Socio-Cultural and Literary Discourse Through Spanish History

Posted on Sep 22, 2024 in Latin

1. The Middle Ages:

Features:

  • Preserved manuscript works, incomplete, others are lost, others are anonymous.
  • Oral transmission. (People could neither read nor write).
  • Monks transcribed works, so almost all the works are centered around God (Theocentric).
  • Genres that do not follow classical models.
  • Frequent war. In the fifteenth century, there are many works around death. (Jorge Manrique: Couplets to the Death of His Father)
  • Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula, and the recapture of the peninsula by Christians caused war.
  • Alfonso X the Wise was in charge of sending all the Castilian translations, which elevated Castilian prose. (The Toledo School of Translators.)
  • During the reign of the Catholic Kings, the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims was ordered.
  • Castilian and Catalan languages were imposed at the end of the fifteenth century.

2. The Renaissance (Humanistic Philosophy)

  • More classical models.
  • Anthropocentrism: Replaces Theocentricism. Man is seen as perfect.
  • Humanism promotes the study of subjects such as Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry, History, and Philosophy.
  • Erasmus of Rotterdam, a religion and classics scholar, wanted to bring Christianity to the time and defended the ideas of its origins.
  • Neoplatonism: Based on the philosophical ideas of Plato, which were rescued in the Renaissance.
  • Plato and Aristotle’s view of nature forbade the translation of the Bible unless it was translated by the church, and much research was also banned.

3. The Baroque

Most important features:

  • The break with balance and harmony.
  • Disappointment with reality.
  • Golden age for art and culture.
  • Social crisis and Spanish decadence.
  • Felipe III expelled the Moors. It was in his reign that the political and economic decline began.
  • With Felipe IX, poverty and the political decline of Spain were accentuated.
  • His son, Charles II, appointed Philip V as his successor due to not having children. The peninsula was then divided between those who supported the French candidate and those who preferred the nephew of Charles II. These disputes gave rise to the War of Succession and led to an impoverished Spain, plagued by disease, crop failures, and division.

Changing Forms of Literary Genres

The Lyric:
1. The Middle Ages
  • Characterized by minor art, brevity, clarity, and anonymity.
  • Octosyllabic verses (this type of verse never stopped growing).
  • Traditional lyric: Anonymous, plain, and simple. Transmitted orally through songs with refrains (carols). There are also jarchas.
  • Lyrical worship: Compositions written with an author. Closed language. Dodecasyllabic verse with rhyme (copla de arte mayor) or the hendecasyllable verse (sonnet).
  • Latin is characterized by words that seemed jumbled, with love as a frequent theme.
  • Courtly love. In court poets, derivation and polipote are very important figures.
  • Use of allegory: A set of metaphors related to each other that serve to explain something.
  • Moral and existential pessimism: Medieval topics appeared (loca-sut: which served to make clear that we all die and that life is passing).
2. The Renaissance:
  • Characterized by the Italian influx (Francesco Triarc).
  • New hendecasyllable verse and heptasílabo started growing:
  • The Sonnet: Stanza of 14 verses: 2 quartets (rhymes embraced) and 2 triplets (cross-rhyme), with rhyme.
  • The Lira: Seven-syllable lines and varying hendecasyllables.
  • Stay: Seven-syllable lines and heroic verse spread the taste of the poet.
  • Eclogues: Compositions of love, where the characters are shepherds.
  • Oda: Praise someone or something.
  • Elegies: Compositions in honor of someone dead.
  • Recovery of classical myths and stereotypes.
  • Carpediem
  • Beatus ille: Praise of the simple life.
  • Locus amenus: Description of idealized landscapes.
3. The Baroque
  • Characterized by the involvement and the recargamiento slope.
  • Mix of traditional and cultured side of lyric.
  • Marked by: bold contrasts, metaphors, antithesis (opposition of two ideas) very frequent.
  • Thematic of desengaño.
  • Odes and Lit continued to be written.
  • The language became a little dark (not understandable).
  • Mythological allusions appeared.
The Epic
1. The Middle Ages:
  • Mester of minstrelsy: Popular nature, anonymous, and oral transmission. Many tales of warriors existed.
  • Cantares de geste: Real gentlemen’s war themes. Anonymous verses, copied by monks. Written in polymetric (many sizes) and assonantal rhyme.
  • Mester of clergy: Religious and moral stories. Isometric verse (same measure), rhyme, and structure of timber means (four-verse Alexandrian stanza with rhyme only). “Miracles of Our Lady.”
  • The story: The tale was born in India. It came to us through Arabic. They invented matters. If the purpose is didactic, they are called fables.
  • *Folk Tales: Cultured stories with oral transmission*.
  • *Stories with an author: (Conde Lucanor)*
  • Books of chivalry: Replaced the epic poem. Invented stories of heroes written in prose. They are not novels but a set of juxtaposed episodes with no changes in plot or characters.
  • Romances: Narrative in verse, especially in the fifteenth century. An infinite series of eight-syllable lines rhyming in pairs with assonance.
2. Renaissance:
  • Written until the mid-sixteenth century.
  • It is said that the first novel was Lazarillo de Tormes, whose character evolved. Italian influence.

Novelistic Genres

  • Sentimental novel: Love theme. Idealized reality.
  • Picaresque novel: Second half of the sixteenth century. Inaugurated the genre of the novel. They have a desire to focus more critically on reality and reflect its negative aspects. (Lazarillo, Guzman Alfarache).
  • Books of chivalry: Idealized reality.
  • Pastoral novels: Shepherds as players, idealized reality.
  • Moorish Novel: Some Moors as actors. Idealized reality.
  • Byzantine Fiction: Genre that grew with Cervantes and Lope de Vega in the seventeenth century.
Theatre
1. The Middle Ages
  • Theatre had to be practically reinvented.
  • Rudimentary form of theatre, a succession of Christological monologues.
  • Christmas scenes. (Only “The Order of the Magi” is retained. It is a handwritten book that represents the journey of the Magi and their visit to Herod. Some authors say that it is incomplete. 13th century)
  • The representations of profanity evolved in the fifteenth century.
2. The Renaissance:
  • Secular theatre was consolidated, but popular theatre arose.
  • In the sixteenth century, due to the Counter-Reformation, works of religious origin arose again, such as autos sacramentales.
  • Difference between tragedy and comedy: Characters were different. Those in tragedy were noble, and those in comedy could not be noble (as the nobles were unable to laugh). They had to be ordinary people.
  • Tragicomedy: “La Celestina” (Fernando de Rojas) has Renaissance and medieval features, written in prose. It was intended to be read because it was very long (21 acts). It did not imitate the classical authors and did not follow either the genre of comedy or tragedy. It brought together the two genres, comedy and tragedy.
  • Cult: University tradition, five acts, written in verse. Comedy differed from tragedy, it did not mix genres. It used the ruler of the three unities.
  • Unity of action: They could not have many interlocking stories so as not to confuse the public.
  • Unity of time: Telling a story that could not occur in more than a day.
  • Renaissance playwrights added the unity of place: It could not go beyond the limits of a city/country. With this, the theatre was verosímil.
  • In the sixteenth century, popular theatre emerged: Some theatre companies came from Italy. “Ll commedia d’art.” Actors had fixed roles based on improvisation. It was represented in the village and was a rather vulgar theatre. It was addressed to the common people.
  • Imitating this, a more serious popular theatre was introduced in Spain.
  • Traditional: Lope de Rueda wrote comic pieces, called short and popular steps. The short works that are represented among the events are called entremeses, and the long pieces are called ntremeses. If they happened in the seventeenth century, they were called Sainete, which is the same as a starter. Lope de Rueda was the first to write them.

Baroque

  • Lope Felix de Vega Carpio invented the formula of popular theatre that was very successful in the late sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, many works were performed.
  • He loved the naturalness of the common people.
  • He did not respect the rule of the three unities.
  • Baroque theatre was the opposite of classical theatre.
  • Lope de Vega’s theatre gave the people the joy of the happy endings of his works. All his works are called plays, but he mixed tragedy with comedy (mingled nobles with commoners). He wrote in verse and adjusted the verse in terms of character or situation.
  • These works were no longer divided into five acts, but into three. He sought entertainment.
  • It was a tremendous success, and he took the opportunity to make propaganda for the king and the monarchy.
  • “The new art of making comedies,” Lope de Vega.
  • Autos sacramental: Characters had allegorical peculiarities: kindness, evil, sin. They were represented in pens (backyards).