Jorge Manrique and Don Juan Manuel: Literary Analysis
Jorge Manrique: *Verses on the Death of his Father***
Jorge Manrique wrote profound love poetry, following the guidelines of the troubadour tradition of courtly love and with the resources characteristic of poets of the cancionero. His most important work, Verses on the Death of his Father, is an elegy that becomes a treatise on Christian philosophy, life, the transience of time, and the transcendence of death.
Key Elements, Topics, and Themes
- Time: Time is a constant flow that never stops. For Manrique, the present does not exist; there is only the past and the future.
- Fortune: Fortune is a product of chance and can bring misfortune or happiness. Manrique says that man must reject material goods and ambition.
- Death: In Manrique’s era, death imitates death dances. In the *ubi sunt* (“where are they?”) motif, the poet asks about the latest events, directly questioning those who had enjoyed life in another time.
- Fame: Fame is the result of a life of honor. Fame is understood as a life of honor, a life longer than glorious fame, situated between earthly life (the first life) and eternal life (the third life).
- The World: The world is a stepping stone for man to achieve the salvation of his soul.
Meter
The verses (12 lines) are composed of 40 double sextuplets of broken foot, formed by pairs of octosyllabic verses cut by a tetrasyllabic verse, a couplet of broken foot.
Internal Structure
- First Part (Stanzas I-XIV): The most philosophical part, on how quickly life passes before the imminence of death.
- Second Part (Stanzas XV-XXIV): Exemplifies the fame and death of historical figures from the immediate past.
- Third Part (Stanzas XXV-XL): The poet focuses on Don Rodrigo, his father. After a dialogue with death, personified, Don Rodrigo is assured of having deserved not only the reputation of this life but also eternal life.
Language and Style
The couplets have an agile and natural language.
Songbooks
- The *Cancionero* of Baena: This *cancionero* collects 576 lyrical compositions. It presents distinct influences: the troubadour inclination, written in Castilian and Galician, and the allegorical tradition of Dante, of Italian influence. In this *cancionero*, poems of social satire and politics alternate with love poems.
- The *Cancionero* of Stúñiga: More lyrical than Baena’s, it features the work of Castilian, Aragonese, Catalan, and Italian poets who met at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon in Naples, beginning in 1433.
Don Juan Manuel
Language and Style
The prose of Don Juan Manuel, which closely follows Latin models rather than Eastern ones, is characterized by its didactic intention, moral morphosyntactic symmetries, lexical variety (many synonyms), attention to detail, and economy of ornamental resources, always careful to capture the reader’s interest.
Don Juan Manuel’s Work: *The Count Lucanor***
The Book of the Count, also known as *The Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio*, has two prologues and five parts. Don Juan Manuel intended to convey a particular moral teaching. Each story has a different theme, but all have a purpose: the salvation of the soul of the two characters, the young Count and his tutor or advisor Patronio. However, they share the same structure: the narrative framework, the example, and the final lines. The Count exposes several practical problems of everyday life to Patronio, and Patronio solves these problems by telling a story to the Count. The themes are varied, including the effects of avarice, pride, and hypocrisy.
Topics
How to distinguish true friends from false ones.