TRAGICOMEDIA PASTORIL DA SERRA DA ESTRELLA
Reading edition
Page 55
It is remarkable that just at the time when Sá de Miranda had returned to Portugal with the new metres from Italy and was frankly contemptuous of Gil Vicente's rough mirth and rustic verse, Gil Vicente felt his position strong enough to present this lengthy play before the King and Court at Coimbra on occasion of the birth of the King's daughter Maria. There is no action in the play, and King Manuel would perhaps have yawned at these shepherds' quarrels, relieved not at all by the parvo's wit or the hermit's grossness and only occasionally by a touch of lyric poetry; but perhaps these simple scenes were welcome to the growing artificiality of the Court. For us the beautiful cossante Um amigo que eu havia stands out like a single orange gleaming from a dark-foliaged tree. The interest lies in the customs of the shepherds and their snatches of song and in the intimate knowledge of the Serra da Estrella shown by the author.
10 The Serra da Estrella, the highest mountain-range in Portugal (6500 ft), is in the province of Beira.
17 meyrinhas = maiorinho (merino).
30 esperauel (as here and in Comedia de Rubena), or esparavel. Cf. Damião de Goes, Chron. de D. Manuel (1617), f. 25 v.: a modo de sobreceo d'esparavel.
32 Cf. the vilão's complaints of God in the Romagem de Aggravados.
35 nega = senão.
51 As in Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral they are advancing as they converse: 'thither our path lies.'
103 Nega se meu embeleco = se não me engano. This line occurs in the Templo de Apolo. The Auto da Festa text has nego se meu embaleco.
113 mancebelhões. Cf. Correa, Lendas, IV, 426: Folgara de ser mais mancebelhão.
127 The corresponding a-lines might be:
Dous açores que eu amava Aqui andam nesta casa.
172 argem for prata. Similarly in Spanish there is the old form argen for argento (= plata). Cf. the proverb Quien tiene argen tiene todo bien.
190 somana for semana. So romendo for remendo and v. infra: perem for porem.
225 gingrar. Nuno Pereira in the Cancioneiro Geral (1910 ed., vol. I, p. 305) has o gingrar de meu caseiro. Cf. Enzina, Auto del Repelon: Hora déjalos gingrar (Teatro, 1893, p. 241).
241 sois. Cf. Barca do Purgatorio: sem sois motrete de pão; Farsa dos Fisicos: não vos quer sois olhar.
290-1 = odi et amo.
322 As a rule Vicente's shepherds are natural enough but we may be permitted to doubt whether any shepherdess of the Serra da Estrella would have spoken of 'ending like Queen Dido.' She had probably been reading Lucas Fernández, Farsas (1867), p. 56.
328 A, B C, D and E unaccountably print querê-lo (through the bad attraction of malo) although querer is needed to rhyme with quer.
367 pintisirgo = pintasilgo.
410 grauisca. Vicente appears to have coined the word from grave and arisca.
427 Fronteira, a village of nearly 3000 inh. in the district of Portalegre. Monsarraz is of about the same size, in the district of Evora.
435 tinhosa cada mea hora. Cf. Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Aulegrafia, f. 89: he hũa tinhosa que ontem guardava patas em Barquerena.
440 cartaxo. Cf. Aulegrafia, f. 10: figo bafureiro em unhas de cartaixo.
443 A pleasant sketch of the presumptuous peasant, then become a common type in Portugal. Felipa considers that to marry a shepherd would be beneath her and her heart leaps up when she beholds a courtier in velvet slippers.
462 The hermit was of course a part of the stock-in-trade of mediaeval plays. He appears in Vicente as early as 1503 (Auto dos Reis Magos). The most interesting alteration in the heavily censored (1586) edition of the Serra da Estrella is not the excision of over a hundred lines about the evil-minded hermit but the substitution in l. 100 of un rey for Dios. Regalist Vicente would never have allowed himself to say that 'a king sometimes acts awry.'
530 For amigo we should probably read marido to rhyme with atrevido.
564 moxama = salted tuna (Sp. mojama or almojama).
566 Cf. J. Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Aulegrafia (1619), f. 84: sejais bem casada com a filha do juiz.
608 Sea, Cea or Ceia, a pleasant little town of some 3000 inh. in the heart of the Serra. (Sea, Sintra, etc. is the 16th cent, spelling, now restored.)
616 Gouvea or Gouveia in the same district and about the same size as Sea. The three other Gouveas in Portugal are smaller villages.
621 Manteigas, a small picturesque town immediately below the highest part of the Serra and nearly 2500 ft above sea-level.
623 Covilham, a larger town (15000 inh.), still known for its cloth factories.
652 Sardoal has about 5000 inh. For its ancient reputation for dancing cf. O Juiz da Beira:
Eu bailei em Santarem, Sendo os Iffantes pequenos, E bailei no Sardoal.
666 This cossante needs for its completion a fourth verse. This was so obvious that it was omitted in the writing of the play.
684 Esse he outro carrascal, a rural form of the phrase une autre paire de manches. The contrast is between the rustic cossante and the more 'cultivated' or Court cantigas that follow (Ja não quer and Não me firais).
711 The chacota, chacotasinha was a peasant's dance accompanied by a simple song the structure of which answered to the movements of the dance. Here, however, it is danced to the sound of the organ and the words of a Court song in which, nevertheless, the repetition of the rustic dance-cossantes is preserved.
724 Cf. Farsa de Ines Pereira: Eu vos trago um bom marido...diz que em camisa vos quer (= 'sans dot').