Vicente, Gil

VICENTE, GIL. - Portuguese writer, b. perhaps in 1465 and d. certainly before 1540. He is the greatest playwright of his country and one of the greatest of the Iberian peninsula; also because of the value of his work, many localities, especially in the Minho and the Beira, contend for his origin: criticism now tends to identify the playwright with the namesake, esteemed goldsmith who served Queen Donna Leonor and Don Manuel I, and whose most valuable work, the famous gold casket of the church of Nossa Senhora de Belém in Lisbon, is made with the first gold to arrive from the East discovered and colonized by the Portuguese.

G. V., having reached Lisbon at an undetermined time, presumably made his entry at court as teacher of rhetoric to the aforementioned Don Manuel; he then accompanied the court in its various sojourns, well received - once he had made himself known through the theater - and well rewarded, by Donna Leonor and Don Manuel as well as by Don João III.

V.'s work consists of 44 (or, according to certain scholars today, whose opinion is still debated, 46) autos: 10 tragicomedies, 13 farces, 17 "works of devotion" or "moralities," and four compositions difficult to classify; of these, 16 were written in Portuguese, 11 in Castilian and 17 bilingual, whence comes the Iberian importance, also linguistic, of this theater. To G. V.'s first autos, the Auto da Visitação, or Monólogo do Vaqueiro (1502), the Auto Pastori Castelhano (1502) and the Auto dos Reis Magos (1503), is owed the transformation of the pastoral eclogue, inspired by Christian feasts, into dramatic production: with them was born the auto, the peninsular form of the sacred drama, which would reach its highest peaks with the Spanish work of Calderón. But the horizon of themes, characters and moods of V.'s dramatic activity was rapidly widening, as is documented by the chronology, even if often uncertain, of the autos, of the most important of which the titles are given here: the Farsa do Escudeiro (1508?) - commonly known by the first words of the text, Quem tem farelos? - a presentation of powerful realism of various human types; the Auto da Alma (1508?), inspired by the mystery of the Passion; the tragicomedy Exortação da guerra (1513), an ardent apology for war for the faith; the Auto da Fama (1515), a fervent allegory of Portuguese action of discovery and conquest in Africa; the three Barcas, do Inferno (1516), do Purgatorio (1518) and da Gloria (1519), marvelous transformations into dramatic masterpieces of the medieval "dances of death," of which the traditional religious inspiration is maintained with the addition, however, of motifs of implacable social satire, in a vast and most animated human tableau; the Pranto de Maria Parda (1522), the most celebrated of the minor compositions - the devilish lament of a drunkard over the rise in the price of wine - a composition to which only the dithyramb Bacco in Toscana of Redi, among works of the genre, or, in painting, the picture Los Borrachos of Velázquez can come close for vivacity; the Farsa de Inês Pereira (1523) which presents, in a form dramatically perfect for unity of action and for a disconcerting and yet most logical development of scenes, the most expressive comic types of the "Vicentine" theater; the Auto Pastori Português (1523), which in staging love contrasts of shepherds of the Beira finds occasion to give scenes of enchanting popular lyricism; O Clérigo da Beira (1526?), an indirect but strong reproach to the selfish indifference of the great ecclesiastical dignitaries toward the neglected clergy of the countryside; the Tragicomedia da Serra da Estrela (1527), another marvelous lyrical exaltation of the Beira, presented with an abundance of Mozarabic customs; the tragicomedy Prunfo do Inverno (1529), a dramatization, in Renaissance form, of the mythical theme of the struggle between winter and summer; the farce Auto da Lusitânia (1531), on the theme of the contrast between the greed for command and the irony of conscience; the Auto da Cananeia (1534), which with lyrical transport of profound faith develops the biblical theme of the acceptance, by Jesus, into the kingdom of his Grace, of the woman of Canaan.

By its courtly nature, G. V.'s theater has as its immediate purpose that of entertaining; the author's vis comica corresponds marvelously to what the age and the environment demand of him, and to perceive comedy in what surrounds him is provided, in G. V., by his detachment from life which he acutely scrutinizes, while to communicate this comedy to the spectator the most vivid mobility of the author's artistic realization attends to it. But the profound sense of a man of the Middle Ages that is in G. V. gives to this natural vis comica of his an extraordinary force and moral integrity, both in the social and in the religious sense, the latter evident beyond certain attitudes of the playwright that may outwardly suggest those of the rebels of the Reformation or of their immediate predecessors (someone has ideally likened G. V. to Erasmus), in his absolute devotion to the spirit of Catholic tradition. On the other hand the strong culture, and not only religious, that lies beneath this sure faith, does not take away the enchantment of the freshness of the "Vicentine" theater, which one does not know whether it is more suggestive in the representation of the landscape (with a predilection for that of the mountainous region of the Beira) or in that of the Portuguese people, which for the writer is a living, concrete entity, whose vitality stands out against the emptiness and exteriority of the courtiers' way of being (for whom G. V. writes), they too portrayed, in their attitudes, with equal acumen and felicity of art. From the sincere love for the people and for the homeland, which inspires G. V., comes one of the most enduring aspects of his theater; the reproduction of national life in a lavish profusion of folklore, with a sudden lyricism that suggestively disrupts the dramatic framework, at the same time recomposing it thanks to the power of the expressive means and the psychological readiness of the artist.

Giuseppe Carlo Rossi