15th-Century Spanish Literature: Poetry and Prose
The Rise of Pre-Renaissance Lyric Poetry
The Poetry of Songbooks
As rude nobility transitioned to royal courts, a gallant culture emerged, fostering literary pursuits. This learned poetry, collected in songbooks (anthologies), reflected courtly life. Love poetry, inspired by the idealization of ladies and expressed with rhetorical devices, became prominent. Moral-didactic poetry explored themes like time, fortune, and death, reflecting early humanism.
Three prominent 15th-century poets exemplify this era:
- Marquis of Santillana (1398-1458): A nobleman skilled in both arms and letters, he cultivated various poetic forms, including Provençal songs, allegorical poems, and sonnets.
- Juan de Mena (1411-1456): A humanist and royal secretary, his masterpiece is The Labyrinth of Fortune.
- Jorge Manrique (1440-1479): Known for his Verses on the Death of His Father, a funeral elegy reflecting on mortality and praising his father’s virtues.
Ballads: Jorge Manrique
Manrique’s ballads, composed of forty stanzas with unique rhyme schemes, explore themes of time, life’s brevity, fate, death, and fame. The “ubi sunt?” motif, questioning the whereabouts of past figures despite their glory, is prominent. The language is simple and natural.
Traditional Poetry of the 15th Century: The Ballad
Anonymous, popular ballads, epic tales in octosyllabic verse with assonance, circulated orally and in broadsides and songbooks. These old ballads are categorized as traditional (epic themes) and minstrel ballads (reflecting newer chivalric tastes). Their style is characterized by spontaneity, simplicity, and a fragmentary nature, often beginning in medias res. Themes include historical events, love stories, and lyrical expressions of romantic love.
La Celestina
First published in 1499, La Celestina represents a transition, blending medieval themes with a new worldview. It reflects a moral, social, and cultural crisis, mixing popular and cultured elements, high and low characters, artificial and colloquial language, joy and moral purpose, comedy and tragedy. Characters driven by passions face misery and death.
The Text and its Development
The work went through several stages: an early edition without a title, editions titled Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, and later, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, with added acts. The title La Celestina emerged later, reflecting the shift in readers’ interest.
The Problem of Authorship
Fernando de Rojas claimed to have found and continued a manuscript. While some believe he authored the entire work, others attribute only parts to him, suggesting an earlier anonymous author. Rojas’s background as a law official and his Jewish heritage may have influenced the work.
La Celestina: The Plot
Calisto, a young nobleman, enlists the bawd Celestina to help him woo Melibea. Celestina succeeds, but tragedy ensues. Calisto dies, and Melibea, in despair, commits suicide. The play ends with Pleberio’s lament.
La Celestina: The Characters
The characters are archetypes driven by base passions. Their complexity and relationships contribute to the work’s realism. Celestina, a cunning and manipulative figure, plays a central role.
La Celestina: Style
Written in dialogue form, the work combines cultured language with popular expressions and proverbs.
The Literary Genre of La Celestina
Its unique blend of narrative and dialogue, along with its length and use of time and space, make it difficult to categorize. It’s often called a dramatic novel or dialogued work.
Purpose of the Work
The work’s purpose is open to interpretation: a purely literary exploration of conflict, a moral critique of disordered love, or a pessimistic vision of the world.