University of Virginia Library

III. Encina's Remove to Italy: Eclogues X and XI-XIV

The play nicknamed El triunfo del Amor by Bartolomé José Gallardo and assigned the number X by López-Morales offers no problems as to dating. The 1507 Salamanca printing of Encina's Cancionero contains this eclogue and two separate editions have survived: one at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, another at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But the real date of the play is clear from its context and original title: Representacion ante el muy esclarecido y muy ilustre principe don Juan, nuestro soberano señor. Prince Don Juan, who we must suppose presided at its performance, was married in Burgos on April 2, 1497, to Margarita of Austria, the daughter of Emperor Maximilian. By October 4 of the same year, in Salamanca, the Prince had gone to a tragically early grave. It seems logical that, at the suggestion of the Duke of Alba, Encina composed the work as a festivity to entertain the royal newly-weds.

Now the date of this play, 1497, proves crucial in the chronology of Cotarelo which we are attempting to discredit and will be dealt with in due course. Meanwhile it provides the basis for a second point of disagreement. Cotarelo always contended that Encina only saw the princeps edition of his Cancionero (1496) through the press and that all subsequent editions (1501, 1505, 1507, 1509, 1516) were done during Encina's absence in Rome.

Dismissing for bibliographical and chronological purposes the validity of any subsequent re-editing, he writes: ". . . no tiene valor ninguno, porque ENCINA estaba fuera de España y no intervino en ninguna de las impresiones de su compilación, que los editores enriquecieron a su gusto" (Prólogo, p. 25).

This is far from certain, however. When Encina's Cancionero was reprinted at Seville in 1501 and at Burgos in 1505, it contained no new additions with respect to dramatic content. But the 1507 Cancionero, printed in Encina's native Salamanca, contained two new additions: IX, the Egloga de las grandes lluvias, and X, El triunfo del Amor. We can only speculate as to how these works were introduced into the 1507 edition, as Encina was indeed in Rome at the time. They date, as we have seen, from 1498 and 1497 respectively. Encina may conceivably have conveyed the manuscripts to one of his brothers (Pedro de Hermosilla perhaps?), since his family frequently acted on his behalf in legal and other business matters. And it is a very different matter with the 1509 edition, also published at Salamanca. Encina had suceeded in winning the favors of Pope Alexander VI shortly after his arrival in Rome late in 1499 or in 1500. Encina's fortunes grew still further under Alexander's successor, Julius II. Probably towards the end of 1508, Pope Julius conferred on Encina the dignity of the archdeaconry of Málaga in southern Spain. Encina ensured that nothing would go wrong with this appointment by obtaining signatures from King Ferdinand himself and an authorization for the papal bull from Don Diego Ramírez de Villaescusa, Bishop of Málaga (1500-1508). Encina's brother, Pedro de Hermosilla, acted as his attorney and presented the documents to the chapter at Málaga on April 11, 1509. Encina could have arrived in person at any time after this date. He signed his first extant capitular act on January 2 of the following year, 1510.

There is, therefore, no valid reason to suppose that Encina was not in Spain in the summer of 1509. The colophon of the 1509 Cancionero reads as follows: "Fue esta presente obra empri-/mida por Hans gysser aleman / de Silgenstat en la muy noble / & leal cibdad de Salamanca: la / qual dicha obra se acabo a. vij. / del mes d'agosto del año de mil / & quinientos & nueve años." Between the act of possession by proxy on April 11 and the date of the new edition, August 7, 1509, almost four full months were available to Encina to travel to his native city, consult with Hans Gysser the printer, and leave him the two new eclogues for inclusion in the Cancionero: XI, the Egloga de los tres pastores, and XIII, the Aucto del repelón. He would then have traveled south to take up his post in Málaga as archdeacon.

Given that the plausible scenario suggested above is the true one, we must conclude that Encina brought the two new plays with him from Italy and that he almost certainly composed them there. Cotarelo opined differently, insisting that both had been composed in Spain before the

year 1497. It is to this difficult and controversial problem that we must now turn.

Writing in 1894,[30] and repeating his argument in 1928 to refute Crawford's specific findings concerning the indebtedness of Encina's Egloga de los tres pastores to the Second Eclogue of Antonio Tebaldeo (1463-1537), Cotarelo asserted that a play of Lucas Fernández provided a terminus ad quem of 1497 for most of Encina's undated plays. From Fernández's Farsa o cuasi comedia del soldado published at Salamanca in 1514, Cotarelo adduces the following passage as an overt reference to Pelayo, the hero of Encina's Triunfo del Amor, struck down by an arrow from the bow of Cupid:

Elsewhere in the same play, Cotarelo emphasizes lines 392-393: "éste cuido en la montaña / ogaño a un pastor hirió." This second reference to Pelayo and the word ogaño (that is, "this year") would fix the date of the Farsa of Fernández and Encina's Triunfo del Amor as one and the same: 1497. Thus, argues Cotarelo, the other overt references to Encinian characters in Fernández's Christmas drama (Gil in Encina's Eclogues VII and VIII, Fileno in XII, Cristino in XI) fix the dates of all Encinian dramas where those characters appear as prior to Christmas of 1497.

This ingenious but circular reasoning bases the interrelationship of Encina's works and their dates upon citations from a second author, which require the known date of an Encina play as the starting-point of the argument in the first place. Moreover, all stands or falls by the literal interpretation of the word ogaño to mean 1497. Answering Don Emilio, Kohler (Sieben Eklogen, 45-46n., 58-61) observed that ogaño might be a rhetorical flourish at best. He also suggested a later date of 1509 for Fernández's Farsa; one or both of these arguments would suffice to dismantle Cotarelo's shaky scaffold of reasoning. The peril, however, lay in refusing to recognize that Encina almost certainly composed Eclogues XI-XIV after leaving for Rome and that: (1) these dramas belong to a later phase of Encina's creative career, and (2) they all show signs of Italian influence. Against Crawford's manifest textual proof that Encina had successfully plagiarized Tebaldeo in his Egloga de los tres pastores, for example, Cotarelo was forced to argue

that it was Tebaldeo who had plagiarized Encina! As Crawford himself later wrote: "Leaving out of the question, for the time being, the internal evidence to determine whether Tebaldeo's eclogue or Encina's play is earlier, how is it possible to believe that Tebaldeo, residing at Bologna or Mantua, should hear of this unpublished play of Encina (which first was printed in 1509), should make a version of it in which every diffuse element should be rigorously excluded and Encina's play of 704 lines should be cut down to 151 lines; and that the Italian version should be printed in the fall of 1498, at least two years before Encina made his first visit to Italy?"[32]

Apart from the commonsense arguments of Crawford and the probability, described by us above, that Encina brought the Tres pastores and the Aucto del repelón with him from Italy to Salamanca in summer, 1509, a long eulogy of Oriana in the Tres pastores by Cardonio (ll. 394-412) would seem to be a reminiscence of Montalvo's Amadís, the earliest known edition of which appeared at Zaragoza in 1508. As to the Aucto del repelón, its strange non-standard Spanish and modified Sayagués might point to a style aimed at wider reader comprehension by a mixed Italian-Spanish audience. Such a hypothesis might explain the continual dropping of prosthetic e before the initial group st, certain cases of the retention of initial f, and some vocabulary.

It remains to add a word on the dates of XI, the Egloga de Cristino y Febea, and XIV, the Farsa de Plácida y Victoriano. The only extant copy of the former work, preserved in Santander, bears no date or place of publication. Barbieri suggested it might have issued from a press in Salamanca some time after 1509. Eduardo Juliá Martínez has surmised of Cristino y Febea that it reflects a moment of spiritual crisis in the life of the author.[33] The play deals with the sudden and ill-advised intention of a cultured young hedonist to abandon the world and devote himself to the religious life in all its ascetic rigor. He is defeated in this design by Cupid and the beauty of the nymph Febea. Though Encina did commit himself to the cloth in 1519 by taking holy orders, he had ample reason to consider doing so already in 1511.

On July 14, 1511, Encina was virtually ousted from the archdeaconry of Málaga by his chapter, discontented at his repeated absences and his lowly status in minor orders as deacon. They decreed that he could only participate and vote in meetings or receive his full stipend if he were to be ordained in sacris. Thus Encina was on the brink of an ultimatum:

commit himself unequivocally to the cloth and the vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience, or lose his status in the Church hierarchy. His torment at this dilemma finds a clear expression in Cristino's vacillations and the play would date, then, from some period in the months around or after July, 1511. Plácida y Victoriano was performed in Rome on January 6, 1513, as attested by a letter of Stazio Gadio. L. F. Moratín stated that there was a Roman edition of the work in 1514. Since Encina left his controversial post in Málaga for a second sojourn in Rome some time after May 7, 1512, the composition of Plácida y Victoriano would have occupied him during the latter months of 1512 in Rome, before the New Year period when the play was being rehearsed for performance. Its long and elaborate nature suggests the work was in the gestation stage for a considerable time.