The Carnival Stage: Vicentine Comedy Within the Serio-comic Mode

ISBN-10: 0838634915
ISBN-13: 9780838634912
Category: Literary Criticism
Pages: 172
Language: English
Published: 1993
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Author: Jose I. Suarez

Description

In this innovative study, Jose I. Suarez attempts to trace the roots of Gil Vicente's theatrical production to their proper sources. Here traditional methods of investigation are integrated with more contemporary approaches to the sixteenth-century Portuguese writer, who is considered to be the founder of Portuguese drama. Vicente's works include autos, comedies, tragicomedies, and farces. Initially, Suarez takes a broad look at the extant data concerning the origins of drama in the Iberian Peninsula in both the secular and liturgical spheres. With the absence of any convincing evidence of true drama prior to Vicente's time, and with the opinion that early theatrical attempts were of a popular nature, attention shifts to Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the impact of carnival on the serio-comic genres such as the Old Attic Comedy and the Menippean satire. Because of the striking similarities between the antique Menippean satire (a highly carnivalized genre) and the Vicentine pieces, Suarez offers a detailed exemplification of the characteristics of the former as contained in the latter. This leads to the conclusion that, although Master Gil was probably unaware of the Greek satires or, for that matter, of its relative, the Aristophanic comedy, his opus shares one essential quality with these ancient genres: its origins are carnivalesque and may therefore be included within the realm of the serio-comical. The application of Bakhtin's critical theories to Gil Vicente has helped in understanding the genre and plot-compositional traits and sources of Vicente's drama. Until now, these have been virtually ignored by Vicentine scholars, most of whom have limited themselves to biographical/historical approaches in an effort to explain the playlets as products of a particular epoch - the Middle Ages and/or the Renaissance - and the corresponding literary modes. The author concludes that it is not the subjective memory of the playwrights but the objective memory of the genre in which they compose their plays that preserves its fundamental characteristics through the centuries, characteristics that derive from the incursion of the popular element into the realm of literary creation. Direct in its presentation, this study presents a concise and scholarly synthesis of Peninsular drama from its origins and the impact that the popular element had on its formation, and it will continue to be regarded as an original facet in the overall complexity of Vicentine studies.

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