Jorge Manrique and La Celestina: A Literary Analysis
Jorge Manrique
Jorge Manrique is the most important poet of the second half of the fifteenth century. His poetry consists of 50 compositions that are grouped into two blocks: love poetry and ballads.
- Love poetry: It is partly inherited from courtly poetry.
- Verses from the death of his parents: It is the work that has brought him universal fame, one of the peaks of our literature. Manrique wrote these lines with the pain, resignation, and sincere emotion aroused by the death of his father.
Couplets for the Death of His Father
The predominant theme is the eulogy of his father. Manrique does not conform, however, with a simple elegy but includes a series of reflections on life, death, and the transience of things of this world.
Characteristics of the Couplets
- From the point of view of the subject, the poem is structured in three parts that range from the most general to the most particular.
- Some of the verses have a propaganda function at the time. They are devoted to extolling the figure of Rodrigo Manrique and putting him as a model Christian gentleman.
- The poem is composed of forty couplets of broken foot. Manrique also employs beautiful images and simple, elegant language.
La Celestina
Textual Problems and Authorship
The first edition has no title or signature and is divided into acts. A new edition titled the work La Celestina, and later editions under the title of Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea added five more acts, bringing the total to 21, as we know the work today.
Problems of Genre
As an exclusively dialogued text, without hardly any narration or descriptions, it is considered a dramatic piece intended only for reading, and its staging would be difficult due to the various changes and long extensions of the work. The complexity of the work leads others to include La Celestina within the narrative, like a kind of dialogued novel.
Characters
Personality
World of Celestina and servants: These characters are pragmatic, realistic, materialistic, and motivated by greed.
World of Calisto and Melibea: Calisto and Melibea are not examples of virtue or morality but of sensual love, selfishness, and hypocrisy.
Calisto
He belongs to the nobility and is rich. He shows no chivalrous ideal and has no cultural, social, or military interests. He always takes pride in his enormous egoism and is carried away by his passion. He is unscrupulous, resorting to bribery and the help of the matchmaker.
Melibea
She is also from a rich, noble family. At first, she behaves like the elusive beloved of courtly love. But when she falls in love, she is a blindly passionate woman. She always makes decisions and can employ various tricks to achieve her purposes.
Melibea’s Parents
They are attached to the conventions of the class to which they belong. They worry about money and material matters.
Celestina
She is skillful, astute, and aware of men’s failings. She lacks any moral sense and is also hypocritical to the extreme. Her cunning is blinded by her ambition, which also leads her to death.
The Love of Calisto and Melibea
It is inexplicable that, given their equal social condition, they cannot bring their love to light and marry. All this makes us think that the author merely aimed to write and create his work as we know it: presenting the tragic outcome of the passion of two lovers with the intervention of the central figure of literary creation, the matchmaker.
The Medieval
The work reflects the moralistic purpose in the death of the lovers and servants as divine punishment for a disordered life.
The Renaissance
The aspects related to the Renaissance, with the new attitude, are, for example, the search for sensuality and pleasure. Possibly, the moralization and censorship of the characters’ behaviors are especially cautious, a concession required by the time, for the spirit that animates the whole work is certainly closer to the ideas and values of the new century.