Juan del Encina

• Born: July 12, 1468
• Birthplace: Salamanca, Spain
• Died: 1529
• Place of death: León, Spain

Other Literary Forms

In addition to his dramatic works, Juan del Encina wrote numerous learned poems, amatory lyrics, jocose-satiric verses, and villancicos (carols), all published in the different editions of his Cancionero. Arte de poesia castellana (1496; the art of Castilian poetry) is a treatise on the theory of poetry. Églogas de Virgilio (1496) is a paraphrase of the pastoral dialogues of Vergil’s Eclogues (43-37 b.c.e.; also known as Bucolics; English translation, 1575). Trivagia (1521; journey to Jerusalem), Encina’s last work, is an extensive poem offering an account of the journey to Jerusalem that Encina undertook in July, 1519, and from which he returned in 1521.

Achievements

Juan del Encina has been called the patriarch, or father, of the Spanish theater. On the other hand, a number of literary historians have generally referred to Encina’s dramatic productions as los primeros balbuceos (the first babbles) of the Spanish theater. This somewhat irreverent qualification was doubtless inspired by the unfavorable comparison of Encina’s first dramatic essays with the perfection this new literary genre was later to reach in the Spanish comedia of the Golden Age.

In Spain there is no well-documented, gradual evolution from a medieval liturgical tradition to the formation of a secular drama, as has been the case in other Western European countries, such as France, England, and Germany. The only existing text of a vernacular drama is the Aucto de los Reyes Magos, dated around 1150. There is no textual support for the existence of a liturgical dramatic tradition in medieval Spain between 1150 and 1450. Encina established the drama as a literary genre in Spain and, indeed, fully deserves the distinction of being called the father of the Spanish theater.

Encina’s dramatic universe is made up of pastoral poetry, and the dramatis personae of both his religious and his secular plays are shepherds. The influence of Vergil’s Bucolics, which Encina translated and adapted, thus makes itself felt not only in the mere adoption of the term Égloga, which the Salamancan used for all his plays, but also in a much deeper sense: Encina’s shepherds, like Vergil’s, appear in a rustic setting and are, at least in Encina’s secular plays, all subjected to the torments and pains of love. Love is the main theme of Encina’s secular drama. His plays represent the gradual evolution and refinement of a theory of love in the incipient Spanish theater. This evolution can be clearly traced from Eclogues VII, VIII, and X, all the way through the last great Eclogues, XI, XII, and XIV. The dialects of love as developed in Encina’s dramatic work were to be adopted almost without modifications by all the great dramatists of the Spanish Golden Age. Herein lies one of the most innovative contributions Encina brought to the establishment of the dramatic genre in Spain’s Golden Age.

Encina was also a gifted musician and composer. More than sixty of his compositions have been preserved in the Cancionero musical de palacio, published by Barbieri in 1890. Twelve of Encina’s eclogues terminate with a villancico (carol), the music of which was composed by the playwright himself. These musical finales must have added a special delight to the pleasure with which these first dramatic essays of the Spanish theater were relished by the dukes of Alba, together with the numerous members of their court in the palace of Alba de Tormes, where these plays were staged and performed during the last decade of the fifteenth century.

Biography

Juan del Encina was one of the many children of a humble shoemaker in Salamanca named Juan de Fermoselle. His mother’s name probably was Encina. There is documental evidence that by 1490 Juan had changed his name from Fermoselle to Encina. This change of name was not an unusual practice among the humanists and artists of the Spanish Renaissance.

In 1484, Encina became a chorister in the Cathedral of Salamanca. Besides music, Encina studied law, Latin, and Greek at the university of Salamanca. At that early age, he also took minor orders, but only many years later, in 1519, was he finally ordained a priest. After the termination of his university studies, around 1492, Encina entered the household of the duke of Alba as a kind of program director for the entertainment presented on specific religious festivals and special occasions. The years Encina spent at the ducal palace of Alba de Tormes, a provincial town near Salamanca, until his departure in 1498 or 1499 mark the crucial period of his greatest literary and musical creations. It was also during this period that Encina’s professional and literary activities became closely connected with those of his great imitator, and possibly rival, Lucas Fernández, who in 1495 also had become part of the duke’s household, probably as a part-time actor serving on programs directed by Encina. The importance of Fernández’s role as cofounder of Spain’s secular drama has been borne out by most recent research on the origins of Spanish theater. Although very little documental evidence is available to shed light on the personal relationship between Encina and Fernández during those years in Alba de Tormes, the direct and immediate dependence of Fernández’s farsas and comedias on Encina’s eclogues, as well as the new dramatic ingredients that the former incorporated in his plays, have made modern students of early Spanish theater more aware of the fact that the dramatic productions of both playwrights during that crucial period of their associated activities at the ducal palace are so closely linked as to be almost inseparable. In effect, if Fernández’s dramatic production is conditioned to a great extent by that of Encina, it constitutes at the same time a short but decisive step away from the theatrical art of Encina. Fernández and not Encina seems to be the concrete point of departure for the next phase of development of Spain’s early drama.

The ducal palace and court in Alba de Tormes provided an ideal environment not only for Encina’s artistic development but also for his search for social recognition. Encina is regarded by most of his critics as a social climber. One cannot, in effect, help but wonder how this humble shoemaker’s son could have risen so fast to the prominent social position he occupied, first in the palace of the dukes of Alba and later in Rome, where his musical and literary talents earned for him the favors and protection of very influential patrons, such as Popes Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X.

Encina’s departure from Alba de Tormes in 1498 or 1499 signaled the end of his most productive period. With the exception of Égloga de Plácida y Vitoriano, his whole dramatic œuvre was already complete. From the point of view of literary creativity, the following phase in Encina’s life was of far less importance than the preceding one. In 1499 he set out for his first trip to Rome, where he stayed until 1510. Three other journeys followed: 1512-1513, 1514-1516, and the last one probably from 1517 to 1521. During these various stays in the Holy City, Encina was very successful in obtaining all kinds of papal favors, which were bestowed on him in the form of appointments to lucrative ecclesiastic positions in the Church of Salamanca, the Cathedral of Málaga, and the Cathedral of León. Then, in 1519, Encina, finally ordained priest, undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and celebrated his first Mass on Mount Zion. An account of this journey is found in his Trivagia, a mediocre composition of some two hundred verses. Back in Spain in 1521, Encina spent the final years of his restless life in León, where he died toward the end of 1529. His mortal remains were transferred from León to Salamanca around 1534.

Encina’s biography, incomplete and fragmentary as it is in many respects, like that of many other Spanish medieval and Renaissance writers, has been viewed by most Encina students as of paramount importance for an understanding of his literary work. Many details of Encina’s biography easily lend themselves to be construed in such a way that the driving forces behind Encina’s life and work can be identified as a relentless search for social prestige. The man who most consistently has pursued this line of critical approach is J. Richard Andrews in his important book Juan del Encina: Prometheus in Search of Prestige (1959). Other critics, however, pointing at the scarcity of identifiable biographical material in Encina’s plays, argue against this approach. For them, the life and the work of Encina are two separate entities, equally enigmatic. Nothing of Encina’s vital experience as a man of the Renaissance, close to the centers of power and cultural prestige, seems to be reflected in his dramatic work. A third direction in Encina scholarship is followed by those who have posited the thesis of Encina’s Jewish ancestry. For them, Encina was a Converso (converted Jew), who, during his whole life, sought the company and the protection of powerful patrons as a guarantee against those who could cause irreparable harm to his reputation and to his very existence by revealing and making public this “shameful” condition.

Analysis

Literary historians generally agree that the secular eclogues of Juan del Encina are of far greater importance than his religious playlets. The latter were written to be performed as part of the yearly festivities that were organized in the palace of the duke and duchess of Alba on Christmas Eve, on Good Friday, and at the beginning of Carnival and Lent.

The entire dramatic output of Encina is written in verse form, presenting the prosodic variety that is characteristic of early Renaissance versification in Spain. All of Encina’s eclogues are one-act plays with no scenic divisions. The only exception may be Égloga de Plácida y Vitoriano, in which the villancico, beginning at line 1192, clearly divides the eclogue into two parts or two acts.

The dramatic universe created by Encina in his secular plays is brief but at the same time profoundly enigmatic. In his pastoral world, where lovelorn shepherds express their afflictions and tribulations caused by love, no clues are provided for explaining these extreme emotional reactions other than in terms of an already established conventionalized pattern of affective behavior. This cultural-literary pattern, which was familiar to the contemporary audience of the early Spanish theater, is to be found in the lyric tradition of fifteenth century cancionero poetry. The brief dramatic universe created by Encina is carved out of the huge poetic metacontext of the cancioneros. The greatest contribution of Encina to the formation of the Spanish theater consists precisely of the fact that he adapted for the theatrical genre the theory of courtly love as it had already been worked out in the extensive love poetry of the fifteenth century—that is to say, in the thousands of amatory compositions brought together in the voluminous collections of poems that are called cancioneros. Encina himself has included in his cancionero many of this type of amorous poems. The forms and contents of these compositions are in absolute conformity with those found in other cancioneros. Thus, as a poet, Encina contributed to the lyric elaboration of a theory of courtly love that, as a dramatist, he adapted to the specific needs of the new genre he was creating at the same time. To a great extent, Encina’s theatrical production is purely and simply cancionero poetry cast in the mold of dramatic dialogue.

An essential characteristic of the Spanish conception of courtly love is the wide range of religious ideas that are associated with this concept. The poetic inspiration that runs through the amatory lyrics of the fifteenth century is guided by the intent to reconcile courtly love with Christian doctrine. In the Spanish concept of courtly love as a literary theme, the medieval idea that woman is the instrument through which the devil causes man’s perdition may still be strongly felt. This idea becomes combined in the imagination of the cancionero poets with the representation of woman as a depository of all the attributes and powers of the God of love: Woman incarnates love’s power, a power which, on an allegorical plane, functions in the guise of the God of love. The only way man can preserve his freedom of will and the use of his rational faculties is to flee from the omnipotent power of love. In the Encinian drama this flight from love, inspired by the negative conception of love as a force inimical to man, is the main theme in his three great eclogues: Égloga de los tres pastores, Égloga de Cristino y Febea, and Égloga de Plácida y Vitoriano.

Égloga representada en reqüesta de unos amores

In Égloga representada en reqüesta de unos amores (eclogue acted in a dispute over love), Pascuala, a pretty shepherdess, is courted by the shepherd Mingo, who is married to Menga. He tells Pascuala that for the love of her, he is prepared to leave his wife, and as token of his love, he gives her a rose. At this point, an escudero (squire) enters who immediately falls in love with Pascuala, declaring his feelings for her in the lofty language of courtly love. The rustic shepherd and the noble suitor now compete for the love of the shepherdess in a dispute of country versus city dwellers. The comic contrast between the two styles of courtship is enhanced by Mingo’s use of Sayagués, a rustic dialect spoken in the northwestern region of Sayago, to express his love for Pascuala. In the end, the two competitors agree to abide by the decision Pascuala will make. She chooses the squire, on condition that he pledge to become a shepherd.

This very short Eclogue VII, of only 253 lines, including the villancico at the end, is a pastourelle, a poetic genre that was abundantly cultivated in Provence and Portugal but much less popular in Castile. Its only precedents are to be found in the serranillas (“mountain-lass” poems) of Juan Ruiz, and in a few compositions of the marquess of Santillana.

Égloga representada por las mesmas personas

The same theme, as well as all the characters of Égloga representada en reqüesta de unos amores, reappears in Eclogue VIII, Égloga representada por las mesmas personas (eclogue acted by the same persons), which was performed in the hall of the Alba palace one year after the preceding eclogue. The dramatic action of Eclogue VIII takes place one year later. The squire-shepherd, now called Gil, has married his Pascuala and has adopted the dialectal speech of his fellow shepherds, but the monotony of the pastoral existence has begun to lower his spirits. He misses the palace and the pleasures of courtly life. He urges Pascuala to leave everything behind and go with him to the court. He also induces his former rival, Mingo, who has become his friend, and Menga to join them in this change of life. First Pascuala and then Mingo and Menga shed their rustic attire and help one another dress in fine robes, according to the courtly fashion. They marvel at the ennobling effect of this transformation brought about by the power of love. All four of them set out for their new life at the villa y corte. From the rustic shepherds they once were, they have been transformed into truly refined characters, eager to initiate themselves further, under the guidance of the squire (who has reverted again to standard Spanish), into the art of courtly life. In the final part of the eclogue, Gil exhorts his former fellow shepherds with the words: “A la criança nos demos” (“Let’s dedicate ourselves to the courtly education or training”).

As in the other secular plays of Encina, love is the predominant theme of Eclogues VII and VIII. What sets these two eclogues apart from the others, however, is the absence of any allegorical representation of love as a divine power. The interplay between the two male and the two female characters unfolds in a real human environment, depicted, to be sure, in the conventional colors of an idyllic Arcadian world, but without the allegorical intervention of the god of love, as happens in Eclogue X, El triunfo del amor.

While reading these two eclogues, one should remember that they were first performed, as were the rest of Encina’s plays (with the exception of Égloga de Plácida y Vitoriano), in the aristocratic setting of the ducal palace of Alba, before the duke and duchess, their noble family and friends, and the undoubtedly larger plebeian part of the audience, which consisted of an extensive domestic staff of servants and other personnel attached to the duke’s household and domains. Add to this peculiar composition of the first audience of Encina’s dramas the circumstance that the role Mingo seems to have been played by Encina himself and that the other actors as well were probably equally well-known to this mixed audience, and one can easily imagine the unique nature of the interactions that took place between public and dramatis personae during these first theatrical performances of Encina’s plays. Much autobiographical material has been woven into these plays under the guise of allusions, hints, and sous-entendus. Students of Encina have displayed great ingenuity and erudition in uncovering and interpreting these hidden aspects of Encinian drama, and these efforts have contributed considerably to scholars’ insight into the personal relationship that existed between Encina and his dramatic creations, between the man and his work. The importance of the work itself, however, reaches far beyond the individual destiny of the man who created it.

El triunfo del amor

The tenth eclogue, El triunfo del amor (the triumph of love), presents, with the preceding Eclogues, VII and VIII, a fundamental thematic relationship that is most revealing for the evolution of the theatrical art of Encina.

At first sight, this tenth eclogue seems a regression to a more primitive phase in the dramatic craftmanship of Encina. Love enters here in allegorical form as a handsome youth. Armed with bow and arrow, Cupid boasts about the irresistible power of love. Pelayo, an ignorant shepherd, then enters. He foolishly incurs Cupid’s wrath by his disrespectful admonishments to the garçón de bel mirar (pretty-eyed youth) that he is hunting on forbidden territory. Cupid, infuriated, wounds him with one of his arrows and departs, leaving the hapless shepherd behind in great agony. Pelayo is found by two other shepherds, Bras and Juanillo, to whom he reports the terrifying details of his encounter with the cruel hunter. The two immediately realize that the simpleminded Pelayo has dared to challenge the power of Cupid himself. Pelayo, overcome by pain, loses consciousness. Greatly alarmed, Bras and Juanillo, with the help of a squire who happens to pass by, try to identify the cause of the ailment that holds Pelayo prostrate on the ground. They decide it must be love. This elicits some skeptical comments from the squire, who believes that the sufferings of love can be experienced—and expressed—only by people of noble birth, not by rustic shepherds. When Bras mentions the name of Marinilla, Pelayo suddenly regains consciousness and recognizes that the secret malady from which he is suffering is his love for Marinilla.

Despite the awkwardly primitive dramatic form of this play, it possesses a consistently developed dramatic motive of great interest for the understanding of the theatrical theme of courtly love as introduced by Encina. What one witnesses in Eclogue X is a process of initiation in the art of courtly love. Pelayo’s total unawareness of the presence and the power of love in his life is remedied by the teachings of Bras and Juanillo, who are more informed in these matters than Pelayo, and by those of noble character, represented by the squire, who represents a higher level of insight into the manifestations and effects of the power of love. This process of initiation, this kind of apprenticeship in the art of courtly love, lies also at the thematic core of the two preceding eclogues, VII and VIII, and therefore constitutes the unifying motif that links these three plays.

At this point, it becomes possible to define what seems to stand out as the single most distinctive feature of the whole Encinian drama. The theory of courtly love, as found in cancionero poetry, before being cast by Encina in the theatrical mold of his secular plays, went through an ideological revision in which noble birth was no longer considered to be the conditio sine qua non for the ability to experience and to express the sufferings and exaltations caused by love. In the Encinian drama, it is the nobility and loftiness of the sentiments experienced by the lover, whether he be noble or plebeian, which make him worthy to be included in the courtly cultus. Encina’s aristocratic characters initially may express surprise at the claims of rustic shepherds who insist that they, as well as the aristocratic lovers, are capable of feeling and expressing the painful but ennobling effects of the power of love, but—after closer scrutiny—the noble characters end up recognizing that these claims on the part of the plebeian characters are, indeed, legitimate.

Égloga de Cristino y Febea

Cristino, the protagonist in Égloga de Cristino y Febea (XI), portrays the courtly features of this type of shepherd as worked out in the preceding eclogues, VII, VIII, and X. In the past, Cristino has always been a faithful servant of love, but now, disillusioned and weary of the ephemeral pleasures of love, he decides to run away from this sinful way of life and become a hermit. His friend Justino, although impressed by Cristino’s saintly intentions, advises against such a radical change of life. In view of his friend’s former lifestyle, Justino doubts that Cristino is strong enough to endure the hardships and the deprivations of the life of a hermit. Cristino, however, is not moved by Justino’s objections and goes off to his self-imposed exile from the sinful world. Love then enters and, on hearing from Justino that Cristino has dared to flee from his omnipotent power, is inflamed with anger. He sends his nymph Febea to Cristino to entice the hermit to abandon his ascetic life, to return to the world, and to become again a faithful servant of Love. When later the god appears before Cristino and holds out the promise to grant him the love of Febea, Cristino no longer can resist these temptations and yields to the overwhelming power of love. Still mortified by the humiliation of his defeat and fearful of what the people in the village may think of his apostasy, Cristino returns to the world.

There is great complexity and even confusion in the ways the various themes of this play are combined as well as opposed to each other in the dramatic action. The service of God, represented in the old medieval ideal of the ascetic life, and the service of love are pitched against each other in the polemical forms of a debate between the old and the new, between the medieval religious ideal and the Renaissance worldly cult of love. The radical character of this opposition, however, is mitigated to a great extent by the high degree of spirituality of Encina’s love concept with its deliberate exclusion of the carnal intent. The fundamental impulse that impels the Encinian characters to flee from love’s servitude and sufferings acquires in this play a fuller and more articulated expression than in any preceding eclogue.

Égloga de los tres pastores

The main interest of Eclogue XII, Égloga de los tres pastores (eclogue of the three shepherds), consists of the fact that it is yet another dramatization of this same impulse on the part of the protagonist, Fileno, to free himself from the intolerable tyranny of the amorous passion. The pathos and rhetoric of Fileno’s laments, which resound throughout the entire eclogue, are in the purest tradition of fifteenth century courtly poetry. The few interventions on behalf of the two other shepherds, Zambardo and more especially Cardonio, who try in vain to comfort their friend, fail to dispel the essentially static character of this eclogue. In the end, Fileno kills himself and is declared a martyr of love by Cardonio and Zambardo. With even greater insistence than in Encina’s other plays, love is depicted in this eclogue as an inimical force that implacably persecutes, torments, and finally kills its victim. Whereas Cristino’s attempt, in Eclogue XII, to flee love’s power fails, Fileno’s flight from love is tragically successful.

Égloga de Plácida y Vitoriano

The plot of Encina’s last eclogue, Égloga de Plácida y Vitoriano, is rather simple. The complexity of this play, just as of the preceding one and even more so of Égloga de Cristino y Febea, lies in the complicated interplay between the various theatrical concepts and motives that Encina, guided by his highly eclectic genius, has drawn together here into the dramatic constitution of his main characters.

The eclogue begins with a long soliloquy of Plácida, a noble lady, in which she reveals her consuming passion for Vitoriano and at the same time her despair caused by her lover’s absence. She fears that he is unfaithful to her. She is tempted by the idea of suicide because, without her lover, life seems intolerable to her. She decides to leave and to seek solace in the wild. From this early stage to the very last part of the eclogue, where, after committing suicide, she is found by Vitoriano, Plácida reappears only once, to utter another soliloquy of some hundred verses in the middle of the play.

The play’s dramatic action revolves around events directly or indirectly related to Vitoriano’s inner conflict and its final solution. Vitoriano is torn between two counteracting forces: his love for Plácida and his desire to flee love’s bondage because of the suffering and loss of freedom it entails. He seeks the advice of Suplicio, a good friend, who recommends the cure of another love. This strategy in the battle of love, already found in Ovid’s Remedia amoris (before 8 c.e.; Cure for Love, 1600), is cynically referred to by Suplicio as “to remove one stuck nail with another.” Suplicio leads his friend to the house of Flugencia, a young prostitute whom Vitoriano courts as if she were a lady. At this point in the play, Encina also introduces Eritea, an old procuress, who is a close imitation of the famous character Celestina, created by Fernando de Rojas a dozen years before in his Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499, rev. ed. 1502 as Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea; commonly known as La Celestina; first English translation, Celestina, 1631).

The conversation between Flugencia and Eritea, full of piquant details about the obscene and infamous practices of the go-between and the prostitute, constitutes a long digression completely dislocated from the main theme of the play. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Flugencia’s mercenary favors are unable to mitigate Vitoriano’s longing for Plácida. He sets out to look for her and, following the indications of some shepherds, finds her corpse in a desolate place. She has killed herself with Vitoriano’s dagger. In a long interlude, the despairing lover expresses his laments for the loss of his beloved. He wants to kill himself, but Venus stays his hand, and, on her request, Mercury intervenes to bring Plácida back to life. The two reunited lovers realize—and this is an important last innovation in Encina’s love concept—that the love they now feel for each other is free from the uncertainties and torments they suffered before. This transformation signals, at least in the work of Encina, the final rejection of the theory of courtly love.

This last eclogue illustrates as no other before the tentative, experimental nature of Encina’s mastery of the dramatist’s crafts, with its indisputable gains and often inexplicable setbacks. Encina’s irremediable eclecticism, which was perhaps considered with more indulgence in his own time than it is today, is no doubt responsible for the lack of cohesion in large portions of the dramatic action. What is impressive, however, is the consistency of his inspiration in pursuing, up to this eclogue, the development of what is undoubtedly his main dramatic motif: the flight from love. The dramatic form chosen by Encina to represent this flight in his last play is Vitoriano’s failed attempt to seek refuge from love’s omnipotence in adopting the hedonistic lifestyle as practiced and preached by his friend Suplicio.

Bibliography

Andrews, J. Richard. Juan del Encina: Prometheus in Search of Prestige. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. A classic study of the works of Encina. Bibliography and index.

Hathaway, Robert L. Love in the Early Spanish Theatre. Madrid: Playor, 1975. A look at the topic of love in the first Spanish dramas, including those of Encina.

Kidd, Michael. “Myth, Desire, and the Play of Inversion: The Fourteenth Eclogue of Juan del Encina.” Hispanic Review 65, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 217-236. Kidd looks at the Égloga de Plácida y Vitoriano, which he sees as a dramatization of sexual desire.

Sullivan, Henry W. Juan del Encina. Boston: Twayne, 1976. A basic biography of Encina that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.