Other Literary Forms
Many of Gil Vicente’s songs have been extracted from his plays and included in poetry anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (1960), edited by J. M. Cohen. Vicente is often, but not always, considered a Spanish writer; as he also wrote in Portuguese, his lyrics are only sometimes available in Spanish-language anthologies of verse.
In the Copilação de todalas obras de Gil Vicente of 1562, commonly called the Copilação, is a section entitled “Trovas e Cousas Miúdas” (verses and small things), containing twelve miscellaneous works. Of these, the most literary is “Pranto de Maria Parda” (“Maria Parda’s Lament”), and the most significant biographically is an untitled “Letter for Tolerance.” In addition, there is an epistolary dedication for the Copilação, which demonstrates that Vicente was planning, if not implementing, the publication of his complete works during his lifetime. In this two-page Portuguese prose piece, the author evinces the proper humility before the fact of his own success and claims that he would not think of publishing his works if it were not for the king’s request that he do so. As many of his plays are works of devotion, he reasons, their publication will not only serve the king but also work in the service of God.
Among the other pieces are a sermon, a paraphrase in Portuguese of Psalm 50 (“Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy”), a lament on the passing of Manuel I, a poem on the subsequent coronation of his son John III, and sundry verses addressed to a variety of persons.
Vicente’s “Letter for Tolerance,” sent to John III in January, 1531, helped to allay a burst of anti-Semitic hysteria in the wake of an earthquake that had shaken Portugal on January 26, 1531. To charges that the earthquake was caused by the wrath of God for the sins of the nation, which apparently included Portuguese toleration of newly converted Jews whose practice of Christianity was less than convincing, Vicente replied that earthquakes are typical phenomena of a natural world characterized by sudden changes. Furthermore, he advised that if some of the Portuguese people (namely, the converted Jews) were still not devout Christians, perhaps it was for the greater glory of God. He suggested that perhaps if they were treated gently, their eventual conversion would follow. Unfortunately, Vicente’s tolerance did not extend to the material he incorporated into his plays. In Dialógo sobre a ressurreição, for example, it is the three rabbis in their rejection of the Resurrection who bear the brunt of the play’s ridicule.
“Maria Parda’s Lament,” one of Vicente’s most fascinating works, is a 369-line poem in Portuguese about how a drunkard named Maria Parda copes with a wine shortage in Lisbon. After traversing Lisbon from end to end to no avail (she names the streets) in hopes of slaking her thirst, she decides that she is about to die and composes her last will and testament, commending her soul to Noah, who first planted the vine. Despite the morbid nature of the subject, Vicente’s characterization of Maria Parda is remarkably sympathetic.
Achievements
Gil Vicente created the national drama of Portugal one generation before the Spanish Golden Age and two generations before the Elizabethans. From 1502 to 1536, he was virtually poet laureate of Portugal in the capacities of musician, actor, lyric poet, and playwright, and the royal court did not plan any celebration without asking for his help. He has been called a Lusitanian Plautus, a medieval Aristophanes, and a Portuguese William Shakespeare. His light touch and...
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singing verses reminded John Dos Passos of Theocritus. Observing the dramatic vitality generated by Vicente in tiny, isolated Portugal, Richard Garnett in hisHistory of Italian Literature (1898) laments that there was no one of Vicente’s caliber among the Italians of the sixteenth century.
As a result of censorship, the changing tastes brought in with the Renaissance, and imitators who were simply unworthy of their master, the tradition of Vicente had little continuation within Portugal (although glimmers of his influence can be detected in the theatrical works of Luís de Camões, Antonio Prestes, and Antonio Ribeiro Chiado). However, his influence can be found in the playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age. Lope de Rueda was acquainted with Vicente, as was Miguel de Cervantes.Vicente’s compression of history and abandonment of chronology as seen in The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra were later a distinguishing feature in the great sacramental plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Various critics have suggested a direct or indirect influence on William Shakespeare.
Erasmus is said to have wished that he knew Portuguese in order to read Vicente’s plays in the original. The eschatological Ship Trilogy, with its angel laying bare the souls in judgment, is unsurpassed in the literature of the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century. Vicente’s Auto das ciganas is the first piece of European theater dealing professedly with the Gypsy race. Dámaso Alonso calls him one of the finest lyric poets of the Spanish language, and indeed some modern Spanish poets, such as Rafael Alberti (in whose poem “Arión,” Vicente, alongside Rubén Darío, and Charles Baudelaire, is one of eight poets whom Alberti acknowledges as his masters), have been inspired by his poetic example. If, as is widely assumed, Vicente the dramatist and poet was indeed the same person as Gil Vicente the goldsmith who made the monstrance for the Hieronymite monastery in Belem, then, as Dos Passos observes, he was one of the most versatile artists who has ever lived.
In 1838, the Portuguese romantic dramatist Almeida Garrette published Um Auto de Gil Vicente, in which he portrayed Vicente as the actor-director of a theatrical company at the court of King Manuel. This same nineteenth century writer translated Vicente’s “Ballad of Flérida” from Tragicomédia de dom Duardos into Portuguese (from Spanish) and included it in his Romanceiro (1843). About the same time, in the United States, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped acquaint American readers with Vicente’s name by including English renderings of his poems “How Fair the Maiden” (from The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra) and “If Thou Art Sleeping, Maiden” (from Quem tem farelos?) in his The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845).
Bibliography
Garay, René Pedro. Gil Vicente and the Development of the Comedia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1988. A study of Vicente and of Portuguese and Spanish drama in the Classical period. Bibliography and index.
Hart, Thomas R. Gil Vicente, Casandra and Don Duardos. London: Grant & Cutler in association with Tamesis Books, 1981. A study of Vicente that focuses on The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra and Tragicomédia de dom Duardos. Bibliography.
Stathatos, Constantine C. A Gil Vicente Bibliography, 1975-1995: With a Supplement for 1940-1975. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997. An extensive bibliography of materials related to Vicente.
Stathatos, Constantine C. A Gil Vicente Bibliography, 1995-2000. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2001. A continuation of the bibliography also prepared by Stathatos.
Suárez, José I. The Carnival Stage: Vicentine Comedy Within the Serio-comic Mode. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. A look at Vicente’s comedic works. Bibliography and index.