Renaissance and Golden Age Essays In Honor of D.W. McPheeters (eBook)

Contents 8
Preface 10
Publications 16
Bartolomé Jiménez Patón: The "Lost" and Unkown Works 22
Bernardim Ribeiro and the Tradition of Renaissance Pastoral 48
The Originality of Antonio Enríquez Gómez in Engañar para reinar 70
Un aspecto de la poética de la Diana Enamorada: Los planos de actuación de G. Gil Polo y su Felicia 82
& #191
Elysium and the Cannibals: History and Humanism in Ercilla's Araucana 103
La oralidad y La Celestina 115
Lope's Arte poética 127
The Role of Deception in La vida es sueño 141
New Data—Mira de Amescua, Royal Chaplain 151
Hercules in Alfonso de Madrigal's In Eusebium 155
Presencia del Padre Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) en la Biblioteca de La Universidad de Illinois: Fondos raros de los Siglos XVI y XVII 169
Fr. Luis de León entre la inspiración clásica y la eclesiástica: la oda ix A Querinto 188
The Catalytic Role of the Dream in La Vida es sueño 215
En torno al sentido y forma de No hay mal que por bien no venga (Juan Ruiz de Alarcón) 226
The Role of the King and His Courtier in the Theatre of the XVII Century 243
The Netherlands and the Literature of the Amsterdam Sephardic Community in the Seventeenth Century 255
Tabula Gratulatoria 272

Bernardim Ribeiro and the Tradition of Renaissance Pastoral (p. 27)

Bryant Laurence Creel

Bernardim Ribeiro`s literary personality argues forcefully for the view that what is recognized as genius in an author is that which is absolutely unlike anything else.

Ribeiro`s fame rests not on his cultivation of the eclogue, by which he introduced Renaissance pastoral in Portugal: successful as he is as a writer of eclogues, that form is highly conventional and admits of relatively little originality on the part of the individual artist.

Ribeiro`s masterpiece is his prose work, Menina e Moga, whose exceptional beauty has attracted yet also perplexed readers for centuries. Critics have had little success in fathoming the work`s mysteries, much of their effort having been spent just on debating the method of its classification.

I would describe Menina e Moqa as a unique blend of chivalric romance, the sentimental novel, and elegiac pastoral romance, the narrative assuming its vivid natural- ness by virtue of a delicately patient, gentle, and plebeian interest in familiar detail, seemingly for its own sake, similar to the descriptive and psychological realism developed much later along more naturalistic lines in the prose fiction of Ivan Turgenyev and Anton Chekov.

But what is there about Menina e Moga that is so "mysterious"? Most obvious is the elliptical character of its plot. Although the work was first known by another title (O Livro das Saudades), the fact remains that the character whom we expect to be the protagonist and who states that the book is to be of her making, Menina, is neither the protagonist nor the fictional narrator, in spite of the fact that the second chapter begins with the words "em que a donzela vai prosseguindo sua historia."

We never find out who Menina is or what happened to her, who her "amigo verdadeiro" was or what happened to him, but instead find the story abruptly transferred to a different narrator, to "uma dona do tempo antigo," who is lamenting what seems to be the loss of her son.

But who he was and what happened to him, or who Dona is and what happened to her, we never learn. Also, in the only edition recognized as entirely the work of Ribeiro (Ferrara, 1554), the novel ends abruptly, in the middle of Dona`s second long narrative and in the middle of an intercalated tale told by the knight Avalor.

The last words are "Laus Deo," words which traditionally mark the author`s intention that the work be considered completed. The fact that we seem to have been prepared for such an occurrence in the work`s prologue (where Menina tells us, "Ainda que, quern me manda a mim oulhar por culpas nem desculpas, que o livro ha-de ser do que vai escrito nele?

Das tristezas nam se pode cantar nada ordenadamente porque desordenadamente acontecem ellas ..." [p. 5, 1. 11-14]2) makes it no less disorienting. Also mysterious is the extreme tension between the bucolic setting and the inward strife of the characters, yet this element is already present in Sannazaro`s Arcadia, though to a much lesser degree, and in Garcilaso`s eclogues.