Conclusion: The Proselytising Tendency and a Change of Audience.
The most interesting thing about the life of Christ poems that we have
looked at has turned out to be their hybrid quality. Many combine characteristics
of religious poetry, political and satirical commentary, purely humorous
interludes, and lyric poetry to be sung and performed. The precursor of all of
these tendencies is Fray Íñigo de Mendoza, whose Vita Christi was perhaps the
most important political poem of the second half of the fifteenth century, an
importance attested by the several published editions of this poem within
religious cancioneros from the 1480s. Unfortunately the version actually written
in the time of Henry IV of Castile was heavily rewritten by the poet by his own
admission, although many of the expurgated passages have been retrieved from
three cancioneros in particular. It is difficult to imagine a performance or
performances of the lengthy Vita Christi, but since there are songs and a
shepherds’ play within the poem, it seems likely that excerpts could have been
performed in court. Even some of the diatribes against the nobility could have
received a separate reading in courts hostile to the king’s faction. As the principal
surviving poetry and prose of the period is written by the successful allies of the
Isabelline faction (Manriques, Mendozas, Guzmáns, Cartagenas), this is not a farfetched speculation.
Curiously, Diego de San Pedro’s La passión trobada, although not only
performable but also partially adapted for performance in the Auto de la Pasión,
does not display the hybrid quality seen in the VC. There is no satire or social
commentary, there are no humorous sequences (obviously inappropriate in the
context), and no villancicos or other obvious songs for performance. It is written
entirely in quintillas dobles, although it would certainly not have been impossible
to have given the lamentations of the Virgin a musical setting, and some of the
stanzas are adapted to the Quinta Angustia of San Pedro’s separate poem on the
seven sorrows of the Virgin. However the lively style with large amounts of
direct speech make it a potential performance text.
A closer investigation of the Comendador Román surprises with the
discovery of a text which seems to have been intended for performance in court,
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the final poem of his sequence on the death of Christ, the Resurrection poem.
Although Román is too unctuous to have ever breathed a suspicion of criticism or
satire in his poetry for the Catholic Monarchs, when he writes of the
Resurrection (obviously a more joyous moment than the Passion poem) he
begins to quote lyric poetry and intercalate performable sequences within the
poetry. Román saves his sharp satirical tongue (which he has) for a slanging
match with Antón de Montoro, an expert in the genre of satirical defamation.
All three of the above were conversos, or in the case of Román, morisco
poets. It has recently come to light that Ambrosio Montesino was also a converso,
and he too was obeying the proselytising agenda that had been set for him and
the others. He too was a faithful servant and confessor of Isabel, and not only a
follower of Fray Íñigo but at times even seemingly guilty of plagiarism of his
model. He too manages to write numerous shorter poems on the life of Christ
and several of these are obviously performance texts based on popular lyrics of
the day. Some of them are so well-known that it is possible that they could be
sung by the audience rather than requiring a formal choir to perform them.
Rather more surprisingly given his privileged position at court, he follows his
model fray Íñigo in writing long criticisms of women and of loose behaviour at
court by the three estates.
Next there are Encina and Fernández, whose autos of the birth and the
Passion may well have taken their inspiration from now-disappeared shepherd’s
plays, but who certainly would have known Fray Íñigo’s literary models. The
format becomes formalized, with comic characters speaking sayago and
rounding off the auto by performing a villancico set to the music of the
composer-dramatists. The intention seems to be to entertain in a court setting
and certainly not in the village. Social commentary comes in the form of the
imitation of literary models like Celestina, rather than in the bitter satire of the
previous generations.
Finally we reach the age of print and the mega-life of Christ by Juan de
Padilla, intended for private reading rather than performance, devoid of humour
or satire, but certainly proselytising and edifying for anyone who could afford to
buy it and had the time and leisure to read it, possibly a target audience of rich
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converso and middle-class readers with enough leisure, money, and education to
buy and enjoy learning from this long arte mayor poem.
Generally speaking, what are the audiences intended for these works?
Isabel had an agenda, which included reformation of the Spanish church, as well
as teaching the recently-converted about the life of Christ and Christianity.
Therefore in the first place these favoured court poets were encouraged to write
works that would be performed and read in court or even in monasteries and
convents. This is the function of the satire when it is directed at the behaviour of
the nobility or of the clergy or of the women. But when Isabel helps these poets
to be the first in print (well before any lyric poetry), she is amplifying the effect
and reaching out to the bourgeoisie, many of whom were in fact conversos and
even moriscos.
It is quite amazing how the Catholic Monarchs immediately saw the
potential of the new technology to reach a larger audience and proselytise: thus
the rewriting of the Vita Christi by Fray Íñigo to remove the specifically antiHenry IV content. Isabel wanted to make peace with her former enemies, and not
perpetuate old feuds to a broader audience. A new audience requires a new
approach. And in fact the old generation of religious poets becomes obsolete as
their poetry is taken out of its court and convent context and reaches the homes
of the non-noble but well-heeled. Reading takes over from performance, and
subsequently silent reading from reading out loud. The poems that can be
performed in the street, like Diego de San Pedro’s Passión trobada, survive, while
the others are superseded by treatises in poetry like the Retablo de la vida de
Cristo.
Taking a leaf from Keith Whinnom’s book (1994), just because some of
this work strikes the modern reader as long and boring, doesn’t mean that the
contemporary audience shared our view. In fact we seem to be looking at three
of the best-sellers of the age, first Fray Íñigo’s VC which was a publishing success
of the dawn of printing in Spain, and next Diego de San Pedro’s PT, which
survived into the nineteenth century in chapbooks. The latter poem undoubtedly
had the power to attract listeners in the street and no doubt was performed by
itinerant individual reader-actors, rather as Celestina was performed by one
person speaking all the voices. It conveys the story of the Passion to a largely152
illiterate audience (and one which certainly couldn’t understand the gospel
versions in Latin) in simple and powerful language which everyone can
understand and react to on an emotional level. Surprisingly the least-favoured of
the poets, a servant of the powerful and disgraced enemies of Isabel, the Girón
family, was one of the two who delivered the message that Isabel wanted to
promulgate.
The biggest surprise is the third best-seller, Padilla’s Retablo, a megatome sold to the middle classes in the sixteenth century, which seems to have
been targeting a converso readership as well. Although Padilla tempers the
language and is never obscure like his mentor Mena, his intentionally intellectual
and very long poem appealed to the opposite end of the spectrum, the newlyemergent, wealthy and literate, town and city middle classes.
Perhaps the most difficult point is the one that I have left until last,
namely whether there were any psychological problems facing the obviously
converso poets of the group when it came to denouncing the Jews in traditional
terms. Suggesting that everyone, including the poets, was naturally anti-semitic,
seems a bit facile in these particular circumstances. Perhaps the answer lies in
the poets’ technique of widening the criticism to include a satire of the estates
and of the sexes, and to point out that there were beams in everyone’s eye, and
not just in those of the Jews. Once established by Fray Íñigo, undoubtedly the
outstanding religious poet of this period, this approach would find favour with
Montesino and Padilla in particular. San Pedro will concentrate on the more
serious Passion sequence, and will use a quantity of apocryphal material,
lamentations, and contemplations to appeal to his popular audience, a technique
that involves the listeners and makes them complicit in the death of Christ.
Román also depends on contemplations to involve the listener in his Passion,
while he specializes in his Resurrection poem in quoting well-known songs to
reach his court audience on a less-cerebral level.
Isabel and Ferdinand’s not-very-hidden agenda, to use the new printing
presses to unite their two emerging territories behind a regent-led, Hispanic
version of Roman Catholicism, is well-served by these poets who, although some
or all of them come from persecuted minorities, are subsumed into the
proselytising plans of the Catholic Monarchs with considerable success.
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