A Seventeenth Century Version of the «Grisel y Mirabella» Story: Juan Arze Solórzeno's «Tragedias de amor» (1607)

John T. Cull

A pleasant surprise awaits the reader tenacious enough to follow Juan Arze Solórzeno's Tragedias de amor (1607) to its conclusion, a surprise seemingly ignored by the authors of book-length studies dedicated to the spanish libros de pastores¹. The narration draws to a close with one of the characters reciting a truncated version of Juan de Flores's Historia de Grisel y Mirabella (1495?). Barbara Matulka, in her study of the influences of this late fifteenth century sentimental romance on subsequent Spanish literature, appears to be unaware of Arze Solórzeno's rendition². The present study will try to reach a determination as to whether we are dealing with a shameless case of literary piracy or merely an example of what was meant by the precept of mimesis, as understood by the literary theorists of the Renaissance. The issue is complicated by the likelihood that Arze Solórzeno was unaware of the original text, and instead availed himself of a Spanish version of a polyglot edition (1556; Italian, Spanish, French and English), that in turn based itself on a translation into Italian (1521)³.

The Grisel y Mirabella plot is familiar to students and scholars of Spanish literature. Nevertheless, a brief summary will prove invaluable for the analysis that follows. In the kingdom of Scotland, at some undetermined time, the king's daughter Mirabella is ardently pursued by all the knights of the realm. Indeed, many perish in their amorous quest. The monarch ensconces his daughter in a remote location to try to prevent the decimation of the ranks of his knights, but without success. Two knights in particular, the best of friends, secretly woo Mirabella at night, each unaware of the threat posed by the other. Eventually, with the rivalry discovered, the two engage in combat for the right to pursue Mirabella's favors. Grisel kills his friend and competitor, and soon enjoys nocturnal rendezvous with the princess. One night they are surprised in flagrante delicto due to the treachery of a servant. Both are imprisoned until the question of culpability can be resolved. The law of the land states that the individual most responsible for inducing the other into illicit dalliance will be executed, and the lesser transgressor perpetually exiled. Even under torture, each of the lovers accepts full blame. To overcome the impasse, the king agrees to a debate between a representative of each sex to decide which gender has a greater role in enticing the other to love. Braçayda is the elected proponent of the feminine cause, while Torrellas is brought from Spain to champion the side of men⁴. A lengthy debate ensues between the formidable combatants, replete with personal insults and vicious indictments of the opposite sex. The judges, all men, ultimately declare Torrellas the winner. Mirabella's father, torn between paternal sentiment and his duty to uphold justice, declares that she must suffer execution by flames. On the day that the sentence is to be carried out, Grisel hurls himself in the fire, in order to join his beloved in death. With one of the pair dead, however, and justice therefore served, Mirabella's sentence is revoked. Unable to live without Grisel, she bides her time until alone, then jumps into the lion pit, where she is savagely torn to bits and devoured. Torrellas, meanwhile, has fallen madly in love with Braçayda, in spite of his unflagging misogyny⁵. The queen and other ladies of the court, in order to exact revenge on the scourge of womanhood, advise Braçayda to play along with Torrellas and feign a reciprocation of his passion. In this way, Braçayda lures Torrellas into a trap. He is bound and stripped by the ladies, and then cruelly tortured all night long until all the flesh has been flayed from his bones. The corpse is burned, and each of the ladies gathers some ashes as a blazon of their triumph. Nevertheless, Flores reasserts the status quo by undermining, through authorial manipulation, the vengeance wrought by the woman. In the closing sentences he reaffirms a paternalistic social order by declaring Mirabella's death sentence as «just» (370).

The version of the Grisel y Mirabella story «imitated» by Arze Solórzeno was probably the aforementioned Spanish text of the 1556 polyglot edition. In fact, a strong initial argument against viewing the Tragedias de amor as plagiarism is the free and open admission that the tale Eusebio relates in the novel is one he has read in four languages: «que es historia muy extraordinaria y antigua, y la leí en cuatro lenguas, Francesa, Italiana, Castellana, é Inglesa: y lo mejor que la débil memoria me ayudare, os referiré lo más sustancial della» (f. 172r-v). Further evidence is offered by the fact that the names given to the protagonists in the Tragedias de amor are those employed in all the European translations. That is to say, Grisel, Mirabella, Torrellas and Braçayda, are rebaptized respectively: Aurelio, Isabela, Afranio and Hortensia in the Tragedias and other European versions of the story⁶. Other internal evidence that is incidental to the focus of this study help to establish the 1556 cuadrilingual edition as the probable source of Arze Solórzeno's treatment of the story.

Nevertheless, for the purpose of analyzing the Tragedias de amores literary mimesis, the versions offered by Juan de Flores and the anonymous translator of 1556 of the Grisel y Mirabella story show negligible differences. The principal difference is one of length. The later translation adds some extraneous material, mostly in the form of invented dialogue, that in no way alters the intentions of the original. The prolixity of the translator led J. A. Praag to exaggerate the differences between the three texts under consideration: «El texto como va intercalado en la novela de Arze difiere bastante (parece muy abreviado) del de la edición cuadrilingüe de Amberes (1556)» (349). In truth, the substance of the three versions of the story are strikingly similar, if we disregard the verbose additions of the European translations. The only appreciable dissimilarity that separates model and continuations at most points is a modernization of the Castillian. Though spatial constraints make a detailed correlation of the three texts impractical, a representative passage will allow the reader to appreciate the faithfulness with which Arze Solórzeno follows his model(s). In the example that follows, chosen arbitrarily, the king, after torture has failed, wonders how he will get the truth out of the pair of lovers. I have chosen to reproduce the original orthography only for the text of Grisel y Mirabella:

Before comparing and contrasting the texts in more depth, it will be helpful to consider the general context in which the tale appears in the Tragedias de amor. This rather obscure pastoral romance, with its pretense to vast erudition, is in the tradition of Lope de Vega's Arcadia, from which it borrows liberally⁷. Arze Solórzeno's preliminary address to the reader acknowledges a certain amount of imitation in the composition of his eclogues: «después de haber en estas églogas con artificiosas historias antiguas fábulas, filosóficos discursos, latinas y griegas imitaciones dado alguna parte de dulce...» («Al Lector», N. pag.) This admission of appropriation of outside sources should blunt any possible accusation of plagiarism. At the same time, it seems to consecrate the Grisel y Mirabella as an «ancient fable» a little more than a century after its initial appearance. This is plausible in view of the fact that the origin of the story was unknown in the early seventeenth century. It was not at all uncommon in the period for authors of short fiction, and especially of the novella, to borrow the plots of their narrations from the Italian masters of the genre. It is not until the prologue to Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares that an author boasts of originality in his plots. Arze Solórzeno, like all his contemporaries, believed that the Historia de Aurelio y Isabela was penned by an Italian author. His borrowing of the story, and refashioning of certain elements to suit his own particular needs, was a well-established practice. It is certainly ironic, nevertheless, that an author who depends so heavily on the inspiration of others claims as his reason for publishing the work a fear lest others should pilfer it with improper imitation: «porque otro no los publicara prevaricados y desconocidos, como ya los he visto» («Al Lector», N. pag.). This kind of lament, of course, is not original with Arze Solórzeno, and appears as a conventional feature of many of the pastoral romances.

The Tragedias de amor is made up of five books (of the fifteen that the author claims to have written), each with a brief allegory to summarize its didactic intention. The pastoral romance, as practiced by Arze Solórzeno, is a great melting pot where many diverse kinds of writing are brought together. In terms of plot development, the Tragedias relies heavily on the technique of the interrupted story. As the action progresses, each narrative thread is related in halting fragments, by different narrators, from their unique perspectives. A series of often violent peripetia interrupt the narration at crucial points in the stories. By the end of the first (and only published) part, very little has reached resolution. The reader is left dissatisfied, with an incomplete narrative, in anticipation of a continuation that never materialized.

The issue of imitation, or plagiarism, is a particularly difficult one to decide for the pastoral romance. One of the most intertextual of literary modes, pastoral depends for its success on a fixed canon of topoi that must be included and refashioned by each author. That is to say, it is a mode that not only encourages, but demands a certain amount of «distillation» or «alembication», as literary mimesis has sometimes been called. Of the Spanish pastoral romances, there is at least one instance where an author clearly steps over the line of reasonable imitation and into the realm of unabashed theft: Jerónimo de Tejeda's continuation of the Diana (Paris, 1627). The late date of its publication with respect to the Tragedias makes it evident that Arze Solórzeno could not possibly have followed Tejeda's lead.

Every one of the pastoral novelists repeats certain conventions that can be traced back at least as far as Theocritus and Virgil. It comes as no great surprise, consequently, to learn that the Grisel y Mirabella story is not the only example of imitation in the Tragedias de amor. To cite just a few, Arze Solórzeno appends a «Tabla de los nombres históricos y poéticos» to the end of the novel, in homage to Lope's Arcadia. Another apparent borrowing from the first of Lope's two pastoral romances is the revelation of the secret properties of twelve stones, from natural philosophy (f. 22r). Other pastoral commonplaces include the ubiquitous play on words «locura /el tiempo lo cura» (f. 51r); a variation of the wild man theme (Camilo); the depiction of pastoral ejercicios; the visit to the subterranean palace, and many other conventions repeated ad infinitum because of the highly derivative nature of pastoral literature.

The inclusion in Tragedias de amor of the episode documenting the tragic love of Grisel and Mirabella in no way strikes the reader as arbitrary or out of place. Rather, it is framed quite naturally. The story under consideration follows logically in part because it is the third of a series of anecdotes in the novel that share the common element of an untrustworthy servant who precipitates the transgression of social mores, and in part because the telling of tales to illustrate moral truths is a standard feature of the Spanish pastoral romance. The first of the three cases is the supposedly historical anecdote of Fernán Ruiz de Castro and his wife Estefanía, daughter of Alonso VII⁸. A maid, dressed in her lady's clothes, engages in illicit sexual relations, and is mistaken for Estefanía. Fernán Ruiz, in a blind rage, kills his innocent wife. Significantly, with respect to what will follow in the tale of Aurelio and Isabela (Grisel and Mirabella), a group of wise men exonerate the perpetrator of the homicide, while the servant is publically burned to death (ff. 103-04). In some ways, this situation parallels the sentence of the judges in favor of Torrellas in Grisel y Mirabella, and perhaps prefigures that planned for Torrella's counterpart Afranio in the never published continuation of Tragedias de amor.

The second incidence of a corrupt servant takes place in Tragedias, somewhat surprisingly, within the bower itself. Again, the transgression involves unsanctioned sexuality, though the shock is somewhat tempered by having it narrated from a safe temporal distance. The violence does not occupy the foreground, or principal narrative plane: it is told rather than shown. Acrisio, the novel's protagonist, falls into disfavor with his shepherdess Lucidora because he is able to persuade a corruptible maid into granting him entrance into Lucidora's rustic chambers at night to engage in a form of voyeurism: «para sólo ver a Lucidora acostarse, sin que ella me viese» (f. 135v). When Acrisio is caught spying by Lucidora, he openly admits his somewhat lascivious intentions: «que sólo me trajo la fuerza de un curioso deseo de ver la hermosura y proporción de tu cuerpo al desnudarte» (f. 136r). The series of three is completed with the Grisel and Mirabella story, in which a maid of Mirabella's, unable to keep a secret, is the direct cause of the tragedy that follows. All three anecdotes are intended to teach a moral lesson to the shepherds who hear or experience them. The appropriation of the plot of this narrative, then, serves a clear and distinct purpose in the Tragedias.

The narration of the material imitated out of the Historia de Aurelio y de Isabela (and ultimately, out of Juan de Flores) evolves convincingly from the course of events depicted. The framework that houses the story is typically pastoral. Marcelo, who is an ardent misogynist, is the stock pastoral character of a pastor desamorado, accused by his fellow shepherds of being an enemy of love. The disaffected shepherd freely admits this and gives his reason for despising the love passion. The diatribe against love, and evil women, incorporates many of the standard arguments enjoined by the misogynists, and common to many of the Spanish pastoral novelists. His vituperation includes, as does the Grisel y Mirabella itself, isolated verses from Pere Torroella's infamous Maldezir de mugeres⁹. It falls to Eusebio to come to the defense of woman and love. Ironically, his apology itself appropriates at least one concept from the Maldezir: that nature, and not woman, is to blame for their alleged defects. The verbal sparring between the two shepherds leads Eusebio to exclaim: «Gran enemigo les eres (dijo Eusebio) según publicas, no querría que te sucediese con ellas como a Afranio, que con ser tan sabio, se vengaron dél, por el más extraordinario camino que se ha oído» (f. 172r). After thus whetting their curiosity, the shepherds present ask Eusebio to tell his story, both for their entertainment and to persuade Marcelo of the error of his ways. The transition between the events transpiring in the pastoral pleasance and the actions depicted in an ancient sentimental romance could not be more gentle.

Eusebio proceeds to narrate the story first penned by Juan de Flores. With some minor differences and omissions, which will be summarized presently, Tragedias de amor follows the plot exactly from the beginning to the crucial juncture where the judges retire to deliberate their decision. There is one respite in the telling of the story, a kind of narrative aside to lend variety and break the monotony. This occurs when the shepherd Daciano complains to courtly Eusebio for not relating extensively the arguments that took place between Afranio (Torrellas) and Hortensia (Braçayda). Daciano's gentle chiding allows him the opportunity to introduce a pastoral convention, the praise of pastoral life, while at the same time he is able to disabuse Eusebio of the notion that pastoral simplicity is the same thing as ignorance. The latter's profuse recantation affords him the chance to condemn urban dwellers. The hiatus is a narrative strategy that helps to fuse and interweave the two narrative planes of showing and telling.

Our pseudo-rustic narrator again picks up the thread of the plot and gives a detailed rendering of the Grisel y Mirabella / Historia de Aurelio y de Isabela until he arrives at a pregnant pause: «Hizo aquí pausa el cortesano Eusebio, dando lugar a que los discretos pastores meditasen un breve rato el discurso, y diesen su sentencia, para después decir la de los Jueces, y proseguir la historia» (f. 189v). At that precise moment, however, an explosion of violence erupts on the foreground of the greensward, as several shepherds, their daggers unsheathed, chase after a wounded shepherd. Just as the judges of the interpolated tale are frozen in time and space with the adjudication about to issue from their lips, so too are the intrusive shepherds indefinitely preserved in their homicidal posture. Feigning exhaustion, the narrator refuses to continue, but promises the conclusion in a sequel. In a superficial sense, it can be argued that Tragedias de amor is not plagiarism simply because it does not avail itself of the entirety of its source, regardless of whether a continuation was intended¹⁰.

There are certain textual indications that suggest an effort on the part of Arze Solórzeno to submit his source materials to an editorial process and thereby improve upon the original. Such an attempt, whether or not we view it as successful, constitutes an authorized literary practice for the period under consideration, and therefore another argument against plagiarism. The major difference between the Tragedias and its two possible models involves significant omissions on the part of Arze Solórzeno, and can be seen as a strategy to pare the plot down to its essentials and thereby expedite the narration. Not only does the author of the Tragedias display his innate aesthetic sensibility by excising most of what the Italian translator added to the original, but he also eliminates some materials found in the Grisel y Mirabella.

The elements that Arze Solórzeno elects not to imitate from his model(s) can be summarized as follows: a) elimination of extraneous and superfluous elements that bog the reader or listener down in unnecessary detail. This is perhaps a function of verisimilitude, since a teller of tales could not possibly be expected to remember every detail of what was read; b) elimination of repetitions and some tedious and complex argumentation. Perhaps this material was being held in reserve for planned discussions between the shepherds in a continuation; c) omission of some of the boastful bantering and insulting parries between the two litigants, Afranio (Torrellas) and Hortensia (Braçayda). Their verbal sparring only encumbers the narrative pace; d) «censorship» of some of the more risqué material, perhaps a lingering effect of the changes wrought by the Council of Trent. This silenced material deals primarily with observations on the clergy, nobility and sexuality; e) suppression of anything that might attribute the story to its original author. As an ancient fable, the plot is now in the public domain. That Flores was its originator, even if known, is of little consequence. All of these alterations to the source text seem to be aimed at improving upon it, and appropriating it to suit different needs; in short, to write mimetically.

The story of the unlucky lovers whose passion is bridled in the interest of reasserting social and moral order is not an end in itself in the Tragedies of Love, but rather a means to an end. Because it screeches to a halt at the point of maximum tension, the decision of the judges and all that follows is left in abeyance. This would allow the listening public to debate the issue themselves, in the cool shade next to a fountain, in true pastoral tradition. One anticipates the shepherds to enjoin different theories of love in defense of their respective positions. It is precisely the discussion of love that is the desired end in typical Renaissance pastoral, in conjunction with the practical demonstration of its effects. The use of the Grisel y Mirabella story as a means to an end is further proof that we are not dealing with a case of literary piracy.

The way in which Arze Solórzeno's contemporaries understood the precept of literary imitation is a topic that has been exhaustively studied¹¹, and which will therefore receive only cursory treatment here. Among the ancients, Pliny, in his Epistles, introduced the analogy that soon became a commonplace: the writer must imitate the bees, who cull the best of the flowers to make their honey¹². Horace, in the Ars Poetica, tied the doctrine of imitation to poetry, while Quintilian amplified upon it in the Institutio Oratoria. Aristotle's comments on imitation in the Poetics only led to a great deal of confusion when the text was rediscovered in the Renaissance.

The Italians were the first theorists to deal with the precept of mimesis in the Renaissance. Marco Girolamo Vida popularized the notion in the Ars Poetica (1527, though written before 1520). After Vida, the endorsement, and occasional rejection, of the imitation of models appears regularly in the poetics of the sixteenth century. Julius Caesar Scaliger yoked the concept of mimesis to the imitation of nature in the Poetices Libri Septem. The same author's Qui et Criticus provided a complete catalogue of proper models to imitate, organized by themes and materials. Giovanni Battista Marino, well after Arze Solórzeno's borrowings, continued to defend the practice of literary plagiarism in the prologue to his La Sampogna (1620), where he euphemistically termed this appropriation as «coinciding» with another poet.

Among the Spaniards who commented on literary imitation, the vast majority embraced its practice. The first major figure to defend it was Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, el Brocense, in the prologue to the second edition of his Anotaciones y enmiendas to the works of Garcilaso de la Vega (1581). El Brocense goes so far as to declare that no good poet can fail to imitate the excellent ancients, and that imitation is an inherent part of the creative process. El Brocense advocated the doctrine of poetic erudition, since mimesis demanded extraordinary talent and artistry. In fact, he extols imitation over originality: «ansí tomar a Homero sus versos y hacerlos propios, es erudición, que a pocos se comunica... y más gloria merece por esto, que no si de su cabeza lo compusiera» (Vilanova 573). El Brocense does not condone uncritical stealing: the poet must attempt to improve upon the original.

Another figure of importance in the long polemic on literary distillation is Fernando de Herrera. In his Anotaciones to the works of Garcilaso (Sevilla, 1580), we find a more prudent and restrictive approach to the problem of imitation. For Herrera, the mere transcription of classical and Petrarchan sources must yield to a more critical culling. Servile imitation results inevitably in the fossilization of a language. Herrera champions a marriage of imitation and originality, with an eye to surpassing the model. Other important contributions to the debate on literary imitation are found in Alonso López Pinciano's Filosofía antigua poética (1596), and Francisco Cascales's Tablas poéticas (1617), both of which depend heavily on the Aristotelian notion of ideal imitation. But nowhere is the pragmatic Spanish attitude towards literary mimesis better encapsulated than in the Adjunta al Parnaso that is appended to Cervantes' Viaje del Parnaso (1614). In the section entitled «Privilegios, Ordenanzas y Advertencias Que Apolo Envía a los Poetas Españoles», we read: «Ítem se advierte que no ha de ser tenido por ladrón el poeta que hurtare algún verso ajeno y le encajare entre los suyos, como no sea todo el concepto y toda la copla entera, que en tal caso tan ladrón es como Caco» (190).

The concept of imitation, to summarize, covered a broad spectrum of meanings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though the theorists were concerned only with verse, we can apply their definitions equally to what was then the less prestigious genre of prose fiction. Four clear possibilities of meaning for the concept of literary mimesis can be distinguished: 1) Based on an apparent misinterpretation of Aristotle, some viewed imitation as simply the photographic representation of nature; 2) The likely meaning of Aristotle's comments in the Poetics, captured by some, involved the imitation of poetic truth, that is, the depiction of men and things not as they are, but as they ideally could be, in accordance with the dictates of verisimilitude; 3) Imitation as pure plagiarism: the appropriation of certain words, entire verses, phrases and passages, which are incorporated into the new work. Even a good translation with nothing original added could be considered a successful imitation under this definition; 4) Imitation as a refashioning of a part or the whole of a model, governed by certain restrictions and limitations to distinguish it from thievery. This is the highest form of imitation, and clearly the one to be emulated. Authors must carefully choose only the best models to imitate, and use a process of keen artistic selection that requires a high degree of competence and erudition. The borrowing must serve the writer's purpose and not be indiscriminate. There must be some resemblance between the imitator and the author imitated. That is to say, an inept writer should not try to appropriate from the great ancient and modern authors. The artist must choose his model in strict accordance with his own abilities and short-comings. Most importantly, the imitator must succeed in creating a higher form of perfection and beauty by means of the borrowing, by surpassing the original model.

We are now armed with sufficient information to pass judgment on Arze Solórzeno's attempt to imitate the story of Grisel and Mirabella in the Tragedias de amor. It is evident that the question of whether we are dealing with mimesis or plagiarism is moot for many who considered them one and the same thing in the Renaissance. However, the prudent approach to literary imitation differentiates the terms according to very precise aesthetic criteria. While Tragedias de amor has far too many failings to constitute an artistically successful pastoral romance, the borrowings from the Historia de Aurelio y de Isabela / Grisel y Mirabella are clearly an example of honest and authorized imitation as the term was understood in the Golden Age. The only serious reservation that can be raised with respect to Arze Solórzeno's mimetic talents is his ability to improve upon his model. Yet, this is an issue that can never be adequately addressed unless the alleged continuation is in fact discovered. The Tragedias de amor was published several years too late to be included in the scrutiny of Don Quixote's library. One questions whether or not its largely successful adaptation of the Grisel y Mirabella plot would have saved if from the flames. They are pages, certainly, that will be of some interest to critics of the sentimental romance as proof of its popularity and longevity. But more importantly, Tragedias de amor is valuable as a document of the legitimacy and practice of literary imitation.

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