520, the year generally conceded to correspond to the apogee of Portuguese power.⁶ So exhilaratingly successful was it that it immediately enjoyed three presentations before various branches of the court.⁷ Barely fifty years later, the new-found India that inspired both a burlesque of the institution of Christian marriage and an allegory of an empire of hitherto inconceivable power and breadth will strike a strange and ironic chord in the words of Camões's old man on the Restelo strand. Gil Vicente both burlesqued and exalted the Indian venture at the beginning of the sixteenth century; by the end of the century Camões had written what must be viewed as that venture's valedictory.

The Manueline Age presaged doom and degeneration, all historians agree; and it was precisely in that transitional period between magnificence and deterioration that Luís Vaz de Camões came of age. In 1553 he sailed for an India and a Goa already famed as pestholes of corruption. From John III onward, reports abound of depravity at home and abroad, but that tragedy of lingering destruction is far too intricate to analyze here. It is sufficient to suggest that the idea of constructing an epic to honor Portuguese conquests abroad and Portuguese history at home probably occurred to Camões in his youth, some nine years before the death of John III, although it appears nearly impossible to place a date on the poet's genial notion of linking the deeds of the Lusitanians to the voyage of Vasco da Gama. As a consequence, scholars are in accord, also, that likely most of Cantos III and IV were composed before the sojourn in the Orient, excepting the opening of the third—which, like the closure of the second, involves Gama's recounting of Portuguese history to the king of Melinde, and the climactic finale of the fourth, which contains the rebuke of the “velho do Restelo.” Similarly, there can be little doubt that the initial dedication to Sebastian in Canto I and the closing solemn counsel to the king regarding the stewardship of monarchy in Canto X were composed after Camões returned to Lisbon in 1570.

Because it is so closely tied to the voyage of Vasco da Gama, it is almost impossible to assume that the incident of the old man and his bitter outrage on Restelo beach was not, likewise, composed after the poet's return from India. The opening dedication, the rebuke of the “velho do Restelo,” and the disillusioned envoi of the epic itself must be viewed as the afterthoughts of an epicist who returned from Babylon to Zion, only to learn that Zion was a chimera.

The mystifying episode of the old man of Restelo closes, as was mentioned, Canto IV (strophe 94 to the end, comprising only eleven strophes). It is an eloquent diatribe contra Famam angrily flung against the sparse fleet of Vasco da Gama immediately prior to its departure from Restelo beach at Belém, traditional embarkation point called by João de Barros “praia das lágrimas.” These eleven stanzas comprise a condemnation of Lusitanian pride and lust for power even before those ills perniciously infected the res publica. Of course, they were composed by an aging and bitter soldier-poet of the Crown after seventeen years of incredible vexations in the Orient. Camões spoke through the other old man, borrowed from all the croaking sages and seers of Antiquity. Gil Vicente's delightfully haughty maid from Beira is damned here for vile covetousness. Fama Portuguesa, heedlessly courted by a foolish populace, will produce only disquietude of soul, abandonments, and adulteries. The pranks of Gil Vicente's Constance were no longer a joke in 1570. The ages of man, from the Golden to the Iron, have but brought Adam's generation to arms and warfare; and homo lusitanus is the vilest of Adam's sons. Why cast the flower of Portugal's manhood to distant shores when the Ishmaelite attacks the back door? The malediction damns princely pride—apparently Manuel's but effectively Sebastian's—in history foretold:

Porque a fama te exalte e te lisonje,
Chamando-te senhor, com larga cópia,
Da Índia, Pérsia, Arábia e de Ethiópia?

[Lus. IV, 101, 6-8]

These are the very words of Barros himself when they were published in Década I in 1552; Manuel has taken to himself new titles through the brilliant victories of Vasco da Gama: “el rey acreic˜etou a sua coróa os titulos ˜q óra tem, de senhor da conquista nauegaçam & cõmercio da Ethiopia, Arabia, Pérsia & Jndia.”⁸

Then follows the ancient topos of the condemnation of the first builder of ships: “Ó, maldito o primeiro, que no mundo / Nas ondas velas pôs em seco lenho!” Mankind would have fared well without the mad dash for the prize of Fame. Mankind is a babbling fool who will pass through fire, iron, water, doldrums, and ice to secure the vanity of impermanent Fame. The final, chilling denunciation of Man ends the canto: “Mísera sorte! Estranha condição!” [IV, 104, 8].

Before the Lusiads was published in 1572, then, the old Camões saw the Oriental conquest—with India the brightest diamond in the crown—as mere vanity and total ruin. The creative literature of Portugal's sixteenth century opened with laughter and pride in that adventure. The so-called Renaissance epic of the modern world, through its dedication and finale directed to the monarch, and through its prognostication of doom in the words of the “velho do Restelo,” brings us to the frontier of the Baroque Age. This strangest of epics, written to glorify all the sons of Lusus, flies apart at three junctures: beginning, middle, and end, all sections composed after the poet's passage to India. These junctures undo the very business of the epic and indicate to us that the vaunted Camonian desconcerto do mundo may well have roots that lie far deeper than the bedrock of mere Platonic doctrine.⁹

Notes

1. Luís Vicente divided his father's plays into obras de devaçam, comédias, tragicomédias, farsas, and obras miúdas. An enlightening study on the use of the terms comédia and tragicomédia, vis-à-vis Gil Vicente's contemporary, the Spaniard Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, may be read in the late I.-S. Révah, “La comédia dans l'œuvre de Gil Vicente,” in Études Portugaises (Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro Cultural Português, 1975), pp. 15-36. The problem of Vicentine taxonomy in general, viewed in the light of the playwright's prose Carta directed to João III in 1531, is analyzed in Jack E. Tomlins, “Una nota sobre la clasificación de los dramas de Gil Vicente,” Duquesne Hispanic Review 3 (Winter 1964):115-31 and 4 (Spring 1965):1-16.

2. Révah discusses this distinction in the article mentioned in note 1. Here he also subdivides the comédia into romanesque comedy and allegorical comedy, the latter derived from the fifteenth-century momo.

3. All quotations from Gil Vicente are taken from the six-volume edition of the Obras completas de Gil Vicente, ed. Marques Braga (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1942-44).

4. Ibid., 5:117-40.

5. These years are admirably and succinctly chronicled in Bailey W. Diffie, Prelude to Empire: Portugal Overseas before Henry the Navigator (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960).

6. The crucial matter of the apogee of Portuguese power in the Orient and its relationship to the composition of Os Lusíadas may be briefly studied in J. D. M. Ford, ed., Os Lusíadas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 8-9; Leonard Bacon, trans., The Lusiads of Luiz de Camões (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1950), pp. xxiii-xxv; H. V. Livermore, A New History of Portugal (Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1967), pp. 150-51. A more extensive—if romanticized—rendition of the degeneration of Portuguese power may be read in the chapters “O Império e a Fé” and “Holocausto Africano” of João Ameal, História de Portugal, 7th ed. (Porto: Livraria Tavares Martins, 1974), pp. 271-329.

7. According to the rubric of 1562, these locales were Lisbon before the dowager Dona Leonor and at Santos O Velho before the monarch Manuel I. Oscar de Pratt believes that there was a third presentation at a slightly later date and at an unnamed place, in Gil Vicente: Notas e Comentários (Lisbon, 1931), pp. 153-56. At any rate, the date of presentation of the rubric (1510) is clearly in error and is, no doubt, better placed around 1520.

8. Ásia de Joam de Barros, Primeira Década, ed. António Baião (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1932), p. 164.

9. A highly original article now allows us to view the Camonian lírica in the light of the epic, and vice versa: Sônia Maria Viegas Andrade, “Fundamentos filosóficos da obra de Camões,” Suplemento Literário Minas Gerais 14, no. 715 (14 June 1980):8-10.