Gil Vicente
Gil Vicente was in Santarém on the 26th of January 1531 when word arrived that Lisbon had been shaken by an earthquake. Friars were already spreading the claim that the disaster was divine punishment on Portugal for harboring its Jewish and converted Christian communities. Vicente reportedly intervened in person, then sent a letter to King John III, rebuking the friars for their fear-mongering. By the accounts that survive, his intervention may have prevented a massacre.
Manuel I and John III both kept Vicente at their courts, and his thirty years of service produced at least forty-four plays. He wrote them, acted in them, directed them, and composed music for many of them. Working in both Portuguese and Spanish, he earned recognition as the Father of Portuguese drama. Together with Juan del Encina, he is also considered joint-father of Spanish drama. Critics have called him the 'Portuguese Plautus.'
Scholars disagree on Vicente's birth year, with proposals ranging from 1460 to the mid-1470s. His birthplace is equally disputed, with several towns putting forward competing claims. A court goldsmith bearing the same name may or may not have been the same person. His last work is dated to 1536. He was dead by 1540, but neither the year nor the location of his death is known with certainty. The Inquisition later suppressed portions of his writing, and his reputation faded for generations. His rediscovery, when it came, would owe something to his own children.
In 1493, Vicente was serving as master of rhetoric to the Duke of Beja. That duke would soon become King Manuel I of Portugal. The post gave Vicente entry to the royal court. His path from courtly official to playwright began nine years later, in a royal bedchamber.
O Monólogo do vaqueiro, 'Monologue of the Cowherd,' was Vicente's first known theatrical work, written in Spanish. The occasion was the birth of Prince John, the future John III of Portugal, to Maria of Aragon, wife of King Manuel. Vicente performed it himself, in the queen's rooms, on the night of the 8th of June 1502. Among the audience were the king, the queen, the dowager queen Leonor of Viseu, and Beatriz of Portugal.
The play drew on the imagery of the Adoration of the Shepherds. It staged the offering of simple rustic gifts, including cheese, to the newborn prince. Queen Leonor asked Vicente for an encore at the Christmas matins. Rather than repeat himself, he wrote a new play, the Auto Pastoril Castelhano, or 'Castilian Pastoral Act.' The court wanted a third piece for Twelfth Night, and he delivered the Auto of the Wise Kings.
Leonor of Viseu became Vicente's most important patron. She continued to commission work from him in the years that followed. By 1520, Vicente was directing the commemoration in honor of Eleanor of Spain, the third wife of Manuel I. In 1521, he began serving John III. He had no permanent company of players. For each production, he recruited students and court servants. Plays rarely ran longer than a single night. Royal documents from that same period of court life name a goldsmith also called Gil Vicente. Whether they were the same man is a question scholars have never fully settled.
Between 1503 and 1506, a goldsmith at the Portuguese court crafted the Belém Monstrance for the Jerónimos Monastery. The gold he used had been brought back from East Africa following Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India. The monstrance featured a ceremonial canopy framed by two high pinnacled counterforts, resembling the portal of the Church of Belém. The man who made it was named Gil Vicente.
Royal documents from 1509 place the goldsmith at the court of Évora. That year he became overseer of three institutions. These were the Convento de Cristo in Tomar, Nossa Senhora de Belém, and the Hospital de Todos-os-Santos in Lisbon. Technical language in the playwright's scripts lends credibility to the identification of the two men as one. The goldsmith is also documented as working for Dona Leonor, the widow of King John II. In 1511, he was nominated vassal of the King. In 1512, he served as representative jeweller in the Casa dos Vinte e Quatro. In 1513, the other masters at the Casa da Moeda, the Portuguese national mint, elected him to represent them in Lisbon.
Camilo Castelo Branco pushed back against the identification in 1881. His letter, titled 'Gil Vicente, Embargos à fantasia do Sr. Teófilo Braga,' argued that playwright and goldsmith were two different people. Teófilo Braga had initially held the opposite view. After reading a study by Sanches de Baena showing different genealogies for two men of the same name, Braga changed his position. Brito Rebelo then examined documents from the Portuguese national archive and found those genealogies historically inconsistent, reopening the question.
Vicente held the title of master of rhetoric to King Manuel I since the mid-1490s. If the playwright and the goldsmith were one person, his professional life spanned two demanding crafts across the same decades. The question remains unanswered. His theatrical output from the same period reached across devotional plays, farces, and tragicomedies. One sequence of three plays from that period would become his most celebrated work.
Auto da Barca do Inferno, written in 1516, places its characters on a dock at the edge of eternity. Among those who arrive to await their fate are a nobleman, a madam, and a corrupt judge. Also present are a dissolute friar, a dishonest shoemaker, a hanged man, and a Jew. Each must board one of two boats. One sails to Hell. The dock, in Vicente's construction, strips social rank of all its protection.
The devotional tradition behind the Trilogy stretches back to Auto da Fé in 1510, which traces a soul's journey toward the Mother Church. The soul is delayed by the Devil and guided back by an Angel. Vicente's seventeen devotional works, which he called 'Obras de devoção,' blended Medieval morality plays with theatrical mumming. They also incorporated the liturgical dramas performed at Corpus Christi festivals. Luís Vicente, his son, would later classify the sacred plays as acts and mysteries and the secular ones as farces, comedies, and tragicomedies.
Exortação da Guerra, Auto da Fama, and Cortes de Júpiter all reflect Vicente's loyalty to Portugal, but none of them simply celebrate the empire. He was equally concerned with the corruption that commercial expansion from the East had introduced. Sudden wealth had arrived alongside disruption of the social order. The poverty of Portugal's lower classes, concealed beneath the empire's outward glory, was a recurring target.
Sailors, gypsies, and peasants appear in his casts alongside fairies, demons, and figures of allegory. His use of dialect in the comedies delineated the social class of each character precisely. Two simultaneous scenes in a single staging might be divided by nothing more than a curtain. His works show what one account describes as a spirit in conflict. The cruelty of some social portrayals sat alongside the tenderness of his devotional scenes.
His philosophical framework, as he described it in a letter to John III of Portugal, encompassed two worlds. One is abstract: a serene realm of divine love, inner peace, and, in his own words, 'resplendent glory.' The other is physical: tired, without order, and beyond remedy. His satirical plays lived in that second world. The characters he mocked inhabited a realm he considered already false and imperfect.
Farsa de Inês Pereira, written in 1523, is one of his later farces. The Latin epigram castigat ridendo mores translates as 'comedy criticises customs through humour.' It is attributed most often to Jean-Baptiste de Santeul, though sometimes to Horace or Molière. Vicente's satirical method anticipated it. Several of his poems appear in Garcia de Resende's Cancioneiro. He also wrote vilancetes and cantigas influenced by a palatial style and troubadour themes. Preserving all of this output would fall to the next generation.
Paula and Luís Vicente published their father's complete works in Lisbon in 1561-1562. The first edition gathered the full range of his output, from plays to lyric poetry. A second edition followed in 1586. By then, the Inquisition had imposed heavy censorship on the content, and large sections appeared in altered or expurgated form. Vicente's reputation faded as the most critical passages were stripped from circulation.
The third edition did not appear until 1834, when Barreto Feio published it in Hamburg. After 1834, his work found new audiences. Max Bruch and Robert Schumann both set Vicente's poetry to music in German, with most translations made by Emanuel van Geibel. Bruch composed Von den Rosen komm' ich from Vicente's 'De la rosa vengo my madre.' Schumann also set that poem, and made further settings from Vicente's work. His Spanische Liebeslieder includes 'Sañosa está la nina' as its seventh piece. His Spanisches Liederspiel draws from Vicente in Erste Begegnung, op. 74 no. 1, and Intermezzo, op. 74 no. 2. He also set Vicente's 'Canción' as his Lied, op. 29 no. 2. The Chilean composer Sylvia Soublette set 'De la rosa vengo my madre' in her song 'Del Rosal Vengo.'
The epigraph of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold quotes Vicente directly: 'The pursuit of love is like falconry.' Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo called Vicente 'the most important figure of the primitive peninsular playwrights.' He added that no one in Europe surpassed him in his time. Since 1965, the year 1465 has been almost universally accepted as Vicente's birth year. Official festivities that year marked what would have been his 500th birthday. The town of Barcelos named their football club after him, and a municipal school in Urgezes, in Guimarães, carries his name as well. Both towns claim him as their own.
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Who was Gil Vicente and why is he important to Portuguese literature?
Gil Vicente was a Portuguese playwright and poet who served at the courts of Manuel I and John III, writing at least forty-four plays in Portuguese and Spanish between roughly 1465 and 1536. He is recognized as the Father of Portuguese drama and, with Juan del Encina, as joint-father of Spanish drama. Critics have also called him the Portuguese Plautus.
What was Gil Vicente's first play and when was it performed?
Gil Vicente's first known play was O Monólogo do vaqueiro, the Monologue of the Cowherd, written in Spanish and first performed on the night of the 8th of June 1502. The occasion was the birth of Prince John, the future John III of Portugal, to Maria of Aragon, wife of King Manuel. Vicente performed it himself in the rooms of the queen.
What is the Triologia das Barcas by Gil Vicente?
The Triologia das Barcas consists of three plays: Auto da Barca do Inferno (1516), Auto da Barca do Purgatório (1518), and Auto da Barca da Glória (1519). Scholars consider it Gil Vicente's magnum opus. The plays place characters from across Portuguese society on a dock where they await transport to their eternal destination, combining Medieval morality play conventions with sharp social criticism.
Was Gil Vicente the same person as the goldsmith who made the Belém Monstrance?
A court goldsmith named Gil Vicente crafted the Belém Monstrance for the Jerónimos Monastery between 1503 and 1506, using gold from Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India. Whether this goldsmith and the playwright were the same person has been debated since at least 1881, when Camilo Castelo Branco argued they were two distinct individuals. The identification has never been definitively confirmed or ruled out.
How did the Portuguese Inquisition affect Gil Vicente's literary legacy?
The second edition of Gil Vicente's complete works, published in 1586, was heavily censored by the Inquisition, with large sections appearing in altered or expurgated form. His reputation faded for generations as the most critical passages disappeared from circulation. A third edition was not published until 1834, in Hamburg, by Barreto Feio.
What famous novel quotes Gil Vicente in its epigraph?
Gabriel García Márquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold opens with an epigraph taken directly from Gil Vicente's plays: 'The pursuit of love is like falconry.'
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9 references cited across the entry
- 3BookInternational Encyclopedia of Women ComposersAaron I. Cohen — Books & Music (USA) — 1987
- 4BookSacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary FictionCesareo Bandera — Penn State Press — 2010
- 5BookJournal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic SocietyRoyal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Ceylon Branch Colombo — Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society — 1906
- 6BookA Companion to Portuguese LiteratureThomas Foster Earle et al. — Boydell & Brewer Ltd — 2013
- 7BookThe Quarterly ReviewWilliam Gifford et al. — John Murray — 1847
- 8BookGil VicenteJack Horace Parker — Twayne Publishers — 1967
- 9BookThe Art of Portugal: 1500-1800Robert C. Smith — Meredith Press — 1968