Renaissance and Baroque Spanish Literature: Styles and Genres

Posted on Oct 5, 2024 in Music

Renaissance and Baroque Spanish Literature

Humanism

Renaissance thinkers rejected the culture of the preceding centuries, viewing the Middle Ages as a dark interval between Greco-Roman antiquity and the modern world, which they sought to recover and continue.

The study of Greek and Latin classical texts, along with grammatical research and language teaching, was termed Humanism. These activities began in fourteenth-century Italy with figures like Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, who wrote in both Latin and the vernacular (Italian). Humanism spread throughout Europe in the following centuries, reaching Spain in the late fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth centuries.

Admiration for classical culture profoundly influenced Latin writers in all national literatures, including Spanish. Italian writers, considered followers of the ancient Roman spirit, were also known and imitated.

The invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century played a key role in this cultural development. It allowed for the dissemination of both classical and Renaissance authors on a scale far superior to the Middle Ages, when works were reproduced by hand, limiting the number of copies.

Formal Features of Baroque Literature

  1. Preparation and Artificiality:

    Baroque literature seeks formal complication, resulting in difficult-to-understand works. It prioritizes expression over content, sometimes to the point of obscurity. It aims to impress the reader with wit and erudition rather than conveying a clear message.

  2. Contrast:

    There’s a marked tendency to establish contrasts between opposing elements. Similar to chiaroscuro in painting, many works are based on the stark opposition between beauty, lightness, elegance, and kindness, and ugliness, darkness, deformity, and evil.

  3. Sensoriality:

    Baroque artists focus on producing a vivid effect on the viewer or reader’s senses. The effects of time, for example, are depicted vividly, accumulating images associated with aging, decay, corruption, destruction, and death. Allegory and the personification of concepts and feelings are also characteristic of the Baroque.

  4. Exaggeration:

    Themes in Baroque literature are often presented hyperbolically. Beautiful and noble elements are idealized, intensifying their beauty and goodness, while ugly or defective aspects of reality are subjected to grotesque distortion.

Culteranismo and Conceptismo

Seventeenth-century Spanish literature features two main styles: Culteranismo and Conceptismo. Both share the difficulty and artificiality typical of the Baroque but differ in their intent, themes, and stylistic devices.

a) Culteranismo

This name, coined by the style’s detractors, who considered it a literary “heresy,” draws an analogy with the term “Lutheranism.” It’s also known as Gongorism, after its main figure, Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561-1627).

Culteranismo prioritizes form, which is always elaborate and artificial, over content. Authors deviate from common language through lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical means, hindering comprehension. Its essential features are:

  • Highly educated vocabulary with many Latinisms;
  • Complex syntax due to the repeated use of hyperbaton and improper Castilian constructions;
  • Abundance of rhetorical figures, especially poetic images, metaphors, similes, and paraphrases;
  • Continuous allusions to mythology, history, and traditional culture, making prior knowledge essential for understanding.

Culteranismo primarily manifested in verse, particularly in extensive mythological poems. Representative examples include Góngora’s Solitudes and Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea, as well as Juan de Tassis, Count of Villamediana’s (1582-1622) Fable of Phaeton and Lope de Vega’s (1562-1635) La Filomena and La Circe.

b) Conceptismo

This style relies on wit and intellectual play with words and concepts. Its ideal is to imbue expressions with multiple meanings and allusions. It primarily uses figures like paronomasia, polyptoton, antithesis, irony, paradox, and dilogy. Prominent authors include Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658) and, above all, Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), although many, including Góngora, wrote poems in this style.

Conceptismo appears in both prose and verse. Many Conceptist poems are satirical or burlesque. Quevedo wrote hundreds of such poems, many notable for their hurtful tone and foul language, often using slang from the era’s criminals.

Numerous prose works, whether burlesque or with moral and philosophical content, also belong to this style. Notable examples include Quevedo’s Dreams and The Hourglass of Time, Luis Vélez de Guevara’s (1579-1644) The Devil on Two Sticks, and Gracián’s The Critic, a long allegory criticizing individual vices and societal ills.

Castilian Prose Before Alfonso X

The literary use of prose in medieval Castilian faced difficulties due to:

  • The higher prestige of verse;
  • The need to establish rules differentiating literary language from colloquial language;
  • The presence of Latin, which, despite disappearing as a living language centuries earlier, was still considered the tool for transmitting religious, scientific, historical, legal, and literary knowledge.

Consequently, the first examples of Castilian literary prose are relatively late. Before Alfonso X’s reign, we only know of brief historical works (like the Navarre Chronicle or Liber Regum) and geographical works (like Semejanza del Mundo or Fazienda de Ultramar), along with religious and didactic prose and story collections, usually translated from Arabic (though ultimately originating from India via Persia). Notable story collections include the Book of Kalila and Dimna and Sendebar, characterized by its misogyny.

Alfonso X el Sabio

During Alfonso X’s reign (1254-1284), Castilian culture, particularly prose, flourished. The king commissioned works from a team of collaborators who translated and adapted Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin texts. Alfonso X personally supervised the linguistic and stylistic aspects of the final versions.

This cultural activity was crucial as it allowed European Christians to access the scientific knowledge of Arabs and Jews. This work had begun in the twelfth century at the Toledo School of Translators, but they translated into Latin, while Alfonso X’s team translated into Castilian.

Alfonso X’s works include:

  • Historical works: General History of Spain and Estoria de Espanna (universal history);
  • Legal works: The Seven Parts;
  • Scientific works: Books of the Knowledge of Astronomy and Lapidary;
  • Entertainment works: Book of Chess, Dice, and Tables;
  • Lyric works: written personally by the king in Galician-Portuguese, including love and satirical poems and numerous Cantigas de Santa Maria.

Celestina: Plot Summary

Calisto, a young nobleman representing the idealized world of courtly love, is madly in love with Melibea, who rejects him. On his servant Sempronius’s advice, Calisto seeks help from Celestina, an old witch and procuress, thus breaking the precepts of courtly love.

Celestina, using cunning and magic, convinces Melibea to accept Calisto. She also overcomes the initial resistance of Parmeno, Calisto’s young and honest servant, by enlisting the help of the prostitute Areusa.

Calisto meets Melibea secretly and rewards Celestina. Sempronius and Parmeno demand their share, but Celestina refuses. They kill her but are wounded while escaping and eventually executed.

Calisto and Melibea’s relationship continues for a while, but Elicia and Areusa, lovers of Sempronius and Parmeno and Celestina’s protégées, plot revenge. They turn to the pimp Centurio, who sends the crippled Traso to scare Calisto away while the lovers are together at night in Melibea’s garden.

Calisto, hearing noises, investigates and falls from the ladder he used to climb the garden wall, dying instantly.

Melibea, unable to live without Calisto, commits suicide in front of her father, Pleberio. The play ends with Pleberio’s desperate monologue, reflecting the author’s pessimism: life is meaningless, dominated by irresistible impulses and passions like love, which inevitably lead to disaster.

The Spanish Comedy of the Golden Age

Theater had limited cultivation in Spain during the Middle Ages. Important playwrights like Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández didn’t appear until the late fifteenth century. As the sixteenth century progressed, theater developed in various social contexts (religious, courtly, student, and popular).

With the growing love for theater, permanent venues for performances appeared in cities: the corrales de comedias, open courtyards with erected stages.

Lope de Vega, building on elements from previous authors and his intuition for public taste, shaped Spanish comedy in the late sixteenth century. Its main features are:

  • Breaking the unities of action, place, and time:

    Classical theater rules, based on Greek and Latin models, dictated a single action, occurring in one place within one day. Lope disregarded these rules, finding them detrimental to the plays’ enjoyment.

  • Mixing tragic and comic elements:

    Lope also opposed the classical mandate for a sharp distinction between tragedy and comedy.

  • Division into three acts or jornadas:

    Earlier plays often had five acts. Lope’s division aligns better with the narrative structure of beginning, middle, and end.

  • Poetic justice:

    The plays feature numerous intrigues and difficulties for the characters, but these are eventually overcome, leading to a happy ending with characters receiving deserved justice.

  • Use of verse as the sole form of expression:

    Predominantly octosyllabic verse, often in quatrains (abba). Different verse types were used for different situations (e.g., romance for offstage events, sonnet for waiting).

  • Inclusion of poetic elements:

    Poems, songs, and dances, though interrupting the action, enhance enjoyment and make performances more comprehensive.

  • Creation of familiar character types:

    The lover, the lady, the gracioso (jester), etc., recur frequently and are easily recognizable. They are more like stock characters than individuals with distinctive personalities and psychology.

Lope de Vega, besides outlining his theatrical views in New Art of Writing Plays in This Time, wrote hundreds of plays based on these principles. Notable examples include Fuenteovejuna, The Knight from Olmedo, Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocaña, The Foolish Lady, and Punishment Without Revenge.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) also followed Lope’s formula, though his plays generally exhibit greater intellectual depth and dramatic complexity. Famous works include The Mayor of Zalamea and Life is a Dream.

Many other authors followed Lope and Calderón, including Tirso de Molina (pseudonym of Gabriel Téllez, 1579-1648), with works like The Trickster of Seville and The Damned for Despair, and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (1581-1639), author of The Suspicious Truth.

The Picaresque Novel

a) Lazarillo de Tormes, the Forerunner of the Genre

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities, published in 1554 by an unknown author, is a foundational work in the European novel. Its importance lies in the originality of its content and anecdotes (many drawn from folk tradition), but also in its overall structure and presentation.

For the first time in European fiction, the protagonist is a man of very low social standing who builds his life by struggling against adversity. It avoids conventional sentiments and idealized situations found in pastoral novels or grand deeds of chivalry books.

In previous works, the protagonist’s character was already formed at the beginning of their adventures. This isn’t the case in Lazarillo: we follow him from childhood to adulthood, and his behavior reflects what life has taught him up to that point. It’s the story of a learning process, a life in the making. In this sense, despite its brevity, it can be considered the first modern European novel.

b) The Picaresque Genre

Lazarillo inspired the picaresque novel. Although Lázaro is never called a “pícaro” (rogue), and his crimes are relatively minor compared to those of actual rogues, they accentuate what’s already present in Lazarillo: the rogue is a character without a stable occupation, resorting to serving, begging, and stealing, lacking a moral conscience and trying to live off others, but often becoming a victim of their own tricks.

The picaresque genre took shape when Mateo Alemán (1547-c.1615) published Guzmán de Alfarache in two parts (1599 and 1605), following the Lazarillo model. This extensive work alternates narrative episodes with frequent moral reflections, marked by typical Baroque pessimism.

Other picaresque novels include:

  • The Life of Justina the Bewitched (1605) by Francisco López de Úbeda;
  • The Life of Squire Marcos de Obregón (1618) by Vicente Espinel;
  • The Life of Buscón (1626) by Francisco de Quevedo;
  • Alonso, the Boy of Many Masters (1626) by Jerónimo de Alcalá;
  • The Life and Deeds of Estebanillo González, a Man of Good Humor (1646), anonymous.

These novels adopt many of Lazarillo‘s structural features, including:

  • First-person autobiographical narration;
  • Protagonist born to dishonorable parents;
  • Use of cunning rather than violence to commit crimes (theft, fraud, etc.);
  • Attempts to climb the social ladder but ultimately failing to escape their miserable and dishonorable state;
  • Traveling across various regions or countries, serving different masters and joining different companies;
  • Adventures primarily taking place in urban settings;
  • Realistic storytelling, avoiding the fantastic but incorporating Baroque exaggeration.