Four Plays of Gil Vicente

Four Plays of Gil Vicente

Those who read the voluminous song-book edited by jolly Garcia de Resende in 1516 are astonished at its narrowness and aridity. There is scarcely a breath of poetry or of Nature in these Court verses. In the pages of Gil Vicente[6], who had begun to write fourteen years before the Cancioneiro Geral was published, the Court is still present, yet the atmosphere is totally different. There are many passages in his plays which correspond to the conventional love-poems of the courtiers and he maintains the personal satire to be found both in the [Pg x]Cancioneiro da Vaticana and the Cancioneiro de Resende. But he is also a child of Nature, with a marvellous lyrical gift and the insight to revive and renew the genuine poetry which had existed in Galicia and the north of Portugal before the advent of the Provenal love-poetry, had sprung into a splendid harvest in rivalry with that poetry and died down under the Spanish influence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He was moreover a national and imperial poet, embracing the whole of Portuguese life and the whole rapidly growing Portuguese empire. We can only account for the difference by saying that Gil Vicente was a genius, the only great genius of that day in Portugal, and the most gifted poet of his time. It is therefore all the more tantalizing that we should know so little about him. A few documents recently unearthed, one or two scanty references by contemporary or later authors, are all the information we have apart from that which may be gleaned from the rubrics and colophons of his plays and from the plays themselves. The labours of Dona Carolina Michalis de Vasconcellos, Dr Jos Leite de Vasconcellos[7] and Snr Anselmo Braamcamp Freire are likely to provide us before long with the first critical edition of his plays. The ingenious suppositions of Dr Theophilo Braga[8] have, as usual, led to much discussion and research. He is the Mofina Mendes of critics, putting forward a hypothesis, translating it a few pages further on into a certainty and building rapidly on these foundations till an argument adduced or a document discovered by another critic brings the whole edifice toppling to the ground. The documents brought to light by General Brito Rebello[9] and Senhor Anselmo Braamcamp Freire[10] enable us to construct a sketch of Gil Vicente's life, while D. Carolina Michalis has shed a flood of light upon certain points[11]. The chronological table at the end of this volume is founded mainly, as to the order of the plays, on the documents and arguments recently set forth by one of the most distinguished of modern historical critics, Senhor Anselmo Braamcamp Freire. The plays, read in this order, throw a certain amount of new light on Gil Vicente's life and give it a new cohesion. Whether we consider it from the point of view of his own country or of the world, or of literature, art and science, his life coincides with one of the most wonderful periods in the world's history. At his birth Portugal was a sturdy mediaeval country, proud of her traditions and heroic past. Her heroes were so national as scarcely to be known beyond her own borders. Nun' Alvarez (1360-1431), one of the greatest men of all time, is even now unknown to Europe. And Portugal herself as yet hardly[Pg xi] appraised at its true worth the life and work of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), at whose incentive she was still groping persistently along the western coast of Africa. His nephew Afonso V, the amiable grandson of Nun' Alvarez' friend, the Master of Avis, and the English princess Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, was on the throne, to be succeeded by his stern and resolute son Joo II in 1481. In his boyhood, spent in the country, somewhere in the green hills of Minho or the rugged grandeur and bare, flowered steeps of the Serra da Estrella, all ossos e burel[12], Gil Vicente might hear dramatic stories of the doings at the capital and Court, of the beginning of the new reign, of the beheadal of the Duke of Braganza in the Rocio of Evora, of the stabbing by the King's own hand of his cousin and brother-in-law, the young Duke of Viseu, of the baptism and death at Lisbon of a native prince from Guinea. The place of his birth is not certain. Biographers have hesitated between Lisbon, Guimares and Barcellos: perhaps he was not born in any of these towns but in some small village of the north of Portugal. We can at least say that he was not brought up at Lisbon. The proof is his knowledge and love of Nature and his intimate acquaintance with the ways of villagers, their character, customs, amusements, dances, songs and language. It is legitimate to draw certain inferencesprovided we do not attach too great importance to themfrom his plays, especially since we know that he himself staged them and acted in them[13]. His earliest compositions are especially personal and we may be quite sure that the parts of the herdsman in the Visitaam (1502) and of the mystically inclined shepherd, Gil Terron, in the Auto Pastoril Castelhano (1502) and the rustico pastor in the Auto dos Reis Magos (1503) were played by Vicente himself. It is therefore well to note the passage in which Silvestre and Bras express surprise at Gil's learning: It is possible that Gil Vicente, like Gil Terron, had been born en serrana. Dr Leite de Vasconcellos was the first to call attention to his special knowledge of the province of Beira, and the reference to the[Pg xii] Serra da Estrella dragged into the Comedia do Viuvo is of even more significance than the conventional beiro talk of his peasants. Nor is the learning in his plays such as to give a moment's support to the theory that he had, like Enzina, received a university education, or, as some, relying on an unreliable nobiliario, have held, was tutor (mestre de rhetorica) to Prince, afterwards King, Manuel. The King, according to Damio de Goes, 'knew enough Latin to judge of its style.' Probably he did not know much more of it than Gil Vicente himself. His first productions are without the least pretension to learning: they are close imitations of Enzina's eclogues. Later his outlook widened; he read voraciously[14] and seems to have pounced on any new publication that came to the palace, among them the works of two slightly later Spanish playwrights, Lucas Fernndez and Bartolom de Torres Naharro. With the quickness of genius and spurred forward by the malicious criticism of his audience, their love of new things and the growing opposition of the introducers of the new style from Italy, he picked up a little French and Italian, while Church Latin and law Latin early began to creep into his plays. The parade of erudition (which is also a satire on pedants) at the beginning of the Auto da Mofina Mendes is, however, that of a comparatively uneducated man in a library, of rustic Gil Vicente in the palace. Rather we would believe that he spent his early life in peasant surroundings, perhaps actually keeping goats in the scented hills like his Prince of Wales, Dom Duardos: De mozo guard ganado, and then becoming an apprentice in the goldsmith's art, perhaps to his father or uncle, Martim Vicente, at Guimares. It is extremely probable that he was drawn to the Court, then at Evora, for the first time in 1490 by the unprecedented festivities in honour of the wedding of the Crown Prince and Isabel, daughter of the Catholic Kings, and was one of the many goldsmiths who came thither on that occasion[15]. If that was so, his work may have at once attracted the attention of King Joo II, who, as Garcia de Resende tells us, keenly encouraged the talents of the young men in his service, and the protection of his wife, Queen Lianor. He may have been about 25 years old at the time. The date of his birth has become a fascinating problem, [Pg xiii]over which many critics have argued and disagreed. As to the exact year it is best frankly to confess our ignorance. The information is so flimsy and conflicting as to make the acutest critics waver. While a perfectly unwarranted importance has been given to a passage in Vicente's last comedia, the Floresta de Enganos (1536), in which a judge declares that he is 66 (therefore Gil Vicente was born in 1470), sufficient stress has perhaps not been laid on the lines in the play from the Conde de Sabugosa's library, the Auto da Festa, in which Gil Vicente is declared to be 'very stout and over 60.' This cannot be dismissed like the former passage, for it is evidently a personal reference to Gil Vicente. It was the comedian's ambition to raise a laugh in his audience and this might be effected by saying the exact opposite of what the audience knew to be true: e.g. to speak of Gil Vicente as very stout and over 60 if he was very young and spectre-thin. But Vicente was certainly not very young when this play was written and we may doubt whether the victim of calentura and hater of heat (he treats summer scurvily in his Auto dos Quatro Tempos) was thin. We have to accept the fact that he was over 60 when the Auto da Festa was written. But when was it written? Its editor, the Conde de Sabugosa, to whom all Vicente lovers owe so deep a debt of gratitude[16], assigned it to 1535, while Senhor Braamcamp Freire, who uses Vicente's age as a double-edged weapon[17], places it twenty years earlier, in 1515. This was indeed necessary if the year 1452 was to be maintained as the date of his birth. The theory of the exact date 1452 was due to another passage of the plays: the old man in O Velho da Horta, formerly assigned to 1512, is 60 (III. 75). Yet there is something slightly comical in stout old Gil Vicente beginning his actor's career at the age of 50 and keeping it up till he was 86. Other facts that may throw light on his age are as follows: in 1502 he almost certainly acted the boisterous part of vaqueiro in the Visitaam[18]. In 1512 he is over 40 and married (inference from his appointment as one of the 24 representatives of Lisbon guilds in that year). In 1512 a 'son of Gil Vicente' is in India. His son Belchior is a small boy in 1518. In 1515 he received a sum of money to enable his sister Felipa Borges to marry. In 1531 he declares himself to be 'near death'[19], although evidently not ill at the time. He died very probably at the end of 1536 or beginning of 1537[20]. Accepting the fact that the Auto da Festa was written before the Templo de Apolo (1526) I would place it as late as possible, i.e. in the year 1525, and subtracting 60 believe that the date c. 1465 for Gil Vicente's [Pg xiv]birth will be found to agree best with the various facts given above. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 28399
Author: Vicente, Gil
Release Date: Mar 24, 2009
Format: eBook
Language: Portuguese

Contributors

Editor: Bell, Aubrey F. G. (Aubrey Fitz Gerald), 1882-1950