[In the essay which follows, Sieber approaches the development of the picaresque tradition from a socio-political perspective, suggesting that this literary genre reflected issues relating to the court of Phillip III.]

In the exploration of various interrelations between literature and history in the second half of the sixteenth century in Spain, my main interests are those points of contact between literature as a process of imitation and renewal, of “new” texts re-creating “old” texts on the one hand, and historical tradition on the other, or rather, tradition as a cultural force in history. “For the literary historian and critic”—and here I intentionally abuse a quotation from Robert Weimann in order to make it my own—the problem “is not whether to accept both worlds and points of reference, but rather, since each is so inevitable and necessary, how to relate them so as to discover the degree and consequences of their connections.”¹ José Antonio Maravall's La literatura picaresca desde la historia social is a recent example of an attempt to articulate such relationships through the language of a social history of mentalités in an age of crisis and decline and in a world, defined in another context by Theodore K. Rabb, “where everything had been thrown into doubt, where uncertainty and instability reigned.”²

For the purposes of this essay I focus more narrowly on Spain's cultural preoccupation with its origins in the process of exploiting continuation as a way of celebrating the empowering myths that serve as its self-legitimation. The manifestations of this reappropriation of the past are contingent with Pierre Bourdieu's general observation in Outline of a Theory of Practice: “If all societies that seek to produce a new man through a process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture.”³ Bourdieu's remarks seem especially relevant to the literature, history, and culture of late-sixteenth-century Spain when translations, adaptations, and imitations of Italian treatises of courtly conduct—of manners—coincided with debates over honor, status, and identity.

Courtesy literature, as Frank Whigham has written, must be viewed as “having an intricate social purpose combining poetry and politics, philosophical speculation and social combat, ritual pageantry and ambition,” because the “court was simultaneously an arena of conflict and a mart of opportunity as well as a radiant center of order.”⁴ Whigham refers to Elizabethan England, but much of his argument can be applied to late-sixteenth-century Spain as well. Spain, like England, had its own “educational revolution,” producing a surge of educated men in search of social mobility and ladders of opportunity in law, the church, the military, and governmental administration.⁵ And as in England, “movement across the gap between ruling and subject classes was becoming increasingly possible, and elite identity came to be a function of action rather than of birth—to be achieved rather than ascribed.”⁶ In addition, Ruth Kelso (again writing of Elizabethan England) also reflects the Spanish scene: “Those who lacked the title [of gentlemen] were busy trying to acquire it … those who had it were anxious to resist encroachment.”⁷ One of the paths toward the achievement of such status was to embrace courtesy books as perceptive manuals, which Stephen Greenblatt has characterized as “handbooks for actors, practical guides for a society whose members were nearly always on stage, … offering an integrated rhetoric of the self, a model for the formation of an artificial identity.”⁸

The extent to which the translations and adaptations of the works of Castiglione and his descendants—Guazzo, della Casa, Riminaldo—played a comparable role in the Spanish court is still unknown.⁹ We do know that Castiglione's Book of the Courtier was reprinted at least fourteen times in Spain after being translated by Juan Boscán in 1534,¹⁰ and that by 1591 Juan Benito Guardiola's Tratado de la nobleza had transformed Castiglione's gentiluomo into a Spanish caballero. By the late 1580s, strategies for advancement in the court had become a parlor game. Alonso de Barros's treatise Filosofía cortesana moralizada (1587), first introduced to its readers with a sonnet by a relatively unknown Miguel de Cervantes, was actually an instruction manual that accompanied a board game not unlike Monopoly, in which, with the throw of the dice and the right moves, one could land on a space called Good Fortune, arrange a meeting with the king's favorite, and win the pot. However, one could also land on spaces—called “casas”—such as the Mudanza de ministros or La muerte del valedor and lose what had been gained and be forced to begin the game again at the Puerta de la opinión.¹¹ For many at court, such activity was no trivial pursuit but rather a matter of life or death, as the famous case of Rodrigo Calderón would later attest.

It is also important to note that the historical situation in Spain had prepared the way for the reception of such treatises. Charles V, for instance, continued the practice of his predecessors by elevating those not born to nobility who rendered military and financial service to the crown. “Government service,” as John Elliott has written, “could lead to dramatic social advancement, as the career of Charles V's secretary, Francisco de los Cobos, spectacularly demonstrated.”¹² Some merchant families gained noble status through entry into the military orders, and by marriage into the ranks, as Ruth Pike has pointed out in her study of Genoese traders in Seville, and as Henri La Peyre has argued with regard to the Ruiz family of Medina del Campo.¹³ While Philip II seems to have cast a suspicious eye on the nobility and their proximity to the sources of power in government service, the demand for honor and a place near the king reached a critical juncture at the end of his reign, perhaps as the result of increasing taxes levied throughout the century, taxes from which only those of noble status were exempt. Becoming a nobleman from mid-century on implied more than acquiring honorable status. Even with the introduction of the “Servicio de los millones” in 1590, a consumer tax placed on basic foodstuffs, those landowners of noble descent who lived in Madrid could import their own supplies of food without having to pay taxes, thus providing for themselves some financial buffer from all taxation policies imposed by both royal and local governments by the end of the sixteenth century.

After the king's death in September 1598, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Marquis of Denia who would soon become the Duke of Lerma, quickly began to consolidate his power over the new king and the court. Some three months later, in January 1599, the contemporary court historian Cabrera de Córdoba was able to report that “la privanza y lugar que el marques de Denia tiene con S. M. desde que heredó, va cada día en aumento sin conocerse que haya otro privado semejante, porque son muy estraordinarios los favores que se le hacen”¹⁴ [the favor and position the Marquis of Denia has gained with His Majesty from the moment he became king is increasing every day unchallenged, as evidenced by the extraordinary favors with which the kind showers him]. Patronage, status and honor, lineage and wealth became matters of immediate concern and debate in a court in which a favorite held power. Lerma and the men he had appointed around him would virtually become the source of “royal” patronage as Philip III removed himself from the day-to-day affairs of government. Antonio Feros has recently demonstrated that “monopolio del favor, lisonja, interés privado y compraventa fueron … prácticas que socavaron la distribución del patronazgo real”¹⁵ [monopoly of favor, flattery, personal interest, and venality were … practices that undermined the distribution of royal patronage] and characterized the regime of Lerma and his favorites. Thus Philip II, often distant and isolated at the Escorial monastery but obsessively in charge of his government, was succeeded by Philip III, who left government to others and whose court in Madrid provided a larger, more public space in which status, identity, and former codes of courtly conduct were subjects of debate.

Many of Philip II's ministers and court functionaries were exiled or expelled from service, and new men with relatively unknown backgrounds and experience, such as Pedro Franqueza (secretary to the queen), Rodrigo Calderón (secretary to the Cámara del Rey), and Silva de Torres (alcalde de casa y corte; corregidor of Madrid), found themselves with new power and authority. At the same time these men actively sought to control access to their ranks by neutralizing those who questioned their power. More significant for us is the fact that it was precisely at this moment that a little novel first published almost fifty years previously, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, was reprinted as an appendix to Lucas Gracián Dantisco's Spanish translation of Giovanni della Casa's Galateo.¹⁶ Why the Lazarillo, principally known for its subtle irony and biting satire of a cruel beggar and priest, proud nobleman, fraudulent pardoner, hypocritical chaplain, and venal archpriest, reappeared at this moment to become part of such a volume is the question I hope to answer by placing it in the context of the literature of manners, the formation of a new court, and the invention of the picaresque novel.

Claudio Guillén has pointed out that La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes has been made an integral part of the history of the picaresque novel at the turn of the seventeenth century primarily by publishers and readers, and more specifically through Ginés de Pasamonte's famous reference to its title in Don Quijote.¹⁷ The 1554 edition was placed on Inquisitor Valdés's 1559 Index of Prohibited Books. There is no evidence of the novel's being reprinted in Spain until 1573, and only then in the censored version of Juan López de Velasco, Philip II's cosmographer and principal chronicler, whose primary fame today is based on his authorship of La geografía y descripción universal de las Indias. Because Velasco's edition was most likely the version of the Lazarillo available to readers at the turn of the seventeenth century, I would like to identify him briefly and to outline the role he may have played in resurrecting the novel.

Juan López de Velasco was recommended for his position at the Escorial library by Juan de Ovando y Godoy, one of Philip II's trusted advisors and president of the Council of the Indies in the late 1560s.¹⁸ Ovando was also a member of the Council of the Inquisition. Both Ovando and Velasco corresponded with Benito Arias Montano, who was in Antwerp during these same years on official business, presiding over a committee charged with compiling an updated list of prohibited and expurgated books.¹⁹ The exchange of letters between Ovando, Velasco, and Montano also reveals that Montano was involved in the book market in general, buying and shipping great quantities of material for Ovando's personal library as well as for the library at the Escorial. Montano was thorough in his work. In his letter to Ovando, dated August 2, 1571, he was able to assure his superior that “el libro o índice expurgatorio se está imprimiendo: será una cosa de grande provecho; porque, de cuantos libros admitían expurgación no se ha dejado de ver y examinar cosa y darse sentencia sobre cada lugar dellos con toda equidad”²⁰ [the book, or index, of expurgated works is at press. It will be of great benefit, for among the books that could be expurgated, nothing has been left unscrutinized or unexamined, and the books have been judged with the utmost fairness]. It is possible that the Lazarillo was one of these “cuantos libros.”²¹

Velasco for his part had a number of interests beyond writing and copying letters and compiling data for his history of the Indies. He was particularly fascinated with spoken and written Spanish, publishing his Ortografía y pronunciación castellana in 1582, and with educational reform, as indicated by his Instrucción para examinar los maestros de escuela de la lengua castellana y enseñar a leer y escribir a los niños.²² His sensitivity to matters of language and style no doubt accounts for his interest in the Lazarillo and other Spanish texts that had already appeared in Valdés's catalog of prohibited books. The fact that Velasco's version is based on the 1554 Antwerp edition of the novel rather than on the Burgos or Alcalá editions of the same year suggests that communication between Ovando and Montano may have played an important role in supporting Velasco's efforts to obtain permission or even with the text that was printed in Madrid two years later, by itself or with other previously prohibited works,²³ as Velasco's prologue indicates:

Aunque este tratadillo de la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, no es de tanta consideración en lo que toca a la lengua, como las obras de Christóbal de Castillejo y Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, es una representación tan biva y propria de aquello que imita con tanto donayre y gracia, que en su tanto merece ser estimado, y assi fue siempre a todos muy acepto, de cuya causa aunque estaba prohibido en estos reynos, se leya, y imprimía de ordinario fuera dellos.

²⁴ [Even though this short treatise on the life of Lazarillo de Tormes is not, when it comes to language, as worthy of consideration as the works of Christobal de Castillejo and Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, it is such a lively and fitting representation of what it charmingly and wittily imitates, that as a whole it is deserving of esteem; and as such everyone always found it appealing, which is why despite being prohibited in this kingdom, it was commonly published and read outside of it.]

Velasco's rescue of three Spanish “classics” coincided with the Inquisition's strategy: his newly available Lazarillo would eventually replace the relatively few surviving 1554 originals (if any) or manuscript copies made from them. Given the tone of mid-sixteenth-century Spanish censorship, it was more acceptable to have a “corrected” Lazarillo circulating at the time than to allow the continued reading of its original prohibited version.

After 1573—with the possible exception of a Tarragona edition of 1586—there is, according to Claudio Guillén and others, no explicit reference to Lazarillo the novel in Spain until 1599. It seems that perhaps earlier, however, our novel acquired new life as it began to circulate with the Galateo español.²⁵ Miguel Martínez, a Madrid bookseller with a somewhat tarnished reputation, added an anonymous translation from Italian of another courtesy book, Oracio Riminaldo's Destierro de ignorancia, obtaining permission to print and sell all three works in one volume “que otras veces con su licencia han sido impressos” (Medina del Campo, 1603) [which on other occasions have been printed with his license], indicating that the novel reached its audience perhaps earlier and was more widely distributed at the end of the century as part of a trilogy.²⁶ Here it is important to note that the project was initiated and financed by Martínez (“a costa de …,” the title page informs us), who would have hired Luis Sánchez to print all three tratados together. Martínez, then, was the one who clearly perceived a common thread linking the Lazarillo to the Galateo, and then to the Destierro: together they constituted a courtesy book aimed at a specific group of readers. Martínez's marketing strategy is revealing in this regard: the second edition containing all three treatises was published in Valladolid in 1603 and the third in Medina del Campo the same year.

These locations coincided with the movement of the court of Philip III at the beginning of the century. Despite considerable public protest, the court, through the Duke of Lerma's influence, was moved from Madrid to Valladolid in 1601. And to make room for the large bureaucracy that accompanied the court, nearby Medina del Campo was chosen as the place for the royal tribunal and its various judges, lawyers, and secretaries.²⁷ Only when Madrid regained royal favor with bribes and special real estate deals for Lerma, his family, and the men he had placed in office did the court return in 1606.²⁸ It seems evident that the readers Martínez had in mind were those literate courtiers, government bureaucrats, merchants, and hangers-on who followed the court and who, according to Madrid's city fathers, numbered in the hundreds.²⁹ Martínez's own travels during these years followed the same itinerary. He had operated a bookshop in the Patio of the Alcázar as early as 1591; in 1601, soon after pirating an edition of Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache,³⁰ he too moved to Valladolid, where he opened another shop to serve his recently departed clients.

Without detailing all the appropriate forms of courtly behavior listed by Lucas Gracián, many of which are direct translations from della Casa's treatise, it is enough to point out that his manual is designed to communicate to his readers one of the potential sources of honor and privilege in the court: the art of winning the goodwill and favor of others through the use of proper language and behavior. Acceptable speech, forms of address, table manners, topics of conversation, dress, and ceremony are illustrated, often through negative examples. At one point Lucas Gracián seems to recall an incident that takes place in the squire episode of the Lazarillo:

Muchas veces acaece … venir a reñir y enemistarse, … quando un ciudadano dexa de honrar a otro como es costumbre, no quitándole la gorra, ni hablándole con crianza. … Y ansi quien llamasse de vos a otro, no siendo muy más calificado, le menosprecia y haze ultrage en nombralle, pues se sabe que con semejantes palabras llaman a los peones y travajadores.

(Morreale, p. 132)

[Many times it happens that citizens fight one another and become enemies … when one fails to honor the other as is customary, refusing to tip his hat or to speak properly. … And thus one who addresses the other as “vos,” not being of higher rank, insults him and commits an outrage in referring to him in this way, because it is known that with such words one refers to common peasants and laborers.]

Then there is advice related to bearing and dress: “Y hay algunos de tal manera que ponen todo el gusto y su felicidad y cuidado en sus vestidos y compostura exterior … son fríos, inútiles y de poca sustancia en su trato y conversación, que no son más que para mirados, o topados en la calle” (p. 114) [There are some who put all pleasure, happiness, and care in their clothing and exterior demeanor … {but} are cold, useless, and of little substance in their behavior and conversation; they only want to be seen or encountered in the street]. He also refers to clearly unacceptable behavior when he narrates the following scene, again taken from della Casa, which would later be associated with the court satire of Quevedo:

Hase visto … otra mala costumbre de algunos que suenan las narizes con mucha fuerça y páranse delante de todos a mirar en el pañizuelo lo que se han sonado, como si aquello que por allí han purgado, fuesse perlas o diamantes que le cayessen del celebro.

(p. 109)

[You have seen another evil custom of those who blow their noses with great force and then stop in front of everyone to look in their handkerchiefs at the results, as if what they discharged were pearls or diamonds that have fallen from their brains.]

Unfortunately, searching for pearls or diamonds in the discharge of one's nostrils was not the place where wealth and power would be found in the court of Philip III.

It may be useful at this point to describe briefly some of the main differences between the Lazarillo of 1554 and Velasco's censored text because, as I have noted elsewhere, it was López de Velasco's version of the novel that was most likely read by Cervantes, Mateo Alemán, and Francisco de Quevedo, as well as by other writers of picaresque fiction during the first years of the seventeenth century. The excised fourth and fifth chapters and various sentences and words may seem at first glance to reflect little damage, but the sharp scissors wielded by the censor and approved by the Inquisition weakened the novel's anticlerical tone and suppressed central episodes, one of which, according to Raymond Willis, is artistically necessary for our modern understanding of the final half of the book.³¹ Seventeenth-century readers learned that Lazarillo's father confessed but was not allowed to deny his crimes, and while his father is still located in “heaven” (“la gloria”) he is not called one of the “blessed” (“bienaventurados”). A paragraph that compares Lazarillo's stepfather to “clerics and friars” who steal from the poor to support their religious houses is conspicuously absent. The third chapter with the squire is left intact. The Mercedarian friar and the fraudulent pardoner in the fourth and fifth chapters never make an appearance. The structure of the novel also changed. The episode of the blind beggar was extracted to become a separate chapter, “Assiento de Lázaro con el ciego,” and Lazarillo's adventures as a water seller, paint grinder, constable's assistant, and town crier are collapsed into one: “Lázaro assienta con un capellán y un alguazil y después toma manera de vivir” (fol. 278r).³²

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Lazarillo would have been for its original author a different book, emphasizing primarily the lessons learned by Lazarillo about how to manipulate others through language, the lack of charity as exemplified by the episode with the priest, the shame of poverty and importance of honor of the squire, and the ironic success Lazarillo claims at the end of his life as he boasts of his position as town crier. The centerpiece of the new Lazarillo is the squire episode, which clearly attracted the attention of Miguel Martínez and the court with its critique of ritualized manners, proper speech, courtly dress, distinguished lineage, and powerful role of honor. We are told, for instance, that the squire was born in Valladolid. After he arrives in Toledo, he is described by Lazarillo as he leaves his rented house “con un paso sosegado y el cuerpo derecho, haciendo con él y con la cabeza muy gentiles meneos, echando el cabo de la capa sobre el hombro y a veces so el brazo, y poniendo la mano derecha en el costado”³³ [walking slowly, holding his body straight and swaying gracefully, placing the tail of the cape over his shoulder or sometimes under his arm, and putting his right hand on his chest]. When he attends mass, Lazarillo continues, his master wishes only to be seen by others, remaining through “los otros oficios divinos, hasta que todo fue acabado y la gente ida. Entonces salimos de la iglesia” (p. 73) [the other holy ceremonies very devoutly until they had ended and the people had gone. Then we left the church]. The squire carefully straps on his sword, proudly displaying it as if it were a fine piece of jewelry—and just as useless, Lazarillo implies, because it is used only as decoration. The squire embodies the proud and mannered nobleman whose rhetoric of courtly manners fails to provide him with that artificial identity to find a place in Toledo's closed society, an example that was unlikely to be lost on those who sought honor and privilege in the court of Philip III.

The Velasco/Martínez Lazarillo is “picaresque” in the narrowest historical sense because it is the version mentioned in all probability by Cervantes in the “Galley Slaves” episode of Don Quijote and is closely associated with the word pícaro in Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache. Recall that Guzmán becomes a pícaro in Book 2 after he arrives in Madrid (“Trátase cómo vino a ser pícaro y lo que siéndolo le sucedió”³⁴ [{This second book} deals with how he became a pícaro and what happened to him]). The story continues through Chapter 8 with his journey to Toledo. Guzmán enters the city at night, but before appearing in public the next morning he quickly changes his attire, “vistiéndose muy galán” (1:329) [dressing like a gentleman]. More importantly, these chapters are shot through with references to honor, the same subject that obsessed the squire in the Lazarillo de Tormes. In Alemán's text Guzmán sermonizes against the vanity of honor: “¿Qué sabes o quién sabe del mayordomo del rey don Pelayo ni del camarero del conde Fernán González? Honra tuvieron y la sustentaron y dellos ni della se tiene memoria. Pues así mañana serás olvidado” (1:281) [What is known or who knows about King Pelayo's majordomo or of Count Fernan Gonzalez's servant? They acquired honor and lived by it and no one remembers them or their honor]. But it is not only honor that Guzmán criticizes; he also attacks its trappings and rituals. Attempting to sustain honor is self-effacing because it precludes the possibility of individualizing one's identity; instead the self is invented and sustained by others. “¡Oh … lo que carga el peso de la honra y como no hay metal que se le iguale! ¡A cuánto está obligado el desventurado que della hubiere de usar! ¡Qué mirado y medido ha de andar! … y cuán fácil de perder por la común estimación!” (1:266-67) [Oh … how heavy is the weight of honor and how no metal equals it! How obligated is he who uses it! How he must look and walk! … and how easy it is to lose it in the esteem of others!]. Honor demands a rule-governing form of behavior: costume, manners, proper forms of address, gaining the friendship and favor of others, and avoiding the apperance of poverty point to an imprisoned existence. This is precisely the problem of the squire in the Lazarillo: the artificiality of his studied manners and ostentatious dress are emphasized by his claims to be able to lie, flatter, laugh, and serve “titled gentlemen” better than anyone else despite his poverty and new identity.

Such mannered behavior for Guzmán, then, is seen as a form of imprisonment; he speaks of the “freedom” he has by not joining those who choose to live by the strict rules of honor. Like Lazarillo, he too becomes a beggar to feed himself and refers to crop failures as the reason for lack of charity in Toledo: “Dábase muy poco limosna y no era maravilla, que en general fue el año esteril y, si estaba mala la Andalucía, peor cuánto más adentro del reino de Toledo y mucha más necesidad había de los puertos adentro” (1:263) [Very few alms were given because of crop failures everywhere, and if it was bad in Andalucia it was worse in the kingdom of Toledo and even worse in the city itself]. Despite his use of flattering language, his dress and behavior broadcast his poverty and reputation and determine the role he will play in Madrid: “Viéndome tan despedazado, aunque procuré acreditarme con palabras y buscar a quien servir, ninguno se aseguraba de mis obras ni quería meterme dentro de casa en su servicio, porque estaba muy asqueroso y desmantelado. Creyeron ser algún pícaro ladroncillo que los había de robar y acogerme” (1:263) [Seeing myself in such rags, although I tried to gain confidence and look for someone to serve, no one could be certain about my deeds nor wanted to place me in his house as servant, because I was filthy and ruinous. They believed I was a thieving pícaro who would rob them and escape].

The more freedom he seeks, the further he alienates himself from the social hierarchy he hopes to join, until he becomes a “pícaro de cocina” (1:287). He is told by his master, however, that someday he might become a magistrate and enter “la casa real y que, sirviendo tantos años, … retirarme rico a mi casa” (1:287) [the royal household, and after serving a certain number of years … retire a wealthy man to my estate]. When he returns to Madrid after his journey to Italy, he initiates his strategy to gain admittance to the court in order to sell his stolen jewelry by choosing and wearing the proper clothes in order to associate with his gentlemen clients: “Comencé mi negocio por galas y más galas. Hice dos diferentes vestidos de calza entera, muy gallardos. Otro saqué llano para remudar, pareciéndome que con aquello, si comprase un caballo, que quien así me viera, y con un par de criados, fácilmente me compraría las joyas que llevaba” (2:320-21) [I began my trade with finery and courtly dress. I made two different outfits with long stockings, very elegant. I took out another pair to change into, appearing to me that if I were to buy a horse whoever would see me (and with a couple of servants) would reaidly buy the jewelry I had].

These hurried references to the Guzmán and the Lazarillo suggest an intertextual reading that announces the origins of the picaresque and its association with the court. Alemán closely follows the historical definition of the pícaro given to us by sixteenth-century texts: “pícaro de cocina,” “pícaro vagabundo,” that is, the pícaro who formed an integral part of the growing urban population that contributed to Madrid's demographic explosion at the end of the sixteenth century. He combines historical, immediate experience with the central problem of honor and its rituals as explored in the Lazarillo. His master tells him: “Aquí verás, Guzmán, lo que es la honra, pues a éstos la dan. El hijo de nadie, que se levantó del polvo de la tierra, siendo vasija quebradiza, llena de agujeros, rota, sin capacidad que en ella cupiera cosa de algún momento, la remendó con trapos el favor, y con la soga del interés ya sacan agua con ella y parece de provecho” (1:278) [Here you see, Guzman, what honor is, because to these it is given. The son of a nobody who raises himself up from the dust of the earth is like a leaking vessel full of holes, without the capacity to contain anything of substance; favor patched it with rags, and with the rope of interest others are able to bring it up filled with water and with profit too]. The shift from worthlessness and poverty to material gain and success through the “patchwork” of favors is a movement from the historical pícaro inherited by Alemán to the redefined pícaro of the court: the basic “vessel” remains the same. The power of goodwill and favor to win and maintain a position at court with flattering words and proper dress and behavior, central to Gracián Dantisco's project in the Galateo español, is the target of Alemán's critique of what he perceived to be the arbitrary nature of honor and privilege at the end of the sixteenth century in Spain.

In order to demonstrate how and why the Galateo, the Lazarillo, and the Guzmán found an enthusiastic audience in the first years of the seventeenth century, I must turn briefly to another novel—described variously as the zenith or nadir of the picaresque genre—Francisco de Quevedo's La vida del Buscón, written about 1604, according to the most recent authorities,³⁵ but not published until 1626. Quevedo's novel tells a story, a simple but grotesque story, about the son of a thief and a prostitute who seeks to deny his blood by falsifying his lineage in order to become a gentleman and to gain admittance to polite society, that is, to live an honorable life in the court. To use Alemán's metaphor, Pablos, the “son of nobody,” a “broken vessel” made up of “dust of the earth,” seeks honor and profit in the court through special favor and connections. He hopes to become part of Madrid's society by acting like a gentleman, by associating with others of rank, and by marrying into the right family. Quevedo's readers discover that Pablos's efforts to adopt the style of the court fail, that his true identity is discovered, that he abandons Madrid, traveling to Seville, where like many of his kind in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he escapes to the Indies in the hope of improving his fortune.

But Pablos is not the only character who seeks to break through social barriers by speaking, behaving, and dressing like a gentleman. All characters in the Buscón pretend to be of higher rank than they are. Pablos's reputed father is a barber who insists that he be called a “tundidor de mejillas y sastre de barbas” (“shearer of cheeks and tailor of beards”). His mother is a prostitute whose surnames—“hija de Diego de San Juan y nieta de Andrés de San Cristóbal” [daughter of James of St. John and granddaughter of Saint Christopher]—are mentioned to prove that she is descended from the Litany of the Saints (pp. 73-74).³⁶ The licentiate Cabra, Pablos's schoolmaster, puts bacon in the soup “por no sé qué que le dijeron un día de hidalguía allá fuera” (p. 98) [for something they said to him one day out there about nobility], alluding to the purity of blood statutes that traditionally defined noble old Christian lineage. Pablos's uncle, the hangman from Segovia, refers to the “ocupaciones grandes desta plaza en que me tiene ocupado su Majestad” (p. 131) [the weighty affairs of this employment in which it has pleased His Majesty to place me]. In Madrid Pablos carefully dresses according to the style of the court and names himself “don Ramiro de Guzmán,” telling others that he is “un hombre rico, que hizo agora tres asientos con el Rey” [a rich man, who has already gained three contracts from the king]. Nearly everyone in the Buscón except Don Diego de Coronel y Zúñiga, Pablos's childhood friend, appropriates courtly language and manners to create new identities to survive in Madrid, searching for honor and profit, the philosopher's stone that will transform them as if by magic from the margin to the center, from the fringes of the court to a place in its society.

Maurice Molho has noted that the narrator of the Buscón could just as easily have been Don Diego Coronel de Zúñiga.³⁷ When Quevedo writes in the first words of the novel that Pablos is from Segovia, his statement applies to Don Diego as well. And when he refers to Pablos's attempts to disguise his lineage and deny his blood, Quevedo cleverly alludes to Don Diego's family too. The name “Coronel” was taken by the converted Segovian Jew, Abraham Senior, in 1492 for himself and for his descendants.³⁸ Don Diego's second surname, “Zúñiga,” may have made him doubly suspect to Quevedo's contemporary readers because in some minds it would have linked him to various noble families or even to Diego de Zúñiga, the first son of the president of the Council of Castile under Philip III, Pedro Manso de Zúñiga, whose meteoric rise to power was described at the time as an “estallido tal que a todos pareció de los milagros de la naturaleza”³⁹ [such an explosion that everyone thought it was a miracle of nature]. The major difference between Don Pablos and Don Diego, however, is that the latter appears in the novel already the son of a gentleman (no matter how tainted), whereas the former will never attain such status. Both apparently descend from converted Jews, but Quevedo allows Don Diego to remain at court as a caballero of a prestigious military order while he condemns Pablos to the life of a hardened criminal. If Don Diego is not as worthy a character as some have argued, why is he not exiled along with Don Pablos? Why is he perceived to be part of the dominant elite in the court of Philip III?

It is possible to begin to answer such questions by first going to another of Quevedo's works, written at about the same time that he was composing his novel. I refer to his satiric poem “Poderoso caballero es don Dinero.”⁴⁰ Sir Money is the subject of a daughter's confession to her mother: “Madre, yo al oro me humillo; / él es mi amante y mi amado” [Mother, I humble myself before gold; / he is my lover and my beloved]. His genealogy is of supreme importance:

Son sus padres principales,
y es de nobles descendiente,
porque en las venas de Oriente
todas las sangres son reales;
y pues es quien hace iguales
al duque y al ganadero
poderoso caballero es don Dinero.(41)

[His parents are illustrious, / and he is descended from noblemen, / because in veins {of gold/of blood} of the East / all blood is royal; / since he is the one who makes equals / of the duke and the rancher / a powerful knight is Sir Money.]

That Don Diego is meant to be perceived as a wealthy nobleman Quevedo leaves little doubt, locating his house on the Calle del Arenal, one of the most prestigious streets in early-seventeenth-century Madrid.⁴² His neighbors would have been the Count of Oñate, the Count of Fuente Ventura, the Marquis of Salinas, and the Duke of Arcos, among others.⁴³ The power of Don Dinero, then, has no limits, and it is the relationship between money and power that turns profit into honor, rustic into nobleman, converso into caballero.⁴⁴ The language and manners of the court for Quevedo, when driven by ostentatious—if not illegitimate—wealth, were forms of deception that allowed those of questionable birth and tainted blood to live nobly and among noblemen in Madrid. Writers of picaresque fiction, if we base their role on Quevedo's example, were morally bound to expose through the language of satire the threat to social and political order that such behavior disguised.

The Coroneles were examples of noblemen by concession and not by blood: “de privilegio y no de sangre,” a traditional pathway to nobility that suddenly was perceived to threaten the exclusivity and legitimacy of those who considered themselves to constitute the high elite and who were already in power. Within months of Philip III's accession to the throne, Cabrera de Córdoba reported that “hánse dado más hábitos de las tres órdenes, después que S. M. heredó, que no se dieron en diez años en vida del Rey su padre; porque pasan de cincuenta personas a los que se han dado, y que los más lo han alcanzado con poca diligencia”⁴⁵ [more military habits of the three orders were given after the king inherited ｛the throne｝ than were given in ten years during his father's reign, because there are more than fifty persons to whom they were given, and most of them obtained them with little effort]. The worst was to come. By 1605, the son of Rodrigo Calderón, less than a year old, was admitted to the prestigious Order of Alcántara. Reaction was swift against the king's wholesale creation of caballeros. The Order of Santiago met in 1603 and approved new entry qualifications: “Ordenamos que el que hubiere de tener el hábito de nuestra orden sea hijodalgo de sangre de parte de padre y de parte de madre y no de privilegio”⁴⁶ [It is ordered that whoever joins our ranks must be of pure blood on both the father's and mother's side; nobility based on concession is not allowed]. This and other restrictions came too late, and in the final analysis—as we have noted with regard to Rodrigo Calderón's son, and certainly with Don Diego Coronel—had little impact. Don Diego and his kind point to that powerful elite, already too entrenched and powerful to be attacked directly and by name. In sum, Don Diego, despite the tainted blood of his ancestors and his questionable behavior in the novel, is identified as the legitimate son of a Segovian nobleman, whereas Don Pablos is unmasked as the bastard son of a Segovian barber whose oficio mecánico alone was sufficient to deny his family noble status.

Quevedo was intimately aware of the strategies adopted by Don Diego and Don Pablos at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Those who would get ahead had to live nobly, forge strong political alliances, and be connected to the right families. Quevedo's own success was assured when he attached himself to the Duke of Osuna, who was appointed viceroy of Sicily in 1609, a year after he arranged the marriage of his oldest son to the second daughter of the Duke of Uceda, Lerma's son. Quevedo profited handily by associating himself with hombres de bien; he insisted on maintaining the exclusivity of the legitimate elite through his picaresque novel by exiling Don Pablos and by pointing a finger at those like Don Diego who would falsify their lineage and deny their blood.⁴⁷

Claudio Guillén is correct when he writes that the invention of the picaresque took place with the almost simultaneous publication of the rediscovered Lazarillo and the Guzmán de Alfarache. However, it may not have been because an enterprising printer named Luis Sánchez wanted to cash in on the popularity of a new literary genre, but rather because a politically and financially astute book publisher named Miguel Martínez had detected the signs of a new court, a court within which the values of the picaresque found a responsive audience. The social and political worlds of the valido both engendered and resisted the picaresque novel, a literary genre that questioned and sustained the arbitrary nature of identity, the power of money and courtly manners, family networks, and political favoritism.

Notes

1. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. xiii.

2. José Antonio Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (Madrid: Taurus, 1986); Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 33.

3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 94.

4. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. x.

5. See Richard L. Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), and Janine Fayard, Les membres du Conseil de Castille a l'époque moderne, 1621-1746 (Geneva: Droz, 1979).

6. Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, p. 5.

7. Cited ibid., p. 7.

8. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 162.

9. M. Morreale points out in her edition of Lucas Gracián's Galateo español (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1968), p. 2, that its first translator, Domingo de Becerra, remarked that “para notar una mala costumbre o crianza … se suele dezir como proverbio ‘no manda esso el Galateo.’” Morreale adds that “una europa ansiosa de afinar el trato social y difundir la urbanidad aun fuera de la clase aristocrática, no podía menos que apreciar los avisos del librito italiano, tan agudamente seleccionados y aplicables a las más variadas circunstancias.”

10. See Margherita Morreale, Castiglione y Boscán: el ideal cortesano en el renacimiento español, Boletín de la Real Academia Española, Anejo 1 (1969).

11. Alonso de Barros, Filosofía cortesana moralizada, ed. Trevor J. Dadson (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1987).

12. John Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 9.

13. Ruth Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: The Genoese in Seville and the Opening of the New World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 3-5; Henri La Peyre, Une famille de Marchands les Ruiz (Paris: A. Colin, 1955).

14. Cabrera de Córdoba, Relaciones de las cosas sucedidas en la corte de España (Madrid: J. Martín Alegría, 1857), p. 3.

15. Antonio Feros, “Gobierno de Corte y Patronazgo Real en el reinado de Felipe III (1598-1618)” (thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1986), p. 40.

16. I will cite Margherita Morreale's edition, Galateo español. Her preliminary study has been helpful in sorting out early editions, especially regarding the early texts of the Lazarillo castigado and Lucas Gracián's treatise.

17. See Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 135-58.

18. For Velasco, see María del Carmen González Muñoz, ed., Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias (Madrid: M. Atlas, 1971), “Estudio preliminar.”

19. J. M. Bujanda et al., Index des livres interdits, vol. 7 (1988): 89-97. “Le comité présidé par Arias Montano semble avoir réalisé un travail de vérification, de compilation et de sélection” (p. 89).

20. Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, ed., “La correspondencia del Doctor Benito Arias Montano con el Licenciado Juan de Ovando,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 19 (1912): 488.

21. The Index of Antwerp (1570) reproduces the list of Valdés (1559) with one important change in the section beginning with the letter “L”: the Lazarillo, which was sandwiched between Las lamentaciones de Pedro and the Lengua de Erasmo en Romance, y en Latín, y en qualquier lengua vulgar in Valdés, is missing in the Antwerp index. No longer completely prohibited, had the Lazarillo been withdrawn to be expurgated? This is difficult to ascertain because certain comedias of Torres Naharro remained. See Bujanda, pp. 696, 700.

22. Many of his autograph manuscripts remain in the Escorial library, including this one, L. I. 13. See J. Zarco Cuevas, Catálogo de manuscritos castellanos en la Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, 3 vols. (Madrid: El Escorial, 1924-29).

23. The royal privilege included in the Madrid 1573 edition of Cristóbal de Castillejo (BN R-1.485) was issued at San Lorenzo de El Escorial on August 5 for its circulation in Aragón, and includes a reference to the works of Torres Naharro and to the Lazarillo: “Por parte de vos Iuan Lopez de Velasco, nos ha sido hecha relación, que mandado y commission del Consejo de la Sancta Inquisicion haviades recopilado y corregido la Propaladia de Bartholome de Torres Naharro, y la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y las obras de Christobal de Castillejo, Secretario que fue del emperador don Hernando, … Y vos aveys suplicado, que atendido vuestro buen zelo que teneys del comun aprovechamiento y el trabajo que en esto abeys tenido fuessemos servido de dar licencia y facultad, para que vos y quien de vos tuviese poder para ello, y no otra persona alguna lo podays y puedan imprimir y vender … assi todo junto en un volumen, como dividido en dos, o tres volumenes, o partes, de la manera que a vos os pareciere mas a convertir a la utilidad de los leyentes” (my emphasis).

24. C. Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña (Siglo XVI) (Madrid: Tip. de los Huérfanos, 1891), p. 39. The work of Castillejo was apparently published separately.

25. Juan Berrillo, a Madrid bookseller, had received permission to publish both texts in one volume in April 1599, but a copy of this edition has never been located. Enrique Macaya Lahmann, Bibliografía del Lazarillo de Tormes (San José, Costa Rica: Ediciones del Convivio, 1935), notes that the edition of the Lazarillo now in the Hispanic Society of America is bound together with the “Coplas de Jorge Manrique, las de Mingo Revulgo y las Cartas de Refranes de Blasco de Garay” (p. 65).

26. Lucas Gracián died in July 1587; Juan López de Velasco had managed to retain his original permission to publish the Lazarillo, but the fact that the novel began appearing within a year of his death seems an odd coincidence. There remains some mystery about the various editions of the Lazarillo published at this time. See Enrique Macaya Lahmann, Bibliografía del Lazarillo de Tormes, who refers to an edition of 1599 printed by Luis Sánchez, which he was unable to locate for his study (p. 64).

27. In an entry for February 1601, Cabrera de Córdoba noted that “Mandan mudar la Audiencia y Chancillería, que allí [Valladolid] reside, a Medina del Campo, y las ferias que hasta agora se han hecho en Medina, las mandan pasar a Burgos” (p. 95). The Lazarillo was also published in Valencia in 1601 (remember that the court made a slow return to Madrid from Valencia in late 1599) and in Alcalá de Henares in 1607.

28. The town council records of Madrid at this time are filled with references as to how the (bankrupt) city would fulfill its end of the agreement. The Duque de Cea, Lerma's son, was provided a house (formerly of Agustín Alvarez de Toledo) whose rent was to be paid by the city. Cea had built a “pasadizo” from the house to the Royal Palace “en conformidad del … ofrescimiento … para S. M. por razon de la buelta de la corte a esta villa” (Archivo Municipal de Madrid: Libros de Acuerdos, vol. 25, fol. 400r, 20 November 1606). Madrid had also agreed to pay the king the sixth part of rental houses, but found that it was “muy ynconbiniente para esta villa y sus vecinos” (fol. 418r, March 1607), and ordered that a committee be sent to Valladolid “a tratar deste servicio por razón de la buelta de la corte” (ibid.). The original agreement stipulated that the city would pay the king 250,000 ducats; the city managed to have the amount spread over ten years, and in addition, “los alquileres de las casas del Marques de Auñón y Agustín Albarez de Toledo en que vive y a de vivir el Sr. Duque de Cea” (fol. 451v, 5 May 1607).

29. See Claudia W. Sieber, “The Invention of a Capital: Philip II and the First Reform of Madrid” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1985).

30. See Donald McGrady, “A Pirated Edition of Guzmán de Alfarache: More Light on Mateo Alemán's Life,” Hispanic Review 34 (1966): 326-28.

31. Raymond Willis, “Lazarillo and the Pardoner: The Artistic Necessity of the Fifth Tractado,” Hispanic Review 8 (1959): 267-79.

32. I cited the Medina del Campo edition of 1603, housed in the Library of Congress, BJ 1981. G66 / 1603.

33. Francisco Rico, ed., La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987), p. 82. All subsequent references are to this edition.

34. Benito Brancaforte, ed., Guzmán de Alfarache, 2 vols. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1979), p. 248. All references to the novel are to this edition.

35. See Pablo Jauralde's note in his edition of the Buscón (Madrid: Castalia, 1990), p. 18.

36. All references to the Buscón are to Pablo Jauralde, ed. (Madrid: Castalia, 1990).

37. See Molho's perceptive study, “Cinco lecciones sobre el ‘Buscón,’” in Semántica y poética (Góngora, Quevedo) (Barcelona: Crítica, 1977), pp. 89-131.

38. See Carroll B. Johnson, “El Buscón: Don Pablos, don Diego y don Francisco,” Hispanófila 51 (1974): 1-26; Agustín Redondo, “Del personaje de don Diego Coronel a una nueva interpretación del Buscón,” Actas del Quinto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas (Bordeaux: U. de Bordeaux, 1974 [1977]); Idalia Cordero, El ‘Buscón’ o la vergüenza de Pablos y la ira de don Francisco (Madrid: Playor, 1987). See also Angel G. Loureiro, “Reivindicación de Pablos,” Revista de Filología Española 67 (1987): 225-44, and Henry Ettinghausen, “Quevedo's Converso Picaro,” Modern Language Notes 102 (1987): 241-54.

39. Vicente Andosilla Salazar, A don Pedro Manso de Zúñiga, Patriarca de las Indias y Presidente del Consejo Real de Castilla (place and year unknown), fol. 4v. This reference comes from Antonio Feros, p. 84.

40. James O. Crosby, En torno a la poesía de Quevedo (Madrid: Castalia, 1967), p. 157. This poem was first included in Pedro Espinosa's Flores de poetas ilustres (Valladolid, 1605). The collection, however, received official permission to be published almost two years later.

41. The text is taken from José Manuel Blecua, ed., Francisco de Quevedo: Obra poética (Madrid: Castalia, 1970), 2:175-76.

42. See the Buscón, p. 228.

43. See the Planimetría general de Madrid, facs. ed. (Madrid: Tabapress, 1988), 1:315-16.

44. See Cordero, p. 14, who cites Maravall, “La aspiración social de medro en la novela picaresca,” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 312 (1976): 595: “Muchos, aunque procedan de baja cuna, si consiguen reunir dinero en cantidad bastante, quieran disponer de placeres, comodidad, ociosidad, lujo, ostentación, consiguiente, de respeto social y, en fin, de poder y mayor riqueza.”

45. Relaciones de las cosas sucedidas en la corte de España desde 1599 hasta 1614, pp. 4-5.

46. See Elena Postigo Castellanos, Honor y privilegio en la corona de Castilla. El Consejo de las Ordenes y los caballeros de hábito en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1988), p. 135. The Diccionario de Autoridades (Madrid: 1732) contains a useful definition of the “hidalgo de privilegio”: “El siendo hombre llano [that is, he who pays taxes], por algun servicio particular o accion gloriosa, el Rey le concedio los privilegios exenciones, y prerogativos que gozan los hijosdalgo de casa y solar conocido: o aquel que compró este mismo privilegio a los reyes.”

47. For Quevedo's ancestry and his early connection to the court, see Pablo Jauralde, ed., El Buscón (Madrid: Castalia, 1990), pp. 10-11. Jauralde points out that “la relación, bastante sinuosa, de Quevedo con la nobleza de su tiempo constituye uno de los capítulos más apasionados de su ya apasionante biografía” (pp. 10-11).