Baroque Disillusionment and Aesthetics
The Theme of Dodsworth
Baroque disillusionment is a radical devaluation of the world and human life. The great issues that manifest in it are:
- The world is worthless. It is no longer a cosmos but a chaos, like a maze in which man is lost, surrounded by evils.
- Life is contradiction and struggle. Man fights himself, seized by contradictions and struggles with other men.
- Life is short, fleeting. Life is as short as that of a rose. Everything changes and everything is gone, hence the obsession with time, which destroys everything that happens.
- Life is not consistent. It is brittle as an hourglass. Such inconsistency is shown in the divorce between appearance and reality (main theme of Baroque), nothing is as it seems, reality escapes us, if life is a dream, the world is a “great theater.”
- To live is to die. Life is a strange emptiness that death occupies. The obsession with death is one of the major aspects of the Baroque.
Baroque Aesthetics in the Plastic Arts
The aesthetic basis of developments will also be the crisis of Renaissance idealism: balance and clarity will give way to the serene, the contrasts, the chiaroscuro, anxiety, and drama. Some essential features are:
- An aesthetic beyond the classic rules. The ‘fees’ have lost their validity. Modules and proportions are broken in search of more intense effects.
- An aesthetic of the unstable. The serene and static forms and shapes are replaced by dynamic, restless, unsettling, twisted ones.
- An aesthetic of contradiction. The contrasts, chiaroscuro, etc., are fundamental characteristics of this art.
- A dramatic aesthetic. This refers not only to the drama of certain topics, but also to the taste for the grimacing, as excessive. The greatest example would be the bleeding Christs of Castilian imagery.
- An aesthetic of appearance. Recharging the ornamental mask reaches constructive lines: the height of the facade of the temple is deceptive, much less.
- Many of these traits may have an ambiguous meaning: the decoration can convey restlessness or ostentation. It is the double face of the Baroque. This art responds to an aesthetic of intensity, its aim is to excite and impress.
Literary Language: Baroque Style
The literary style responds to the collapse of Renaissance balance. According to R. Lapesa, “the loss of classical serenity manifested in extreme attitudes.” It withdraws from the naturalness and selection of the Renaissance (which are present in Cervantes). The Baroque, following the steps of Mannerism, subjected the style to intense development.
An essential feature is the frenzy to squeeze the possibilities of language, trying to fulfill the most varied intentions: from the most casual banter to more complex expressions. In some cases, the repertoire of verbal audacity is vast and results in previously unsuspected effects: creations of words, phonics games, etc. The dominant impression is sometimes deep, sometimes contrived, or of darkness.
Conceptismo and Culteranismo
Both are Baroque aesthetic tendencies present in the poetry and prose of the Baroque:
- Conceptismo is the ‘subtlety of thought and expression’. It is particularly concerned about the content, and its ideal is to say a lot with few words. Hence the puns, paradoxes, and conceptual games. The ornamentation is minimal at the lexical level, but subject to unexpected associations. It relied on wit and acuity of the concept. In addition, it is characterized by intellectual optimization and the concentration of meanings. Its growers did not call themselves conceptistas but cultos because the difficulty of their writing lay in the complexity of their thoughts, not the linguistic devices employed. The aesthetic characteristic of this trend is expressive density. In poetry, the most representative author is Quevedo, and in prose, Baltasar Gracián.
- Culteranismo (also called Gongorism) seeks, above all, formal beauty. The subject can be minimal, but it develops a sumptuous style: loud voices and other sensory effects, brilliant paraphrase, etc. Both the lexicon (cultism) and the syntactic freedom (hyperbaton) seem to show a desire to provide the language with the resources of the prestigious Latin and give poetry a specific language. Also, it sought to create a cultured poetic language, characterized by the use of Latinate language and the frequency of mythological allusions. [Góngora boasted of being dark and unintelligible to the ignorant].
It is now considered that conceptismo is the basis of all Baroque style, and that culteranismo would be a variety of conceptismo to which are added some features that come from the creative sensibility of Góngora.
Literary Genres of the 17th Century: Poetry
With regard to lyric poetry, we should remember the following:
- Lope de Vega, besides his plays, is one of the greatest Spanish poets. His poetry, of enormous wealth and variety, is scattered in his plays or gathered in books like Rimas Sacras, Rimas Humanas y Divinas, and so on. All of Lope’s vital diversity is present in his poems: his loves, his family daily life, his religious anxieties, etc., without forgetting his good assimilation of popular lyrics.
- Góngora (1561-1627) is the champion of culteranismo.
- Other poets respond in part to the allure of gongorism and leave samples of deeper concepts. For example, the Count of Villamediana (1582-1622), brilliant in his Fable of Phaeton and deepest in his love sonnets.
- It is usually distinguished apart, a classic line, closer to the equilibrium of a Fray Luis than to Baroque developments. In this line appears, on one side, Francisco de Rioja, singer of the removal of fortune and the brevity of life, in his poems to the flowers; Rodrigo Caro, who has the same themes in his Song to the Ruins of Italica; and Fernández de Andrada, author of a lyric poem of our ascendancy: the Moral Epistle to Fabius, maximum example of the ascetic and stoic attitude. This classicist line includes an ‘Aragonese group’ and their top representatives are the Argensola brothers (Lupercio and Bartholomew), growers of a doctrinal and moralistic lyric.
- Another of our great lyrical peaks of the 17th century is Quevedo.
The Spanish Theater of the Baroque
The Spanish Stage in the 17th Century: The “Corrales”
The three existing types of theater during the sixteenth century, both in Spain and other European countries, are: religious, courtly, and popular. The popular one was the one that reached the greatest development among us. Towards the late sixteenth century, there were already some fixed venues: the “corrales”. They were outdoor patios, among several homes. In the background, was the stage, a platform without curtains or decorations. On the opposite side, stood the cazuela, reserved for women. The nobles were placed in the aposentos, balconies and windows of homes that closed the courtyard. In the yard, removing some benches and bleachers, stood most of the spectators, who were the common men, whom they called “mosqueteros.” They were formidable for their violent reactions when the work was not to their liking.
The performances began at two in winter and three in summer. They lasted several hours and were developed with this order: beginning with a loa, a kind of introduction in verse, after which the first act of the play was represented; when finished, there was an entremés; after the second act, there was another entremés or a baile; and the play ended with the third act, and as a coronation of the show, another dance or a fin de fiesta.
At first, there was no scenery: the viewer imagined it with references in the text. This favored the freedom of authors to place the action in the most varied settings. Then, later, decorations and other scenic resources would be used, mimicking courtly theater.
The works lasted little in the lineup, because they were almost always performed only once, and if the play lasted for several days in the poster, it was a success.
The public demanded new plays non-stop, so both our playwrights were charged with work, and the extensive production of many of them, with the great Lope at the head, is explained.
The actors were very varied. A contemporary author speaks of “eight kinds of companies”, ranging from the bululú, a single author, to larger groupings like the entretenimiento and the compañía, which had sixteen actors and a repertoire of fifty comedies. Some groups came into the category of “royal or titled companies,” but many others were ‘strolling players’. The lives of the comedians was hard and not infrequently, they were frowned upon and their customs were often censored.
Some moralists multiplied their attacks on the theater and succeeded on several occasions in having the king ban all kinds of performances. But the prohibitions did not last long, because the popular passion for the theater was stronger than the attacks.
Court Theater and Religious Theater
The success of popular representations was so great that even the kings wanted to enjoy them. Since early this century, Philip III ordered to transform one of the courtyards of the Palace into a theater, to see the plays “as the people represent them in the corrales.”
Along with this, other events will take place in the courtly environment. The halls of the Palace, etc., hosted lavish representations, far removed from the austere stage of the corral. After 1630, advances in scenery reached the Court: richness of scenery, elaborate props, ‘machines’ capable of producing amazing changes, appearances and disappearances of characters, through the air or the ground. The music contributed to the splendor of the spectacle.
With the help of these media, great comedies, magic plays, etc. were developed, and opera began to appear. If Lope de Vega did not like all this apparatus, Calderón, by contrast, would make extensive use of all these scenic inventions.
No less bright was the religious drama, the mystery plays, linked to the celebration of Corpus Christi, which reached its peak in the seventeenth century. During this festival, the cities vied to organize representations to exalt the doctrine of the Eucharist. The shows were done outdoors in a plaza before the church. A few decorated carts served as a stage and comprised a wide stage, soon to be enriched with the major trappings of Baroque art.
The mystery plays are one-act plays, with allegorical characters (Man, Sin, Grace, Wisdom, Love, etc.), who developed a spiritual matter related to redemption and ending with a celebration of the Eucharist. The autos were ordered from the most renowned playwrights, from Lope to Calderón de la Barca, who took them to their highest perfection.