51
The inclusion of Apollo's privileges and ordinances in the «Adjunta» prompts one to compare the dialogue that frames them with the encounter between Quevedo's Pablos and a manic poetaster in Book II, Chapters 2 and 3 of El buscón. To ridicule his ineptitude, Pablos shows him a burlesque decree promulgating sanctions and prohibitions against diverse abuses committed by «los poetas hueros, chirles y hebenes» -species well represented by the losing side in the battle on Parnassus in Cervantes's Viaje del Parnaso. The sardonic hilarity that Pablo shows towards the filthily attired, aged, blockish ex-sacristan from Majalahonda throws Cervantes's good-humoured urbanity in the «Adjunta» into stark relief. (N. from the A.)
52
I refer particularly to the
versos de cabo roto of
«Urganda la Desconocida», which precede Part I, with their jibes at
Lope de Vega or López de Ubeda or both. See: F. Rodríguez
Marín's edition of
Don Quijote, 10 vols. (Madrid, 1947-49),
i, 48 ff.; Luis Astrana Marín,
Vida ejemplar y heroica..., v, 541 ff.;
Marcel Bataillon, «Relaciones literarias» in
Suma Cervantina, 215-32 (224-26), and
«Urganda entre
Don Quijote y La pícara
Justina», in
Pícaros y picaresca. La pícara
Justina (Madrid, 1969), 53-90. The verses of Urganda, if indeed aimed at
Lope, are a fusillade in the hostilities between Lope and Cervantes which broke
out around 1600, or not long after, and of which only tantalising débris
has survived: Lope's famous comment in a private letter of August, 1604 about
his hatred of envy, more hateful to him than his plays are to Cervantes (see n.
25 below); the obscene sonnet which begins
«Pues nunca de la Biblia digo
le-, / ni sé si eres, Cervantes, co- ni cu-...»
and is obviously by Lope or one of his admirers (see
Viaje del Parnaso, p. 197); the
references to Cervantes's envy of Lope and spiteful personal allusions to him
and Avellaneda in Avellaneda's prologue to
El Quijote. In what specific ways
Cervantes contributed to this war, apart from what he published in
Don Quijote Part I, is not clear. His
modern biographers have speculated about satiric broadsides, including poems,
that he may have written against Lope between 1600 and 1605. See Melveena
McKendrick,
Cervantes (Boston and Toronto, 1980), 197
ff., and Jean Canavaggio,
Cervantes (Paris, 1986), 225-26 and 252.
(N. from the A.)
53
Let us take drama as an example of this mellowing. In all the works that Cervantes may plausibly be deemed to have composed in the last few years of his life -between approximately 1610 and 1616- the motifs of the attack on the New Comedy in Don Quijote Part I, without being radically modified, are re-capitulated in a light and ludic key. Examples are: the caricature of the unscrupulous autor de comedias in the episode of Maese Pedró s puppet-show (Don Quijote II, 26) and in El retablo de las maravillas; the satire of the lacayo consejero in Act I of La entretenida (see the edition of Cervantes's Comedias y entremeses by R. Schevill and A. Bonilla, 6 vols. (Madrid, 1915-22), iii, 25-29) and in the passage from Persiles III, 2 discussed below in the text; the reference to the disparates of the New Comedy in the closing lines of Pedro de Urdemalas. If, as several critics have argued, La entretenida is to be interpreted as a parody of the conventions of the New Comedy, then its merry tone is further corroboration of my point. (See, e. g., Stanislav Zimic, «Cervantes frente a Lope y a la Comedia Nueva», Anales Cervantinos 15 (1976), 19-119; J. L. Flecniakoska, «Quelques propos sur La entretenida», Anales Cervantinos 11 (1972), 17-32.) Symptomatic of the same modification of attitude is the tacit recognition of Lope de Vega's «monarchy» over the Spanish theatre, and the praise of dramatists of his school, in the prologue to the Ocho comedias; this conciliatoriness is repeated in Viaje del Parnaso, where Lope, Vélez de Guevara, Miguel Sánchez, Mira de Amescua, Guillén de Castro are amongst those honored on Parnassus. (N. from the A.)
54
The justification of «and so on» may be found in my book on Don Quixote (Cambridge, 1990), 15-20. (N. from the A.)
55
See my essay «Ambivalencia del estilo elevado en Cervantes», in «La Galatea» de Cervantes cuatrocientos años después, ed. J. B. Avalle-Arce (Newark, Delaware, 1985), 91-102, and my book Don Quixote, 68-70. (N. from the A.)
56
See Persiles y Sigismunda in the edition by R. Schevill and A. Bonilla, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1914), ii, 20. (N. from the A.)
57
See A. Porqueras Mayo, El prólogo como género literario: su estudio en el siglo de oro español (Madrid, 1957); cf. his anthology, El prólogo en el manierismo y barroco españoles (Madrid, 1968). (N. from the A.)
58
The epithet was applied to Cervantes by Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, in his Junta de libros, la mayor que ha visto España, hasta el año de 1624: «ingenio, aunque lego, el más festivo de España». Cited in Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes (Madrid, 1925), 113 note. However, the epithet must have circulated before then, since Cervantes himself mentions it in Viaje del Parnaso, Chapter 6, l. 174. (N. from the A.)
59
In «Los prólogos al Quijote», 232. (N. from the A.)
60
The prologue to
Persiles is not really an exception,
since here Cervantes, on his deathbed, articulates his primary commitment and
claim to fame as a writer, summed up in the salutation of the youth encountered
on the highway from Esquivias to Madrid:
«¡Sí, sí;
éste es el manco sano, el famoso todo, el escritor alegre, y,
finalmente, el regozijo de las Musas!»
(Persiles, p. lviii). (N.
from the A.)