Spanish Literature of the Golden Century and Baroque
Spanish Literature: Golden Century and Baroque
Lazarillo de Tormes
Mystery of the Authorship
The work is anonymous and appeared without the author’s name. It has been impossible to discover the author’s identity.
The Boy’s Life Story
Lazarillo’s life seems to be a series of misfortunes. Born into a poor family, his father is a thief and dies in war. At the age of eight, his mother entrusts him to a blind beggar who leaves him hungry. The second master, a clergyman, only gives him an onion to eat every four days, leading Lazarillo to steal food but eventually being discovered and dismissed. In the third treatise, Lazarillo serves a squire of the lower nobility who is ruined, and the boy helps him to avoid starvation. The fifth master is a pardoner. In the sixth treatise, he has two masters: a painter and a chaplain. In the seventh treatise, the protagonist achieves the greatest success, becoming a preacher and marrying a servant.
Cervantes and Don Quixote
In 1605, Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote, a masterpiece of world literature. The general features of his work are rooted in the Renaissance, so it is studied within this movement. Cervantes’ style is fully Renaissance, with a taste for balance between a realistic vision of society and an idealist eagerness. This leads him to use a rich but simple and clear language.
Novelas Ejemplares
These are 12 short stories, between the short story and the long novel. Cervantes combines entertainment with a desire for moralizing, hence the name “exemplary.” The realistic group includes Rinconete y Cortadillo. The Licensed Vidriera is a clear critique of social cruelty. The idealistic group includes The Gypsy, which shows the idealized life of gypsies, and The Illustrious Kitchen Maid.
Don Quixote
The work was published in Madrid in two parts: the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. It has been translated into all languages.
Part I
Chapter I introduces the protagonist in his home and his unknown village. From Chapter II to VI, he makes his first exit: he confuses an inn with a castle. He is armed by the innkeeper. His neighbor, Don Alonso, takes him back home. The priest and the barber, as he recovers, examine his library.
Part II
In the second part, Don Quixote no longer confuses reality but is deceived by others. The adventures are reduced, and the psychological component increases. In the end, the bachelor Samson Carrasco disguises himself as a knight to challenge him. Don Quixote is defeated and returns home, where he falls ill and dies aware of his folly. Meanwhile, Sancho proposes a fourth exit, this time as shepherds.
Characters
The main characters are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Cervantes creates a partnership that reveals the duality of human beings around two poles: the idealistic and the realistic. Along with these, the gallery of characters is extensive, as in any other previous work, and together they form a comprehensive view of society.
Themes
The themes are varied: love, friendship, literature, the clash against injustices, and a wide range of feelings.
Style
Dialogue interventions are usually long, but in Don Quixote, Sancho’s are shorter than Don Quixote’s, who uses a developed and rich language, but simple and full of phrases and sayings. Sancho’s language is full of proverbs. Poems appear in the novel in varied styles, themes, and forms. The novel is interspersed with fragments of dialogue that could easily become short theatrical pieces. Cervantes achieves a perfect combination of clarity and naturalness of expression with a rich vocabulary.
17th Century: The Baroque
The 17th century was a Baroque period, full of contrasts and characterized by political and economic decline.
From Idealism to Realism
The idealistic values of the Renaissance were broken, and reality imposed itself with all its shortcomings. Realism aesthetically represented reality as it was. Baroque artists sought beauty in the accumulation of ornament and contrast.
Culteranismo and Conceptismo
Seventeenth-century authors were not innovators. They started from the Renaissance and evolved to find a new form of expression characterized by formal elaboration of literary language, moving away from the naturalness sought by authors of the previous century. The Renaissance balance between form and content was broken, giving rise to two literary movements that shared the same aesthetic: the manicured formal elaboration.
Quevedo y Villegas
Francisco de Quevedo is the maximum representative of Conceptismo. He mastered language like no other, creating neologisms. His serious poetry reflects on the brevity of life and a resigned acceptance of death. His burlesque poetry is humorous, including humorous love poetry.
Luis de Gongora
Gongora’s poetry includes satirical and provocative poems about events in his life in letrillas, romances, and sonnets. In his poems, he plays with words, breaking them down to form new meanings.
Themes
Gongora’s idea of love is earthly. He uses puns, antitheses, and paradoxes. Mythology is one of the most important subjects of his writing, serving as the setting for his most famous work: “Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea.”
Innovations
Gongora’s most important innovation is the creation of a new poetic language: cultured, elitist, beautiful, and difficult. The most common resources used by the poet are hyperbaton, anaphora, and antithesis.