SOURCE: Hart, Thomas R. “Characterization: Casandra.” In Gil Vicente: Casandra and Don Duardos, pp. 49-63. London England: Grant & Cutler, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Hart maintains that in the play Casandra Vicente privileges character development over plot events.]

A. A. Parker has observed that the Spanish comedia of the seventeenth century is “essentially a drama of action and not of characterization … The plot and not the characters is the primary thing” (7, 3-4). Our two early sixteenth-century plays by Gil Vicente work rather differently. Dámaso Alonso has contrasted the “lenta matización psicológica” in Vicente's treatment of Don Duardos and Flérida with “los cambios bruscos e infundamentados del teatro de Lope”, suggesting that “aquí, en la expresión, por matices sumamente delicados y pequeños, de las variaciones de un alma es donde está el mayor valor dramático de la Tragicomedia” (1, 26). The “lenta matización psicológica” which Alonso finds in Don Duardos is perhaps unique to that play. It may have something to do with the sheer length of the text—more than 2,000 lines—which was perhaps written to be read rather than performed before an audience.¹ But in Casandra, too, though in a rather different way, character is more important than action. The action arises out of the character of Casandra and is shaped by the special kind of person she is.

In Casandra, as in the earlier Auto pastoril castellano and Auto de los reyes magos, Vicente centers his attention not on the Nativity itself but rather on its effect on those who witnessed it, or, more precisely, on its effect on the protagonist whose attitude toward it is different from that of his or her fellows. Different at least at the beginning of the play. The birth of Christ inaugurates a new era in human society; the play will end by composing the differences which earlier had separated the protagonist from the other characters. In Casandra, however, this structure is turned upside down. Casandra, unlike Gil and Gregorio in the earlier Christmas plays, cuts herself off from her society because she is less, not more, ready than the other characters to accept the message of the Incarnation. As a result, the end of the play leaves her much more radically transformed than her counterparts in the other shepherds' plays.

Like Vicente's earlier Christmas plays, Casandra begins with a soliloquy by the protagonist. From it we learn two things, first that she does not wish to marry, and second that she is proud. If she will not marry, it is because she is convinced that there is no man who is worthy of her:

Pues séame Dios testigo
que yo digo
que no me quiero casar.
¿Quál será pastor nacido
tan polido
ahotas que me meresca?

(5-9)

To marry, Casandra insists, means for a woman losing her liberty, “su libertad cautivando” (15). Aubrey Bell saw Casandra's attack on marriage as a reflection of “the sad life of married women in Portugal”.² More recently, Melveena McKendrick has argued that Casandra is “the first [Spanish play] in which the theme of active feminism appears. The figures of the unrequited or importunate lover and the unyielding maiden are common in the early drama but the rejection of man by maid is born not of principle but of personal preference. Vicente's Auto offers us the first, and for many years the only, example of the heroine who denounces the very concept of marriage” (6, 45). McKendrick's feminist reading of the play offers a number of interesting insights. She suggests, for example, that “Casandra has what today would be called a neurotic obsession about marriage” (49) and that “she lacks confidence in her ability to cope with life and comes to see herself as the passive object of glory” (50). I believe, however, that the play may be better understood in the light of some widespread sixteenth-century ideas on marriage.

For a convenient statement of them, we may turn to Fray Hernando de Talavera, the first Archbishop of Granada and a member of the triumvirate to whom Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492, entrusted the administration of the newly reconquered city. In the third chapter of his treatise De cómo se ha de ordenar el tiempo para que sea bien expendido, Fray Hernando tells Doña María Pacheco that:

aún devéis mirar, noble señora, que no sois libre para hacer vuestra voluntad; ca el día que fuistes ayuntada al marido en el estado matrimonial, ese día perdiste vuestra libertad. Porque no solamente tomó el marido el señorío de vuestro cuerpo, como vos tomastes del suyo, mas sois subjeta a él y obligada a vos conformar con su voluntad en todo lo que no fuere pecado mortal o venial … era cosa natural y mucho razonable que la mujer, que comúnmente, como tiene flaco el cuerpo y mucho menor el esfuerzo, así no tiene tan complida discreción, siga y obedesca el seso y querer del varón, que en todo es más perfecto; ca es ley general que todas las cosas inferiores e menores sean movidas por las superiores e mayores, como lo son los hombres por los buenos ángeles, e los elementos y cosas elementadas por los cuerpos celestiales.³

As the last sentence makes clear, the wife's subjection to her husband is only a special case of what C. S. Lewis has called “the Hierarchical conception”. He explains it thus:

According to this conception degrees of value are objectively present in the universe. Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors. When it fails in either part of this twofold task we have disease or monstrosity in the scheme of things until the peccant being is either destroyed or corrected. One or the other it will certainly be; for by stepping out of its place in the system (whether it step up like a rebellious angel or down like an uxorious husband) it has made the very nature of things its enemy. It cannot succeed.⁴

To those who saw or read Vicente's play when it was new, Casandra's refusal to marry must have seemed simply another manifestation of her overweening pride, a refusal to submit to any authority whatever.

Casandra makes her attitude perfectly clear in lines 91-3:

          No quiero ser desposada
ni casada,
ni monja ni ermitaña.

The same point is later made even more explicitly in Pedro de Luxán's Coloquios matrimoniales; first published in 1550, the book had reached its eleventh edition by 1589. Near the beginning of the first Coloquio, we find the following passage:

DOROTEA.
—Me parece que te veo agora más fresca y hermosa que nunca te vi.
EULALIA.
—Por dicha harálo los pocos cuidados que debo tener.
DOROTEA.
—Como no eres casada.
EULALIA.
—Ni aun lo querría ser.
DOROTEA.
—¿Por qué causa no quieres tomar el yugo del matrimonio?
EULALIA.
—Algunas veces he sido requerida por mis padres que me case y no lo he querido hacer.
DOROTEA.
—¿Por qué?
EULALIA.
—Porque no querría casarme.
DOROTEA.
—¿Meterte monja?
EULALIA.
—Ni querría ser monja.
DOROTEA.
—¿Por qué?
EULALIA.
—Por no estar contino encerrada debajo de siete llaves.
DOROTEA.
—¿Pues qué piensas de hacer, no queriendo tomar estado ninguno: convience a saber de ser casada o monja?
EULALIA.
—Vivir acá en el mundo, sin tener superior a quien dar cuenta, ni aun a quien contentar.
DOROTEA.
—No te acabo de entender.(5)

Dorotea finds Eulalia's attitude incomprehensible, just as Cervantes makes Grisóstomo's friends refuse to accept Marcela's assertion that “tengo libre condición y no gusto de sujetarme”.⁶ Vicente's contemporaries would doubtless have felt the same way about Casandra's refusal to tomar estado, which strikes at the very foundations of a hierarchically structured universe.

Casandra's refusal to accept a place within the established social hierarchy is stressed repeatedly. The opposition between Casandra and “the others” is apparent in the very first words she speaks in the play:

          ¿Quién mete ninguno andar
ni porfiar
en casamientos comigo?

(1-3)

It is stressed again in her first song, where the opposition between Casandra and those who wish her to marry is emphasized by the rhyme yo: no, by the repetition of the negative particle no, and by the emphatic position of yo after the verb: “Dizen que me case yo: / no quiero marido, no” (200-1). It is, of course, still further emphasized by the fact that this couplet serves as an estribillo, repeated at the end of each of the following stanzas.

Casandra apparently feels no need of company. She lives alone; we learn later that her mother is dead, when Cimeria reminds her that “Tu madre en su testamiento / … manda que cases” (226-8). Casandra's address to her mother in her song “Madre, no seré casada” (208) should not be attributed to carelessness on Vicente's part. It is simply a part of the traditional rhetoric of folk song, sometimes used, as here, where it is not strictly applicable.⁷

Casandra's insistence on living apart from society is underscored by the imagery. Thus, in her song “Dizen que me case yo” she asserts that “Más quiero bivir segura / 'n esta sierra a mi soltura” (202-3). Sierra implies a lofty place from which she can look down on those she considers her inferiors—we recall the arrogant questions she asks in her opening soliloquy:

          ¿Quál será pastor nacido
tan polido
ahotas que me meresca?
¿Alguno hay que me paresca
en cuerpo, vista y sentido?

(7-11)

Morally, however, Casandra's sierra is anything but segura, since it symbolizes the pride which governs all her actions. The image is repeated in the song “Sañosa está la niña”, sung by Solomon and his uncles when they join him in attempting to persuade Casandra to marry him:

          En la sierra anda la niña
su ganado a repastar,
hermosa como las flores,
sañosa como la mar.

(315-18)

Here there are doubtless echoes of the serranillas, the Hispanic counterpart of the pastourelles found in other medieval Romance literatures. The line “sañosa como la mar” presents Casandra as a natural force which, like the sea, is not easily subjected to man's will. The image may have been suggested to Vicente by an idiomatic use of the verb ensoberbecerse to refer to a stormy sea; Casandra implicitly applies the word to Solomon earlier in the play (128).⁸

Casandra's self-imposed isolation, repeatedly stressed in the text, is also brought out by the stage action. In the greater part of the play, this isolation takes the form of an active opposition between Casandra and the others, centering on her refusal to marry Solomon. Almost every line is either spoken by Casandra herself or addressed to her. The only exceptions are the prophets' song (313-21) and the brief conversation between Solomon and the sibyls which precedes it (296-312). Even here, however, the subject remains Casandra herself. Part of the comic force of the latter scene lies, as Mia Gerhardt has remarked, in the way Solomon and his aunts, their patience exhausted, end by speaking of Casandra as if she were not present.⁹ There is a marked change after Casandra reveals her conviction that she is to be the mother of the Messiah. Now Abraham, Isaiah, and Solomon all reproach her for her presumption and call her mad; Casandra confidently replies that “Aún en mi seso estó: / que soy yo” (533-4). She will say nothing more for some 200 lines, a quarter of the play. Instead, she remains on stage, a silent witness to the prophecies of the other characters; they, in turn, address each other and pay no further attention to her. Finally, Casandra approaches the other characters and, like them, kneels before Mary and her child in adoration. To stage the scene in this way would underscore the movement of the action from Casandra's total isolation as a result of her refusal to tomar estado toward her final incorporation as a full member of the community of Christian believers. We may say of Vicente, as Victor Dixon says of Lope, that he “has in mind … the total effect of his play in the theater; … he seeks to communicate not only via the ear, through what is said (or sung), but via the eye, through what is presented”.¹⁰

Alternatively, we can say that Casandra moves from a position in which she is the precise opposite of Mary to one in which she will accept Mary as a model—a movement, of course, which would also be symbolized by the stage action just discussed. Isaiah tells her that:

          Tú eres de ella al revés
si bien ves,
porque tú eres humosa,
sobervia, y presumptuosa,

while Mary

… humildosa ha de nascer,
y humildosa conceber,
y humildosa ha de criar.

(538-41, 546-8)

Isaiah's speech opposing Casandra to Mary is perhaps best understood in terms of the analysis of pride offered by St Thomas Aquinas:

Pride is the opposite of humility, which … regards the submissiveness of man to God. And so pride … consists in the lack of that submissiveness, in that a person spurns the condition appointed for him by divine rule or measure, in defiance of the lesson of St Paul, But we will not glory beyond our measure, but according to the measure of the rule that God has measured for us [II Corinthians x.13] … There is always a conflict between pride and loving God, for a proud person does not submit himself as he ought to the divine rule. Sometimes, also, it is contrary to loving our neighbour, as when we inordinately set ourselves above him and refuse to defer to him. This, too, derogates from divine governance which has established orders among men carrying with them duties of respect and obligation.¹¹

I suggest, then, that for a sixteenth-century reader, Casandra's refusal to heed her aunts' advice and accept Solomon as her husband may well have seemed a manifestation of the sin of pride, quite apart from her mistaken belief that she is to be the mother of the Messiah.

Vicente's treatment of Solomon helps to bring out the precise nature of Casandra's pride. Solomon enters confidently with the greeting “Dios te mantenga!” which Lazarillo's master was to find so offensive. Vicente and his audience were surely aware of its rustic flavor; its Portuguese equivalent “Deus mantenha!” seems also to have been used by uneducated country people (14, 48). Casandra does not reply. Solomon himself is compelled to speak the welcome she refuses to offer: “y yo venga / también mucho norabuena!” (24-5). The point could easily be emphasized by having him pause before line 24 to await her reply. Solomon plows bravely on, though Casandra's stubborn refusal to show that she understands the purpose of his visit causes him to become almost incoherent as he tries to explain why he has come. His next lines,

Pues te veo tan serena,
nuestra estrena
ya por mí no se detenga,

(26-8)

echo the end of Casandra's opening monologue:

¡Y piensan que ser casada
que es alguna buena estrena!

(21-2)

The lines reveal Solomon's own pride; he apparently believes that it is he who has finally made up his mind to marry Casandra, though she makes it very clear that she has refused him before:

lo que te dixe hasta aquí
será ansí,
aunque sepa de morir.

(59-61)

At the same time they reveal that Solomon is totally unaware of Casandra's emotional state: at this moment she is hardly serene.

Casandra still says nothing. Solomon, increasingly unsure of himself—we may imagine that his next speech is punctuated by long pauses as he waits for her to give him some sign of encouragement—makes still another attempt to propose to her. His speech is in sharp contrast to the assurance of Casandra's opening monologue. It is not surprising that her response, the first words she speaks to him in the play, should be a blunt “No te entiendo” (34).

Solomon, however, is undaunted. He launches into a recital of his own good qualities, which leaves him a bit ashamed of having to repeat his offer of marriage to someone who so obviously fails to see him for what he is:

Bien se ve
que soy yo para valer
tal, que juro a mi poder
que, de no ser,
ni esta paja me dé.
Yo soy bien aparentado
y abastado,
valiente zagal polido,
y aun estoy medio corrido
de haver acá llegado.

(46-55)

He concludes with a peremptory command, “Anda, si quieres venir”, which Casandra just as curtly rejects: “Sin mentir, / tú estás fuera de ti” (56-8).

Solomon, like Casandra, is proud, but his pride is of a quite different kind. Casandra is proud of a distinction which, as she will learn in the course of the play, is not destined ever to be hers. Her pride strikes both at the foundations of the social order, in her refusal either to marry or to become a nun, and at her relationship to God, since she arrogates to herself a distinction which could be hers only if it were given her by God. Aquinas tells us that “pride, superbia, is so named because thereby a man's will aims above, supra, what he really is; hence Isidore notes that a man is said to be proud because he wills to appear higher than he is” (2a2ae.162.1; p. 119). Solomon's pride, by contrast, does not touch the hierarchical principle itself. Moreover, we may assume that he really does have the things he says he has. Indeed, much of the comedy in his first scene with Casandra comes from his obvious pride in possessions which might be those of any moderately prosperous farmer (thirty-two hens). The comedy would be still further enhanced if, like María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, we believe that Solomon is dressed as a king rather than as a shepherd (5, 53-4). A different view is held by Duncan Moir, who believes that Solomon and the other prophets are dressed as shepherds or farmers.¹² The audience would learn Solomon's identity only when he contrasts his proverbial wisdom with Casandra's foolishness:

tú loca, yo Salamón,
dame razón:
¿qué vida fora la nuestra?

(530-2)

But arguments from the presumed theatrical effectiveness of the two alternatives are hardly convincing; too much depends on the expectations of Vicente's first audiences, the conventions with which they were familiar. Though the rubric given in the Copilaçam is clearly wrong about either the date or the place of the first performance, and possibly about both, it is nevertheless reasonable to assume that the play was indeed first produced in a royal chapel and on Christmas Day. The spectators must surely have been expecting to see an auto de navidad; they must, that is, have expected to find a connection between the apparently secular scenes which begin the play and what they knew would be its ending, the news of the birth of Christ. Certainly Solomon's pride in his rustic possessions will be funnier to someone who knows that he is not just a shepherd but a king, and indeed that he is the “king Solomon [who] exceeded all the kings of the earth for riches and for wisdom” (I Kings x.23). But the costume he wears will hardly settle the matter. Even if we accept Lida de Malkiel's view that Vicente's sibyls and prophets would have worn costumes similar to those worn by such figures in late medieval art, the spectators would still have seen Solomon only as an Old Testament figure; it is hard to see what attribute he could be given that would reveal immediately who he is.

The question is further complicated by the fact that in Vicente's day there was more than one tradition connected with Solomon. As Lida de Malkiel remarks, “Salamón, cantor de la Virgen y figura de Cristo, es también ejemplo vitando del sabio que por lascivia cae en idolatría” (5, 56). Vicente himself presents Solomon in more than one way. In Casandra, he appears as “cantor de la Virgen” in lines which echo the Song of Songs (583 ff.), as he does also in the Auto pastoril castellano (343-61) and in the Auto dos Mistérios da Virgem, more usually known as the Auto da Mofina Mendes.¹³ Elsewhere, however, Vicente treats Solomon quite differently. In the Nau d'amores, Amor asks:

Pues ¿cómo serán sentidos
mis poderes quántos son,
sino en los sabios vencidos?
Los más sabios, más perdidos,
como os dirá Salamón.(14)

Here Vicente must have in mind the King Solomon of I Kings xi.3-4 who “had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart … after other gods”. Again, in the Frágua de amor, Vicente presents Solomon neither as “cantor de la Virgen” nor as “ejemplo vitando del sabio que por lascivia cae en idolatría” but rather as a model of wisdom:

y dizen que a Salamón
ni Dios ni la natureza
no le dio más prefeción.(15)

The wise King Solomon is frequently presented in medieval art as an old man, but in Casandra Solomon must still be young. Casandra's aunts call him a zagal (220, 267).¹⁶ Moses addresses him as “buen garçón” (584).

More importantly, the dramatic point of the scene would be lost if there were some obvious reason, such as a great difference in age, for Casandra to refuse Solomon's proposal of marriage. Her later statement to her aunts that Solomon seems to her “Ni bien ni mal” (221) is doubtless to be taken at face value. She does not want to hurt his feelings, if only because she has no desire to prolong her conversation with him:

No tomes de esto passión
ni alteración,
pues que no desprecio a ti.

(108-10)

She is quite willing to flatter him if it will help to win him over to her point of view: “… pues eres cuerdo y sientes, / para mientes” (147-8). At the same time, she is obviously irritated at his smug assumption that any girl would be proud to have him as her husband. Her list of the “malinas / condiciones de maridos” begins with those who are “ensobervecidos” (126-8)—doubtless intentionally, given Solomon's attitude in this scene, but of course also ironic in view of Casandra's own superbia. Earlier Solomon had suggested that if Casandra is unwilling to become his wife it can only be because she is in love with someone else:

Según el tu no querer,
a mi ver,
otro amor tienes allá.

(88-90)

Now Casandra continues her list of unsatisfactory husbands with those who are:

… llenos de mil celos
y recelos,
siempre aguzando cuchillos,
sospechosos, amarillos

(131-4)

and those who go:

pavonando tras garcetas,
sin dexar blancas ni prietas,
y reprietas.

(138-40)

The last point is especially funny if we remember that the biblical King Solomon “loved many foreign women” (I Kings xi.1).

Neither Solomon nor any of the other characters, with the obvious exception of Casandra, learns anything new in the course of the play. They simply see their prophecies confirmed, as they had always known they would be. Casandra, of course, does learn something new. She learns not only that she is not the Virgin who will bear a child but that her prophecy was wrongly focused. Unlike the other sibyls, she has centered her attention on the Virgin Birth itself, saying nothing about the character of the child who will be born. God, moreover, hardly enters Casandra's prophecy at all; if she is to be the chosen Virgin, it is because she deserves to be, not because He has chosen her for special favor.

Casandra's new knowledge destroys forever the pride in her own uniqueness which had been her dominant trait at the beginning of the play. She now knows the folly of her confident assertion that “tengo sabido / que la flor yo me la so” (216-17), for she can measure the distance between herself and Mary, who is called “rosa florida” (481) and “blanca flor” (764). Her earlier confidence in her own judgement—“Aún en mi seso estó / que soy yo” (533-4)—now gives way to her recognition that:

… nunca di passada
concertada,
ni deviera ser nacida.

(737-9)

Now she can praise Mary as “corona de las mugeres” (742) and implore her intercession. Once the very opposite of Mary, as Isaiah had told her, she will presumably now try to make her own life an imitatio Mariae. The question of whether or not she will marry Solomon is left unresolved because it no longer matters. The important thing is that Casandra now accepts her own subordinate place in the hierarchical order. Whether she marries Solomon or not, she will surely no longer refuse to tomar estado, but will take her place as a faithful member of the militia Christi. We may assume that she joins the other characters in singing the spirited call to arms which brings the play to a close:

Pues los ángeles sagrados
a socorro son en tierra,
¡a la guerra!

(784-6)

Casandra's isolation, at first a source of pleasure to her—“Más quiero bivir segura / 'n esta sierra a mi soltura” (202-3)—becomes intolerable when it is no longer sustained by the firm conviction that she is superior to everyone else. One may see her as embodying A. A. Parker's conception of poetic justice in the later comedia. He observes that “the degree of frustration which a character meets with at the end of a play is the measure of the dramatist's condemnation of his action, and therefore a pointer to the interpretation of the theme” (7, 8). Yet the Auto de la sibila Casandra does not end unhappily. When the play ends Casandra can see the folly of her own earlier presumption. It is not so much that her plans have been frustrated as that she herself has come to reject them as unworthy of the person she now aspires to be.

Casandra is not a tragedy but a comedy. Northrop Frye, in his influential book Anatomy of Criticism, makes a number of points which are helpful in understanding Vicente's play. “The movement of comedy”, Frye asserts, “is usually a movement from one kind of society to another.”¹⁷ Comedy tends “to include as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated” (165). The “blocking character” in our play is, of course, Casandra herself. Her refusal to marry Solomon and, by extension, to accept her place in the hierarchical order, is the central theme of the play. Her state is that which Frye calls “ritual bondage”, in this case her obsession with the idea that she is the Virgin who will bear a child.

Frye argues that “the action of comedy … is not unlike the action of a lawsuit, in which plaintiff and defendant construct different versions of the same situation, one finally being judged as real and the other as illusory … A little pamphlet called the Tractatus Coislinianus, closely related to Aristotle's Poetics, which sets down all the essential facts about comedy in about a page and a half, divides [it] into two parts, opinion (pistis) and proof (gnosis)” (166). In Vicente's play, the “opinions” are the conflicting prophecies of the Virgin Birth offered by Casandra and by the other characters; the “proof” is the appearance of Mary and her child at the end of the play. Finally, Frye notes that:

the movement from pistis to gnosis … is fundamentally, as the Greek words suggest, a movement from illusion to reality …, generally manipulated by a twist in the plot …

The manipulation of plot does not always involve metamorphosis of character, but there is no violation of comic decorum when it does. Unlikely conversions, miraculous transformations, and providential assistance are inseparable from comedy. Further, whatever emerges is supposed to be there for good: if the curmudgeon becomes lovable, we understand that he will not immediately relapse again into his ritual habit.

(169-71)

So, too, we must accept the humility of Casandra's last speech in the play (734-9) as marking a permanent change in her character.

In giving his auto a comic structure Vicente, of course, follows the pattern found in his own earlier Christmas plays and in those of Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández. As John Brotherton has observed, “Comedy pervades [the Nativity plays]; it is their very essence, manifesting itself not only in humor, through the antics of the Pastor-Bobo, but also in their structure. In [them] we witness the movement from consternation to contentment, from ignorance to enlightenment, from sin to salvation.”¹⁸ In the Auto de la sibila Casandra, Gil Vicente goes further than his Salamancan predecessors, and further than he himself had gone in his earlier shepherds' plays, to turn this traditional comic structure into a fully developed comedy of character centering on the unique figure of Casandra herself.

Notes

1. See Ch. 2, p. 18.

2. Portuguese Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), p. 114.

3. Escritores místicos españoles, I, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, XVI (Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, 1911), p. 97. I have slightly modernized the text.

4. A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 72.

5. Coloquios matrimoniales (Madrid: Atlas, 1943), p. 8. See Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España, trans. Antonio Alatorre (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950), II, pp. 255-7.

6. Don Quixote, I, xiv (see Ch. 2, note 2), p. 132. See Thomas R. Hart and Steven F. Rendall, “Rhetoric and Persuasion in Marcela's Address to the Shepherds”, Hispanic Review, XLVI (1978), 296-7.

7. Margit Frenk Alatorre, in the Introduction to her edition of the Cancionero de galanes (Valencia: Castalia, 1952), observes that “en ciertos giros se nota el desgaste de las fórmulas tradicionales: [por ejemplo] el ‘madre’ del verso 9 [of the song “Aunque me vedes / morenica en el agua”], que está fuera de lugar, puesto que la muchacha está hablando justamente de la madre” (p. xlv).

8. Covarrubias, Tesoro (see Ch. 5, note 4), s.v. sobervia, says that “dezimos del mar ensobervecerse quando está tempestuoso y agitado de los vientos”.

9. La Pastorale: essai d'analyse littéraire (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1950), p. 144.

10. “The Symbolism of Peribáñez”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, XLIII (1966), 11.

11. Summa theologiae, 2a2ae.162.5, trans. Thomas Gilby, O. P. (Blackfriars in conjunction with McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, and Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1972), XLIV, 135-7. Subsequent references will appear in my text.

12. Edward M. Wilson and Duncan Moir, The Golden Age: Drama, 1492-1700, in A Literary History of Spain, ed. R. O. Jones (London: Ernest Benn, and New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971). pp. 9-10.

13. Copilaçam, fol. 21^v; Obras completas, ed. Marques Braga (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1953), I, 136.

14. Copilaçam, fol. 148; ed. Braga, IV, 74.

15. Copilaçam, fol. 151^v; Farces, ed. Hart (see Ch. 3, note 1), lines 41-43.

16. Covarrubias, Tesoro (see Ch. 5, note 4), s.v. çagal, tells us that “quedó la costumbre en las aldeas de llamar çagales a los barbiponientes, y çagalas a las moças donzellas”.

17. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Univ. Press, 1957), p. 163. Subsequent references will appear in my text.

18. The ‘Pastor-Bobo’ in the Spanish Theatre before the Time of Lope de Vega (London: Tamesis, 1975), p. 2.

Bibliographical Note

Bibliography

The most recent and reliable is C. C. Stathatos, A Gil Vicente Bibliography (1940-1975), Research Bibliographies and Checklists, 30 (London: Grant and Cutler, 1980).

Background

The best account in English, particularly good on social history, is A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal. I. From Lusitania to Empire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972). An extremely readable treatment of many topics of interest to students of Vicente's theater is C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969). There is no recent history of Portuguese literature in English, though Aubrey F. G. Bell's Portuguese Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922) still retains much of its value. Good treatments in Portuguese include Hernâni Cidade, Lições de cultura e literatura portuguesas (5th ed., Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1968), and António José Saraiva and Óscar Lopes, História da literatura portuguesa (4th ed., Oporto: Porto Editora, [1964]). The fullest account of the development of the theater in Portugal is Luciana Stegagno Picchio, História do teatro português, trans. Manuel de Lucena (Lisbon: Portugália, 1969).

Editions

The indispensable starting point for all modern editions of Vicente's plays is Obras completas de Gil Vicente. Reimpressão “fac-similada” da edição de 1562 (Lisbon: Oficinas Gráficas da Biblioteca Nacional, 1928). This facsimile edition is not, however, completely trustworthy; see 8, below, pp. 197-223. Both text and notes in Marques Braga's edition of Vicente's Obras completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1942-44), are unreliable. For Don Duardos alone there is:

1. Dámaso Alonso, ed., Tragicomedia de Don Duardos, I (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1942). A superb annotated edition of the text as given in the Copilaçam of 1562 and two masterful essays, “La poesía dramática en la Tragicomedia de Don Duardos” and “Problemas del castellano vicentino”. “La poesía dramática” is reprinted in his Ensayos sobre poesía española (Buenos Aires: Revista de Occidente Argentina, 1946), pp. 125-44.

Critical Studies

2. Margit Frenk Alatorre, Estudios sobre lírica antigua (Madrid: Castalia, 1978). A useful collection of sixteen previously published articles, some of which are of fundamental importance for the understanding of Vicente's lyrics.

3. Eugenio Asensio, Poética y realidad en el cancionero peninsular de la Edad Media (2nd ed., Madrid: Gredos, 1970). The splendid essay “Gil Vicente y las cantigas paralelísticas ‘restauradas’” (pp. 134-76) ranges much more widely than its title implies and offers a number of insights into Vicente's theater.

4. Giuseppina Ledda, “Note sul Primaleón o Libro segundo del emperador Palmerín”, in Studi sul ‘Palmerín de Olivia’. III. Saggi e ricerche (Pisa, 1966), pp. 137-58. A sympathetic reading of the romance of chivalry which was the principal source of Don Duardos.

5. María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, “Para la génesis del Auto de la sibila Casandra”, Filología, V (1959), 47-63; rpt. in her Estudios de literatura española y comparada (Buenos Aires: Eudeba [Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires], 1966), pp. 157-72. In a note at the end of the essay the author observes that her work was completed before the appearance of the studies by Spitzer (12) and Révah (9), which to some extent supersede it.

6. Melveena McKendrick, Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the ‘Mujer varonil’ (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1974). McKendrick's feminist reading of Casandra (pp. 45-51) is interesting, though she perhaps gives too little attention to the play's theological content.

7. A. A. Parker, The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, Diamante, VI (London: The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1957). Basic to an understanding of the similarities and differences between Vicente's theater and the later comedia.

8. Stephen Reckert, Gil Vicente: espíritu y letra. I. Estudios (Madrid: Gredos, 1977). The most comprehensive book on Vicente in many years. Reckert's analysis of the two versions of Don Duardos (pp. 236-469) will be indispensable to future students of the play.

9. I. S. Révah, “L'Auto de la Sibylle Cassandre de Gil Vicente”, Hispanic Review, XXVII (1959), 167-93. The most authoritative account of the play's sources.

10. Elias L. Rivers, “The Unity of Don Duardos”, Modern Language Notes, LXXVI (1961), 759-66. Argues persuasively that everything in the play, including the episode of Camilote and Maimonda, may be seen as a variation on the basic theme of love.

11. N. D. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval Times until the End of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). The standard account of the staging of plays in the Peninsula. The final chapter offers some stimulating pages on the ways in which a knowledge of stage conditions can contribute to literary appreciation of the plays.

12. Leo Spitzer, “The Artistic Unity of Gil Vicente's Auto da sibila Cassandra”, Hispanic Review, XXVII (1959), 56-77. Probably the best single essay on the play.

13. John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961). A marvellously evocative account of courtly society in England which throws much light on sixteenth-century Hispanic literature.

14. Paul Teyssier, La Langue de Gil Vicente (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1959). The classic treatment of Vicente's use of both Spanish and Portuguese.

15. Bruce W. Wardropper, “Approaching the Metaphysical Sense of Gil Vicente's Chivalric Tragicomedies”, Bulletin of the Comediantes, XVI (1964), 1-9. An application to Don Duardos and Amadís de Gaula of the analysis of imagery which Wardropper has used in a number of important studies of the comedia. See also his essay “The Implicit Craft of the Spanish comedia”, in Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age Presented to Edward M. Wilson, ed. R. O. Jones (London: Tamesis, 1973), pp. 339-56.