Part 1 (1/2)
Four Plays of Gil Vicente.
by Gil Vicente.
PREFACE
Gil Vicente, that sovereign genius[1], is too popular and indigenous for translation and this may account for the fact that he has not been presented to English readers. It is hoped, however, that a fairly accurate version, with the text in view[2], may give some idea of his genius. The religious, the patriotic-imperial, the satirical and the pastoral sides of his drama are represented respectively by the _Auto da Alma_, the _Exhortaco_, the _Almocreves_ and the _Serra da Estrella_, while his lyrical vein is seen in the _Auto da Alma_ and in two delightful songs: the _serranilha_ of the _Almocreves_ and the _cossante_ of the _Serra da Estrella_. Many of his plays, including some of the most charming of his lyrics, were written in Spanish and this limited the choice from the point of view of Portuguese literature, but there are others of the Portuguese plays fully as well worth reading as the four here given.
The text is that of the exceedingly rare first edition (1562). Apart from accents and punctuation, it is reproduced without alteration, unless a pa.s.sage is marked by an asterisk, when the text of the _editio princeps_ will be found in the foot-notes, in which variants of other editions are also given.
In these notes A represents the _editio princeps_ (1562): _Copilacam de todalas obras de Gil Vicente, a qual se reparte em cinco livros. O primeyro he de todas suas cousas de deuacam. O segundo as comedias. O terceyro as tragicomedias. No quarto as farsas. No quinto as obras meudas. Empremiose em a muy n.o.bre & sempre leal cidade de Lixboa em casa de Ioam Aluarez impressor del Rey nosso senhor. Anno de MDLXII_. The second (1586) edition (B) is the _Copilacam de todalas obras de Gil Vicente... Lixboa, por Andres Lobato, Anno de MDLx.x.xVJ_. A third edition in three volumes appeared in 1834 (C): _Obras de Gil Vicente, correctas e emendadas pelo cuidado e diligencia de J. V. Barreto Feio e J. G.
Monteiro_. Hamburgo, 1834. This was based, although not always with scrupulous accuracy, on the _editio princeps_, and subsequent editions have faithfully adhered to that of 1834: _Obras_, 3 vol. Lisboa, 1852 (D), and _Obras_, ed. Mendes dos Remedios, 3 vol. Coimbra, 1907, 12, 14 [_Subsidios_, vol. 11, 15, 17][3] (E). Although there has been a tendency of late to multiply editions of Gil Vicente, no attempt has been made to produce a critical edition. It is generally felt that that must be left to the master hand of Dona Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcellos[4]. Since the plays of Vicente number over forty the present volume is only a tentative step in this direction, but it may serve to show the need of referring to, and occasionally emending, the _editio princeps_ in any future edition of the most national poet of Portugal[5].
AUBREY F. G. BELL.
_8 April 1920._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Este soberano ingenio._ Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, _Antologia_, tom. 7, p. clxiii.
[2] Although the text has been given without alteration it has not been thought necessary to provide a precise rendering of the coa.r.s.er pa.s.sages.
[3] The Paris 1843 edition is the Hamburg 1834 edition with a different t.i.tle-page. The _Auto da Alma_ was published separately at Lisbon in 1902 and again (in part) in _Autos de Gil Vicente. Compilaco e prefacio de Affonso Lopes Vieira_, Porto, 1916; while extracts appeared in _Portugal. An Anthology, edited with English versions, by George Young_.
Oxford, 1916. The present text and translation are reprinted, by permission of the Editor, from _The Modern Language Review_.
[4] I understand that the eminent philologist Dr Jose Leite de Vasconcellos is also preparing an edition.
[5] Facsimiles of the t.i.tle-pages of the two early editions of Vicente's works are reproduced here through the courtesy of Senhor Anselmo Braamcamp Freire.
INTRODUCTION
I. LIFE AND 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 pa.s.sages 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 _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 Provencal 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 doc.u.ments 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 Michaelis de Vasconcellos, Dr Jose 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 doc.u.ment discovered by another critic brings the whole edifice toppling to the ground. The doc.u.ments 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 Michaelis 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 doc.u.ments 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 st.u.r.dy 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 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, amus.e.m.e.nts, dances, songs and language. It is legitimate to draw certain inferences--provided we do not attach too great importance to them--from 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 _Visitacam_ (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 pa.s.sage in which Silvestre and Bras express surprise at Gil's learning:
_S._ Mudando vas la pelleja, Sabes de achaque de igreja!
_G._ Ahora lo deprendi....
_B._ Quien te viese no dira Que naciste en serrania.
_G._ Dios hace estas maravillas.
It is possible that Gil Vicente, like Gil Terron, had been born _en serrania_. Dr Leite de Vasconcellos was the first to call attention to his special knowledge of the province of Beira, and the reference to the 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 _n.o.biliario_, 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 Fernandez and Bartolome 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 guarde 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, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage, 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?