Part 42 (2/2)

331-2 Cf. _Divisa da Cidade de Coimbra_: _Vai delas a eles to grande avantagem... como havera...do vivo a hua imagem_.

341 _G.o.dos_, Goths, i.e. of ancient race, 'Norman blood.'

346 For _dioso_ = _idoso_ v. _C. Geral_, vol. II (1910), p. 153. Fernam Lopez, _Chron. J. I._ Pt. 2, cap. 10, has _deoso_.

384 _pequenas quadrilhas_. When Afonso de Albuquerque began his glorious career (1509-15) there were in India but a few hundred Portuguese fighting men, and most of these badly armed. The whole population of Portugal during this time of fighting and discovery in N.-West, West and East Africa and India is by some calculated at a million and a half, by others at between two and three millions.

416 Prov. _mais so as vozes que as nozes_.

418 For this line cf. Pedro Ferrus: _Que por todo el mundo suena_ (ap.

Menendez y Pelayo, _Antologia_, t. I, p. 159 and Enzina, _Egloga_, V (_ib._ t. VII, p. 57)).

420 _pois que...pessoa_, a homely version of Goethe's _Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast Erwirb' es um es zu besitzen_.

470-4 These lines are translated from the Spanish poet Gomez Manrique (1415?-1490?). See Menendez y Pelayo, _Antologia_, t. VII, p. ccx.

Cf. Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, _Ulysippo_, V, 7: _Vos quando vos tirarem de Ansias e pa.s.siones mias e guando Roma conquistava_.

487 _dom zote_. Cf. supra _zopete_ and Sp. _zote_, _zopo_, _zopenco_, _zoquete_ (a dolt); low Latin _sottus_; Dutch _zot_; Fr. _sot_; Eng.

_sot_ (_bebe sem desfolegar_). _Zote_ occurs twice in the _Auto Pastoril Portugues_: _muito gamenho_ (cf. Fr. _gamin_) _zote_ and _Auto da Fe_, l. 5.

534 _trepas_ is the Span. form (Port, _tripas_?).

538 _soycos_ the old, _soldados_ the new, word for 'soldiers.' Cf. Lucas Fernandez, _Farsas_ (1867), p. 89: _Entra el soldado, o soizo, o infante_.

559 This rousing chorus fitly ends a play from every page of which breathes the most ardent patriotism. Small wonder that King Sebastio (1557-78), with his visions of conquest and glory, read Vicente with pleasure as a boy.

561 Cf. Gaspar Correa, _Lendas da India_, IV, 561-2: _o Governador logo sobio e o frade diante dele bradando a grandes brados, dizendo: 'O fieis Christos, olhai para Christo, vosso capito, que vai diante'_ (1546).

FARSA DOS ALMOCREVES

PAGE 37

This is one of the most famous of those lively farces with which Gil Vicente for a quarter of a century delighted the Portuguese Court and which still hold the reader by their vividness and charm. Its fame rests on the portraiture of the poverty-stricken but magnificent n.o.bleman who has been a favourite object of satire with writers in the Peninsula since the time of Martial, and who in a poem of the _Cancioneiro Geral_ is described in almost the identical words of Vicente's prefatory note:

o gram estado e a renda casi nada (_Arrenegos que que fez Gregoryo Affonsso_).

An alternative t.i.tle of the play is _Auto do Fidalgo Pobre_, but the extremely natural presentment of the two carriers in the second part justifies the more popular name. The Court, fleeing from plague at Lisbon, was in the celebrated little university town of Coimbra on the Mondego and here Gil Vicente in the following year staged his _Divisa da Cidade de Coimbra_, the _Farsa dos Almocreves_, and (in October) the _Tragicomedia da Serra da Estrella_ and Sa de Miranda, in open rivalry, produced his _Fabula do Mondego_. But Gil Vicente was not to be silenced by the introduction of the new poetry from Italy and to these two years, 1526 and 1527, belong no less than seven (or perhaps eight) of his plays. Yet what a difference in his own position and in the state of the nation since his first farce--_Quem tem farelos?_ twenty years before!

The magnificent King Manuel was dead, and his son, the more care-ridden Joo III, was on the throne:

to ocupado co'este Turco, co'este Papa co'esta Franca.

There was plague and famine in the land. The discovery of a direct route to the East and its apparently inexhaustible wealth had not brought prosperity to the Portuguese provinces. There the chief effect had been to make men discontented with their lot and to lure away even the humblest workers to seek their fortune and often to find death or a far less independent poverty:

ate os pastores ho de ser d'el-Rei samica.

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