Celestina, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Fray Luis de Leon: Key Aspects
The Celestina
In the theater of the religious legacy of the 15th century and the vitality of popular theater, authors began to experiment with secular subjects, poetic verses, and a greater variety of characters in religious drama (grown-up issues related to the life of Jesus). Secular theater includes burlesque elements, such as the subject of love and pastoral themes.
Authoring and Editing
The first known edition appeared in 1499. In 1500, new editions were published in Toledo and Salamanca, titled Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea. The 1501 edition includes a foreword and two poems. In the 1502 editions, five acts were added. In the mid-16th century, it was published in Alcala de Henares with the title The Matchmaker.
Argument
It chronicles the love affair between Calisto and Melibea. Calisto falls for Melibea after a chance encounter, but she refuses him. Sempronius advises him to seek the help of a matchmaker, Celestina, to challenge Melibea’s will and win her love. In gratitude, Melibea gives Celestina a gold chain. Celestina is killed by Calisto’s servants for not wanting to share the reward. Calisto, on a visit to Melibea, falls and dies. Melibea tells her father what happened and throws herself from the top of a tower. The play ends with Pleberio lamenting before the death of his daughter.
Style
The most outstanding features are:
- Calisto and Melibea’s dialogues (cultured and courtly style)
- Celestina, servants, and pupils (slang)
Garcilaso de la Vega
As a poet and a man, Garcilaso was the prototype of the courteous, polite, good conversationalist, humanist, musician, and soldier. His poetry of love renews concepts and induces a new sensibility. He recovered classical forms and introduced new metrical forms.
Topics
- Petrarchan Love: Inspired by Garcilaso’s impossible love. When he describes the woman he loved, he always represents the ideal of feminine beauty. Petrarchan beauty, in addition to being physical, is spiritual.
- Idealized Nature: Refined and harmonious, responding to the topic of the locus amoenus (pleasant place).
- Mythology: Recreates myths that combine love, despair, and death.
Style
Garcilaso’s style is characterized by calm and simplicity, expressing feelings naturally and elegantly. He recovers the classic literary topics of carpe diem to insist on the passage of time and locus amoenus to describe idyllic nature, creating the ideal atmosphere for the meeting of love.
Works
His work is not overly extensive. He composed three eclogues, two elegies, an epistle, four songs, 38 sonnets, and eight songs in Castilian verses. His sonnets are in the Petrarchan style, combined with the rhetoric of love and tags of lyric songs. The elegies indicate the influence of the classics.
Fray Luis de Leon
Fray Luis de Leon is the foremost representative of ascetic lyric poetry, excelling in both prose and verse. Besides his own poetic production, he translated classical poetry and Biblical texts.
Topics
Appeals in his desire for solitude and retreat from the bustle of urban life, finding refuge in nature, as well as in the pursuit of peace and knowledge, and as a way to approach the topic of God. Responds to the Beatus ille topic, extracted from Horatian tradition, emphasizing the joy in rebirth.
Style
His poetry is mostly made up of odes. Different compositions are used as an extension to the lira stanza. Principal traits include:
- Sense of humor and irony
- Language improvement based on simplicity and sobriety of Castilian
- Use of the second person and rhetorical exclamations
- Questions and enumerations, with symbols expressing the feelings associated with nature
- Use of epithets, personification, and metaphor
Works
The most important works include:
- Ode to the Retired Life: Praises those who choose the peace of nature to give meaning to their existence.
- Ode to Francisco Salinas: Attributes mystical nature to music, showing how the soul, through music, emerges from worldly attachments, flies to God, and enters into harmony with Him.
- Serene Night (Noche Serena): Platonic influence in a composition that uses the image of a starry night to relate the harmony in the universe with Christian love.
- Ode to the Ascension: Again, the subject of flight is present, manifested in the desire to accompany Christ.
- Prophecy of the Tagus Cut (Profecía del Tajo): Fits a Horatian theme to a medieval legend about the Spanish King Don Rodrigo.