VICENTE, GIL. - Portuguese writer, born perhaps in 1465 and certainly before 1540. He is the greatest playwright of his country and one of the greatest of the Iberian Peninsula; even for the value of his work, many places, especially in Minho and Beira, contend for his birthplace: criticism now tends to identify the playwright with the homonymous renowned goldsmith who served Queen Donna Leonor and King Don Manuel I, and whose most prized work, the famous gold custodia of the church of Nossa Senhora de Belém in Lisbon, was made with the first gold brought from the Orient discovered and colonized by the Portuguese.
G. V., who arrived in Lisbon at an undetermined time, is presumed to have entered the court as rhetoric master to the aforementioned Don Manuel; he then accompanied the court in its various stays, well received—once he had made himself known through his theater—and well rewarded, not only by Donna Leonor and Don Manuel but also by Don João III.
V.'s work consists of 44 (or, according to some modern scholars 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 are written in Portuguese, 11 in Castilian, and 17 are bilingual, from which comes the linguistic as well as Iberian importance of this theater. To G. V.'s early autos—*Auto da Visitação*, or *Monólogo do Vaqueiro* (1502), the *Auto Pastoril Castelhano* (1502), and the *Auto dos Reis Magos* (1503)—we owe the transformation of the pastoral eclogue, inspired by Christian feasts, into dramatic production: with them the *auto*, the peninsular form of sacred drama, was born, which would reach its highest peaks with the Spanish work of Calderón. But the horizon of themes, characters, and states of mind in V.'s dramatic activity quickly expanded, as documented by the chronology—though often uncertain—of the autos, the most important of which are listed 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), ardent apology for war for the faith; the *Auto da Fama* (1515), fervent allegory of Portuguese action of discovery and conquest in Africa; the three *Barcas*, *do Inferno* (1516), *do Purgatório* (1518), and *da Glória* (1519), marvelous transformations into dramatic masterpieces of the medieval "dances of death," whose traditional religious inspiration is maintained with the addition, however, of motifs of unrelenting social satire, in a vast and animated human tableau; the *Pranto de Maria Parda* (1522), the most famous of the minor compositions—a drunken woman’s lament over the rising price of wine—which can only be compared in vivacity, among works of the genre, to Redi’s *Bacco in Toscana* in poetry or Velázquez’s painting *Los Borrachos*; the *Farsa de Inês Pereira* (1523), which presents, in a dramatically perfect form for unity of action and disconcerting yet logical development of scenes, the most expressive comic types of "Vicentino" theater; the *Auto Pastoril Português* (1523), which, in staging love conflicts of shepherds from Beira, offers scenes of enchanting popular lyricism; *O Clérigo da Beira* (1526?), indirect but strong reproach to the selfish indifference of high ecclesiastical dignitaries toward the neglected rural clergy; the *Tragicomédia da Serra da Estrela* (1527), another marvelous lyrical exaltation of Beira, presented with an abundance of Mozarabic costumes; the tragicomedy *Triunfo do Inverno* (1529), dramatization in Renaissance form of the mythical theme of the struggle between Winter and Spring.
V.'s theater is characterized by the reproduction of national life in a profusion of folklore, with sudden lyricism that suggestively disrupts the dramatic framework while simultaneously reconstructing it through the power of expressive means and the psychological quickness of the artist.