Relíquias de Casa Velha (Classics of Brazilian Literature Livro 16) (Portuguese Edition)

Relíquias de Casa Velha (Classics of Brazilian Literature Livro 16) (Portuguese Edition) eBook: Machado de Assis: leondumoulin.nl: Kindle Store.
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Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. Feedback If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us. This intonation, which interests us here, reminds us of the contributions of the so called Bakhtin Circle, especifically the essay Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry by Voloshinov, who states that intonation: Living intonation, as it were, leads discourse beyond its verbal limits" , p. This case is an example of the transition from life circumstances to literary meaning.

It shows how the interlocutors and the author together determine the short story style and wording, which depart from the emphasis given by the intonation of the author, who expresses his willingness to try writing a story based on stories to which he listened and on values which are close to his literary universe.

Everything occurs in the form of dialogues between conversationalists. The reader listens to them as an intertwined discourse that permeated the discussed arguments within a specific context. The short story examines this situation when the protagonist's behavior and the behavior of the crowd about which the sailor appears to be enthusiastic are alternatively focused upon. In this sense, we observe the circumstances in which the character walks around Montevideo until he comes across a fire:.

It was an April Saturday. B…arrived at that harbor and disembarked. He went for a walk, drank some beer, smoked, and in the evening he walked toward the pier, where he was waiting for the ship boat. He was reminiscing about moments in England and pictures from China. He turned at a corner and saw some commotion at the end of other street. As he had always been curious for adventures, he hurried to see what was going on. When he arrived at the scene, the crowd was already bigger. There were so many voices, and the wagons that came from everywhere made so much noise. In face of that, "the generous soul of the officer could not help but storm through the crowd and into the building entrance" ASSIS, e , p.

From the street, the flickering lights of the flames gave people a deceiving view of the building, projecting an image of a woman at the top floor who "seemed to hesitate between death by fire and death by fall" ASSIS, e , p. For Machado, society is the raw material from which one understands the human condition. That is why his short stories are directed to the behavior and feelings of his characters. He thus prioritizes representing their sensations, their inner world when they face uncertain fate. Machado de Assis's literature is not constrained by barriers. In fact, he refuses them.

He wants to make variations, comments, and give no consolation. He wants the anecdote with its originality; thus, he prefers laughter and humor. This was done from the perspective of modernism and through the disorderly emotions of his protagonists. Thus, he worked with multiple ideas, both his and somebody else's. That helps us understand the breach of the bond between the subject who writes and his writing as he produces his "writing act," the term he preferred to use. There is not much of a difference between Machado de Assis's criticism and his chronicles, for they are guided by the same concern: They point to the balance and impartiality of someone who sees how things change and how human nature is diverse and uncertain.

Through criticism, it would be possible to understand art as a way to communicate indifferently and uninterestedly. Machado's critical spirit is sharp. One must search for the spirit of a book, must examine it, and deepen it until one finds its soul…" ASSIS, g , p. As an author who is in tune with his time, he also chooses to stay away from both a romantic and a realistic perspective of originality. The article, which addresses Brazilian poetry, resumes the analysis that he made about the same topic in , viz.

He also referred to the same topic in a chronicle of Notas semanais [ Weekly Notes ] from In this chronicle he makes some reflections based on Baudelaire's legacy: For the critic and fictionist, they understand Victor Hugo, but do not understand Baudelaire so well. This is clearly asserted in his article from a year before, i. He states that "Realism knows neither necessary nor accessory relations; its aesthetics is the inventory" ASSIS, h , p. Thus, when Machado de Assis reflects upon the national post-romantic poetry, he seems to be close to Baudelaire's literary modernism and in the scope of a discussion in which new aesthetic definitions are proposed according to the aesthetic experiences of that time.

He does not want to make an inventory of that, but to observe it according to the values of the current time, or as Charles Baudelaire , p. It is a place of ephemeral and brief beauty, and a theme that the fictionist is able to acclaim. This still relates to Baudelaire, to whom the literary work encompasses the beauty it renders sacred in the memory of the present together with the eternal values of the past, and the fortuitous and contingent values of the present.

Machado de Assis keeps a logical, formal, and constant structure in his texts, which makes possible for him to stylize irony. Besides that, in his texts he often makes it clear that he complements them with prefaces and with situations from someone else's texts. Thus, his narratives cover a course of constitutive tensions that tells us of his way of writing, which at the same time enables us to keep a method of reading his fiction. Machado's literary discourse is constructed along the side of somebody else's discourse. In Machado's text, the presence of the other stems from the one who speaks.

For the fictionist, one text complements the other just as life complements art. The critic Machado de Assis requires that the Brazilian literature take a new stand and have a new reader. Thus, his talent is directed towards the creation of his narrator, who is given a voice that amplifies the narrative's point of view by making use of other people's arguments. Machado achieves an aesthetical autonomy in Brazilian literature and starts to require a new and even more experienced reader for his texts.

As we have stated before, this is a short story comprised of reflections and refractions of the news of a fire that occurred in a port area of Montevideo. According to the report present in two of his chronicles from , viz. He does that by providing us with an interweaving of situations that unleashed the creative process of the short story and created a space of interlocution where the intellectual friends, the boy Bandeira, the writer Machado de Assis and the engineer Abel Ferreira, could meet.

I did not make up what I'm about to tell you, nor did my friend Abel. It was stamped on my memory, and here it goes, exactly the same. You will not find the sharp point, the peculiar soul that Abel gives to everything he expresses, be it his idea or, as it is in this case, someone else's story ASSIS, e , p. Thus, Machado de Assis takes on the structure and the narrative of a story that is given to him.

He keeps his narrator away from the position of an anonymous mediator, and with that point of view he seems to be involved in the narrative. Between authors and texts, there is an interweaving of voices in the course of 49 years, when echoes and implications are placed without conflict. Thus, the chronicler's voice characterizes the event reported in the short story and establishes the use of words in Machado's penultimate short story.

As we will see later on in this text, it also guides the reading of the epigraph. From different voices and diverse narrative lines, it associates not only memory with fiction, but also the perceptions of existence in terms of fiction and memory data coded with fiction. In the scope of the literary trends of that period and of narrative poetics, this is an amalgam between friendship and reading relationships. We should also mention that the voices of discourse bring indicators of place and time to enunciation and materialize the dialogic relations of the text.

In the creative process of the short story, Machado de Assis registers an echo of voices that is accepted and well assimilated in the constitutive development of the narrative. The case of the short story also presupposes an encounter between Manuel Bandeira and Machado de Assis at Largo do Machado [Machado Public Square] during a streetcar ride. Bandeira recalls this moment in the chronicle Machado de Assis , p. We should say that despite being skeptical and with no faith in mankind, Machado de Assis behaved with cordiality and kindness in life.

I remember that at the age of fourteen I got on a streetcar at Largo do Machado [Machado Public Square] and so it happened that I was sitting next to the old writer. It would be natural if he did not give attention to me and kept on reading. And with pleasure I washed my hair, My friend. And with pleasure I washed my tresses, My friend.

I bound it with gold And waited for you, My friend.


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This is a song of waiting, but note that the girl has washed her hair a prenuptial rite also found in Sephardic songs and bound it an old Germanic custom denoting betrothal or marriage. The stags and fountains of Meogo have nearly come to symbolise the genre for many readers whose familiarity is restricted to anthologies, but in fact the stags occur only in Meogo and the fountains rarely outside his work.

Her boyfriend claims he is dying and losing his mind, but he never completes either task. If he were truthful he would go mad and drop dead. Cantigas de amor Some very early cantigas de amor hardly differ from early cantigas de amigo except in the gender of the speaking voice. Here is an example by Bernal de Bonaval: Ai Deus, que mh-a fezestes mais ca min amar, mostrade-mh-a u possa con ela falar; se non, dade-mh a morte.

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The lady I love and call my Lady — Show her to me, God, if you please, and if not, just give me death. That one that you made the most beautiful of all, oh God, please just let me see her, and if not, just give me death. Oh God, who made me love her more than me, show her to me, where I can talk with her, and if not, just give me death.

In this song, which uses an aaB strophic form rare in Amor, common in Amigo , the speaker praises the lady, declares his love, loyalty and mortal suffering, and asks God either to grant him what he wants or to let him die. Curiously, what he wants is to see her and talk with her — just as in the cantigas de amigo.

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And what will I do when he goes elsewhere to serve another Lady? What it suggests is rather that Amigolike songs existed before the earliest known Amor, and that the female-voiced tradition could be incorporated into the male-voiced genre. The dramatic complexity of the situation, which outstrips that of nearly any other cantiga de amor, could be attributed either to an early experimental stage in the development of the genre in the thirteenth century, or to a long-standing tradition which was subsequently abandoned in favour of simpler scenarios. As the thirteenth century progresses the genre tends to become less flexible.

What poets aim at is elegance of form and subtlety of argument and expression in handling a few fixed kinds of situation. Rare is the poem which stands out for the situation it represents. But there are exceptions, including parodies. Then this transgression is itself parodied. How did it get into a cantiga de amor, where references to the physical world are so rare? Though she now shows me her frown Let her still come and take me down In the night, in the moonlight.

Though she treats me really bad Let her still come and make me glad In the night, in the moonlight. Why cannot this be a cantiga de amor? How can we tell this is an insult and not an amorous invitation? There are several ways. First, though her name is not given, the woman is identified line 1 , violating the conventions of a cantiga de amor.

Second, the speaker asks her to come out once more to a rendezvous at night, under the moonlight, a scandalous suggestion in the social context of the thirteenth century. And finally, this invitation, framed as if it were a romantic plea for reconciliation, clearly presupposes prior sexual activities. You see me here dying, and you lie there fucking Your woman. The careful placing of obscenities all located in the verse just before the refrain, and only used in the last two strophes is typical of the genre: The early trend after the Hebrew series was deciphered in towards seeing a genetic link between kharajat and cantigas de amigo seems now to have been over-hasty.

If those possibilities mark the limit at one end that of reduction of the script, it is rare to find a script in Amigo that exceeds the general form given above, and those are texts where both strophic form and script overstep the boundaries of the matrix. In Amor the elements of the script rarely vary much, while in CEM they can be almost anything.

And you want to talk with me? You swore that no matter what, you would come willingly Before the day had ended; you broke your word, you liar! The background information x, y is: Thus we can represent the script as: There are constraints on the possible combinations of speaker and addressee, which can be represented as in Figure 1. These combinatory possibilities, their flexibility and constraints, point to a pre-existing tradition; and together with the rhetoric and form of the cantigas de amigo, suggest that tradition was old.

It has the hallmarks of an oral genre of folksong that must have been at least centuries old when the first surviving texts were written down, roughly in the s. The early forms of Amigo aaB, aaBB, and kindred strophic designs and the rhetoric — whereby a script is slowly revealed — seem inextricably linked with the nature of the scripts. Form, pragmatics and rhetoric are so intricately interconnected that to ask which came first seems a chicken-or-egg issue. This intimate interrelation between the main aspects of poetic composition leaving aside the music, about which we know very little also seems to underwrite the thesis, argued more than a century ago, that Amigo is rooted in native folksong from the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula.

But what about the other two genres? While there has been much debate about Amigo, most scholars blithely assume that Amor comes from France. The considerable formal debt of Amor to Occitan and Old French lyric is undeniable, and many scholars have pointed to clear thematic parallels. It seems likely that parallelism, certain strophic forms, and at least some of the thematics of Amor existed before any Occitan or French influence, but it is difficult to go much beyond that, since the genre has been so tinged or tainted by foreign sway that we cannot trace its stemma.

Only Lang, among the pioneers, seems to have understood that the poetry of insult must also have had deep roots in Iberia. Hernando, , pp. There is no comparably large body of verse in Occitan, Old French, or Italian; and CEM are certainly not, as Tavani has suggested, a kind of deformation of the Occitan sirventes by a people whose ethical and political intelligence was not up to that of those beyond the Pyrenees. The Galician-Portuguese poetry of insult has nothing to do with the sirventes, and can legitimately be seen as a continuation of the Roman customs of convicium insult and reflagitatio public dunning.

How could Alfonso X, and other monarchs and magnates, not only have tolerated but encouraged and enjoyed songs of insult? How could they themselves have composed them? In the case of Alfonso X, most of his secular output is in this genre, and among them are some of the most brilliant in the corpus. The only answer I can see that makes sense is that a deeply rooted Roman tradition of comic insult had made this genre an important part of the culture of Iberia, and of the north-west quadrant in particular.

The social and poetic matrix of an oral tradition is by definition deep. And even if rhymed strophic forms could hardly have existed in the time of the Roman Empire, the rhetoric of insult psogos, vituperatio, convicium etc. The final question, then, is this: To which we can only say: Their distinctive properties — a unified devotional subject matter, a single dominant poetic form, an apparent single author, an exemplary manuscript tradition with an independent tradition of iconography, and an unbroken musical tradition — derive from the special circumstances in which they were commissioned, 29 Catullus, 42 Peter Bing and Rip Cohen, Games of Venus: Routledge, , pp.

Catullus, Virgil , sometimes with mutual insults. The CSM are perhaps the most personal of all the cultural projects of King Alfonso X of Castile, later known as Alfonso el Sabio Alfonso the Learned or Alfonso the Wise , a testimony of his devotion to the Virgin Mary, and a conscious attempt to portray himself as the troubadour, confidant and ward of the Queen of Heaven, at a time when his power and competence to rule were under threat.

Their unity is a matter of design rather than essence, and conceals an enormous variety of authors, origins, content, styles, and techniques; the apparently perfect manuscript tradition points to a highly developed workshop system and a reluctance to release these royal treasures to the wider world. The CSM fall into two main types: The predominant poetic form is a precursor of the French virelai, known by its Arabic name zajal Sp.

Each zajal has a refrain which is thematically and metrically central to the poem: The music implements this pattern, so that the piece begins with the melody for the refrain, generally a repeated AA phrase; different melodic material BB, often of a different tessitura, suggesting a soloist rather than a chorus accompanies the new narrative material, before the refrain music returns for the end of the strophe and is then repeated for the refrain proper. The parts of the zajal are traditionally labelled with terms borrowed from the later Spanish villancico: The first nucleus of CSM was a collection of poems, organised in a regular, rosary-like progression of miragres and loores, with every tenth poem a loor.

Most of the early narratives are taken from the Latin collections of miracles of the Virgin which proliferated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and vernacular collections such as the Miracles de Nostre Dame of Gautier de Coinci; even at this stage, however, miracle stories from Iberian shrines such as Montserrat and Salas are included, and Iberian locations are provided for others.

Santiago St James is emblematically bettered by the Virgin in a version of the miracle of the revival of a pilgrim CSM For greater visual effect, the fifth cantiga of each decade would be illustrated by a double-page spread of twelve panels. Other stories relate miracles associated with the royal family, including Alfonso himself, tales of Reconquest skirmishes, and finally, a cycle of poems narrating miraculous events associated with the town of Porto de Santa Maria, which Alfonso himself established on the Andalucian coast, in the former Arabic town of Al-Quanat. While the earlier poems show some evidence of personal involvement by Alfonso himself, and show the metrical and linguistic innovation which characterise his outrageous cantigas de escarnho, the later poems show the extension of production techniques in which commissioned writers produced poems of a standard metrical pattern, relatively easy to set to music.

Many of the poems have roots in folktales and popular traditions of the miraculous, and are narrated to amuse as well as to instruct. A priest who dares ban his flock from going to a church of the Virgin is left bleating like a goat ; another, who steals an altarcloth to make underclothes, is bent double by night cramp until he confesses Every refrain reinforces the message that if you serve the Virgin, as Alfonso has done so emblematically, she will look after you.

Alfonso died in , deposed and rejected, worn out by fighting cancer and his son. The Cantigas de Santa Maria remain as a monument to his hope. Niemeyer, ; reprinted with Glossary, Lisbon: Universidade, —28; reprinted, Lisbon: Universidade, ; reprinted Lisbon: Studies on Medieval Hispanic Metrics London: A Poetic Biography Leiden: Mellen, Parkinson, Stephen ed. Historical writing has a long Iberian lineage, with native Iberian historians such as Lucas of Tuy Chronicon Mundi, pre-dating the emergence of Portuguese historiography. When transferred to the Parliament Building in S. Bento in it officially became the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo National Archive of the Archive Tower , a name it retained in its move to a purpose-built archive complex in the University of Lisbon in Vincent, patron saint of Lisbon.

All translations from Old Portuguese are by the author. In this way Lopes signals that he is marshalling historical materials, not just retelling them. Less obvious, and only slowly being uncovered by current research, is the extent of his overall debt to other historical narratives, and the extent to which he reproduces, paraphrases, abbreviates, expands, and rewrites them. Lopes is disarmingly candid and often robust and trenchant in identifying and usually resolving questions of disagreement between his sources: If at this point you read that the Castilians cut their lances and made them shorter than was their custom, know it to be true and doubt it not …8 There was no advantage to the Portuguese in their choice of battleground, nor hills or valleys to confuse the enemy, as some ill-meaning writers narrate in their books.

Lopes equally excels in expressing the complexity of chronological sequence and of interacting forces, which his sources typically reduce to a monotone chronological sequence, in order to pursue simultaneous narratives: The third strand in the literary argument, the prophetic, is not stated: This is added to the emergence of the common people, the povoo,12 as a political force: The main streets were too small for them, and they went by alleys and byways, each one trying to be the first.

Lopes expresses wonderment and revulsion at the violence meted out to perceived enemies a bishop, an abbess, even a notary. The same observation and literary force is deployed in the descriptions of Oporto preparing to welcome the Master, and of Lisbon awaiting news of the final battle. Lopes catalogues the names thrown at them by the nobility: In a memorable comic moment, the defeated captain of the castle of Portel takes his wife into exile in style, prefacing a parodic song with a bawdy gloss: Estampa, , p.

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This passage was brought to my attention by Josiah Blackmore. Other snatches of verse are fired from the ramparts of Lisbon while it is besieged by the Castilians, and bons mots are tossed between disputing courtiers. The mechanics of a change of narrative become a personal change of view: And the Castilians, not wishing to contradict them, ran all the more.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara? Son of a cleric, brought up at the court of Afonso V, he was groomed for royal patronage, and chosen as chronicler for his rhetorical skills. For Zurara the writing of history was a humanistic literary enterprise, deploying rhetoric for the noble end of recounting glorious deeds and ensuring the abiding fame of the great and those who served under them. The captains now take the role of valiant warriors: Zurara must nevertheless take the credit for recognising the common humanity of the Other, in his portrayal of the pathos of the separation of families in the first recorded slave market in Lagos.

He transferred his attention to theatres of war closer to home, in his lengthy accounts of the careers of the governors of Ceuta, Pedro de Meneses and Duarte de Meneses. The emerging Portuguese empire needed no justification or apology, only an unequal distribution of the glory and the credit for its inspiration. Recent linguistic research shows that the writings of King Duarte were in the vanguard of changes in the language. Pedro I, ed Giuliano Macchi, introd and tr. Teresa Amado, 2nd edn Lisbon: Torquato de Sousa Soares Lisbon: Pedro de Meneses, ed.

Maria Teresa Brocardo Lisbon: Duarte de Meneses, ed. Universidade Nova, Others Castelo perigoso, ed. Elsa Maria Branco da Silva Lisbon: Adelino de Almeida Calado Aveiro: Universidade, A Demanda do Santo Graal, ed.


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    • Adelino de Almeida Calado Coimbra: Universidade, Leal conselheiro: Orto do esposo, ed. Irene Freire Nunes Lisbon: Palgrave Macmillan, Deyermond, Alan ed. Oakley, The English in Portugal —87 Warminster: Variorum, —— Prince Henry the Navigator: A Life New Haven and London: Earle Gil Vicente Juliet Perkins On the night of 7 June , the royal apartments were invaded by a rumbustious figure, a herdsman sent on behalf of his village to find out whether it was true that the Queen of Portugal, Maria of Castile, had given birth.

    He showers warm praise on the baby heir to the throne and his lineage before ushering in his companions to present their gifts of eggs, milk, honey and cheese, but not without muttering that they too will have to run the gauntlet of the pages at the door. It allows also a fleeting glimpse of the gulf that had opened up in sixteenth-century Portugal between courtier and peasant, palace and countryside, conspicuous consumption and subsistence diet, leisure and unremitting toil.

    It identifies the author as someone sympathetic to rural life and people, yet at ease and of some standing at Court. That standing can be explained by documentary evidence that the playwright of had been for some time a goldsmith in the service of Queen Leonor, Dowager Queen since Certainly, a document of in respect of his second son, Belchior, refers to him as no longer living. If this biographical information is sparse, even more unclear is exactly when he started to write and what prompted him.

    We do know that the monologue of June was his own initiative. It pleased the Dowager Queen so much that she asked for more, and from then on he became an indispensable furnisher of plays for the Court.

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    In the prologue addressed to his patron, he stated he would not have thought to publish them had he not been so commanded; if his works were worth remembering it was because many of them were devotional pieces directed to the service of God, and nothing of virtue should be left undone. Manchester University Press, , p. Imprensa Nacional—Casa da Moeda, , pp. This is the only source for all but a fraction of his work.

    There is no mention of them in the first Index of prohibited books of , but in that of seven plays, all of which were circulating in chapbook or broadsheet form, were found wanting. It is widely held that the protection of the Queen Regent, Queen Catarina, was vital to ensuring that his work passed unscathed and that the Inquisition relented a little between and This was not the case for the second edition in , a severely mutilated version of the works, displaying a Counter-Reformation mentality in full spate.

    Despite the corrections produced by the best efforts of scholars such as Braamcamp Freire and Vasconcelos, the chronology of the works remains tentative. Not all scholars have accepted this. Conde de Sabugosa, Auto da Festa. Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, , pp. Three Discovery Plays Warminster: In his preface to Don Duardos, c. The moralities, too, have a looser meaning than do their French and English 9 Thomas R. Livraria Bertrand, , pp. Associated University Presses, Understandably, given his Christian faith in redemption and salvation, the one genre missing is tragedy.

    Another critical concern has been the lack of unified action, whether real or perceived. Many of the plays are episodic in structure, reflecting the processional nature of proto-theatrical representations, religious and secular, liturgical and courtly, with which Gil Vicente would have been familiar. A fruitful comparison may be with the law court, where witnesses are called, questioned and heard, and then leave the room rather than linger to take part in a generalised discussion.

    In common with his contemporaries, Gil Vicente wrote for a bilingual court, at which Spanish poets and dramatists were well known and highly regarded. The four Queen Consorts who spanned his literary lifetime were all Spanish. Out of his forty-seven plays and dramatic monologues, fifteen are totally in Portuguese, twelve are totally in Castilian, and the rest are a mixture of both.

    The speech of Portuguese gypsies, Jews, Moors and Africans is also characterised, and comic mileage is gained from foreign characters speaking their respective languages. A major element in Vicentine theatre itself totally in verse is its lyric poetry. Songs permeate the plays, whether as extracts or in full.

    Many were pre-existing, but some were composed expressly by him. They develop both the argument of the plays and the psychological characterisation of the personages. The autos were almost all performed on royal premises, whether in chamber or chapel, in Lisbon or wherever the king was residing. It is likely that the royal members of the audience sat on a dais, their ladies-in-waiting perhaps on cushions whilst other spectators stood. A good deal of information about staging and scenery is contained in stage directions or is embedded in the dialogue, 15 Stephen Reckert, From the Resende Songbook, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 15 London: GIL VICENTE 61 and indicates that Gil Vicente had available to him, at least at some of the locations where his plays were put on, elaborate scenery and sets, a raised stage, and some means of control of lighting, to allow the performance of the numerous scenes which take place at night.

    For indoor performance he would have used torches or candles, to be dimmed at will; outdoors, curtains could have been positioned to allow or exclude light. As court playwright, Gil Vicente was obliged to reflect royal policy and power, its overseas enterprises in military, religious or colonising spheres. Where panegyric and propaganda are evident, they are expressed with subtlety. This intimate circle, however, was not a watertight compartment. He was a conduit of knowledge, presenting a crosssection of society that Court and courtiers might choose to ignore, whether or not it was meant to constitute a source of amusement.

    His plays kept in view also the countryside from which many had recently gravitated to Lisbon, left depopulated by the peasantry and undirected by the landowners and gentry. In return, the chapbook editions of his plays bear witness to their wider reception by the populace. All the texts repay close attention, not the least for their inexhaustible source of information and insight into sixteenth-century Portugal. The following discussion of plays which makes no pretence at being comprehensive will be grouped under three broad categories: Editorial Inova, , pp.

    His sudden access of erudition amazes his companions, an erudition that he accepts as the God-given gift of tongues. This opposition between the contemplative and active life is sketched out in the next play, Auto dos Reis Magos Play of the Wise Men , with the additional hint of class differences when the shepherds come across the page attending the Three Kings on their journey to Bethlehem. In this play, performed at Madre de Deus, she asserts her refusal to marry on the grounds that it is a form of captivity.

    On the other hand, she rejects the idea of becoming a nun.

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    Her head is turned by her conviction that it is she who will bear the Messiah. Though spiritual enough to receive a divine message, she fails to understand that her presumption disqualifies her from being the Blessed Virgin. During the action, Cassandra progresses from resistance to the good advice given by the Old Testament prophets and the sibyls of Classical Antiquity, through her refusal of the truth, towards acceptance of the reality when faced with the Virgin and Child, and finally her joining in worship and hymn singing, urging on the soldiers of Christ. For all their apparent simplicity, the pastoral autos contain ambiguity and irony.

    Such is the ornateness of a cross, that they fail to recognise it as such. It is left to Faith speaking Portuguese to enlighten these rustics. However, the last laugh is not on her, nor on the congregation at Matins. We have, in embryo, the dichotomy that Gil Vicente would raise more than once, between the lost simplicity of the early Church and its sheepskin-wearing pastors, and the over-elaborate and empty ritual of his day. This fantastical work, based on a series of monologues by the various characters and personifications, is another illustration of universal homage to the Christ Child.

    His talent for sweetening the bitter pill of dogma comes to the fore in the Auto da Barca do Inferno, the first of three satires in which the dead face judgement and are sent on their way to Hell, Purgatory or, very rarely, to Heaven. In this evergreen morality, a series of characters traipse to and fro between the ships of Hell and of Heaven, learning from a garrulous devil and a laconic angel why they are condemned to eternal damnation.

    A nobleman, a usurer, a cobbler, a friar, a bawd, a Jew, a magistrate, an advocate and a hanged thief have all sinned according to the opportunities their station in life or occupation have allowed and have failed to earnestly repent.

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    The only characters to escape damnation are a simpleton, pure in intention if not in speech, and four knights who have died defending the Faith in North Africa. Since Cassandra also rejects the veil, she is not seeking the independence and autonomy that the religious life was able to give. What distinguishes these souls is that they are penitent, albeit only at the last minute. At their piteous tears, Christ arrives to bear them off, rather as if he were harrowing Hell, except that He is already risen.

    Whether they go directly to Heaven or have to pass through Purgatory is not specified. For his most elevated religious play, the allegorical Auto da Alma Play of the Soul , performed for Maundy Thursday, Gil Vicente eschews damnation and punishment as he tracks the path of a Soul along the journey of life to an inn Mother Church , alternately urged on by an angel and delayed by a devil. This beautiful and serene play combines wit, compassion, theology and optimism. In the late s, this serenity had disappeared.

    In the latter play, Rome, personified as a young girl over whom her friends are fighting, can bring nothing to the Christmas exchange-fair that will allow her to acquire peace, truth and faith. Into this picture of religious discord are integrated two farmers, discontented with their respective wives, epitomising the disharmony of the world. The last part of the play features a lively band of country lads and lasses who raise spirits with their flirting chit-chat and exchanges with the Seraphim. From him, they learn of the true purpose of the Fair and its patroness, the Virgin, to whom they sing a beautiful lyric of praise.

    The details of their complaints reveal harsh lives, blows of fate and injustices. Juggling Portuguese and Castilian lovers with skill while her husband is away on this voyage to get rich — though against a seemingly illogical chronology — the wife is a born survivor.

    Both accept at face value the account that each gives of their lives during their separation.

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    The farce of the Velho da Horta The Old Man and the Garden is pitiless in its mockery of an old man lusting after a pretty young girl. His cupidity leads to his penury, since he falls into the clutches of a rapacious procuress, Branca Gil. The girl warns him at the outset that his folly will bring his downfall, but he will not be deterred.

    He even tries to court the maiden in the language of palace poetry, which the courtiers in the audience would recognise as theirs. In part, a victim of love when taken out of its appropriate framework, the old man brings his wife and four children down with him, for they are left penniless.

    Most acutely observed is the argument that ensues between the two women. Isabel furiously points out the inconsistency of presenting an elegant, leisured face to a suitor, whilst having to do the household chores. Gil Vicente treated courtship and marriage seriously as well as humorously.

    Imprensa Nacional—Casa da Moeda, , vol. It opens with the widower lamenting the death of his beloved wife, with whom he had lived a harmonious existence. Through obstinacy or lack of experience, she prefers good looks and sweet talk from an impecunious squire, who turns tyrant on marriage. The last scene shows her riding on his back to a meeting with a former admirer, now a hermit. The first two are comic characters but the Castilian is presented seriously no doubt in deference to the importance of that country in relation to Portugal.

    Fama treats her suitors to a history and geography lesson, turning them down on the grounds that Portuguese conquests, commerce, military power and defence of Christianity against Islam, render insufficient anything that they can offer. As she is crowned with laurel by Faith and Fortitude and borne away in a triumphal car, the message is made clear: Christian Portugal has achieved superiority over the Ancient World. As a contrast to the main action, a parody of courtly love is supplied by a wild man, Camilote, and his ugly lady, Maimonda.

    Occasional, festival and allegorical plays These spectacular entertainments, to mark royal betrothals, births, ceremonial entrances, and so forth, allowed Gil Vicente free reign to his fantasy. They have never proved the most popular texts for analysis, and it is all too easy to relegate them as examples of superficial flattery and propaganda. Cambridge University Press, , p. Angelus Novus, , are exemplary in this respect. In accordance with the spirit of regeneration that the love match will bring to Portugal, a Forge of Love is set up in which a succession of characters are transformed.

    If the crooked figure of Justice is a predictable candidate, the most touching individual is a black African from Guinea. He enters the forge with the desire to emerge white. This he does, but his speech remains that of a black African. Comedy moves into pathos as Gil Vicente sketches the isolation and dismay of a man with a split racial identity, rejected by both white and black women. Gil Vicente was very far from being the only Portuguese dramatist of the sixteenth century to put a black man on stage.

    They figure in the work of other playwrights, and the traffic was not all one way, because it is very likely that one writer of religious autos had an African mother. His work, and the autos of many other popular dramatists of the sixteenth century, are only now beginning to appear in modern editions. Their study and appreciation will be a task for future generations of scholars. When we add to these the experiments in humanistic comedy of Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos we have another body of work which remains for the most part hardly known.

    It owes nothing to Gil Vicente and it had no immediate successors. It belongs to a brief period in the s in which a fully developed classical aesthetic could blend with a Catholic world view to produce a play of the highest literary and human quality. That blending will be the theme of this brief account. Ferreira was probably aware of contemporary Italian tragedy, and he certainly had before him the Roman tragedies of Seneca.

    Ferreira approached this material with the sensibility of a sixteenth-century Catholic. One of the features of classical, and of all tragedy is a sense of fate. The king tries to absolve himself of responsibility, but cannot. The fate of which he speaks is not the pagan fatum but his own weakness and his failure to control his son. The Castro is also a political play, and its message is a clear one. It is that an immoral act — the execution of an innocent woman — cannot have favourable political consequences. They are not wicked, and are willing to take 26 George Buchanan, Tragedies, ed.

    Peter Sharratt and P. EARLE personal responsibility for their actions ll. They reason that if Pedro cannot be persuaded to obey his father voluntarily then force is the only solution.