SOURCE: Foster, David William. “Works on the Nature of Man and Fortune.” In The Marqués de Santillana, pp. 19-47. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.

[In the following essay, Foster examines the Comedieta de Ponça, Bías Contra Fortuna, the Doctrinal de Privados, and other works by Santillana that treat philosophical subjects.]

I COMEDIETA DE PONçA (COMEDY OF PONZA)

In 1435, King Alfonso V of Aragon suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Genoese in the naval battle of Gaeta, off the island of Ponza in the Mediterranean. Alfonso and his brothers, Juan, King of Navarra, and Enrique, Maestre de Santiago, were imprisoned by the Duke of Milan, to be released toward the end of that year, but not before the queen-mother Leonor had passed away, supposedly in great part due to her grief at the sudden misfortune to the usually triumphantly victorious royal house.

Santillana, no doubt motivated in great part by his continuing allegiance to and affection for Enrique, in whose household he had served during his youth, composed the Comedieta de Ponça (Comedy of Ponza), probably the following year,¹ although the letter of transmittal that accompanied the presentation of the first copy to Doña Violante de Prades is dated May 4, 1444. During the intervening years it appears that the poet neither shared his composition with his growing audience nor updated it to include in its hyperbolic prophecies of future military glory the actual accomplishments of the monarchs after their release from unfortunate captivity. The Comedy, then, is largely contemporary with the event of its title and anachronistic only in Santillana's foreknowledge of the prophesied release of the prisoners. Composed of 120 stanzas in arte mayor (eight eleven-syllable lines with the rhyme ABABBCCB), this extremely ambitious composition relates the poet's purported vision of four ladies dressed in black,² lamenting their sad plight in a pastoral setting. The ladies are the queen-mother and the wives of the three captured brothers. Their lament is addressed to the Italian poet Boccaccio, who has supposedly come down from Heaven to hear their cares. He is invited to elaborate poetically their troubles, troubles which far exceed those that any poet invents in his verses. Leonor then relates the specific cause of their plight—her prophetic dream and the news detailing the Spaniard's defeat and the accuracy of her dream. Leonor dies as she concludes her description of the bad times that have come upon her noble family. This segment of the Comedy, approximately two-thirds of the total number of stanzas, is crowded with the elaboration of the background, the description of personnel, and the narrative of the motivating event. The last forty stanzas concern the appearance of the personification of Fortune, who materializes with all of her retinue to articulate the major thesis of the poem set forth in the apostrophic introductory stanza:

          O vos, dubitantes, creed las estorias
e los infortunios de los humanales,
e ved si los triunfos, honores e glorias
e grandes poderes son perpetuales.
Mirad los imperios e casas reales,
e como Fortuna es superiora:
revuelve lo alto en baxo a desora
e faze los ricos e pobres eguales.

(stanza 1)

          (Oh you who doubt, believe the stories
and the misfortunes of men, and see if the
triumphs, honors and glories and great
powers are lasting. Look at empires and
royal houses, and at how Fortune is superior:
She turns things upside down when least
expected and makes the rich and the poor
both equal.)

Fortune also prophesies the future renewed glory of Alfonso, Juan, and Enrique.

The end result is a composition that bespeaks a carefully conceived attitude toward the nature of Providence and its role in the fortunes and misfortunes of the great. It is an attitude that Santillana very obviously has attempted to formulate within the framework of a major work of art. Let us consider in detail some of the principal literary implications of that framework.

One of the most interesting aspects of Santillana's poem concerns the title-word, Comedy. In the Spanish title—Comedieta—it is obvious that a diminutive of comedy is implied, an implication not inappropriate in view of the less than one thousand lines of poetry involved. The word comedy, however, has acquired for us a meaning contrary to the one intended by Medieval usage. Indeed, our contemporary sense with serious overtones concerning human behavior is closer to that of Antiquity and the Renaissance. Nevertheless, the Late Middle Ages had worked out its own understanding of many of the classical genres, and tragedy, comedy, and satire are no exception. Our poet makes it quite clear in his prologue to the Comedy that the source of his image is to be found in Dante and the latter's conception of comedy as it is used in the Divine Comedy:

… I have called the Comedieta de Ponça by this name since poets have discovered three ways of designating the things that they talk about: tragedy, satire, comedy. Tragedy is that which encompasses the fall of great kings and princes, such as Hercules, Priam, Agamemnon, and so on, all of whom began life happily and lived so for a time until their sad downfall. And, in speaking of these individuals, Seneca the younger used the word in his Tragedies, as well as did Giovanni Boccaccio in his De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fall of Illustrious Men) …

Comedy occurs where the beginning is difficult, and then the middle and end are happy, joyful and successful, such as one finds in Terence and in Dante in his book, where he speaks of having seen first the pain and grief of Hell, and then Purgatory, and finally, with joy, Paradise.

Crude as these definitions from the poet's prologue to his Comedy may seem to us today, given the complexity of the works involved and given the shifting connotations of the terms involved, they constituted working artistic principles for the poets of Santillana's day.³ Thus, the Spaniard dignifies his composition through the explicit adoption of one of the literary commonplaces of the Late Middle Ages. It is significant to note that, as in the case of the three levels of style treated in his Prohemio é carta, Prologue and Letter (see the last chapter), Santillana's understanding of genre classification is typical of Medieval literary theory. It is a literary theory that bears little resemblance to practice and, despite its abundant citations of classical authorities, demonstrates only an apparently haphazard understanding of the issues involved. One of the ironies of Medieval literature is the fact that poets like Santillana, while continuing to pay lip service to the genres and the styles of Antiquity, made major contributions to the development of unique and distinct forms.⁴ Thus, here as elsewhere, the poet's classification of his own work is more a demonstration of his own learning (recall that the prologue is addressed to a feminine admirer) than an aid in understanding the work itself.

Turning to the work itself, one is immediately struck by the care with which Santillana has organized it for maximum artistic unity. Of course, the poet must initiate his poem with the standard apostrophic charge to his audience (stanza 1) and invocation of Jupiter and the Muses (stanza 2). One notes in the opening apostrophe, already quoted, the succinct statement of purpose and the implication of an important revelation for those who are dubious or uninformed, emphasizing the role of the poet as a vates or seer who is able to perceive and transmit to us truths that we might not otherwise acquire on our own. This stance of the poet as a privileged witness to experience is elaborated extensively in the Comedy and in Santillana's other works.

The central purport of the Comedy is the description of a dream that overcomes the poet. The dream is a common device in the poetry of this period and provides the artist with the opportunity to guise his narrative in the trappings of a somnambulant fantasy or vision. Reversing the frequent classical and Renaissance commonplace of a dawn-to-dusk unity of time (cf. Garcilaso de la Vega's Égloga Primera), the dream is based on the lapse of time from the depths of night, when the vision occurs (stanza 4), to dawn, when Fortune personified makes her triumphant entrance (stanza 85), to daylight, when the vision passes away and the poet concludes with the rhetorical question that makes the point of his poem:

          Con candidos rayos forçaba el aurora
la espessa teniebra, e la compelia
a dexar la España, asy que a desora
la magna prinçessa e su compañia
me fueron ausentes: pues quien dubdaria
si fuy desplaziente o muy consolado,
visto tal caso e tan desastrado,
despues convertido en tanta alegria?

(stanza 120)

          (With pure rays the dawn pushed against
the thick darkness, compelling it to abandon
Spain—thus unexpectedly the great princess
and her company were gone: well, who would
doubt that I was both displeased and very
consoled, seeing such an event and so un-
fortunate a one thus converted into so much
happiness?)

As I have already suggested tentatively, the most significant characteristic of the Comedy is the artistic unity based on the stylization of the narrative encompassed by the dream or vision, distanced in its occurrence from the sharp reality of the light of day. One is immediately struck by the role that the “poetic I”—the voice that speaks to us from the lines of the poem (a voice that is not necessarily that of Santillana himself)—comes to assume within the framework of the overwhelming vision. Except for the specificness of the personal reference in the concluding stanza, supposedly reflecting the poet's sentiments on awaking from his dream, the voice of the poet must recede in order to be dominated by the substance of the vision that overcomes him.⁵ The resulting point of view is both superior and distant, removed both from the immediate realm of the event, which is only fortuitously “observed,” and from the audience, which plays no important role in the hermetically sealed world of the vision. Indeed, aside from the opening apostrophe and the concluding rhetorical question, the audience is left completely out of consideration; Fortune addresses herself to the participants of the inner-world of the vision and the implication is that the audience is pertinent to that vision only to the extent that it may or may not identify with its motivating events and thesis (cf. stanza 7g-h).

The employment of the commonplace of the vision allows for the greatest exercise of poetic artificiality in setting and narrative. This artificiality is most to be seen in the manner in which the circumstances of the vision are handled, and the impression cannot be escaped that Boccaccio and the four ladies simply “stand up and talk” until they are presented with the appearance of Fortune and her retainers. In this respect, Santillana's procedure, his “rhetoric,” is less satisfying than that of the important Renaissance poets. We tend to appreciate the total effect of the integration, the harmonization, of men, events, nature, and the universe over the insignificant, pastoral backdrop that accompanies the introduction of the principals of the Comedy. Although Lapesa has made much in his book of the extensive descriptions and opulent detail surrounding the introduction of the historical personages and Fortune, there is little question that this decorative aspect, while foreshadowing the appeal to the senses of the early Renaissance poets, remains essentially unintegrated in the overall meaningful intentions of the compositions.⁶ Particularly indicative of the impression of such a procedure is the expansiveness of the penultimate stanza concerning the impact of Fortune's words:

          Con tales palabras dio fin al sermon
aquella imperante sobre los vivientes,
e non punto lata fue la execuçion;
ca luego delante me fueron presentes
los quatro señores, libres e plazientes,
de quien mi COMEDIA e proçesso canta:
pues note quien nota maravilla tanta,
e vos admiradvos, discretos oyentes.

(stanza 119)

          (With these words that ruler over the
living finished her speech, which was
carried out without delay; for then I
saw before me the four lords, free and
joyful, of whom my COMEDY and proceeding
sing: well, may he who can observe such a
marvel, and behold, discreet listeners,
with admiration.)

Pertinent to Santillana's reliance on the artificial effects for distancing the dream-vision are the digressions or ecphrases that surround the presentation of the central event. Particularly significant are the presence of Boccaccio, the four women of royalty, and, indirectly, the three brothers whose military defeat provides the narrative stimulus. Santillana makes much of these seven members of Spanish nobility and devotes extensive space to their presentation, description and praise: the poet introduces the ladies, while the brothers are eulogized by Leonor, the queen-mother. Aside from the all-important role that these persons play in dramatizing vividly the vicissitudes of Fortune for even the most highly born, they possess a more immediate significance since they are presented as universal examples of human virtue and accomplishment. By indulging in an extensive use of implied antonomasia, Santillana is faithful to his desire to see the royal family as not only the natural embodiment of human worth, but also—and this is more important in the end—as the least deserving of but most ably equipped to overcome misfortune and adverse providence.

Commentators have noted more than once the plethora of names and allusions offered by the poet as he proceeds with his outline of the ravages of Fate upon the Spanish royal house—names not only of those immediately concerned, but of attendants and supporters in their campaigns as well. Moreover, of particular fascination for the reader interested in the growing awareness of Santillana's time with what has come to be called, somewhat incorrectly, the humanism of Antiquity, is the abundance of hyperbolic allusion and simile concerning the relationship between the virtues of the Spaniards and the qualities of prototypic classical authorities. For example, speaking of Alfonso, Leonor, his mother, dwells on her son's learning (stanzas 26-27); in eulogizing her other son, Juan, it is his military prowess that is held up as so exemplary (stanzas 31-32).

In addition to these references marshalled for the purpose of praising individuals, the poet is eager to incorporate as many classical authorities as possible for the details of his composition. Leonor's prophetic dream (stanzas 51ff), in which she has referred allegorically to her son's defeat, is particularly outstanding in this regard. The purpose of the prophetic dream, or somnium, is to reveal to the dreamer the events of the future, which are veiled in allegorical or symbolical disguise. Thus, Leonor, after precisely citing the literary authorities for her experience, proceeds to recount her vision, which came to her in the form of classical figures and allusions. She concludes as follows:

… por çierto non creo que en Thebes Yocasta,
por bien que recuente su triste elegia,
la su dolor fuesse egual de la mia,
nin de la troyana, por mucho que Homero
descriva el su caso e sueño mas fiero,
como soberano de la poesia.

(stanza 55c-h)

          (… Certainly I can't believe that Jocasta
of Thebes, no matter how well she makes her
sad elegy, had any grief to equal my own,
and much less the Trojan's, no matter how much
Homer, sovereign of poctry, describes their
case and most terrible dream.)

Thus, there is a confluence of antonomasia and decorative allusion that speaks well for Santillana's acquaintance with the preferred literary authorities of his century. And unlike the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages, where Christian and pagan authorities were intermingled with a harmonistics somewhat jarring to us today, Santillana's poem is characterized by the almost exclusive dependence on classical material. The degree to which such a dependence is significant in a discussion of our poet's “Renaissance qualities” is rather moot. Santillana, it would seem, knew classical literature only in translation and it is therefore certain that he is essentially making use of literary commonplaces in his references. Nevertheless, their abundance and the poet's repeated insistence on working them into the fabric of the poem are important for an appreciation of Santillana's commitment to an aesthetic rather than merely doctrinal principle in his poetry. There is, of course, a more immediate importance for the employment of classical allusion in portraying the warriors. As has been stated, Santillana is concerned with presenting them as exempla⁷—examples of human virtue which we are to admire and emulate.⁸

Turning to some of the organizational features of the Comedy, we note the care with which the poet builds up to the stunning defeat of the Spanish forces and the commentary by Fortune on this defeat. Contrary to what we might expect, the construction of the poem is not symmetrical. Given compositional techniques of the period, it would not be unusual for Santillana to have neatly divided the 120 stanzas into two blocks of sixty stanzas each, one for the eulogy of the warriors and their unexpected defeat, and one for the all-important clarification of her own motives by Fortune. However, the poem is instead divided roughly into two groups of eighty versus forty stanzas, weighting the elaboration in favor of the initial presentation of the event before the appearance of Fortune in the last third of the work. Such a division has an important purpose, for it allows Santillana to dwell leisurely on the virtues and victories of the warrior (approximately the first forty stanzas) and the humiliating battle (approximately the second forty stanzas) before insisting succinctly in the final segment of the Comedy on the insecurity of men's lives while at the same time prophesying Alfonso's return to fame. There is a definite irony intertwined with the introductory eulogies, an irony that reinforces the poet's belief that virtuous glory of man is in the end modified by the controlling will of God through the ministry of his handmaiden, Fortune. Such is the implication of Leonor as she concludes the description of her family and turns to the signs, dreams, and finally, concrete news of their defeat (stanza 42).

Thus, despite Santillana's well-known friendship with and sympathy for the causes of Alfonso's house, when Fortune finally appears the poet is able to fuse the disastrous battle with a transcendent vision of the will of God that in the end harmonizes the deserving fame of these warriors with the seemingly unjustifiable reverses in their fortune. Undoubtedly, the attitude implied by Dame Fortune's words in stanzas 108ff toward the events of man demonstrates a certain influence of passive stoic philosophy.⁹ Yet, at the same time, her assertions are expressed within the framework of a poem that clearly bespeaks the triumph of virtue and grace and that underlines the role of Fortune, not in the everyday lives of common man,¹⁰ but as a leveling force in the powerful domination of history by individuals of Alfonso's measures: “[if it were not for me], some would be / monarchs of the world and great lords, / while without hope lesser people would waste and die away from hunger” (stanza 112). That the latter is to return to rule ever more impressively—sobered, one assumes, by the pointed intervention and counsel of Divine Providence—cannot be overlooked in weighing the poet's words on the design of human affairs.

With regard to Leonor's account of her dream, and the news of the battle, it is significant to note that, while the event is obviously central to the poem, the Comedy is less concerned with it from a historical point of view than it is with using it as a point of departure for a unified concept of Providence. That is to say, the Comedy of Ponza is not a historical poem in the sense, say, of the fourteenth-century Poem of Fernán González concerning the military battles between Castile and her assorted adversaries. Rather, history is only an excuse—although one might argue sociologically that at the time the poem served to mitigate the humiliation of the Spanish defeat. Nevertheless, what stands out for us as of lasting literary value is Santillana's exposition of his beliefs on the nature and function of Fortune. And toward the end of appreciating the full impact of these essentially optimistic beliefs, it is interesting and profitable to measure them against the all-encompassing and pessimistic vision of the engulfing power of Death, who is only marginally described as a handmaiden of the Divine Will in the frequent fourteenth-century poems on the theme of the Dance of Death.¹¹

Since the historical event is thus of only tangential thematic importance, the fact that the signs, dreams, and news of the defeat are narrated off-stage by Leonor is a point worth considering in evaluating Santillana's distribution of the details of the composition for greater rhetorical effect. Although the three interrelated circumstances are portrayed vividly—Leonor swoons and dies from the emotion after completing her long soliloquy (stanzas 21-83)—the fact is inescapable that the events are communicated to us through the dream of the poet, who has overheard them from Leonor, who has been told them by signs, visions, and letter. This triple removal serves to focus our attention on the more immediate presence of Fortune and the correspondence between her commentaries and the conclusions of the poet as he addresses the reader in the opening and concluding stanzas on the purport of his poem. It is significant to note that the entrance of Fortune is given far greater immediacy than the events narrated in the foregoing eighty-odd stanzas through the poet's repeated recourse to invocations of the Muses in order to strengthen the portrayal of his majestic personification (stanzas 84, 94, and 101). Through recourse to the commonplaces of failing poetic powers, Santillana makes that much more impressive and forceful his vivid portrayal of the lady that rules man's fame and destiny.

The Comedy of Ponza has been called the most elaborate allegory of the fifteenth century, with the exception of Juan de Mena's contemporary thrice longer Laberinto de Fortuna (Labyrinth of Fortune). While the purpose of this traditional classification is to bespeak the poetic mastery of Santillana, nevertheless the label “allegory” is accurate in only the most general of senses. While Leonor's prophetic vision is true allegory, to the degree that a truth is revealed to her under the guise of veiled images and events, allegory is not a precise evaluation of the literary procedure adopted by Santillana in the overall elaboration of the poem, where the events, descriptions, and commentaries are presented in a straight-forward, if somewhat ornamental, fashion. The reader is under no burden whatever to decipher the meaning of what he is told, as he must do in works that are more properly described as allegorical. This is not the place to enter into a formal discussion of the merits of using the term “allegory” in order to describe the personification of Fortune or to refer to any works that convey a transcendental meaning through the narrative of immediate circumstance (would not then all works of literature be allegory?). Nevertheless, it is not inappropriate in this outline of the organization of Santillana's poem to reject “allegory” as an inaccurate evaluation of the poet's detailed elaboration of his theme. While it is indisputably decorative and nonrealistic in its development, the Comedy is also nonallegorical for the absence of any attempt on the poet's part to veil or disguise in artistic fabrications the motivating import of his work.¹² Santillana's poem, in its artful combination of human triumph and human defeat with a harmonizing vision of the ministry of Divine Fortune, is an accomplished and well-articulated composition of immediate literary and artistic intelligibility.

Before turning to Santillana's other major poem on Fortune, there is a sub-theme of the Comedy that merits close attention. While a latter period of Spanish literature is to work out a unified concept of the interrelationship between life and literature (see Baltasar Gracián's seventeenth-century El Criticón [Master Critic]), Santillana's age is still sensitive to the sharp dichotomy between “true” life and the “trivial fictions” of literary fable. This dichotomy appears several times as an issue in the Comedy and explains in part the presence of the great Italian “fableist,” Boccaccio.¹³ Thus, the poet begins by telling us that he has “set aside the style of those that feign / vain metaphors with sweet chatter …” (stanzas 3e-f). Boccaccio is told further on by the four ladies that he will find more worthy material, if he chooses to listen, in their lament than in all that he had written in his lifetime (stanza 13)—a not inaudacious challenge, given the Italian's prodigious literary fame. Elsewhere also the poet alludes to the desire to speak eloquently of truth rather than literary vanities (stanzas 21, 51), culminating in an injunction that is contained in the letter received by Leonor and which introduces the description of the disastrous battle:

»E çesse la pluma sotil de Lucano
del punico belo, e non fable Homero;
ca por bien que canten el sitio troyano,
e pinten el dia de Emathia mas fiero,
si dexan las fablas e tocan el vero,
por çierto non creo poderse fallar
tan crua batalla en terra nin mar …

(stanza 62a-g)

          (Let Lucan's pen of the Punic War be silent,
and let Homer speak not; for as well as they may
sing of the seige of Troy, and paint Emathia's
most terrible day, if they abandon invention
and treat truth, I do believe that they could
not find such a bloody battle on land nor
on sea.)

Thus, it is apparent that Santillana is insistently anxious to create at the same time both a satisfying work of art, as witnessed by the careful design and elaboration of the composition, as well as a document forceful for its attempt to articulate a well-defined and valid concept of human affairs. There is little question that the Marqués was successful in accomplishing both of these goals in the Comedy of Ponza, a poem significant in its representation of the artistic and thematic concerns of its day.

II BíAS CONTRA FORTUNA (BIAS VERSUS FORTUNE)

In 1448, Santillana's cousin, the Conde de Alba, found himself in prison, the victim of the rising malevolence of Álvaro de Luna. Having been requested to send some literature of consolation, the Marqués was presented with the ideal opportunity to elaborate further on the nature of Fortune, on the attitude that man must adopt toward her, and the role that reason and literature can play in safeguarding his equanimity and tranquility in the face of adverse Providence.

In an extensive prologue the poet speaks of his affection for his cousin, of the person of Bias, and of the purpose of his composition, Bías contra Fortuna (Bias Versus Fortune); as an appendage to the poem, the prologue is probably the first scholarly abstract in Spanish literature. The poem itself, composed of 180 stanzas,¹⁴ is a debate between Bias and Fortune personified.

The debate is one of the fundamental forms of Medieval literature, having been a frequent genre in Medieval Latin literature whence come so many of the more “learned” forms of pre-Renaissance Romance literature. Often employed for the lightweight exposition of contending positions such as the twelfth-century Elena and María, in which the two damsels debate the superior value of their corresponding suitors, a cleric and a knight, the debate on occasion attained a superior expression, as in the Debate of Water and Wine in which the two sacramental elements debate their respective virtues with each other. Santillana's poem, however, is the most significant extensive manipulation of this dialectic for purposes of a profound and artistic vision of a fundamental aspect of man's experience. In his more serious interest in basic questions of a “higher order,” Santillana reveals the earlier origins of the debate as an expository technique of Scholastic-Aristotelian theology. The example of St. Thomas Aquinas' writings (mid-thirteenth century) comes immediately to mind as one widely-diffused source for the procedure of pitting alternatives against each other in order to prove by the discrediting of one the superiority of the other.

Since it is dialectic in nature, the elaboration via debate of the Bias Versus Fortune has even less than the Comedy of Ponza that can be called plot or narrative. Neatly divided into two balanced segments, stanzas 1-89 are a series of brief and emotional interchanges between Bias, a Stoic and one of the seven wise men of ancient Greece, and Fortune. Central is the former's demand, “Exactly what are you planning, Fortune?” (stanza 1a), that both opens and closes the poem. Bias maintains insistently that Fortune is deceitful, blind, unjust, and cruel in the exercise of her office. Fortune, somewhat heated in her response, attempts to challenge the Stoic's assertions and to prove that she is, after all, not so bad. Both make abundant allusions to personages and events in support of their views, a procedure that adds a major literary interest to the concepts under their review. By the end of the first segment, Fortune is sufficiently angered to threaten Bias with prison. In stanzas 90-180, in verses that attain victorious expression, Bias is brilliant in countering Fortune's challenge and in demonstrating successfully his ability to match any move by Fortune with an irrepressive and indomitable inner strength drawn from reason, learning, and the acceptance of the nature of human existence. The poem concludes with Bias's noble and moving exposition of the manner in which he will confront death and transcend the mortal circumstance. Throughout, the reader is impressed with the display of knowledge exercised by both debaters and in particular by the catalogue of disasters that Fortune threatens to visit upon Bias on the one hand and, on the other, the latter's restrained and powerful recital of the inner means at his disposal for suffering these disasters.

It is, therefore, of primary interest to consider the nature of the two debaters as they portray themselves in the elaboration of the poem. In so doing, we must also measure the rhetorical or thematic effect of their participation in terms of an overall appreciation of the poem's significance.

The contrast between the Fortune of Bias and the Fortune of the Comedy is striking. Whereas in the latter work she is presented as the handmaiden of God and thus as the central point of reference for the poem's theme and artistic validity, in the present work Fortune has been personified as a petulant and blind erratic principle or mover who brings disaster and misfortune to an unsuspecting mankind that is quite incapable of coping with her vagaries. Thus, Santillana is for the bulk of his poem little concerned with a relationship between virtuous man and the emissary of God, who is, through her machinations, to enable the former to maintain a perspective between his deeds and God's will. It is no surprise that as a result of this shift in emphasis between the two works in Fortune's “personality,” most critics have been able to insist successfully on the Stoic character of the Bias. This Stoic character is best reflected in the notion that man is subject to the merciless whims of an unfettered Fate and that the only possibility open to him for coping with his unfortunate circumstance is to adopt an attitude of resignation and tranquility supported by reason, learning, and the virtues of philosophy. Bias's famous statement, Omnia bona mea mecum porto (“all of my riches I carry with me”), becomes a pivotal shibboleth of the poem (stanza 4e: “mis bienes lievo conmigo”).

That this later version of Fortune is so non-Christian in comparison to the resplendent figure of the Comedy has troubled some critics, and an adequate measurement of this aspect is indeed central to a comprehension of Santillana's work. Although we shall have more to say in a moment concerning a reconciliation between these two concepts of Fortune, it is important at this point only to underline the rhetorical function of Fortune as the adversary in debate. Given Santillana's own explicit introduction and, more significantly, the exclusive focus in the second half of the narrative on Bias's Stoic soliloquy, there is little question that the role of Fortune is markedly secondary, if not marginal. In the Bias, the personification of Fortune is more intended to place Bias in relief than to give a full and direct characterization of that abstraction. In sum, then, Fortune, rather than constituting a main force in Santillana's narrative, is better seen as the antithesis of Bias's tranquility. Indeed, the wise man's tranquility is born of a stimulus provided by Fortune and by the necessity to forge an inner strength of character capable of triumphing over misfortune. Thus, Bias is morally strong, not despite Fortune—this would make them balanced equals in the contest—but precisely due to her unfair powers for controlling human destiny (cf. stanza 27).

In contrast, the presence of Bias and what he stands for is overwhelming. We must first answer the obvious question, treated in part by Lapesa in his study, as to why Santillana should select the relatively unknown Bias over the more obvious and famous figures of Cato, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, all individuals who bear a resemblance in the exemplariness of their biographies to the poet's intent. In the first place, we must agree with Lapesa, who sees that in the person of Bias are fused the qualities of Cato as a politician, Seneca as a philosopher, and Marcus Aurelius as a man who suffered much at the hands of Fate.¹⁵ To this extent, as a poetic representative of the virtues, values, and attitudes that the Marqués is counseling for his beleaguered cousin, Bias is all the more effective as a literary symbol and as a tribute to the Conde de Alba, whom by implication he represents in a certain sense.

There are, of course, several other major considerations in evaluating the significance of the selection of Bias. In an age when the dignification of poetry was at least as important as the transcendence of its meaning, the choice of a Greek figure, unknown at least in the Spain of the fifteenth century (which explains the explicitness of the poet's prologue), bespeaks Santillana's vital concern with the refurbishing of Hispanic poety with the most impressive and sophisticated influences at his disposal. Bias, in the synthesis in his person of the accomplished politician, philosopher, literatus and world-traveller, is eminently qualified to be the spokesman for the mature attitude of the emerging Renaissance.

Nevertheless, despite Santillana's superficial emphasis upon the biographical uniqueness of Bias, there is little question that in the long run he is “revised” in order best to represent the interests of the poem's vision. Bias is transformed into an Everyman, the ubiquitous figure of Medieval literature who incarnates either what man is or what man should become. It is this transformation alone that can explain Bias's surprisingly anachronistic acquaintance with the fate of historical figures who followed him in chronological time (see the elaborate series of examples and counter-examples offered by both parties as support of their views in the first segment of the poem).

Bias is a universal symbol of all mankind. In his person are distilled not only the afflictions of the human condition, but the ideal and potential strength of the human soul in its struggle to overcome its temporalness and to transcend its mortal confines. Otis Green has mentioned that Bias is conceived of as a typological figure of mankind, and our analysis tends to substantiate and to extend further Green's suggestion.¹⁶ What is meant by a typological figure in Medieval thought is a person, place, or event of either pagan or Hebraic antiquity that, besides its superficial and immediate truth and validity, conceals the portent, the prophecy, or the suggestion of a Christian meaning, either in terms of the present New Law of Christianity or in terms of the Church Triumphant of the Last Judgment.¹⁷ Thus Bias, besides his real historical importance, in speaking for Everyman and in possessing a universal and timeless perspective, has become also a spokesman of the values and beliefs of Santillana's fifteenth-century Christian audience. What is more important, as Green points out specifically in refutation of Lapesa's purely Stoic interpretation,¹⁸ at the conclusion of the poem the Stoic, in addition to his sacred Elysian fields, concludes by finding solace in the promise of what can only be interpreted as the beatitude of the Christian Empyrean:

          Este camino sera
aquel, que fare yo Bias,
en mis postrimeros dias,
Si te plaze o pesara,
a las bienaventuranças;
                              do cantando
vivire, siempre goçando,
do çessan todas mudanças.

(stanza 179)

          This road shall be the one that I,
Bias, will travel when my last days come
in spite of your protests to the abode of
the Blessed; there I shall live singing
and ever rejoicing where all change ceases.

In this way, Bias rises above his pagan background to merge the latter with the supposedly more far-reaching and saving Christian consolation.

Moving back now for a moment to the beginnings of Bias's presentation as a synthesis of pagan and Christian wisdom and tranquility, we note how the poet is careful to insist on Bias's role as Everyman. In the first place, Santillana weaves together three different occurrences of the “journey of life,” a frequent commonplace associated with Everyman who undertakes a pilgrimage through the valley of tears that is life (cf. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or Gracián's Master Critic). Bias early speaks of “this brief journey,” i.e., life (cf. stanza 8). Then, following the practice of the interpretation of typological figures,¹⁹ Santillana allows Bias to recount his historical journeys through the world (stanzas 126-30). At this point in the poem, Bias is describing to Fortune how he has been able to construct for himself such a formidable defense against her aggressions, and it is difficult for us to separate the historical events of his life from the significance that they contain concerning man's journey through life to wisdom and spiritual awakening. Most significant, however, is Bias's elaborate description in the closing stanzas of the poem of how he will face death and the road that he will take toward the ultimate consolation and beatitude. It is a lofty conclusion and we have already cited the final stanza beginning with the key-phrase “This, then, is the road / I, Bias, shall take …” (stanza 179a-b). Within the overall framework of Santillana's narrative, these three interrelated “journeys” play a dominant role in underlining the poet's transcendent fusion of a pagano-Christian concept of spiritual fortitude and consolation.

It is curious to note that the poetic justification for Bias—that is, his justification in terms of the internal organization of the poem—comes in the last segment of the composition, where, in his response to Fortune's intemperate threat, he is forced to expound at length on his life, his character, and his spiritual defense. However, throughout the first part of the poem, the actual debate proper, we are presented with any number of suggestions that we are to understand Bias as an exemplary figure of the best potential of mankind. It is worth noting that the poet, through the debates, emphasizes on several occasions that the recurring triumph of Fortune as man's adversary is due as much to the latter's own inherent spiritual and intellectual weaknesses, to his own ignorance and willful pride, as it is to the malevolent machinations of Fortune (stanzas 14, 46-52, 55 ff., 75 inter alia). Indeed, if the preceding comments concerning the far more dominant role of Bias as Everyman is accurate, Fortune as a force that beleaguers man despite his virtue diminishes in the face of the insistence that the only salvation lies, not in the confrontation with Fortune, but in man's potential to transcend, as typified by Bias. Along with learning in general (cf. stanza 92), reason is, of course, the most satisfactory recourse, as frequent reference is made to its effectiveness:

          Tanto que de la razon,
Fortuna, tu non me tires,
nin me revuelvas e gires
a non devida opinion,
non me vaniras jamas,
                    nin lo creo:
virtud racional poseo;
pues veamos, que faras?

(stanza 34)

          (So much so, Fortune, that you cannot
separate me from Reason, nor turn me around
toward unmerited beliefs; you will not make
me vain, by my word—rational virtue is
mine, so let's see, what are you
going to do?)

Significantly, two stanzas later Bias speaks of the examples to be found in literature, making explicit not only his own exemplariness as a literary allusion, but the value of the Bias Versus Fortune as well. Here there is no longer any conflict between the feigning of the poets and the truth of historical reality, as we found in the Comedy. As Bias himself cautions Fortune in the role of spokesman for his own presence in the poem: Nin olvidas, segund creo, / ca non es fabla fingida … (“Don't forget, by my word, for there is no feigning here …”), (stanza 52a-b).

In this way, at every turn if not Bias then the persons whom he alludes to (cf. Pythagoras, buen exemplo [“a good example”], stanza 13f) are put forth as examples of what man is, what he has been, and particularly, what he must be in order to overcome effectively the tribulations and misfortunes of existence.²⁰ However, in accord with Santillana's own humanistic interests, there is little doubt that literature constitutes Bias's most favored source of inspiration and solace:

          E la bibliotheca mia
alli se desplegara;
alli me consolara
la moral philosophia.
E muchos de mis amigos,
                    mal tu grado,
seran juntos al mi lado,
que fueron tus enemigos.
          E asy sere yo atento,
de todo en todo al estudio,
e fuera deste tripudio
del vulgo, ques grand tormento.
Pues si tal capitividad
                              contemplaçion
trahe, non sera presion,
mas calma e feliçidad.

(stanzas 110-11)

          (And my library will be spread out
there and moral philosophy will be
my consolation. And despite you,
many of my friends, who were your enemies,
will be together at my side.
          Thus, I will be given over com-
pletely to study, away from this dance
of the masses that is pure torment. Well,
if such contemplation is brought by
captivity, then it cannot be imprisonment,
but rather tranquility and happiness.)

The general organization of the Bias Versus Fortune, with its balanced division between debate and soliloquy, permits Santillana ample free rein in his employment of allusion and artistic digression. Unlike the Comedy, the purely decorative aspect is lacking, and the impression is that Santillana is more involved with the meticulous elaboration of his vision in this his most serious poem. In contrast to the Comedy, the weight of the poet's theme and the all-important selection of Bias as its spokesman lends a greater integration to the dwelling on literary allusion and example. There is a very definite pattern of iteration and insistence in the initial segment of the composition that reflects Santillana's adherence to the debate technique, with its procedure of loosely balancing the exposition of the adversaries, as well as the gradual incrementation in the profundity of the exchange, culminating in Fortune's frustrated and intemperate threat in stanza eighty-nine. Bias is ever the master of the discussion and his opening challenge to Fortune recurs to taunt her.

Of particular interest is Santillana's use of the ubi sunt commonplace (stanzas 18-20), as Bias demands that Fortune tell him what has become of certain famous figures whose glories and triumphs have passed. This is a rhetorical procedure involving an anaphora that is particularly effective in the poetry dealing with fame and death and was used by several other major poets contemporary to Santillana. Another commonplace that Santillana borrows from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century death poetry is the concept of death as a leveler. Bias uses this commonplace effectively in addressing himself to man's need to detach himself from the pomp, the vanities, and the material treasures of life, for all these must in time pass from him (stanzas 41-42). The appropriate use of these familiar commonplaces contributes to the highly artistic development of the mature philosophic principles with which the poet is working.

However, there is little doubt that the greatest significance of Santillana's Bias Versus Fortune is the unique combination of pagan and Christian values, a harmonistics that is frequently found in Medieval literature, but rarely with the sophistication of Santillana's composition. Firmly committed to emerging humanistic ideals concerning art and human existence, Santillana is able to organize and present a poem that uses a figure of Stoic philosophy to offer to his cousin and to his audience an impressive accomplishment.

III DOCTRINAL DE PRIVADOS (THE CONFIDANTS' MANUAL)

As if Bias's position toward the devastations of Fortune required further contemporary validation, in 1453 Don Álvaro de Luna fell from royal favor and was executed. Luna had risen to power as a result of the vacuum created during the period immediately preceding the Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella) by the striking incompetence of Juan II, who, to no advantage for Spain, held the throne for fifty years. Unable to govern the country effectively on his own, Juan came to rely inordinately on the capable but ruthless Luna, whose heavy hand in the affairs of the country only served to alienate the aristocracy at a time when Spain sorely needed unity. Persecution of the nobles was frequent, and there is little question that the hated Luna was involved in the imprisonment of Santillana's cousin.

Ironically, Luna's fall did not come through the revolt of the nobles, who on other occasions had been temporarily successful in having the detested favorite banished. Rather, it was Juan's second wife at whose insistence the monarch took the irrevocable step of having Luna executed. The irony of the event is compounded by the fact that Juan followed his notorious favorite to the grave in 1454, the political situation having become intolerable in the absence of the overly-trusted but effective favorite.

We have already seen that Santillana had ample reason to detest Luna, and indeed composed two separate poems on the precipitate demise of the man. The first, Coplas del dicho señor marqués (Couplets by the Selfsame Marqués), is hardly known at all, and is inferior overall to the more famous Doctrinal de privados (Confidants' Manual).²¹ The Couplets consist of forty-nine stanzas, exclusive of an introductory couplet and a closing quartet. The first twenty-four stanzas are a tirade against Luna, a kind of anti-eulogy that on occasion soars with fervent emotion on the part of a poet who obviously knew the man at quite close range. Central to this tirade is the conceit advanced in the introductory couplet, a pun based on the fact that Luna's name means “moon” in Spanish and that privado, his role as a favorite, is also the past participle of the verb for “deprive”: “Of your splendor, oh Luna, / Fortune has deprived you.”

Stanzas 5-24 are a methodical point-by-point recapitulation of the subversion of Juan by Luna, concluding with a final reiteration of Santillana's central conceit:

          O Luna … eclibsada
y llena de oscuridad,
tenebrosa y fuscada,
conplida de çeguedad;
toda negra ya pareçes,
de clareza careçiente,
galardon equiualente
reçibes segund mereçes.

(stanza 24)

          (Oh Luna [moon] … eclipsed and full of
darkness, shaded and overcast, replete with
blindness; now you seem to be entirely black.
lacking in clarity; you are rewarded in accord
with your merit.)

Interestingly enough, Santillana proceeds in stanzas 25-49 to eulogize in turn Juan, his queen—who had been immediately responsible for Luna's demise and who is equated with several famous “liberators” of history—and the crown prince, the future and equally pitiable Enrique IV. That Santillana should devote so much space—indeed ninety per cent of the stanzas—to portraying the royal family as the repository of virtue and grace, bewitched and subverted by the nefarious Luna, attests to Santillana's orthodoxy as well as, more probably, to his and fellow nobles' ecstatic elation at the death of the unbearable and seemingly untouchable adversary. The end product however, is poetry devoid of Santillana's more engaging artistry.

By comparison, the Confidants' Manual is one of Santillana's most important works. Like the Bias Versus Fortune, the Manual consists of fifty-three stanzas, each of eight octosyllabic verses, the whole possessing nothing that could be called a narrative organization. The subtitle is important, however: “composed at the death of the Master of Santiago, Don Álvaro de Luna; wherein the author is introduced, speaking in the name of the Master.” Stanzas 1-13, beginning in medias res with a first-person preterite vi (“I saw”), are devoted to a sort of mea culpa in which Luna, ostensibly speaking always for himself, denounces the evil of his ways, asks rhetorically where has all his fame and fortune gone, and exhorts others not to follow his example—the antithesis of the favorable examples in Santillana's other poems. Stanzas 14-39 represent the “doctrine” proper and Luna details the virtues and qualities that should have distinguished him in his power and prevented his demise—if the “Fall of the Princes” in the Comedy occurs despite their virtues, the fall of Luna is precisely the consequence of his lack of the qualities possessed in abundance by Alfonso and his brothers. Stanzas 40-53, entitled significantly “Confession,” constitute a summary by Luna of his many sins and a supplication to God for mercy and absolution. Santillana here involves Luna in a frequent practice, the public recital of sins; from the literary point of view it is a genre stimulated by the well-known example of the fifth-century Confessions of the powerfully articulate African rhetorician, St. Augustine of Hippo. Luna's confession—indeed his entire mode of address—is of all the more importance for its suggestion that the privado is to be interpreted, as was St. Augustine and Santillana's recent figure of Bias, not just as a historical figure, but at the image of Everyman as well. More on this aspect of the Manual below. At this point, it is important to note how, in the concluding, fifty-third stanza, the “I” that speaks has become that of the humble and repentant sinner:

          Cavalleros e perlados,
sabed e sepa todo onbre
queste mi sermon ha nonbre:
DOTRINAL DE LOS PRIVADOS.
Mis dias son ya llegados
e me dexan dende aqui;
pues rogad a Dios por mi,
gentes de todos estados.

(stanza 53)

          (Gentlemen and prelates, know ye and let
all men know that my speech is entitled:
          CONFIDANTS' MANUAL. My hour has now arrived
and here I am left; pray then to God for me,
men of all estates.)

One of the most significant aspects of Santillana's poem, and one that has received far too little critical attention, concerns the narrative point of view. Accustomed as we are in the twentieth century to the stream-of-consciousness novel and the so-called “Kunstlerroman,” or “portrait of the artist” type novel, it is somewhat difficult for us to be impressed by the novelty of an author choosing to present a character from the exclusive point of view of that character. True, Medieval literature abounds with confession literature in which the poet speaks of himself to us, and the Renaissance gives rise to the related but non-humble “life” of a Benvenuto Cellini. In addition, there is an enormous quantity of Medieval poetry in which the poet speaks of himself, but in the overt non-personal and universally symbolic terms of Everyman, as the “I”—called the “poetic” or “feigned ‘I’”—of Berceo's allegorical introduction to the Milagros de Nuestra Senora (Miracles of Our Lady). Moreover, as we have seen in the Comedy or may see in the poetry of the Renaissance, the poet is not hesitant to introduce a personage who then proceeds to discuss himself. However, despite these affiliated practices, it would be difficult to produce a catalogue of instances where the “I” of the poetic composition is not that of the historical poet and where that “I” by every sign of internal evidence is the “true” source of the poem while every sign of external evidence is that he is not. Without insisting that Santillana was the first to employ this eminently “modern” procedure in Spanish poetry, let us examine its implications in terms of mood and rhetorical effect.

The most telling effect of this procedure, which depends, one must stress, on the tension between the claims for identity of the historical narrator (Santillana) and those of the poetic narrator Luna, is the intense irony that it produces vis-à-vis what Santillana “allows” or “forces” Luna to say concerning himself.²² What we are handed, then, is ostensibly a palinode, a recantation of sinful ways, by the archvillain of the fifteenth century. The initial impact of Santillana's poem, particularly one supposes on his contemporaries and fellow sufferers, is an impressively telling example of the power of the wronged poet's pen; it is a pity that Luna was permanently incapacitated from appreciating the appropriateness of Santillana's rhetoric.

In any event, what is of value to the poet's readers of today is the initial effectiveness of the choice of a narrative or expository technique that permits the audacious Santillana to pretend that the putative poetic voice, Luna's, is something other than it in historical fact was—i.e., humble, repentant and contrite. The irony derives as is always the case with this flexible mode, from somebody's having been taken in—usually the audience (as in many of Pirandello's dramas or Camilo José Cela's novels) or a third-person character. In this case, however, the irony is squarely against the first-person “voice” itself, as we recall that Luna, at least before his fellow men, was singularly non-humble, non-repentant and non-contrite. To the casual reader, these circumstances may not appear to be as interesting nor as significant as they are here made out to be. However, if we acknowledge the importance of the poetic rhetoric of a poem, the manner in which the poet organizes the presentation and elaboration of his material for the greatest and most convincing impact on the reader, then we cannot fail to make an issue of Santillana's innovative procedure. In fact, as we shall see, the poet's procedural choices are decidedly pertinent to a thematic assessment of the Manual.

Luna's palinode, therefore, is extremely effective poetically for its historical falseness, and the poet scores his best marks for revenge in the first thirteen stanzas, where Luna almost literally tears himself apart in a manner much more interesting than Santillana's conventional, second-person denunciation in the aforementioned Couplets. Luna's words cover, as is to be expected, many of the frequent commonplaces of the theme of the “Fall of Princes”: the by now familiar motif of the betrayal by Fortune (stanza 3), the suggestion of the plaintive ubi sunt, as Luna refers to the rapid disappearance of his riches (stanza 5), and the overall tone of the lament in time of misery of past happiness and success. Luna's entire position is summarized by his subsequent rhetorical question based on the already mentioned pun inherent in his name:

          Que dire, sinon temedes
tan grand eclipse de luna
qual ha fecho la Fortuna,
por tal que vos avisedes?

(stanza 20a-d)

          (What shall I say, if you do not fear such
a lunar [Luna] eclipse as Fortune has
wrought and of which you should be appraised?)

Throughout all of these and other stanzas, the reader is struck by the glaring lack of decorative and learned elements, such as we find in Santillana's other major poetry; the humanistic, “bookish” ambient is markedly absent. Perhaps this circumstance derives from the nature of the ostensible author—Luna could not, of course, match the Marqués' prolific literary background. But, then, Bias as an entity supposedly transcending the confines of the poem is falsified and anachronized in what he is “made” to say, and, as an artificial, literary contrivance that really deceives no one as to who the “real” inspiration of the poem is, the unity of Manual would in no way be disrupted by the presence of Santillana's favorite pedantic allusions.

Rather, we must turn to a hypothesis founded on expressive economy to explain this singular plainness. In at least the first thirty-nine stanzas, up to the “Confession,” Santillana adheres to a central litotes—the ironic device of implying one thing by refuting its opposite. Thus, in the initial thirteen stanzas, as well as in the “doctrine” proper of stanzas fourteen to thirty-nine, the poet is successful in implying an accurate and appropriate portrait of Luna via the latter's stated guidelines for Christian humility and virtue. Pivotal in this inside-out account is Luna's own incriminating words that constitute a litotes in and of themselves; “Do precisely what I did not do …” (stanza 12a). Then, as he proceeds to offer his advice, he would need have us accept it as truth (cf. stanza 14a-d). Luna makes for a magnificent anti-example, and herein lies the continuing effect throughout of the devastating inversion of character and the ironic litotes of statement with regard to the historical Luna. The only moment in which allusion is introduced into the Manual is in Luna's spectacular hyperbole on his ability to inform us what not to do in order to succeed as a privado (cf. stanza 15).

With regard to the specific advice of the “Santillanized” Luna to pretenders to his vacant office, there is little worthy of note that cannot be found in the Marqués' less interesting but more concrete Proverbs or in the eulogy of Alfonso by his mother, Leonor, in the Comedy. In short, Luna's “doctrine” consists of the usual catalogue of Christian virtues and fifteenth-century courtly refinements hinging basically on modesty and humility (stanza 18), the biblical wisdom that man will reap what he has sown, that he will get what he deserved in life and thus must work to deserve what he wants to get (stanzas 22ff.), and the particular Spanish virtue of moderation (stanza 29).

Returning to the more fundamental issue of the validity and value of Santillana's position toward Luna as he has him emerge in the Manual, we note a marked shift in tone in the final segment, from stanza forty on, the “confession.” Whereas up to this point the poetic Luna has been more or less listing his faults and sins in a fitting literary context of auto-diatribe, in the last fourteen stanzas the tone becomes much more serious, raising new and fundamental questions concerning Santillana's intent. Why does Santillana permit Luna to confess himself with such moving sincerity in these lines and to beg so convincingly God's forgiveness?

On one superficial level, we may pursue the issue of the all-pervading irony of the Manual to see this final segment as the definitive humiliation of Luna, as he is placed in the position of the most miserable and abject of individuals—precisely in the position to which his own machinations in life had reduced so many persons.

In the same vein, but more precisely, it is possible to see the confession as the natural outgrowth, a structural and rhetorical necessity, of the self-denunciation before man and the knowledgeable listing of political vices and their corrective virtues. In this final segment, Luna turns to God, the Final Arbiter of man's soul, to conclude his self-denunciation before man's Ultimate Judge.

However, as we have suggested,²³ there is the inviting possibility that, aside from his immediate desire to humiliate an archenemy so artfully, Santillana was striving seriously to lend his composition a vision and a perspective of much greater profundity than that of an ephemeral revenge by sharpened pen. Probably from the outset of the poem,²⁴ and certainly from stanza forty on, Luna emerges not only as the ironically repentant image of his historical self, but as an image of Everyman, subject to and dominated by the intense vices of the human condition, aware of the virtues to which he would subscribe, and able at the end to recant his life, confident in the boundless mercy of his God for salvation. The poetic Luna, thus, is insistently the antithesis of his historical self, and the poet's implication of the real Luna's unmitigated evil is juxtaposed with the dramatically Christian validity of the confession. For what is more important—indeed, herein lies the more serious aspect of Santillana's poetic transformation of the real Luna—is not whether the historical Luna as a man was repentant or otherwise; presumably this matter is of concern only to the real Luna and his God, and not pertinent to our own interests. Rather, any significance of the poetic Luna's palinode and confession is its rhetorical function in underlining Santillana's fervent belief in the inherent antithesis and tension of man's soul, in the permanent potential for salvation accorded the sons of Adam, and in the infinity of God's mercy.²⁵ Thus, Luna is able to summarize his plea to the Almighty in the following terms, so charged with the tenets of the Christian doctrine of the Fall, not of this one historical “prince,” but of Everyman:

          Non desespero de ti,
mas espero penitençia;
ca mayor es tu clemençia
que lo que te meresçi.
En maldad envejesçi;
mas demandote perdon:
non quieras mi damnaçion,
pues para pecar nasçi.

(stanza 51)

          ([Oh Lord] I do not despair of you, but
rather I trust in penitence; for your mercy
is greater than what I did to deserve it.
In sin did I grow old; yet I implore your
forgiveness: do not desire my damnation,
for to sin I was born.)

The image of the humbled Luna, so entertainingly emphasized by Santillana's clever inversion of narrative point-of-view in the initial segments of the poem, gives way before the image of Everyman standing before his Lord and begging for forgiveness and salvation from the confines of his almost unbearable and inescapable human condition. The fact that we may remember that the sinner is the infamous Don Álvaro de Luna, Maestre de Santiago, can only add to the vividness of this human circumstance. But the fact that Luna is, in the final analysis, just a common sinner made in the Adam image of all of us, of Everyman, is in no way diminished by such an identification.

Indeed, Santillana's revealing combination of the autobiography of the soul of such a hated man with a clear enunciation of what he can justly expect from God's boundless mercy cannot fail to attract our attention as a lesson in Christian humility for us, his fellow Everyman images. Of course, it is less a lesson to us than it must have been to the Marqués' contemporaries, whose emotions probably still ran high on the subject.²⁶ However, to the extent that we as individuals can accept Santillana's basic premises concerning the human condition, the palinode and divine mercy, we cannot be indifferent to the subtle manner in which the poet has fused a sharply-focused image of ourselves as Everyman with his personal Christian vision of the potential for our Salvation.

In contrast to the sophisticated rhetoric and the mature vision of the Manual, Santillana's poetry reveals what is probably an earlier, and certainly a less equanimous, poem on the detested Luna.

The Favor de Hércules contra Fortuna (Hercules' Favor against Fortune) is most noteworthy, despite its insignificant artistic value, for the lack of restraint on the part of the poet. It is an emotional outburst that takes the form in six stanzas of arte mayor (“major art”), plus a “Fin,” of a series of indirect commands. Expressed within the framework of the Labors of Hercules, Santillana's brief poem advances a heated plea for the prompt action of Juan in decisively disposing of the malevolent counselor. Supposedly inspired by an unsuccessful palace intrigue against the favorite, the Marqués' poem is single-minded in vision and therefore disappointingly narrow in literary merit. Aside from the superficial appropriateness of the consistent allusions to Hercules—the very intensity of whose force appearing to be the last chance of loosening Luna's stranglehold on internal affairs—Santillana's composition is too direct and lacks the measured subtlety of his less emotional and more carefully “objectified” attitude toward Luna in the memorable Manual.

Notes

1. Concerning the dating of the work, see Rafael Lapesa, “Sobre la fecha de la ‘Comedieta de Ponza,’” Archivum, IV (1954), 81-86.

2. This relatively minor detail has led to an over-insistence on the putative influence of Alain Chartier's Livre des quatre dames. Charles V. Aubrun, in his “Alain Chartier et le Marquis de Santillane,” Bulletin hispanique, XL (1938), 129-49, has pointed out the significant thematic and technical differences between the two poems. In attempting to refute a mechanistic “influence thesis,” one might underline the obviously more important relationship between history and detail in Santillana's poem.

3. Concerning the term further, see E. J. Webber, “Santillana's Dantesque Comedy,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, XXXIV (1957), 37-40.

4. Indeed, by the Renaissance, both theoreticians and poets felt the need to “purify” literature by returning to the classical genres that Medieval writers claimed to have been following all along.

5. Cf. “forçada del sueno la mi libertad” (stanza 4e).

6. One of the most strikingly unintegrated segments is Boccaccio's speech in Italian in stanzas 19-20, a circumstance that is jarring to us, but which reflects the poet's efforts to appear cosmopolitan (despite the fact that Santillana's grasp of Italian was imperfect enough for him to request a translation of the Divine Comedy from his friend and fellow poet, Enrique de Villena).

7. The exemplum (pl., exempla) tradition of Medieval literature made reference not only to exemplary situations for purpose of instruction (cf. the Count Lucanor), but also to individuals whose behavior, virtues, sins, etc., were to be taken as examples of what and what not to be (cf. Berceo's Miracles of Our Lady). That the tradition is still pertinent for Santillana is evident in stanza 47, where Leonor has been describing antecedents in literature for her family's misfortune (the references to these works constitute another sector where Santillana displays his learning): “There [in these works] it was said, by way of example …” (stanza 47f).

8. The abundance of literary references in Santillana has led to some interesting studies on his library—what we know it contained and what we may speculate was available in it, making the Marqués one of the most widely read men of his day. …

9. Santillana's position is less explicit in the Bías Contra Fortuna (Bias Versus Fortune); see the next section of this chapter, particularly the discussion of Lapesa's and Green's opinions.

10. That common man is exempted from the ensnaring wheel of Fortune is made obvious by the words of Caterina, wife of Enrique, in the three stanzas beginning anaphorically Benditos aquellos … (Blessed are they …), stanzas 16-18. These three stanzas, perhaps the most famous of the poem, are the first trace in Spanish poetry of the Horatian beatus ille where the simple life of the peasant is praised over that of the tumultuous court. The beatus ille motif attains its most elaborate expression (after the implied acceptance of it in the pastoral literature) in Guevara's Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (Praise of the Village and Disdain for the Court).

11. See for this subject Florence Whyte, The Dance of Death in Spain and Catalonia (Baltimore, 1931).

12. Thus, in a “true” allegory, what we read is not to be taken in its literal, explicit sense, but as a “code” or “cipher” whose meaning we must unravel to get at the more important meaning that lies beneath the overt exterior of the narrative. For a good example of highly successful allegory, see the introduction to Berceo's Miracles of Our Lady.

13. Fable is not used here, of course, in its more restricted genre sense as an allegorical story in which the foibles of men are portrayed by the anthropomorphized activities of animals—this is a frequent type of literature in the Middle Ages and derives in part from Aesop's Fables and other Oriental sources. Fable is used here in the general Medieval sense of a fabricated story that is told for amusement, the word deriving from the Latin fabulari, “to talk, converse, tell an untruth,” an etymology revealing for the attitude of many Medieval moralists toward the insidious nature of literature.

14. The stanzas are composed each of eight lines; all lines, with the exception of the sixth, are of eight syllables—the traditional Spanish meter. Line six is a pie quebrado (literally, “broken foot”), of four or five syllables. Rhyme is abbacddc. Concerning the debate technique employed, see John G. Cummins, “Methods and Conventions in the 15th-Century Poetic Debate,” Hispanic Review, XXXI (1963), 307-23.

15. Rafael Lapesa, La obra literaria del Marqués de Santillana (Madrid, 1957), p. 216.

16. Otis H. Green, “Sobre las dos fortunas: de tejas arriba y de tejas abajo,” in Studia philologica. Homenaje ofrecido a Dámaso Alonso (Madrid, 1960-61), II, 143-54. Summarized in his Spain and the Western Tradition (Madison, Wisconsin, 1963-67), II, 202-4.

17. For an extended study of this concept see David William Foster, Christian Allegory in Early Hispanic Poetry (Lexington, Ky., 1971).

18. Lapesa, op. cit., pp. 215-23. See also his article “Un gran poema estoico del Marqués de Santillana,” Insula, XII, no. 130 (1957), 1-2.

19. We are using “typological,” from typus, the Greek form of figure, to qualify the limited use of figure to mean person. Historically, the limited and the common usage were inseparably intertwined, which explains the need for a qualification today.

20. It is interesting to note that in stanzas 119-23, Bias speaks favorably of several well-known suicides who have taken this form of escape from the press of Fortune. Of course, these stanzas cannot be reconciled with any Christian principle and Santillana does not attempt to. Their presence can be attributed to two aspects of the composition: (1) the historical validity of Bias and his world, in which suicide was acceptable—a world that is to be supplanted by the Christian context of Bias's contemporary significance as he moves from the pagan Elysian fields to the harmony of the Christian Empyrean; (2) to Santillana's humanistic impulse, with its favorable interest in any and every aspect of Antiquity, even those incompatible with Christian teachings. Suicide, it must be remembered, is becoming a frequent literary theme at this time: Victoriano in Encina's eclogue, Melibea in the Celestina, Leriano in Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de Amor (Prison of Love).

21. Amador de los Ríos does not include the Couplets in his edition of Santillana's works: Foulché-Delbosc places it immediately before the Manual, reflecting the accepted opinion that it was sort of a “trial run” on the topic of Luna's fall, although the two works are completely unrelated in mood and tone.

22. A considerably later but somewhat comparable example of this ironic tension is Fielding's riotous Shamela (1741), an outright parody in the first person of the heroine of Richardson's tedious Pamela. Fielding's proposed intent in portraying Shamela/Pamela from within is to give us the “real story” on Richardson's paragon of virtue, which in his novel is observed from an equivocable third-person point of view.

23. We are extending Lapesa's discerning suggestions, op. cit., pp. 230-33.

24. Lapesa, idem, underlines the “we” of the following early stanza, as well as the concept that greed is not unique to one man:

              O fambre de oro rabiosa!
    quales son los coraçones
    humanos, que tu perdones
    en esta vida engañosa?
    Maguer farta, querellosa
    eres en todos estados,
    non menos a los passados,
    que a los presentes dañosa.

    (stanza 4)

              (Oh ravenous hunger for gold! Are there
    any human souls that you pardon in this deceitful
    life? For you are glutted and quarrelsome for
    all stations, no less for the dead than for
    the living are you harmful.)

25. Many critics are convinced that these very same Christian concepts underlie the elaborate ambiguities of Juan Ruiz's fourteenth-century Book of Good Love, although, to be sure, in combinations much more complex and artistically significant.

26. Lapesa, idem, calls the Manual the first step in the literary rehabilitation of Luna, although the critic does not underline as emphatically as we have the reason and the significance of why the poet is able so successfully to initiate such a rehabilitation.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Obras. Edición de José Amador de los Ríos (Madrid: Rodríguez, 1852).

[Obras poéticas], in R. Foulché-Delbosc, Cancionero castellano del siglo XV (Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, 1912), I, 449-575. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from this edition.

Obras [selectas]. Edición al cuidado de Augusto Cortina; 2a ed. (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1956 [orig. ed., 1946]).

Canciones y decires. Edición y notas de Don Vicente García de Diego (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964).

La comedieta de Ponza. Edición prólogo y notas de José María Azáceta (Tetuán: Cremades, 1957).

“… Prohemio é carta quel Marqués de Santillana envió al Condestable de Portugal con las obras suyas,” in Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1943), I, Apéndice III, 495-504.

Proverbios. Glosados por Pedro Díaz de Toledo, estudio preliminar por Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (Madrid: Atlas, 1944).

Los proverbios con su glosa … (Valencia: Soler, 1965).

“Refranes que dizen las viejas tras el fuego. Republished by Urban Cronan,” Revue hispanique, XXV (1911), 114-219.

Serranillas. Edición y prólogo de Rafael Lapesa (Santander: Pablo Beltrán de Heredia, 1958).

Los sonetos ‘al itálico modo’ de don Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana. Estudio crítico y nueva edición de los mismos por A. Vegué y Goldoni (Madrid: A. Marzo, 1911).