Golden Age of Spanish Literature: Authors and Works
Fray Luis de León
The work of Fray Luis de León, Textos en prosa, includes religious translations and characterizations of the classical position and the Bible, plus original poems. In public life, he reconciled his position with classical and Renaissance ideals and religious character, which he cultivated in his prose works. He wrote around 40 poems.
Positive influence on three currents of thought:
- Neoplatonism: Rejected the idealized vision of the universe and love. Nature is impossible to perceive because of the human condition. In an ordered world, love is the only thing that can impede knowing God.
- Pythagoreanism: All is reduced to number, including musical elements. The soul must ascend to higher spheres to contemplate the divine.
- Stoicism: Advocated for overcoming passions and achieving peace. In his search for inner peace, he used poetry to express life and the peace of martyrs.
Fray Luis practiced what he preached. His treatise La perfecta casada and the Odas are written in stanzas like those used in the lira, with careful lexical selection.
San Juan de la Cruz
Juan de la Cruz’s work has always been focused on ontological and literary perspectives, often presented together. His work reflects extensive religious training, although it reveals the influence of the traditional songbook of the sixteenth century, particularly in the use of profane love to symbolize and represent divine love.
The most common stanza in his poems is the lira, although he also demonstrates comfort in the use of the octosyllable romance. Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Song, and Living Flame of Love are some of his most famous works.
His lyrical and religious position grew. Driven by enthusiasm, he imitated the sacred books, making his style original. His verses are easy to understand, with an ardent and passionate style born of love and positive mysticism. The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Dark Night, and Spiritual Canticle are some of his works.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote was published in two parts and is considered the first modern novel. It is considered modern because of its characters, history, and technical resources. The protagonists, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, are not heroes but ordinary people. At the beginning of the novel, they have contrasting personalities, but throughout the story, they are modified by mutual influence.
History and technical resources: It also narrates a journey of friendship and offers a reflection on the defense of ideals.
Narrative Style: Cervantes pretends not to be the author but a copyist who transcribed the narrative. He uses dialogue as a means to show the true self of the characters. Humor results from the personalities of the characters and the sequence of wild adventures.
Lazarillo de Tormes
Published in 1554, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities is a picaresque novel with the following features:
- The protagonist is a young rogue marginalized from society.
- The narration is in the first person from the point of view of an autobiography.
- The work is written from a key moment in the life of the mischievous rogue.
- It allows us to know the crude aspects of reality, and the events are told with realism.
It is an anonymous work, suggesting that the author was a Jew or a convert. It is written in letter form, with Lázaro himself chronicling his adventures since he is betrayed by his mother to a blind man. Lázaro’s hungry situation is arranged when he gets a stable job. His autobiography tells of his social advancement and degradation. This work opens the realist novel and establishes an antihero.
Characteristics:
- Autobiographical-episodic structure
- Explanation, through the past, of a final statement
- Protagonist of low birth
- Unkindness hardens his character after suffering strokes of fortune and serving several masters
- Driven by hunger, the rogue weaves tricks to survive but ends up being a victim of his own tricks
Lázaro serves a blind man, a clergyman, a squire, a buldero, a chaplain, an archpriest, and a friar, and marries a maid.
Miguel de Cervantes
Cervantes makes his works a great display of voices and linguistic registers. The polyphony of his language reflects the different attitudes of the characters. Through discordant voices and faces in dialogue, Cervantes creates a natural, anti-rhetorical style, providing readers with moral and intellectual profit and pleasure. The features of simplicity and naturalness that characterize Cervantes’ pure style can be found in the narrators of his novels. The style that informs the expression of the characters depends on their psychology, social status, and life experience. Consistent with his aesthetic ideal, Cervantes makes use of rhetoric and content and is revealed as a master of irony, humor, and parody. He is the architect of a nimble and fluid style that leaves the reader with an impression of spontaneity and credibility.
Narrative Works:
Cervantes’ novels include La Galatea, Don Quixote, the Novelas ejemplares, and Persiles and Sigismunda. La Galatea (1585) is a pastoral novel—an eclogue in prose—that mimics the genre represented by Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s Diana enamorada. The work, though unfinished, is divided into six books and chronicles the loves of Elicio and Galatea.
Lope de Vega
Literary Production:
- Lyrical work: Heavily autobiographical, including Rimas, Rimas sacras, and Rimas humanas. Romances and sonnets stand out.
- Narrative work: Pastoral novels, Byzantine novels, and novellas. His great work of fiction is La Dorotea (1632).
- Epic work: He wrote many epics. Best known are The Beauty of Angelica and The Dragontea.
The Theater of Lope de Vega:
- Dramas of unjust power: Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocaña, Fuenteovejuna.
- Dramas of honor: The Punishment Without Revenge.
- Legendary dramas: El caballero de Olmedo.
- Plays of love and entanglement: The Gardener’s Dog.
Lope lived a passionate, tumultuous life, full of contrasts.