[In the following essay, Suárez traces the way Vicente represented old people in his dramas; for the most part, the elderly are comic figures derided for their foolish and lecherous behavior.]

Literary characterization of the elderly may be traced to the oral tradition. By the age of Homer, conflict between young and old was already common in Greek mythology. Uranus's children castrated him and one, Cronus, so hated his own offspring that he devoured them. Zeus, god of gods, attacked and conquered his father Cronus and the Giants, his father's half brothers. In the Iliad, however, depiction of the old is characterized more by veneration than by conflict. Achilles honors aging Nestor by awarding him the fifth prize in the funeral events both because of his age and because of his past deeds and wisdom.

Nevertheless, if the intent of epic poetry is to sing the praises of a race, that of comedy is to instruct and to edify through satire. Readers are unlikely to identify with epic heroes whose rigidity, sententiousness, and often superhuman attributes render them alter egos of the poet; comedic characters, on the other hand, exhibit human traits with which spectators can identify. It is noteworthy that Aristophanes, whose plays are the only representatives of Old Comedy wholly extant, pokes fun at old people. In The Congresswomen, for example, Blepyros, the quasi-senile husband of Praxagora, must don her shrug and wedgies and go outside the house to defecate—Praxagora and other Athenian women are wearing their husbands' clothes to be admitted into the male-only Congress. Blepyros relieves himself in the presence of Chremes, a neighbor, who informs him that the city has been entrusted to women. Believing that wives will coerce husbands into coition, Blepyros expresses his concern by stating, “We're not as young as we were” (35).

The subject of age comes up again when Praxagora informs Blepyros that, with women now in power, intercourse will be indiscriminate among citizens; so as not to have a monopoly on sex, attractive persons must first sleep with unattractive mates. At Blepyros's remark that it will be difficult for a father to know his children, Praxagora retorts, “But why does he need to? Age is the new criterion: Children will henceforth trace their descent from all men who might have begot them” (47). Such ribald decrees cause the hilarious scene of the three old hags with Epigenes. They demand that the young man, desirous to lie with Sweet Young Thing, engage them sexually. After a lengthy struggle, Epigenes succumbs to two of the women.

Gil Vicente, like Aristophanes, composed comedy and derided old people while attempting to convey moral, didactic messages in his works. One example is the 1512 playlet, O Velho da Horta, where a certain “homem honrado e muito rico, já velho” (V, 141), instead of remaining loyal to his wife and position, suddenly falls in love with a young girl who has come to gather greens in his garden. Love at first sight, uncommon even among the young, is here employed as a comic device. Segismundo Espina observes:

O cômico tem como fonte uma série de inadaptações, desde o início da farsa: a mudança psicológica inesperada no espírito do Velho que, espairecendo, calmo, pela horta é acometido por uma paixão repentina, à primeira vista e de efeitos fulminantes.

(Vicente xxxv)

Unable to seduce the girl, the Old Man seeks the aid of Branca Gil, a panderess who is more interested in his money than in the fulfillment of his desires. After receiving several payments from the Old Man and not making good on her promises, she is beaten and apprehended by a jailer and four guards. Another young girl comes for greens and tells the Old Man that his sought-after damsel has married another man. He goes off to die of love, leaving his wife and four daughters penniless. This unexpected ending is a parody of the love-stricken heroes of chivalric novels. The desire to die, along with loss of appetite, was typical of a knight doing penance over a damsel's rejection. It was a common device in amour courtois (Suárez 100).

Continuing the classical tradition, Camões's masterful epic, Os Lusíadas, introduces the venerable Old Man of Restelo in the Fourth Canto. Besides censuring vanity and greed among the ruling class, he condemns Portugal's expansion in the East at the expense of its holy North African crusade. (He supposedly embodies common sense and a popular opinion that preferred victory in Morocco to overseas adventurism.) Richard Helgerson sees the Old Man as a figure inserted to decry the mercantilism that Vasco da Gama's voyages had caused, to accentuate that “fame,” not “profit,” was the pursuit of the Portuguese nation (161-62). To Camões, commercial ventures além-mar undermined the very nature of Portuguese aristocracy and were, by their own nature, antiheroic.

The Old Man in Vicente's play, on the other hand, symbolizes foolhardiness and debauchery, the very hallmark of the corrupt nobility that Camões criticizes. But whereas modern readers still identify with and laugh at an old man so smitten by a lecherous fancy that he would destroy his family, they are unlikely to identify with the Old Man in Os Lusíadas, whom they probably deem stilted, robot-like, with no character of his own—in short, the poet's mouthpiece. As history would prove, the epic scene is unsuitable to serve a didactic, moralistic end because Lusitanian greatness resulted from feats of navigation, not from religious wars—who, after all, can justify King Sebastian's disastrous North African campaign soon after the poem appeared? The Old Man obviously espoused Camões's wrong views that, in turn, reflected those held by most Portuguese of the period. Mikhail Bakhtin would attribute the sharp contrast in characterization not to the poets, but to their genres: the epic is traditionally monological; comedy, dialogical (108). This observation implies that heroic characters only convey their creator's views, which is one explanation for why their lines sound so grave and sententious. Comedy exhibits almost as many independent voices as there are protagonists; consequently its dialogues, rather than proselytize, test an idea or philosophy by laying bare its pros and cons.

In the 1521 Comédia de Rubena, the love-stricken old codger is reintroduced at the play's end in the figure of Crasto Liberal, one of Cismena's suitors. As in O Velho da Horta, the old man's courting of a young girl, Cismena, is interrupted by a nitwit servant sent by his wife. Yet unlike in the earlier play, this senior citizen does not employ a panderess after failing to seduce the girl; he sends the servant back with a basket of apples to entreat Cismena, who is still in the company of a group of embroideresses. This ploy also fails and the servant leaves, but not before the embroideresses sing: “Bien quiere el viejo, / ay madre mia, / bien quiere el viejo / a la niña” (III, 71). Crasto Liberal represents the ridiculed “senex,” a man who has lost moral integrity and represents the absurd law of traditional norms (Garay 160). In this play, to a lesser degree than in O Velho, the “dirty old man” idea is enacted to test it.

Floresta de Enganos, written in 1536 and Vicente's last known play, contains the same theme among others. A learned 66-year-old doctor becomes enamored of a young girl. Here, however, the girl leads the old man on and makes him a fool by forcing him to dress as a woman and sift flour, to the disbelief of an old lady who discovers him. If his hope to seduce the girl is to remain alive, the doctor must lie to the point of making a total ass of himself: “á mí llama Caterina Furnando” (III, 196), he tells the old lady. Another lovesick old man, Hum Velho, requests passage on the 1527 Nau de Amores's allegorical ship of love. These impassioned senior citizens, who ruin their lives by falling for young women, embody conventional insanity or foolishness, a state that is the antithesis of real love because nonsense or desperation induces it (Teles 90). This is the idea that these particular scenes examine. Paul Teyssier, however, sees these Vicentine plays, where no central action is apparent, as an examination of an overall idea or notion: “Na construção de conjunto dos autos constituídos por cenas justapostas há muitas vezes, senão sempre, a rebusca de um tema geral, a expressão duma idéia central, o exame de um problema particular” (114).

Vicente did not limit geriatric prurience to one gender. In the 1525 Auto da Festa, the aged Felipa Pimenta eagerly agrees to marry Rascão, a young man whom she just met. Not serious about the proposal, he warns that they may be blood related. She then leaves to get the Nuncio's permission. Alone, Rascão decides to flee and says, “Senhoras! que vos parece / destas velhas engelhadas? / estão meias entrevadas / e tão sois não se conhecem” (VI, 159). Felipa returns with the permission and in wedding gown only to find her fiancé gone. Ianafonso, a villager who has returned after an earlier appearance, offers to marry her after hearing what happened. The play ends with the wedding celebration.

The 1529 Triunfo do Inverno contains a scene where a wrinkled and hunchbacked Velha, in love with a mancebo, accepts his condition for marriage: that she cross the mountains in the midst of winter. When the shepherd Brisco, whom she meets on her trek, alludes to her hump, the Velha counters that it is the cold that has induced this condition; to his remarks about her age and wrinkles, she retorts, “Hi ha velha rapariga / e manceba velhentada” (IV, 287). These two scenes lead me to share Richard Freedman's view that “the specific butt of satire against the aged [is] the disparity between their physical ugliness and decrepitude and their erotic urges: the satirists' complaint seems to be as much esthetic as moral” (52).

Although the “lustful aged” theme was used in Old Comedy, as previously illustrated, it must not be inferred that Master Gil possessed a firsthand knowledge of ancient literature. Unlike Eugenio Ansensio, Stephen Reckert, and Américo da Costa Ramalho, I support Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos's contention that Vicente's erudition was limited essentially to the religious literature of the Middle Ages and to Spanish and Portuguese writers of the time (151-53).

Poking fun at old age was common in early Peninsular poetry, as this thirteenth-century “cantiga d'escarnho” by João Vasques, directed at the aging dancer Maria Peres, illustrates:

Maria leve, u se maenfestava,
direi-vos ora o que confessava:
                              —Sõo velh', ai, capelan!
Non sei oj' eu mais pecador burgesa
de mim, maias vede-lo que mi mais pesa:
                    Sõo velh', ai, capelan!

(Rodrigues Lapa 193)

Alfonso Martínez de Toledo discusses the subject of senescent eroticism, however, as early as 1438 in his Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho. Ridiculing marriages where one or both spouses are old, he approves only of those between “el moço con la moça, la moça con el moço” (203). In the dramatic realm, the converso Rodrigo de Cota's Diálogo del Amor y un viejo, published in the Valencian Cancioneiro of 1511, has Love tricking an old man into wanting to love again, only then to scorn him. It is said that this play influenced Juan del Encina's Representación del Amor and Égloga de Cristino y Febea (Carreter 75). Yet, as indebted as Vicente was to Encina during the early part of his career, he must have been familiar with Cota's Diálogo and probably drew his inspiration for O Velho from this piece.

Vicente's Auto dos Físicos, whose composition year is either 1512 or 1524, satirizes clergy who often broke their vows of celibacy by seducing young women. Nonetheless, although an age difference is implied between the Cleric and the object of his desire, Blanca Denisa, no reference is made to his being advanced in years. The age of the Widower in Comédia do Viúvo, written in either 1514 or 1524, is also unknown. What is known is that the Widower is old enough to have two nubile daughters and a compadre whose own conjugal situation makes him envious of the Viúvo's newly gained freedom.

In these plays Master Gil satirizes, if not old age itself, certainly “geriatric sexuality.” After all, would it not be understandable for a young cleric to weaken before the charms of a pretty maiden, or for a friend of a recent widower to empathize with his misfortune? Situations like these, however, do not lend themselves to derision. Without derision, laughter, the aim of comedy, cannot be elicited. What is comical about these situations is that the Cleric should “know better” because he is probably old enough to be Blanca's father, and that the Widower's friend, because of what is likely many years in an unhappy marriage, can view the passing of his friend's wife as vicarious relief—although mention of “a second bachelorhood” and its inherent philandering opportunities is omitted, the compadre understands this reality. Both the Cleric's and the compadre's behavior are typical of “aging sexuality” or “middle-age craziness.” Robert Magnan's comments on the idea of aging among medieval literati also apply to Vicente's era, the early Renaissance:

[M]edieval authors seem little interested in aging as a gradual and individual process. Although a long line of works present various schemes for the division of life into stages, the tendency in literature is to polarize, to reduce these divisions to the most basic, the dichotomy of juventus and senectus, associating a wide range of physiological, psychological, and moral traits with either one or the other of these idealized states. The senescent person, around age 30 in women and age 40 in men, passes between the two very different worlds of juventus and senectus which seem to have no real point of contact. The Christian ethic exhorts the senescent person to withdraw from the rest of society, to turn his or her thoughts and energies toward death and salvation. The courtly ethic also promotes this separation, finding elders' presence to be detrimental to the amorous activities of the young. As the aged figure constitutes an allegorical memento mori (remember that you shall die), the senescent—who may be only 30 or 40—constitutes a memento senescere (remember that you are growing old).

(29-30)

In the 1524 Frágoa de Amor, old age is employed to allegorize a corrupt legal system. Justice appears as a hunchbacked old woman seeking to be straightened by four blacksmiths (Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and Sun), whom Vicente calls Planetas (IV, 109). The initial attempt to transform her in the forge fails. Jupiter, realizing the cause of her deformity, remarks to Cupid, the foreman:

          Señor vuestro martillar
no nos aprovecha nada,
porque la Justicia dañada,
los que mas la han de emendar
la hacen mas corcovada.

(IV, 118)

After bribes (chickens, partridges, bags filled with money) are extracted from her, Justice again enters the forge and exits “muito fermosa y direita.” Since her deformity was initially attributed to her advanced years, no doubt now remains that venality was the cause. Moreover, although the desire is solely to straighten the old woman, her rejuvenation is strongly implied. Thus age, along with a misshapen body, portrays the wretched condition of the era's judiciary and shows its satire.

In O Velho da Horta, Branca Gil is a panderess. Fernando de Rojas popularized this profession, usually practiced by aging prostitutes, in Iberian literature. In La Celestina (circa 1500), Calisto, a young gentleman, hires Celestina as a go-between to gain the favors of Melibea, a maiden whom he desires. With the help of the devil and a potion, Celestina succeeds in persuading Melibea to surrender to her client. The old bawd is then killed by Calisto's servants when, after receiving payment for her services, she attempts to short-change them. Calisto later dies from a fall; consequently, Melibea commits suicide.

Like her Spanish predecessor, Branca Gil is apparently an aging harlot with no professional options but to ply the trade of the alcoviteira, motivated solely by money. The panderess as a protagonist makes four other appearances in Vicentine drama: Genebra Pereira—a.k.a. Feiticeira—in O Auto das Fadas (1511), Brizida Vaz in O Auto da Barca do Inferno (1516 or 1517), Beata in Comédia de Rubena, and Ana Dias in O Juiz da Beira (1525)—the last of these is inferred to be old because of her demands for justice for a raped daughter. Of these women, only Genebra Pereira, like Celestina, combines the role of hetaera with that of sorceress.

The panderess' appearance in Comédia de Rubena does not link her directly to Crasto Liberal's aspirations; surmising that he would have been one of her intended clients is safe. Beata, like Celestina, is a wicked old woman. Yet, although she does not combine additional roles in her character, another interesting difference exists between the two plays:

As the first test of her chaste love, now that she is of a nubile age and alone and unprotected, Cismena meets a formidable threat to her virginity, one with a long Peninsular tradition: the old go-between. The deceptive panderess becomes the self-appointed “protector” of Cismena's virtue. The comic yet dangerous endeavor of this woman shows her in a role opposite to that of the two characters in the play modeled after Celestina, the midwife and the witch. While the latter women try to help Rubena out of trouble, the panderess tries to entice Cismena into it.

(Garay 150)

As demonstrated here, Vicentine drama derides the elderly by depicting aging men, if not as outright dolts, as libidinous creatures; older women fare even worse in that, when not openly coveting youth, they are portrayed as either whores, witches, or both. Although not discussed here, other groups are also ridiculed: the petty nobility, the clergy, judges, medical doctors, Jews, gypsies, usurers, peddlers, blacksmiths, bakers, and wenches. Overall, Vicente employs members of these groups as “blocking characters” within the plot (Frye 87). Comedic heroes like Cismena or the Widower are not terribly interesting characters because they tend not to be ridiculous. It is different, however, with secondary characters like Crasto Liberal and the compadre who “block” the action with their absurd behavior. When the ethical interest of the piece falls on what, ordinarily, would be a blocking character, the play is named after the personage (O Velho da Horta) or his role (O Juiz da Beira).

What makes a blocking character absurd? According to Frye, “he is obsessed by his humor, and his function in the play is primarily to repeat his obsession” (87). This observation holds true with the elderly in Vicentine drama: as confirmed, a desire to obtain young partners or to be young again drives these characters. Nowhere do we see them accepting their agedness. It is precisely this inconformity that creates humor. Old folks per se are not humorous, but old folks lusting after youth are; they do not come to terms with their age, nor do they ever do anything inconsistent with the role they have prescribed for themselves.

Such standard group portrayals may come across as gross generalizations to modern audiences and, at times, as insulting. It is, however, unarguable that, since antiquity, stock characterization was a compositional formula used to elicit laughter. Only after World War II did Europeans and North Americans become sensitive to the realities of all groups comprising their societies, particularly of those historically disadvantaged like the elderly. Therefore, in these countries, comedic stereotypes, although still abounding, no longer reflect the prejudices shared by much of the citizenry toward minority groups. The aged, although often typecast in the above roles, are not limited to them, thus avoiding the impression that a person's later years are solely a time for foolishness, wickedness, or concupiscence. Gil Vicente, a sixteenth-century playwright and like all of us a creature of his times, was unaware of today's creative subtleties, for it was his period that defined and limited his canon, a canon within which he worked with consummate excellence.

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———. O Velho da Horta; Auto da Barca do Inferno; A Farsa de Inês Pereira. Ed. Segismundo Spina. Sao Paulo: Brasiliense, 1965.