[In the following excerpt, Sousa examines Vicente's depictions of both upper-class characters and peasants, as well as the language peculiar to both groups.]

The words of my title—“Vos outros tambem cantai por vosso uso acostumado” (You too sing, according to your custom)—are said by Fé (Faith), the representation of Christian belief, to the shepherds Bras and Benito at the end of Gil Vicente's Auto da Fé (Play of the Faith).¹ The play, a slight one of some 330 lines, was presented to the court of the Portuguese king Manuel after that court had celebrated Christmas matins in the year 1510.² Like much of Vicente's early “pastoral-religious” theater, it is in the very strictest of senses occasional: much as had been the case with his first play (Visitação, or Monólogo do Vaqueiro (Visitation, or The Herdsman's Monologue), of 1502, the central concept of Auto da Fé is the two peasants' appearance at the palace chapel where matins had just been said and festive celebration of Christmas is beginning. What is done with that dramatic situation to lead up to the lines reproduced in my title can, and eventually must, be analyzed with regard to the cultural-literary practice from which it arises and which it in many ways subsumes, as well as with regard to Vicente's own prior and subsequent work. For example, the play is the last of his so-called sayagués plays—continuations, in his fashion, of the pastoral-religious theater of the Salamancan playwrights Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández. (As a result of that precedent, the shepherds of Auto da Fé speak sayagués, whereas Faith, by contrast, speaks Portuguese.) The entire dramatic development from Salamanca to Lisbon undoubtedly owes to the peninsular Church miracle and morality plays of which we know primarily by reference in Spanish sources. Before I allow such elements to enter the analysis of Auto da Fé, however, I wish to engage in a preliminary reading of a generally technical nature, after which I shall let those other considerations enter slowly, in an effort to extend that initial reading in what I consider to be useful analytical directions.

The first item in reading is necessarily an accounting of the situation of the play's staging. Because of the radically occasional setup, there is in fact minimal proscenium function in the play, and what there is is highly permeable: the actors playing the character roles were probably given a small space and were watched by a more-or-less formally composed audience, while in the world behind that minimal proscenium they observe in amazement the splendor of the court and as well the symbols of the Christian faith, both circumstantially present at the site, as though the court were going about its Christmas celebration unaware of their presence. Thus, while only the peasants and Faith have speaking parts, the nobility/royality/upper-level clergy is presented within the text. It both is represented in corpore as an element strongly present in the world of the play through the permeable proscenium arrangement and also is re-presented—to itself, as audience—in the language of the play, through the words of Faith and of the represented peasant figures who comment on its appearance. Thus a key feature of the play is treatment of a multifaceted juxtaposition of what are defined as representations of two social groups.

The active element is that represented by the shepherd figures. Bras and Benito enter the royal chapel and react to what they see. Their initial bedazzled reactions indicate social inadequacy: they cannot identify much of what they encounter and bumble around, aware of their inadequacy, providing the material for a broad verbal humor grounded in social differentiation:

BEN.
Cata, mas ha hi que mirar:
qué siñifica esta mesa
con tanta retartanilla?
BRA.
Bobo, es cama á for de villa,
chaqueada á la francesca.
BEN.
Cuerpo de santa Pipía!
sabes mas que tú ni yo.(3)
(BEN.
Look, there's more there to see:
                    What does this table, with so much
                    Stuff atop it mean?
BRA.
Fool, it's a town-bed
                    Decked out French-style.
BEN.
By Santa Pipia's Ghost,
                    You know more than either of us!)

Indeed, those lines manifest a characteristic feature of the play's language: the shepherds metaphorize in a specific, idiosyncratic way about the items they are unable to identify with adequate terminology: “cama á for de villa, chaqueada á la francesa” has analogues throughout the play applied to the people and things that they see in the chapel. In fact, there is soon suggested a standing relationship between the characteristics of the shepherds' diction and the items of upper-class culture—items the terms for which in that culture we are regularly provided with in the stage directions or by Faith, when she finally comes in to help resolve the shepherds' dilemma. The metaphorical or metaphorlike locutions uttered by the shepherds usually incorporate reference to specific objects and social practices, are openly typed as “rustic,” are composed periphrastically, and sometimes employ a biographical-experiential dimension reflected in anecdote. Opposed are single, usually referentially abstract terms that regularly come imbedded in an elaborate abstract metaphysics.

Overcome with their verbal-cultural inadequacy, the shepherds wish for a “lletrado, que supiera esto entender” (86) (lettered [i.e., literate/learned] person, who would know how to understand all of this). They need a guide into a culture that they admit is superior to, and has authority over, their own. The guide who appears immediately after the wish is verbalized is Fé, specifically called by them a lletrada.⁴ Incidentally, she is said by Benito to be dressed “á la morisca” (Moorish-style). Commentators continually repeat that remark as an instance of cultural syncretism,⁵ not seeing that what syncretism there is is lexical and that what is at work in the passage is the same sort of culturally based humor as occurs elsewhere in the play: Benito, unable satisfactorily to identify Faith's Christmas finery, again destroys himself culturally as a result, and again is therefore comic.

When the shepherds ask Fé what all this is that they have encountered, her response is:

          A divinal claridade
seja em vosso entendimento,
e vos dê conhecimento
de sua natavidade.

(88)

          (May divine clarity
Enter your minds,
And may it give you understanding
Of your nativity [i.e., nature].)

Her answer is hardly one involving the issue of cultural differentiation, which has been the primary element at work in discourse-shaping up to this point. Instead, she insists that the shepherds are innately capable of understanding all that faces them if abstracting divine light is made to enter their understandings and they thereby become aware of their true identities. She in essence states that the guidance that she can provide will lead to a higher resolution of the problem presented to her. She then goes on to explicate the surroundings in theological terms, turning circumstance into language and, simultaneously, attempting to catechize her two interlocutors.

It becomes clear at this point—if it was not so earlier—that the core problem of the play is the nature of Christian cultural continuity and that what we have before us is a kind of shepherds' play deriving from the Christmas officium pastorum—though to be sure an unusual one. At the point where Faith enters, we expect the shepherd figures to begin to play the role of the shepherds of liturgy, to (re)experience the Nativity, leaving behind the state of nature that we can presume their cultural ignorance to betoken, thereby acting as symbols of the transparent, simple sincerity and openness to a metaphysics grounded in faith that is the human soul presumed by traditional Catholicism. In short, we expect a movement in the play's language, through transmutation of the status of the shepherd figures, from, according to medieval exegetic hermeneutics, sensus literalis to sensus anagogicus, and we expect that movement to affirm both universal Christian culture and the language constitutive of that culture, a language ultimately grounded in the Word of God. Indeed, this play of all plays, with the title Auto da Fé, promises such a movement: exposition to the soul, through the medium of faith, of the Word as guarantor of unity of culture and language.

What happens, then, is surprising. After Faith majestically introduces herself: “Pastores, eu sam a Fé” (Shepherds, I am Faith), Bras replies: “Ablenuncio Satané! fá no sé que se es” (I renounce Satan [to be read as a general interjection of surprise]! I don't know what faith is, or even fa). And the play goes on in that vein. Faith explains that the Christian symbols, and the shepherds, comically, metaphorize now not only about the symbols but also about the language of the attempted explanation, in just the same manner as they had previously done. It becomes a battle between hermeneutic literality, given a very tangible culturalist development in the representation of the shepherds, and Faith's constant effort to locate signification at the anagogic level and thereby to unify a discourse whose disunity is becoming more and more apparent as the play goes on. In rhetorical terms, the battle is one involving competing metaphor systems. On the one hand, Faith attempts to establish a set of culturally given metaphors that define a relationship between existence and presumed essence, as when she explains to Bras:

          Aquella he a cruz preciosa,
pera sempre esclarecida,
pera os perigos desta vida,
e nao da salvação nossa.
O homem se chama Jesu,
Messias, Rei, Salvador,
Deos e homem, Redemptor;
(não sei se o entendes tu)
Deos he seu nome maior.

(90)

          (That is the precious Cross
Forever immanent
Against the perils of this life
And ship of our salvation.
The man is called Jesus,
Messiah, King, Savior,
God and man, Redeemer
(I don't know if you're understanding);
God is his greatest name.)

In contrast, Bras responds with a much less theological formulation of his own, but one with certain trinitarian implications:

          Mi amo ha nombre tambien
Pero Alonso, y Pero Matos,
y Perazo lo llaman hartos,
ansí como á mano vien.

(90)

          (My master is named as well:
Pero Alonso and Pero Matos,
And Perazo many call him,
Whatever comes to hand.)

One is tempted to worry that the third term, ‘Perazao’, with all its morpho-semantic implications, corresponds to the Holy Ghost. Be that as it may, obviously two discontinuous concepts of master or lord and of the implications of the naming of that personage are at work in the passage, and, again, they describe a struggle between a culturalist literality on the one hand and anagogy on the other.

On the play goes in the same manner, Faith trying to get the shepherds to relive the Nativity, with all that that implies, as behooves shepherds on Christmas (93), but getting the same “concrete,” “biographical” responses. In short, instead of the expectable movement from literality to anagogy, the second part of the play involves a dialogue between literalist discourse and anagogic discourse that ultimately is not dialogic but rather merely enacts a process of canvassing a series of key items circumstantially present about which the two sides discourse, each in a code that meets the other only back at the point of departure: in the item itself. Thus the presumed Christmas shepherds' “simplicity”—the vehicle for raising from literality to anagogy—never moves from its original constitution: “simplicity” is worldly “ignorance,” or “inferiority,” even “stupidity.”

The entire situation is gnomically represented in what is a very clever nine-line sequence constituting Bras's reaction to the explanation of the Cross that Faith offers:

Alla en nuestro lugar
si no viene lluvia ni vella,
toman una como aquella
nuestros amos, á clamar
ora pro nubes, ora pro nubes;
          y las mugeres ansí
la que mas gritillo tiene:
la lluvia ni va ni viene,
e la cruz estáse ahi.

(90)

(In our land
If mist and rain don't come
Our masters put up a Cross
Like that one, calling
Pray for clouds, pray for clouds;
          And the women too,
Especially the ones with the loudest voices;
Rain doesn't show up
And there the Cross stands.)

A reading of the lines in immediate contextual terms reveals but another instance of rustic metaphorizing, here articulated by an anecdote containing what amounts to a popular etymology that, humorously, resides in phonic differentiation of only two sounds: nobis becomes nubes. That small difference serves to set in relief the cultural-linguistic divergence that has been built up to this point, one between referential concreteness and referential abstraction, practicality and idealism, ritual grounded in direct observation and ritual grounded in an elaborate metaphysics. That reading, however, merely sets up background for a series of further, metalinguistic readings. The nine-line sequence constitutes an elaborate chiasmus whose pivot comes between the two halves of the center line, between the two instances of “ora pro nubes,” and whose end line—“e la cruz estáse ahi”—proclaims that we have just had a chiasmus, or “cruz,” uttered. Thus is traditional rhetoric suggested. Biblical rhetoric, for example, makes great use of chiasmatic structures, from simple chiasmus to entire inverted panels—of which the sequence in question is an example in miniature. If we look upon the sequence with that linking in mind, it can be read as an ironizing of Biblical rhetoric through rehearsal of it with trivial content as a response to the explanation just uttered by Faith. The last line can then be seen to say “That is all that chiasmus can put forth in this situation”—“la cruz estáse ahi.” “Cruz” also signifies “burden,” and in context “e la cruz estáse ahi,” so read, suggests failure of Christian ritual heretofore to produce results, or, analogically in this context, to produce anagogy. Further, “cruz” is cognate and parallel to English “crux,” ‘a crucial point to be made.’ In the light of the other lines of signification that run through the entire nine-line sequence, lines that sum up the nondialogic dialogue that has been taking place, the last line read as “there is the crux of it all,” “la cruz estáse ahi,” can be seen as a metalinguistic commentary on, and summing up of, the play's problematic to this point. At very minimum, then, the lines release another discourse to play a role in the language of the play: a discourse that resides in rhetoric itself and that posits the existence of metalinguistic commentary on the language of the play. In fact, that rhetorical discourse, here confirmed, has already suggested itself in less obvious ways several times earlier in the text. Its impact within the play is multiple. In traditional “characterization” terms, it keeps the shepherds from being representationally autonomous, for, as in this example, the significance of their words occasionally exceeds their language, to be registered in another discursive system as well—in a manner that is humorous. Their deficiencies are thereby added to in relation with yet another aspect of the text. The presence of the rhetorical discourse thus alludes to the text itself as rhetoric, to a complex communication with the audience, to authorship. In the final analysis, given its role in comic domination of the represented shepherds, it suggests an organizing force within the text that promises throughout a final resolution in favor of upper-level Christian-noble culture. It suggests, in sum, that what is in doubt all along is not “whether or not” but rather “in what manner” that resolution will be effected.

After we reach that “crux” of the play, the movement to resolution—that is, to “how” it will be achieved—is rapid. The nondialogic dialogue moves on for a scant few lines, if only to give Benito the chance to follow out in a limited way Faith's suggestion that the shepherds try to use imagination to reach greater understanding. He follows it at least far enough to contemplate how nice it would be to “ver a nuestro Dios nacer” (see our God born). That is, he contemplates movement toward the expected participation in the officium pastorum but ends up asking a factual question about the Nativity instead.

Finally, in answering that factual question, Faith concludes:

E porque elle [Cristo] é dado a nós,
cujo imperio he eternal,
faz esta corte real
a festa que vedes vós.
          vos outros tambem cantai
per vosso uso acostumado
como lá cantais co'o gado:
ambos de dous começai.

(95)

(And because he [Christ] is given us
Whose Kingdom is eternal,
This royal court prepares
The celebration that you see.
          You too sing
According to your custom
Just as you sing with your herds;
Both together now, begin!)

The argument is key. It moves from Christian “imperio … eternal” (Kingdom … eternal) to the rhyming “corte real” (royal court), suggesting interrelationship: the royal court celebrates the presence of the eternal empire by having a “festa” (feast, festival, celebration), which, of course, is culturally meaningful precisely because the court is “real.” The “festa” is thus a claim for celebrant as well as celebrated. That mutually confirming relationship between the two loci of authority is made clear rhetorically when it is seen in the context of the play, for it has already been emphasized that Christian, upper-level culture is true and socially superior, and it has been promised that this culture will ultimately triumph. And it is from the rhetorical union of noble and Christian that there emerges the imperative that constitutes the title of this chapter. Faith tells the shepherds that they “too” should “sing.” In that way, they “too” participate in the observance that anchors the superior social, cultural, and linguistic order, the order that Faith had suggested as universal in her first speech. It is now obvious, however, that the case is quite different from the one she initially proposed. There is now no talk of “claridade” (light) entering “entendimentos” (understanding[s]). The participation suggested instead is a mere formal following-along, since it is quite clear that the shepherds have not been moved into commonality with the dominant culture through movement to anagogic status. Indeed, Faith's immediate addition of “por vosso uso acostumado” (according to your custom) confirms precisely that disjuncture. Further, the song that Benito gives us has in itself absolutely no Christian celebratory value. It is rustic, associative, culturally inadequate, and therefore comic—as was much of the shepherd language before. After the song, however, Bras thanks Faith for having shown the shepherds “el cielo” (Heaven), and the play ends.

At this point we are left with the problem of understanding what sort of resolution has in fact occurred. There has been no raising to anagogy, no demonstration of a single basis of language and culture. What is left is pure authority, which of course has all along been a part of the claim for Faith's language, but there it is an authority based on the promise of performance, a promise of the power to create unity. At the end of the play, however, Faith simply tells the shepherds to sing, and they sing a song from their “own culture” that has no inherent correspondence to the issues invoked but which participates. It is a resolution that, contrary to the notion of a necessary interrelationship between human nature and Christian faith inherent in the medieval exegetic hermeneutic itself, is grounded in cultural divergence, with union only through an authority principle.

That point is clearly the critical one—for a reading of the play and of its immediate cultural significance as well. Rather than pursue it within the text—a pursuit that will quickly reach a point of diminishing returns—I shall here break off my reading and attempt instead to “surround” it with approaches from several other viewpoints: from a review of other related texts, from a brief consideration of the socio-cultural implications of the song Benito sings, and from an analysis of the implications of the court's presence in the play.

Although it is by no means unequivocally clear, Auto da Fé would seem to have been the seventh play of Vicente's career. Of the preceding six, all save the first—which is occasional and involves shepherd figures, but is not devotional—and the last two, are religious festival plays. In the first of those devotional plays, the Auto Pastoril Castelhano (Castilian Pastoral Play), written for Christmas matins of 1502, there is Gil Terrón, a sayagués-speaking shepherd who, unlike his companions who in many ways recall Bras and Benito of Auto da Fé, is constitutionally called to a contemplative life. It is he to whom the nativity is announced by the Angels and who explains in detail to the other shepherds aspects of doctrine—as Fé does in Auto da Fé—and leads them to adore Christ. That this represents a change in his character is observed by another shepherd, who says to him:

¡Á Dios plaga con el ruin!
mudando vas la pelleja:
Sabes de achaque de ygreja!
(God be praised by the outcome!
You are changing your skin:
You now know the Church inside out!)

And Gil answers:

Ahora lo deprendí.

(29)

(It just now came to me.)

The change prompts another of the shepherds, after having been catechized by Gil, to remark:

Gil Terrón lletrudo está;
muy hondo te encaramillas.
(Gil Terrón has become a lletrado;
You've climbed into the depths [of yourself].)

The lines are important as forerunners of the language of Auto da Fé: being a lletrudo is compared to “climbing into the depths”—of yourself and of presumed devotional and cultural truth. In terms of plot, Gil Terrón undergoes a process of personal/metaphysical anagnorisis. In terms of language, he articulates movement to anagogy. His response to his companions' analyses:

Dios hace estas maravillas.

(31)

(God performs these miracles.)

As precursor of Auto da Fé, then, Auto Pastoril Castelhano demonstrates the possibility of the movement from literality to anagogy, with all its implications regarding culture and language, thus indicating what was taken up but very pointedly not achieved eight years later in Auto da Fé.

The other important early play is Auto dos Reis Magos (The Play of the Magi), presented on Epiphany of 1503. In that play, two shepherds come seeking the Christ child. A hermit whom they meet remarks, in a passage that indicates the type of language that he uses throughout:

Oh bendito y alabado
y exalzado
sea nuestro Redentor
que un rústico pastor
con amor
lo busca con gran cuidado.

(37)

(Oh blessed and praised
And exalted
Be our Redeemer
That a simple shepherd
With great love
Should seek him with such dedication.)

The three eventually run across a nobleman who is also seeking Bethlehem; the shepherds and the nobleman get into a quarrel—apparently for no other reason than class conflict. It turns out that the nobleman is a separated member of the Reis Magos' entourage. When the shepherds find that out, they apologize for their “ignorance” in language that resembles that of the shepherds' self-analysis as inferior in Auto da Fé. The nobleman responds to the apology by replying to one of the shepherds:

Yo te perdono, pastor,
que el Señor
por cualquier culpa mortal
no pide al al pecador.

(47)

(I pardon you, shepherd,
For the Lord
Asks only that of the sinner
For any mortal sin.)

Now the situation is somewhat different from the two Christmas plays, but there are representations of each class defining the other linguistically and entering into opposition. There is a culturalist characterization. No move to anagogy occurs, since the setup is different, and the hermit has enacted an explanatory part all along, with the others engaging in complete, meaningful dialogue with him. The resolution of the class-based quarrel, however, coming in a pardon given by the nobleman in the name of greater pardons given to greater transgressions, paves the way for a reaching of Bethlehem. Thus a tiny rift in a presumedly unified culture is quickly patched up in the name of the prime guarantor of cultural unity. Nonetheless, there is in Auto dos Reis Magos a hint both of the culturalist analysis that is to come in Auto da Fé and also of the universal resolution that will there be denied.

By contrast, no such class-based constitution is given to shepherds, and no such sense of class opposition is to be seen in the work of the Salamancan playwrights from whom Vicente derived these structures (with the exception of a passage in Lucas Fernández's Comedia de Pravos (Comedy of Pravos)—and there it comes about and is resolved differently). Instead, the entire situation with the Salamancans is different: by and large, shepherd figures—very clearly, the shepherd and the entire pastoral mode are frequently used and polyvalent at this time—are not given a hint of even the culturally divergent status that is present in Vicente's first play, Monólogo do Vaqueiro. Instead, the Salamancans invest their shepherds with thinly disguised nobiliary status; in short, in the Salamancans the courtly use of the pastoral predominates. Courtier psychology is strongly present in their shepherds' makeup, and corresponding language frequently breaks out in their rhetoric, betraying the fact that they do not proceed from any consistent analysis of cultural divergence. The contrast helps to set off and define Vicente's culturalist analysis of the shepherd. The tendency to such analysis becomes greater in the works immediately preceding Auto da Fé, the first two of his farces, Quem Tem Farelos? (Who has Bran?) and Auto da India (Play of India), both obviously benefiting from familiarity with the recently printed La Celestina. In the farces, social-class identity codes are dealt with and broadly parodied; proverbs appear in abundance. In short, seen within Vicente's career, Auto da Fé would seem to represent a crux of yet another sort: the bringing together of several lines tentatively explored before, the examination of how they work out together, and the following out of the result. I shall return in a moment to touch upon that juncture.

First, let us look to the question of the song that Benito sings at Faith's behest. It reads as follows:

          No no no no no no
no no no
que no, que no,
que no quiero estar en casa;
no me pagan mi soldada
no no no, que no que no.
          No me pagan mi soldada,
no tengo sayo ni saya
no no no, que no que no.

(95-96)

          (No no no no no no
No no no
No, to be sure, no, to be sure.
To be sure, I don't want to stay inside;
They don't give me my just pay,
No no no, to be sure, to be sure.
          They don't give me my just pay,
I have neither bib nor apron,
No no no, to be sure, to be sure.)

Aside from the phonic negativity that characterizes the song and provides its chorus, the language is remarkable for its form, incorporating the technique of leixa-pren (literally, ‘letting drop … picking back up’) and probably constituting a fragment of the parallelistic song that came from the popular level into upper-level literature during the thirteenth century in the troubadours' cantiga de amigo (song of the lover), in which a woman sings of her distant lover. By Gil Vicente's age, however, it had long since passed from literary favor. And, in any case, the text of this example is hardly “literary” in any official-cultural sense. In fact, despite its suggestion of the parallelistic arrangement, the song's content is comically inappropriate. At the same time, however, it appears almost surely because it was associated with the “uso acostumado” of the popular social level in the era. The song thus reaches out referentially beyond the confines of the text to incorporation within a culturalist analysis of an element that has ethnographic and historical resonances connected with that culture. It marks, more forcibly perhaps than any other possible language, the analysis of the shepherds of Auto da Fé as culturalistic over and above any other potential mode. The lines that Benito sings are, in the final analysis, a comic parody of popular song functioning as a link to popular-level culture.⁶

Now, if we think back to the fact that what is repeatedly asked for by Vicente's culturally separate and inferior shepherds of the early plays is a lletrado as a cultural guide, we can hypothesize in the light of the foregoing considerations that the extratextual reference confirmed in Benito's song is one made to a culture that is precisely not lletrada, to one that is orally based. Vicente would not, of course, be invoking our contemporary concept of a modally different oral culture, but it is arguable that the overall representation of the shepherds in Auto da Fé—the “concrete” diction; nonlinear, periphrasis-filled language; use of proverb, set phrase, and anecdote; “popular” song—adds up to a bundle that is being presented as different from upper-class culture and that what that presentation attempts to convey is a sense of the presence of what we today would label an oral culture.

It is noteworthy that never again after Auto da Fé does Gil Vicente put on stage just “pastores” named Bras, Benito, Gil, and so on. Such names, and aspects of the language that the shepherds of Auto da Fé and the other early plays speak, are transferred to the farce—a form being tried out at the time of Auto da Fé—in which language-based social typing goes on, growing more and more complex through time. The Christmas shepherd's play too goes on, however, and other devotional plays are written, but with a much more thoroughgoing allegorical structure or like apparatus. In subsequent Christmas plays classical and Biblical prophets appear as shepherds (Auto da Sibila Cassandra [Play of the Sybil Cassandra]), seasons of the year as shepherds (Auto dos Quatro Tempos [Play of the Four Seasons]), and the shepherd figure serves as cipher for the courtier much as in Encina and Fernández (Auto Pastoril Português [Portuguese Pastoral Play]), but no longer do we see plain shepherds and there is certainly no culturalist analysis of them. The one later play that comes close to such a problematic is the Auto da Mofina Mendes (Play of Mofina Mendes), of 1534, at the very end of Vicente's career. Although a number of elements of that play are like those of the early plays, much is different, and in the final analysis the shepherds' state of nature allegorizes humanity's forgetfulness of mortality rather than signifying the starting place for a wide cultural problematic. I think that, in the light of that history, one can conclude that in his early sayagués religious-pastoral plays Gil Vicente finds it increasingly difficult to keep culturalist representation from overwhelming argumentation of the subject grounded in traditional hermeneutics, until finally it does exactly that and divides up the shepherd figure—or, rather, what he implied up to that time—reassigning portions of that significance in ways that inform the future work.

The last item to be examined is the source of the pressure that precipitates that division—and the source of the mechanism of the reassignment. I refer to the circumstantial/textual presence of the royal court as articulated in the verbal economy of the play. We have already noted the treble presence of the court. The fact is that the three presences are not isolated from each other; indeed, to the contrary, there is a mechanism that unites them. First, the court provides the sense data for the shepherds. In the nondialogic dialogue its attributes are canvassed and named by each side: the shepherds according to their represented cultural paradigm, Faith through engaging in what is presented textually as a transparent renaming, since she reflects the dominant culture, the one shown to be superior. It is clearly at least in part in that role as the voice of culture itself that Faith alone speaks Portuguese. And the entire process, of course, is presented to the Portuguese court as audience. It thus sees its presence and constitution analyzed by the play, and ultimately confirmed. It is in essence given to itself in its own language by an author who in the rhetorical discourse of the play suggests his presence as controller, shaper, and confirmer of all. But in what form does that “self” come? It comes not as God-given pinnacle of homogeneous society ultimately grounded in the Word, as the tradition of the shepherd's play and Vicente's prior career might seem to promise, but rather through the court's own socio-cultural authority, as organizing principle of a society implicitly recognized as heterogeneous. I do not think it at all untoward to see the entire mechanism—court presence leading to definition of the court's implicit participation in the signification process itself and then to re-presentation of that role to the court as audience—as the textual figuration of social forces then at work, as well, correspondingly, as the model of discourse-creation in the play. In a word, I see textual economy, especially given the occasional nature of the work, as representation of social functioning. A degree of homogeneity is by now a necessity for the developing Portuguese state; that necessity leads to analysis of the problematic of real cultural heterogeneity and to efforts to overcome it. The force that needs and seeks to define and create homogeneity and guarantee its viability is the state itself, focused in the royal court. Thus, in the final analysis, Auto da Fé is the representation—or rehearsal—of that signifying mechanism to that court itself—a class-bound ideological act. I suggest that it is the circumstantial/textual presence of the court that invokes representation of that mechanism, rendering the traditional movement to anagogy an indefensible proposition. And it is Faith who comes out the prime loser: textually, she is simply inconsistent between her first words and her last.

Now there is one other item that is processed for the court in the same way as are the constitution and role of the court itself—namely, the shepherd figure. It too is posed as material, named, then presented for confirmation to the court as audience. It is named a tangible social category with certain culturally based characteristics. What is happening, in effect, is that a sense of popular-level culture is being propounded and its features are being codified within the text of Auto da Fé. Moreover, now-untenable abstract notions of cultural unity are being abandoned in favor of statist mechanisms of unification. While the definition being propounded rests on recognition of cultural difference, its very proposition in this forum constitutes the location of popular-level culture within upper-class, official culture. Thus recognition of difference in the presence of the constituting of authority as organizing principle becomes in effect a homogenizing act: it represents the bringing of the “popular” into a cultural paradigm expanded to include that category, and guaranteed by authority. “Popular” will be characterized as inferior, as grounded in such language as Auto da Fé propounds, language based on a metaphorizing of upper-class language, which, in turn, possesses the “true” signifying value—one that, in contrast to the essentially metaphorical discourse ascribed to “popular” language, I would call symbolic.

If we follow the suggestion that the culture being so characterized was primarily oral, according to our contemporary nations of oral culture, with the modal differences from learned culture we now think therein involved, we can glimpse an entire cultural-historical transference being signaled in Auto da Fé. Oral culture, which we now think is basically discontinuous with learned culture, first is brought into the presence of learned culture—in terms of the text, from the time the two shepherds come in the door, come into contact with the court (i.e., when the first words of the play are uttered)—and then in the play's language it is defined as separate from that culture but in a way that constitutes it as a cultural mode that is not basically discontinuous but only divergent, inferior, idiosyncratic—and whose interchange with what can now be called “high” culture is important, required, indeed guaranteed by state authority.

Now Gil Vicente, court playwright that he is, is notorious for presenting a two-class society; from him we get almost exclusively only povo and nobreza, little between. The social homogenization project suggested in the structure and language of Auto da Fé is pointedly focused in the court. Very clearly the social situation is more complicated than that and rapidly growing even more complex at this precise time: other classes and groups within classes can take up a similar project to similar but hardly identical ends. (I think, as an obvious example, of the Humanists and their circle of influence, who have a very different stake in the representation of the popular.) Furthermore, other groups can be represented linguistically, and other groups can have that representation made to them. And it is precisely theater, of which Gil Vicente is the universally acknowledged primary formal codifier, that will become the first “public” literary medium in the history of peninsular culture. Now, in the case of the representation of the popular, the formal directions Gil Vicente establishes, following the Salamancans and others but setting matters more categorically and in more nearly clear social terms, are more or less followed. Implications of the formal categories, however, will change according to proposer and forum in which the proposal is made. I think specifically of Juan de Valdés's similar representation but very different evaluation of aspects of popular language in Diálogo de la lengua (Dialogue of the Language).⁷

And the question is not merely limited to a historical object of study. The question “for whom the popular?” here suggested represents a powerful methodological caveat for anyone engaged in studies of “popular culture.” Again, Gil Vicente can stand as an example, for by far the majority view of his representation of the popular has it as an unproblematic registering of empirically verifiable “popular material,” a view that corresponds to the necessities of the romantic-positivist criticism that initiated, and to some extent still commands, studies of Vicente.

Such are problems ultimately set in motion when Faith tells not only, directly, Bras and Benito but, indirectly, the select audience before which she is performing in a radically new manner “Vos outros tambem cantai por vosso uso acostumado.”

Notes

1. I have greatly benefited from discussion of this paper, in preliminary version, in a graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota led by Professors Wladyslaw Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini. I should like here to thank both them and their students.

2. For dating and other documentation, I follow the standard Jack Horace Parker, Gil Vicente (New York, 1967), which does not significantly diverge from critical opinion on any major issue that comes into question in this paper.

3. Gil Vicente, Obras Completas, preface and notes by Marques Braga (Lisgon, 1942), vol. 1, p. 84. Subsequent references, not only to Auto da Fé but also to other works dealt with in this essay that are also contained in this volume, are incorporated into the text by page number only. All translations are my own and aspire to literal status only.

4. This is by no means a surprising connection, of course. In Portuguese texts from this era and before, letrado seems virtually synonymous with cleric, a synonymy that probably bespeaks an actual social division of labor—i.e., there were very few lay people who were “lettered.” That lexical interrelationship continues through the eighteenth century, presumably becoming decreasingly descriptive and increasingly prescriptive during that time.

5. See, e.g., Parker, Gil Vicente, p. 139.

6. I here differ with the reading of Eugenio Asensio, Poética y realidad en el cancionero peninsular de la edad media (Madrid, 1957), pp. 143-46, who sees the passage as palace lyric. Indeed, although I agree with the general thesis of the section of his book that runs from p. 133 to p. 180 (not to mention other sections as well), I find that Asensio's argumentation is often weakened by failure to read passages against a defensible reading of the entire work from which they are taken. The shepherds' song of Auto da Fé is a case in point: there can be no doubt that it is designated as “popular” by the terms of the text itself. If Asensio's proposal has any validity whatsoever—a question about which, given the anachronism upon which the argument depends, frankly I am undecided—then it must reside at a metalinguistic level. The entire passage might, accordingly, be read in a manner like the “cruz” passage commented on above. Its implications for communication between author and audience would, then, be similar to those that I propose for the “cruz” passage—indeed, in the light of Asensio's commentary, even more obviously so. Such a reading of the two passages might well pave the way for an attempt at a reading of metacommentary in Vicente's work.

7. I have used the version printed by Gregorio Mayans y Siscar in Orígenes de la lengua española, 2nd ed. (Madrid, 1873), pp. 1-148.