Spanish Literature of the Renaissance: Eclogues and Lazarillo
Spanish Literature of the Renaissance
Eclogue of Garcilaso de la Vega
Renaissance poetic creation is consistent with the concept of imitatio. Two stages have been established to signal the consolidation of the Renaissance lyric. In a second phase, theoretical reflections arise. Spanish poetry creates two schools of thought: Salamanca and Seville. The Petrarchan influence did not prevent the persistence of Hispanic roots, both traditional and educated.
The main genres are the Petrarchan sonnet, the song, etc. The Salamanca school arises, and thus acquires its final form. With the Italian example, Spanish poetry will result in abundant production, specialized in the theme of love. Classical poetry fit the ode, the elegy, and the epistle to be integrated into the system with precise tasks. The Eclogues go back to Theocritus and Virgil.
The Arcadian landscape, in the indefinite Golden Age, provides the framework of the eclogue, a genre with versatile styles and thematic motifs. Garcilaso’s work introduces meters, themes, and techniques of Italianate poetry into Spanish letters and sets a standard to remain as a reference during the Golden Age. There is a division of his collection of poems into the Petrarchan, classical, and pastoral sections. Sonnets and songs form the songbook, benefiting from fragmentary non-Petrarchan elements, as illustrated by the enigmatic sonnets.
In the classical bucolic derive the three Eclogues, characterized by the harmony of the shepherd with nature. In Garcilaso’s work, there is a polished finish that will remain an archetypal exponent throughout the 16th century. Garcilaso enters the pastoral genre and proposes, in each of his three eclogues, a different mode. In Eclogue I, he follows the bipartite model of Virgil’s Eclogue VIII, dividing the poem into two cantos: that of Salicio and that of Nemoroso, dedicated to regretting Galatea’s infidelity and the death of Elisa, respectively.
The perception of nature and pastoral life, central to the classical eclogue, merge with Petrarchan modes. If the classical tradition provides pastoral topics, Petrarch and Petrarchism underlie the representation of the beloved as inaccessible, cruel, or angelic and divine. Nature and love share their skills so that the semantic pastoral scene comes alive, to be moved by the complaints of the self and participate in their pain.
The Eclogue III shows a conscious art through the exordium, with metapoetic statements that provide a defense of the pastoral genre. This poem has a dual structure of symmetric divisions. The first part applies the descriptive technique, which is followed by the lament for the death of Elisa.
Eclogue I
The metric is a variation of the song; it is a strophic form, with an average length of about 15 verses and seven-syllable and eleven-syllable verses (heroic verse) of rhyme. Its rhyming scheme is governed by freedom within the following guidelines:
- It starts with a border.
- A link-verse that rhymes with the border.
- A second part, sirim, which distributes its rhymes with freedom.
The Eclogue I is written in stanzas. All stanzas include 14 lines, except the 20th, which adds one, changing the rhyme scheme in the final section of the sirim. This scheme brings with it a structure and rhythm, which usually coincide with the metric division. Eclogue I mimics the structure of Virgil’s Eclogue VIII, divided into introduction, dedication, and two amebeos songs with a transition in the middle.
Structure:
- Introduction
- Purpose and dedication, stanzas 1-4
- Song of Salicio, stanzas 5-16
- Transition, stanza 17
- Song of Nemoroso: stanzas 18-29
- End, stanza 30
Lazarillo de Tormes
The variety of genres in 16th-century prose can be sorted into two categories:
- Didactic prose, which crystallizes in non-fiction genres such as dialogue and the epistle.
- Fiction, in which the literary envelope is attached to a doctrinal purpose.
In prose, the term “romance” brings together a range of genres in which freedom of invention is balanced with constructive formalism.
Dialogue is recovered in the classical revival, which incorporates humanistic literature through mediated recreations of the genre. In Italy and Spain, Platonic, Ciceronian, and Lucianesque models persist as approaches and sources of technical issues. From the wide repertoire of works ascribed to the genre, highlights include those that used the dialogic mold to pour Erasmian ideas.
The editions of Lazarillo appeared in 1554, resulting from a lost editio princeps, taking the division into treatises, the headings (not always suitable to the contents of the chapter), and the bewildered general title. The writing date is not far from the printing date.
The different proposals of authorship decline to the anonymity that this autobiography, presented as an apocryphal letter, seems to claim.
Among the sources of the work, the Golden Ass of Apuleius stands out, as well as the tradition of letters and folklore, adapting the messenger’s service to narrative efficiency.
The book is an autobiography, in which the adult Lázaro evokes his entire history, which explains the “case,” his unexpectedly low marital status. This ambiguous order is reconciled with the narrative perspective; the narrator is limited to the perception of the protagonist.
The style is divided into two registers, consolidated by the pretensions of humor and mastery of the sermo humilis. The projection of the whole story towards that final event gives the work a symmetrical structure, with ternary modules overlapping in the management of the different masters and episodes. The work also contains elements of a critique of contemporary society and religion.
Although Lazarillo did not have an immediate impact, its formula would be retrieved by a later work, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. The merger of the two features foundational works of the genre, establishing a picaresque canon in which the autobiographical mold is used to narrate the adventures of the main character and portray their vileness.
Due to the weight of doctrinal content, to which the rogue’s adventures are subordinated, Guzmán de Alfarache presents itself as a comprehensive work intended to demonstrate the recognition of free will and the possibility of salvation.
The first-person narrative maintains a coherent discourse of the evocation of his past. The model thus formed is impersonated in El Buscón, as consideration within the picaresque requires managing a flexible concept and category, and allowing interaction with other traditions, primarily satirical.
The work is done anonymously. Born as an apocryphal letter, it continues in that condition until the end, without any of the proposed authors being fully convincing. It is presented as a memoir that draws on the fiction of the letter, addressed to a recipient who is appealed to as “Your Grace.” This action became a non-spoken letter, which is manifested in oral evidence incorporated into the story. Since this letter evokes the past, it is conditioned by the present moment. Even the act of writing the letter constitutes a further phase of Lázaro’s life. The epistolary form is incorporated as part of the autobiography, a sort of novelization of perspective. The whole narrative is directed towards the “case,” while the pretext of the question of work and condition guides the selection of its episodes.
The process culminates at the end of the play when previously silenced data reveal the type of profession that the narrator has repeatedly boasted about. It lacks all social esteem since it involves selling wine and playing the trumpet, a character who consents to the adultery of his wife and takes the mold of the letter to disclose his dishonor. Only the outcome reveals the cynicism and meanness of the protagonist, whose late revelations shed new light on his ambiguous biography.
The narrative technique adapts to the conventions of the epistolary mold so that the narrator is limited to the perception of the character with credibility and realism.
The unity of composition is achieved through the interweaving of motifs, continuing throughout the work or arranged between the beginning and the end. The ternary diagram of the architecture seems to preside over the work, both in the relationships and grouping of chapters and in their division, which runs predominantly through three phases. The language and style of the work conform to its design, resulting in the sermo humilis to maintain the decorum that the type of character and subject required.
The prose of Lazarillo adapts to situations, emphasized through accumulations and subordination, where the description of an action requires an abundant style. It usually avoids hyperbaton and tends to confine ideas and sentences in short phrases, topped with word games or irony.