Four Plays of Gil Vicente
Four Plays of Gil Vicente gathers a representative quartet from the founding father of Portuguese drama, presented in Aubrey Bell's 1920 edition with the rare 1562 first-edition text alongside an English version. The selection spans the breadth of Vicente's range: the Auto da Alma, a religious allegory in which the human Soul, tempted along the road of life, is sustained by the Church toward salvation; the Exhortação da Guerra, a patriotic-imperial summons to arms; the Farsa dos Almocreves, a sharp domestic satire of a spendthrift nobleman and his unpaid carriers; and the Tragicomédia Pastoril da Serra da Estrella, a pastoral idyll graced with lyric song.
Together these plays reveal Vicente's gift for fusing courtly form with the genuine poetry of nature, faith, and folk life. Sovereign satirist, lyric poet, and national voice of sixteenth-century Portugal, he remains the country's most original and indigenous dramatic genius.
How it begins
Gil Vicente, that sovereign genius [1] , is too popular and indigenous for translation and this may account for the fact that he has not been presented to English readers. It is hoped, however, that a fairly accurate version, with the text in view [2] , may give some idea of his genius. The religious, the patriotic-imperial, the satirical and the pastoral sides of his drama are represented respectively by the Auto da Alma , the Exhortação , the Almocreves and the Serra da Estrella , while his lyrical vein is seen in the Auto da Alma and in two delightful songs: the serranilha of the Almocreves and the cossante of the Serra da Estrella . Many of his plays, including some of the most charming of his lyrics, were written in Spanish and this limited the choice from the point of view of Portuguese literature, but there are others of the Portuguese plays fully as well worth reading as the four here given. The text is that of the exceedingly rare first edition (1562). Apart from accents and punctuation, it is reproduced without alteration, unless a passage is marked by an asterisk, when the text of the editio princeps will be found in the foot-notes, in which variants of other editions are also given.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.