In spite of a growing modern interest in the varied artistic
achievements of the noted poet, playwright and composer of the Spanish
Renaissance, Juan del Encina (1468-1529?), the lopsided picture of his
evolution and creative growth established by Don Emilio Cotarelo y Mori
has remained the standard, largely unchallenged one for nearly half a
century.[1] Increased interest in
Encina's multiple talents over the last two decades has taken numerous
forms: re-editings of his influential drama in sound, inexpensive
volumes,[2] editions of his
poetry,[3] musical criticism and
performance of his music live or on long-playing records,[4] and new monographic studies in
English.
[5] Cotarelo's picture of
Encina's growth, however, might be summed up by comparing his
precocious career to a firework display that had all but guttered out by the
poet's twenty-eighth birthday. It will be our modest purpose in this article
to question and modify the reasoning by which Cotarelo came to this view
of Encina's life and work. In 1496, the year of the first publication of
Encina's
Cancionero at Salamanca, the vast bulk of the poet's
writings, it is true, some sixteen thousand lines of lyric verse, a prose
Arte de poesía castellana, an idiosyncratic rendering of
Virgil's
Bucolics, sundry prologues and the first eight
eclogues
written for the Duke of Alba's court, had already appeared. Since Cotarelo
dated most of the dramas that figured for the first time in subsequent
reprints of the
Cancionero as works produced by Encina prior
to 1497 and published later, it would be possible to come to the conclusion
with Don Emilio that the Salamancan's talent had indeed deserted him by
the time he passed thirty. Obliged by the evidence of his questionable dating
procedures to view Encina's career in two discrete halves, Cotarelo could
write in 1928: "Juan del Encina compuso todas sus obras conocidas, menos
dos, la
Trivagia y la
Farsa de Plácida y
Victoriano, antes de su primer viaje a Italia y apenas cumplidos los
treinta años de edad. Y al considerar que su vida alcanzó la
cifra
casi normal de sesenta y un años,
el hecho nos produce el
efecto
como de un autor malogrado, tanto más cuanto podemos
comprender el número y variedad de sus obras y dada su gran
facilidad
para componer lo mucho que pudo haber producido en los otros treinta
años de su existencia" (
Prólogo, p. 28; my
emphasis).
As recently as 1972, Anthony van Beysterveldt has repeated Cotarelo's
perception of the matter as if that critic's informed opinion were actually
an objective
fact. In a monograph quite masterful in other respects, the Dutch critic
unreservedly states: "Todo lo que se ha conservado de su obra literaria fue
escrito antes de cumplir el autor los treinta años descontando la
Egloga de Plácida y Victoriano y la ya mencionada
Trivagia, obra esta última compuesta cuando ya
tenía
cumplidos los cincuenta años."
[6] Neither critic can then repress the
impulse
to wag an admonishing finger at Encina across time for having wasted his
energies in hedonistic revelry instead of sticking to his writing.
[7]
Such a picture is not only inaccurate and unjust, it is misleading with
regard to Encina's steady maturation and psychological integrity as an artist
and, worse still, palpably distorts the story of Spanish secular drama's
experimental but lusty beginnings. Cotarelo's widely accepted chronology
is very far from definitive and the steps of reasoning employed to sustain
it are on occasion so complicated that Cotarelo's virtuosity may easily
baffle the reader into silently consenting to positive distortions. To modify
this picture, it will be necessary to recapitulate the interesting evidence
suggested by J. Caso González for a revised chronology of the early
eclogues I-VIII,[8] and advance
original arguments building on Crawford's and Kohler's work to revise the
order of eclogues IX-XIV forward in time.[9] We also plan to include the
controversial
Egloga interlocutoria in this series and round out our revision
with some closing remarks on Encina's later poetry. This patient sifting of
evidence and minutiae will necessarily be set against the background of
Encina's professional and intellectual growth and peripatetic shifts of
domicile; consequently, problems of dating, bibliography, and biography
will assume a dimension of prime importance. From the synthesis of these
results, a very different Juan del Encina emerges both as man and
artist.
