Lauso, a Portrait of the Poet in Cervantes’s La Galatea

Abstract

This article analyzes the enigmatic character of Lauso in Miguel de Cervantes’s pastoral romance La Galatea (1585), his first published work. In the past, the shepherd Lauso has sometimes been interpreted as a fictional double for the author. This essay argues that Lauso actually provides a symbolic portrait of the poet and represents the exercise of poetic voice even as he takes a place among the other characters of the romance. In his symbolic function, Lauso constitutes one of the earliest examples of Cervantine metafiction, which has become a hallmark of the author’s many contributions to global literature. Examining the trajectory of Lauso’s development through the course of La Galatea, the article demonstrates how Cervantes identifies this enigmatic shepherd with the proto-nationalist celebration and promotion of Spanish poetry as well as with a more universal portrait of the poet as a sensitive and melancholy artist and dreamer connected to a higher realm.

KEYWORDS:

• Cervantes
• La Galatea
• Lauso
• metafiction
• pastoral romance
• poet
• poetic voice
• poetry

Notes

Notes

1 On the Italian influence in La Galatea, see Stagg 14–15; López Estrada; Rosucci; Byrne 80–99; and Gherardi 439–47. On links between this romance and Mannerism, consult Dudley 30–34; Damiani 78–79; and Gaylord. The issue of Mannerist and Italian influence on La Galatea’s poetry clearly remains a fruitful area for further critical inquiry.

For varied critical approaches to La Galatea’s poetry, see Valencia; Egido; Montero et al. 439–564; Byrne 80–94, 97–99; Ruiz Pérez, La rúbrica 179–81 and “Cervantes” 8–9, 12–13, 28–29; Hernández-Pecoraro 89–92, 97–101, 115–20, 182–96; Trabado Cabado 39–95; Rhodes, “La Galatea” and “The Poetics”; Gaylord; and Collins 169–71, 174–80.

2 Regarding poets composing in a post-Petrarchan vein and the expansion of the properties of lyric poetry, Roland Greene observes: “[W]here the poets of the post-Petrarchan line communicate and extend one another’s work, they are largely writers of (what I will often call) fiction. In fact, a generic perspective on the fate of the sequence ought to contribute a fresh sense of a post-Petrarchism that involves not simply the usual stylistic devices and attitudes, but the idea of poetry that contains them, the highly influential conviction that lyric poetry can attain the properties of any other type of fiction” (13).

3 Quotations from La Galatea are from the edition of Juan Montero et al. and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number(s) and also by line numbers in the case of poetry citations.

4 López Estrada and López García-Berdoy discuss possible historical identities of Lauso and Silena in their edition of La Galatea 74–76. See also Hernández-Pecoraro 115–16 on Lauso. Renaissance pastoral romances, of course, often encourage speculation about the actual identity of real-life courtiers fictionally disguised as shepherds, and Cervantes’s romance similarly invites such gamelike speculation.

5 Consult Lowe on the cuestión de amor tradition and Book 3’s four-part eclogue/debate/masque on which kind of lover suffers most. On the importance of Marsilio Ficino’s platonic philosophy in La Galatea, especially regarding Ficino’s impact on the debates on love in Books 3 and 4, consult Byrne 82–99.

6 On Garcilaso’s influence on Cervantes, Blecua draws our attention to “el extraordinario fervor con que Cervantes leyó la obra del divino toledano, una des sus mejores admiraciones. No fue un entusiasmo juvenil y pasajero, sino todo lo contrario. El eco de las lecturas garcilasistas resuena por toda la obra cervantina, desde la elegía a la muerte de Isabel de Valois hasta el Persiles, pasando por el Quijote y las Comedias” (151). On Boscán, Garcilaso, and the appropriation and adaptation of Petrarchan forms, motifs, and modalities in Cervantes’s Spain, see Navarrete 38–125.

7 For more on the concept of the representative shepherd, see Alpers 25–28, 137–84. According to Alpers, from Virgil’s engagement with Theocritean models, “the figure of the herdsman emerged as representative both of the poet and of all humans” (138).

8 On La Galatea’s introductory material, see Rhodes, “The Poetics”; Finello 41–44.

9 For more on the Meliso identification with Hurtado de Mendoza, see Montero et al. 351–56n40–41, 45–48, 53. For more detailed studies on the Valle del los Cipreses episode, see also Collins 174–81; Rhodes, “La Galatea”; and Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle 212–22. On the concept of community in the romance, also consult Hernández Pecoraro 115–20, 124–29.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marsha S. Collins

Marsha S. Collins is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Royster Professor for Graduate Education at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the study of early modern Spanish literature and culture in a comparative context.