If we were limited to the information about Gil Vicente furnished by his contemporaries, we should but know that he had introduced into Portugal representaÇÕes of eloquent style and novel invention imitating Enzina's eclogues with great skill and wit[93], and that the mordant comic poet Gil Vicente, who hid a serious aim beneath his gaiety and was skilled in veiling his satire in light-hearted jests, might have excelled Menander, Plautus and Terence if he had written in Latin instead of in the vulgar tongue[94]. That is, we should have known nothing that we could not learn from his plays and it is to his plays that we must go if we would be more closely acquainted with his character and his attitude towards the problems of his day. King Manuel, says DamiÃo de Goes, always kept at his Court Spanish buffoons as a corrective of the manners and habits of the courtiers[95]. The King may have had something of the sort in his mind in encouraging Gil Vicente, and probably he especially favoured his allusions to the courtiers; but we cannot for a moment consider that Vicente, friend and adviser of King JoÃo III, the grave town-councillor whose influence could check the fanaticism of the monks at Santarem—can we imagine them bowing before a mere mountebank, a strolling player?—was looked upon simply as a Court jester. The impression left by his plays is, rather, that of the worthy thoughtful face of Velazquez as painted in his Las Meninas picture, a figure closely familiar with the Court yet still somewhat aloof, apartado. like Gil Terron. Vicente regards himself as a rustico peregrino (III. 390), an ignorante sabedor (I. 373) as opposed to the ignorant-malicious or ignorant-presumptuous of the Court. But Vicente was no ascetic, his was a genial, generous nature, he liked to have enough to spend and give and leave in his will. Kindly and chivalrous, he was a champion of the down-trodden but had first-hand knowledge of the malice and intrigu[Pg xxxiii]es of the peasants and of the poor in the towns. Above all he was thoroughly Portuguese. He might place his scene in Crete but in that very scene he would refer to things so Portuguese as the janeiras and lampas de S. JoÃo. Portugal is

Pequeno e muy grandioso,
Pouca gente e muito feito,
Forte e mui victorioso,
Mui ousado e furioso
Em tudo o que toma a peito,

and he appears to have shared the popular prejudice against Spain. Did he also share the people's hostility towards the priests and the Jews? It cannot be said that the priests presented in his plays are patterns of morality. As to the Jews he knows of their corrupt practices and describes them in a late play as a mais falsa ralÉ[96]. It was during the last ten years of Vicente's life that the question of the new Christians came especially to the front (from 1525). In earlier plays Vicente seems more sympathetic towards them and the pleasant sketch of the Jewish family in Lisbon is as late as 1532[97]. In 1506, the very year of the massacre of Jews at Lisbon, he had gone to the root of the question when he declared in his lay sermon that:

Es por demÁs pedir al judÍo
Que sea cristiano en el corazÓn ...
Que es por demÁs al que es mal cristiano
Doctrina de Cristo por fuerza ni ruego[98].

And twenty-five years later he said to the monks at Santarem: 'If there are some here who are still strangers to our faith it is perhaps for the greater glory of God[99].' That is to say: if you force the Jews to become Christians you will only make them hypocrites; far better to treat them frankly as Jews and not expect figs from thistles. That Vicente himself was a devout Christian and Catholic and a deeply religious man such plays as the Auto da Alma, the Barcas, the Sumario, the Auto da Cananea are sufficient proof. He had much of the Erasmian spirit but nothing in common with the Reformation. His irreverence is wholly external, it was abuses not doctrine that he attacked, the ministers of the Church and not the Church itself. He may have been in the secret of King JoÃo's somewhat stormy negotiations with the Holy See and he took the national and regalist view: in the Auto da Feira Mercury addresses Rome as follows:

Nam culpes aos reis da terra,
Que tudo te vem de cima (I. 166).

He wished to reform the Church from within. All are perversely asleep, a sleep of death[100]. Many prayers do not suffice without almas limpas e puras[101]. Men must be judged by their works[102]. In the Auto da FÉ (1510) we have a simple declaration of faith:

FÉ he amar a Deos sÓ por elle
Quanto se pode amar,
Por ser elle singular,
Nam por interesse delle;
E se mais quereis saber,
Crer na Madre Igreja Santa
E cantar o que ella canta
E querer o que ella quer[103].

But four years earlier and ten before Luther's formal protest against the papal indulgences we find Vicente in his lay sermon referring to the question 'whether the Pope may grant so many pardons' and laughing at the hair-splitting of preachers: was the fruit that Eve ate an apple, a pear or a melon[104]? His own religion certainly had a mystical and pantheistic tendency[105]. It was as deep as was his love of Nature. He would have the hearts of men dance with jocund May[106]:

Hei de cantar e folgar
E bailar c'os coraÇÕes,

and he had an eye for the humblest flower that blows—chicory and camomile, hedge flowerets, honeysuckle and wild roses:

Almeirones y magarzas,
Florecitas por las zarzas,
Madresilvas y rosillas (I. 95. Cf. II. 29).

And he sympathized closely with what was nearest to Nature: peasants and children. Of the people of the towns he was probably less enamoured and he speaks of a desvairada opiniÃo do vulgo and of the folly of pandering to it[107]. At Court he certainly had many friends. A friendly rivalry in art and letters bound him to Garcia de Resende for probably over forty years and he was no doubt on excellent terms with the dadivoso Conde de Penella (II. 511), the muito jucundo Conde de Tentugal (III. 360) and the Conde de Vimioso. High rank was no certain shelter from the shafts of Vicente's wit, but when it was a case of princes he was more careful:

Agora cumpre atentar
Como poemos as mÃos,

as he ingenuously remarks[108]. King JoÃo II had seen to it that no class or individual should dispute the power of the throne, and now the King reigned supreme. Kings, says Vicente, are the image of God[109]. That was in 1533, when it might seem to him that the authority of the throne was more than ever necessary to cope with the confusion of the times. The King's power stood for the nation, that of a noble might mean mere private ambition or power in the hands of one unworthy, and Gil Vicente asks nobly:

Quem nÃo É senhor de si
PorquÉ o serÁ de ninguem?
(Who himself cannot control
Why should he o'er others rule?)

He had witnessed many changes, and looking back as an old man his memory might well be overwhelmed by a period so crowded[110]. He had seen the provinces and capital of Portugal transformed by the overseas discoveries. We may be sure that he had watched with more interest than the ordinary lisboeta the extension of the Portuguese empire and the deeds of the unfortunate Dom Francisco de Almeida ('Tomou Quiloa e MombaÇa, Parece cousa de graÇa Ver de que morte acabou') and the redoubtable Afonso de Albuquerque, who snatched victories from defeat in the teeth of all manner of obstruction and indifference and placed Portugal's glory on a pinnacle scarcely dreamed of even in the intoxicating moment of Gama's first return to Belem in 1499:

Outro mundo encuberto
Vimos entÃo descubrir
Que se tinha por incerto:
Pasma homem de ouvir.

Meanwhile Vicente never lost sight of the fact that the nation's strength lay not in rich imports, however fabulous and envied, but in the good use of its own soil and capacities and in the vigour, energy and discipline of its inhabitants, and a note of warning sounded again and again in his plays as he saw the old simplicity sink and disappear before wave on wave of luxury, ambition and hollow display. He had felt the good old times, content with rustic dance and song, vanishing since 1510:

De vinte annos a ca
NÃo ha hi gaita nem gaiteiro[111].

Now no one is content: ninguem se contenta da maneira que sohia[112]. Tudo bem se vai ao fundo[113]. He especially deplored the new confusion between the classes[114]. Shepherd, page and priest all wish to serve the King, that is, to become an official and to idle for a fixed wage while the land remained unploughed. The peasants do not know what they want and murmuram sem entender[115]. There is slackness everywhere (todos somos negligentes)[116]. Portugal was suffering from a crisis similar to that of four centuries later and men were inclined to leave their professions in order to theorize or in the hope of growing rich by a short cut or by chance instead of by hard, steady work; and the result was a period of upheaval and disquiet. Vicente suffered like the rest. He had embodied in his plays the simple pastimes of the Portuguese people, their delight in the processions, services and dramatic displays of the Church, in the mimicry of the early arremedillos, in the rich fancy-dress momos which were an essential element at great festivities. But his drama was not classical, often it was not drama. Technically he is less dramatic than Lucas FernÁndez or Torres Naharro. He defied every rule of Aristotle and mingled together the grave and gay, coarse and courtly in a way faithful to life rather than to any accepted theories of the stage. While he continued to produce these natural and delightful plays all kinds of new conditions arose. It was the irony of circumstance that when the old Portuguese poetry held the field the taste of the Court for personal satire and magnificent show could scarcely appreciate at its[Pg xxxvii] true value the lyrical gift of Vicente; and later, after King Manuel's death, Vicente found himself confronted by a new school in which classicism carried the day, the long Italian metres superseded the merry native redondilha of eight syllables, and the latinisers began to transform the language and shuddered like femmes savantes at Vicente's barbarisms and uncouth voquibles. His attitude towards his critics was one of humility and good humour. It is at least good to know that Vicente with his redondilhas continued to triumph personally in his old age and it was only the hand of death that drove him from the scene. Nor did he cease to point out abuses: the increase of a falsa mentira, the corruption of justice[117], the greed for money[118] and the growth of luxury[119]. He pillories the ignorance of pilots[120] by which so many ships were lost now and later, and he seems to doubt the wisdom of keeping women shut up like nuns both before[121] and after[122] marriage. If in many respects Vicente belonged to the Middle Ages, in his curiosity and many-sidedness he was a true child of the Renaissance. He dabbled in astrology and witchcraft, loved music (he wrote tunes for some of his lyrics), poetry, reading, acting and the goldsmith's art, and maintained his zest in old age: Mofina Mendes was probably written when he was over sixty. Attempts to represent him as a Lutheran reformer, a deep philosopher or an authority in questions philological fall to the ground. He was a jovial poet and a keen observer who loved his country, and when he saw its inhabitants all at sixes and sevens he would willingly have brought them back to what he called a boa diligencia.