THE DRAMATIC UNITY OF GIL VICENTE'S COMEDIA DE RU BENA

Abstract

Many readers of Gil Vicente's Comédia de Rubena would doubtless agree with the play's most recent editor, Giuseppe Tavani, that ‘la sua struttura è inconsistente, assolutamente priva di unità; l'azione è frammentaria e contravviene, si direbbe quasi programmaticamente, alle unità di tempo, di luogo e di svolgimento.’ In particular, ‘la terza scena [potrebbe] essere considerata un autonomo Auto de Cismena’ (15).

Tavani suggests several possible reasons for the play's lack of unity. One is that Rubena, performed in 1521, is Vicente's first attempt at a romantic comedy, a kind of play he was soon afterwards to undertake with such happy results in the Comedia del viudo and in Don Duardos. Another is that in Rubena Vicente for the first time divides his play into acts (cenas), a practice perhaps suggested to him by the division into jornadas found in the plays of Torres Naharro (14–15). But no explanation seems really necessary, since Tavani insists that the same lack of unity is to be found throughout Vicente's theatre: ‘ciascun testo gilvicentino è una successione disarticolata di scene drammaticamente perfette’ (18). Rubena is not an exception but rather a good example of the norm.

BSS Subject Index:

• COMÉDIA DE RUBENA [G. VICENTE]
• STRUCTURE [AS LITERARY/CULTURAL TECHNIQUE]/ STRUCTURALISM
• LIBRO DEL CABALLERO CIFAR [F. MARTÍNEZ?]
• MARTÍNEZ, FERRÁN (fl. late 13th cent./early 14th cent.)
• VICENTE, GIL (1465–1537?)

Notes

¹ Comédia de Rubena, ed. Giuseppe Tavani (Rome 1965). 18. My quotations from Rubena are from Tavani's edition.

² Tragicomedia de Don Duardos, ed. Dámaso Alonso (Madrid 1942), I, 26.

¹Alonso, 17.

²Elias L. Rivers, ‘The Unity of Don Duardos’, MLN, LXXVI (1961), 761, 766. See also Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘Approaching the Metaphysical Sense of Gil Vicente's Chivalric Tragicomedies’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, XVI (1964), 5, 7.

¹I quote from the facsimile edition of the Copilaçam of 1562 (Lisbon 1928), folio CVII v°. I. S. Révah, ‘La “comédia” dans l'oeuvre de Gil Vicente’, Bulletin d’histoire du théâtre portugais, II (1951), 8, suggests that the immediate source is Torres Naharro's Prohemio to his Propalladia (ed. J. E. Gillet [Bryn Mawr 1943], I, 142): ‘Comedia no es otra cosa sino vn artificio ingenioso de notables y finalmente alegres acontecimientos, por personas disputado’. The italics are Révah's.

³ Dantis Aligheri Epistolae, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford 1920), 176–77.

⁴ Cancionero castellano del siglo XV, ed. R. Foulché-Delbosc (Madrid 1912), 1, 461.

²It is, of course, a common feature of comedy generally; see Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective : The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York and London 1965), 73–75, and, for a more extended treatment, his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton 1957), 163–86, especially 178–79.

¹See P. E. Russell, ‘La magia como tema integral de la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea’, Studia Philologica homenaje ofrecido a Dámaso Alonso (Madrid 1960–1963), III, 337–54.

¹See Paul Teyssier, La langue de Gil Vicente (Paris 1959), 351 ff.

²Tavani's note to line 1718 glosses amor de sequeyro as ‘l'amore non confortato e sorretto da un'adeguata posizione sociale ed economica.’ I see no reason to suppose that Felício's situation is unsatisfactory on either count.

¹A. A. Parker, ‘An Age of Gold: Expansion and Scholarship in Spain’, in Denys Hay, ed., The Age of the Renaissance (London 1967), 241.

³Wardropper, 7–8, discusses the image of the desert in Vicente's own Tragicomedia de Amaís de Gaula.

¹I should like to express my thanks to Alan D. Deyermond of Westfield College who read an earlier draft of this paper and made a number of very useful suggestions.