Gil Vicente

Gil Vicente (; c. 1465c. 1536), called the Trobadour, was a Portuguese playwright and poet who acted in and directed his own plays. Considered the chief dramatist of Portugal he is sometimes called the "Portuguese Plautus," often referred to as the "Father of Portuguese drama" and as one of Western literature's greatest playwrights. Also noted as a lyric poet, Vicente worked in Spanish as much as he worked in Portuguese and is thus, with Juan del Encina, considered joint-father of Spanish drama.

Vicente was attached to the courts of the Portuguese kings Manuel I and John III. He rose to prominence as a playwright largely on account of the influence of Queen Dowager Leonor, who noticed him as he participated in court dramas and subsequently commissioned him to write his first theatrical work.

He may also have been identical to an accomplished goldsmith of the same name at the court of Évora; the goldsmith is mentioned in royal documents from 1509 to 1517 and worked for the widow of King John II, Dona Leonor. He was the creator of the famous Belém Monstrance, and master of rhetoric of King Manuel I.

His plays and poetry, written in both Portuguese and Spanish, were a reflection of the changing times during the transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance and created a balance between the former time of rigid mores and hierarchical social structure and the new society in which this order was undermined.

While many of Vicente's works were composed to celebrate religious and national festivals or to commemorate events in the life of the royal family, others draw upon popular culture to entertain, and often to critique, Portuguese society of his day.

Though some of his works were later suppressed by the Portuguese Inquisition, causing his fame to wane, he is now recognised as one of the principal figures of the Portuguese Renaissance.

Life

The year 1465, the date proposed by Queirós Veloso, is the commonly accepted year of Vicente's birth. However, Braamcamp Freire proposes the year 1460, while de Brito Rebelo proposes between 1470 and 1475. Vicente's own works indicate contradictory dates. The Velho da Horta ("Old Man of the [Vegetable] Garden"), the Floresta de Enganos ("Forest of Mistakes"), and the Auto da Festa ("Act of the Party") indicate 1452, 1470, and before 1467, respectively. Since 1965, when official festivities commemorating the 500th birthday of the writer were held, the date of 1465 has been almost universally accepted.

Though Frei Pedro de Poiares conjectured Barcelos was Vicente's birthplace, evidence for this is scarce. Despite this, the people of Barcelos honored the playwright by naming their own football club after him. Pires de Lima, on the other hand, proposed Guimarães, which better accounts for Vicente's identification as a jeweller. The people of Guimarães have embraced this theory; a municipal school in Urgezes is named after the playwright. There are some stories about Gil Vicente's father, that he was from this parish in Guimarães, so people believe that Gil Vicente had lived here too. Another conjecture places his birthplace at Lisbon. The Beira region is also a candidate because of various references to it in his plays, more exactly the location of Guimarães de Tavares, that has been mistaken with Guimarães.

Vicente married his first wife Branca Bezerra in 1490. The couple had two sons. Following Bezerra's death in 1514, Vicente married Melícia Rodrigues in 1517. He had three children with Rodrigues: Paula (born ), Luis (born ), and Valeria (born ). Luis organized and published a compilation of Gil Vicente's work in 1562.

It is well known the presence of the playwright in Santarém, on 26 January, during the 1531 Lisbon Earthquake, where rumors quickly spread, apparently encouraged by the friars of Santarém, that the disaster was divine punishment (Latin: "Ira Dei"- Wrath of God) and that the Jewish community was to blame. Faced with social instability in the city, Gil Vicente, reportedly, personally defused the situation while scolding the friars for their fear-mongering in a powerfully written letter to King John III, and possibly averting a massacre of Jews and recent converts to Christianity.

Vicente's last work is dated to 1536, and he was dead by 1540. The precise year of his death is unknown, and the location is variously given as Évora or Torres Vedras. technical terms used by the playwright lend credibility to this identification.

In 1881, Camilo Castelo Branco wrote the letter "" ("Gil Vicente, Refutations of the Opinion of Mr. Teófilo Braga") , which argued that Gil Vicente the writer and Gil Vicente the goldsmith were two different people. Teófilo Braga, who initially believed them to be the same man, later adopted a different opinion after reading a study by Sanches de Baena which showed the different genealogy of two individuals named Gil Vicente. However, Brito Rebelo demonstrated the historical inconsistency of these two genealogies by the use of documents from the Portuguese national archive.

Between 1503 and 1506, Vicente the goldsmith crafted the famous Belém Monstrance for the Jerónimos Monastery using gold brought back from East Africa following Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India. The monstrance features a ceremonial canopy framed by two high pinnacled counterforts, resembling the portal of the Church of Belém.

Three years later, he became overseer of the patrimonies of the Convento de Cristo in Tomar, Nossa Senhora de Belém, and the Hospital de Todos-os-Santos in Lisbon. In 1511, he was nominated vassal of the King, and a year later he was the representative jeweller in the Casa dos Vinte e Quatro. In 1513, as master of the balance of the Casa da Moeda, the Portuguese national mint, Vicente the goldsmith was elected by the others masters to represent them in Lisbon.

Written works

Christmas-related themes, very present in Gil Vicente's works since the first order from Queen Leonor, have also a strongly symbolic and suggestive meaning. Here, a painting from the contemporaneous Vicente Gil (not to be confused with the playwright)

Vicente's oeuvre spans the years between 1500 and 1536. Most of his plays were intended for performance at court, where he and the ladies and gentlemen of the court participated in their production. He wrote no fewer than forty-four pieces, ten of which are in Spanish, fourteen in Portuguese, and the remainder in mingled Portuguese and Spanish. His plays may be grouped into four main categories: acts, or devotional plays; comedies tragicomedies; and farces.

Like Spain's classical dramas, his plays are often in verse form. In addition, they feature his own musical compositions and well as popular lyrics and melodies of the time.

He was also a noted lyric poet in both Portuguese and Spanish,

A quote from one of Vicente's plays, "The pursuit of love is like falconry", appears in the epigraph of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold.