Baroque Literature and Theater: A Golden Age of Spanish Arts
The Baroque Period
The Baroque period, immediately following the historical and cultural rebirth, reached its highest representation in Spanish literature and splendor, crowning the Golden Age launched by a revival.
Historical and Social Context
The Baroque in Spain covered the period of the so-called Habsburg children: Philip III, Philip IV, and Charles II. This era was characterized by a historical crisis:
- Financial crisis: Spain wasted opportunities by not adequately investing the wealth from the New World.
- Spanish decay: Spain lost influence in Europe.
- Emigration to America: This depopulated parts of Spain.
- A new mysticism and sense of religion, created by the disastrous situation.
Characteristics of the Baroque
Renaissance optimism disappeared in the Baroque. Ideals were shattered, and the art of balance, serenity, and anxiety gave way to societal unrest. Baroque literature assumed and repeated Renaissance topics, reflecting a loss of faith in man and the devaluation of their world. However, between the Renaissance and Baroque, there wasn’t a complete break but a natural evolution and change.
Ideology and Attitudes
Baroque thinking clearly expressed disappointment with the world. Three positions emerged with the decline:
- Clash, rebellion, and nonconformity, visible in moral and political treatises and poetry.
- Avoidance through content inherited from the Renaissance and various forms of beauty.
- Conformity and coexistence with the situation, primarily seen in theater.
The Aesthetics of Literature
Key themes of the Baroque:
- Epic, romantic, and mythological
- Religious, moral, and political
- Mischievous and satirical
- Historical and legendary
Baroque writers sought originality, creative individuality, surprise, rhetoric, wit, and the creation of new art or artifice.
Culteranismo and Conceptismo
Culteranismo is more concerned with form and expression, using rhetorical figures of thought like antithesis, paradoxes, and puns.
Conceptismo focuses on content, employing wit and intricate wordplay.
The Poetry of the Baroque
Baroque poetry, whether Culterano or Conceptista, reached unparalleled heights in Spanish poetry.
Themes
- Renaissance themes (love, nature, mythology) evolved logically.
- Moralistic themes reflected on the brevity of life and the transience of earthly things.
Renaissance themes developed in accordance with the Baroque attitude:
- Love with transcendent meaning
- Nature transformed into a moralizing object
- Mythology as beauty and rhetorical play
Baroque themes resulted from disillusionment and pessimism:
- Time and transience, the brevity of life, and the presence of death
- The dream as a symbol of life
- The mirror as a symbol of disappointment
- The problem of Spain
Learned Poetry
Heroic verse, sonnets, and songs were common. Poets formed two groups:
- Those who broke the classical balance between content and expression
- Those who maintained the aesthetic ideal of naturalness and selection from Renaissance classicism
Baroque poetry is often divided into three trends: Culto, Conceptista, and Classicist.
Culto Poetry: Luis de Góngora
Luis de Góngora’s Culterano poetry best captured the Renaissance heritage. Culto poets conceived of the work as a complex web of formal and strong contrasts in risky rhetoric. It was a way of creating artificial and perfect worlds. Notable features include perfect use of verses, great musicality, masterful treatment of metaphor, impeccable poetic transformation through cultism and rhythmic sound, empowerment of mythological themes, and exquisite syntactic complication.
Conceptista Poetry: Francisco de Quevedo
The association by similarity or contradiction between objects forming a concept wasn’t new. What made 17th-century Conceptismo peculiar was the intense accumulation of wit, verbal semantic games, and ellipses in poems. Conceptista poets used rhetorical figures of thought, word games, phonic games, syntactic devices, and intensifier procedures.
Harmonizing Poetry: Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega deserves special mention for his use of various forms. He shared greatness with Góngora and Quevedo, living a life full of anxieties provoked by passions of love, both human and religious. His extensive poetic work included cultured poetry, epic poetry, and traditional poetry.
Classicist Poetry
The Classicist trend included poets who, outside the influence of Góngora and Quevedo, sought to maintain the formal and aesthetic ideals of Renaissance poetry.
Traditional and Popular Poetry
Despite the importance of cultured poetry in the Baroque, poets also cultivated traditional song and ballad forms.
Baroque Theater
Baroque theater presented the most radical changes compared to the Renaissance.
The Legacy of the Renaissance
After the medieval religious drama and the beginning of the second half of the 15th century, the Renaissance brought little drama. The first half of the 16th century highlighted Gil Vicente and Torres Navarro, still largely dependent on the classical. The second half saw Lope de Rueda in popular theater, alongside Juan del Encina and Cervantes.
The New Comedy
Lope de Vega led the renovation and consolidation of the Baroque theatrical formula. He realized that Spanish theater needed to separate from classical imitation and forge its own path. Lope de Vega’s ability was exemplary, aligning the profitable with freer forms, offering the public a relatable theater drawn from chronicles, embodying monarchist sentiment and national pride, and providing stage agility and passionate storytelling.
Technical Innovations of the New Comedy
Lope’s renewal extended beyond content. He departed from the Aristotelian concept of imitation and reacted against classicism. Technical changes included reducing acts to three, conceiving comedy as incessant intrigue, disregarding the three unities, mixing tragic and comic elements, reacting to metric units, varying stanzas, expressive decorum, configuring comedy around fixed characters, and converging dramatic action in love and honor.
The Theme of Honor
Lope de Vega made honor a main driver in his plays. Honor was a personal virtue based on others’ perception of oneself. In Baroque comedy, honor was an absolute value comparable to life, and shame had to be erased with life, restoring social order through revenge.
The Two Eras of the New Comedy
Spanish Baroque theater is grouped into two cycles or schools around Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca. Differences stemmed from personality and stylistic choices.
Text Comment: (As to compete with your hair)
This poem addresses the collige, virgo, rosas theme, echoing Garcilaso’s carpe diem. Góngora invites a girl to embrace her beauty’s duration. The key content lies in the time adverbs introducing each quartet, repeated at the beginning of each odd verse. The “mientras” (while) at the sonnet’s start mirrors Garcilaso’s Sonnet XXIII. The imperative “enjoys” in the first triplet reinforces this. The poem’s structure develops the virgo collige rosas theme, describing the lady’s youthful beauty (verses 1-8), exhorting her to enjoy it before time fades it (verses 9-13), and concluding with a pessimistic view of human destiny (verses 13-14). This pessimism, with its bleak imagery of death and decay, firmly places the poem within the Baroque, reflecting the era’s concern with time’s passage and the transience of life.
The Theater of the 16th-17th Centuries
Theater of the 16th Century
Early theater companies imitated Italian commedia dell’arte. Royal companies had official permission and performed in one city, while country companies traveled. Popular theater originated from the comics and moved to corrales de comedias. Dramatic genres included pasos, entremeses, and plays.
Pasos
Brief theatrical compositions with simple arguments based on folktales, centered on tricks, featuring fixed masked characters (often the fool), and using colloquial prose dialogue.
Entremeses
Comic pieces presented between acts of serious works, featuring fools, simpletons, and marginalized characters, often using ingenuity and parody.
National Theater
In the second half of the 16th century, epic tradition themes were incorporated, paving the way for Lope de Vega’s theater.
Cervantes as Playwright
Cervantes’s works, except for the entremeses, weren’t appreciated in his time. His work reflects a struggle between classical drama rules and Lope de Vega’s new comedy.