A 'spectacular' revisitation: French presence in the Vincentian theater

Abstract

Falling within a wider reflection and focused on the rereadings of the past and the present, as well as on the cultures among frontiers, this article has as its central theme the Vicentian theatre, a paradigm of the culture of the other -foreigner or predecessor-, highly valued in the past. During the first three decades of the XVI century, betwe­en 1502 and 1536, period of visible opening and interchange between courts, with their retinue of artists, Gil Vicente presided over the entertain­ment of a bilingual and bicultural court. Owing largely to the neighbouring literature, his theatre takes into account other influences. Among them, the French one occupies a relevant position, either in the recovery of themes, characters or linguistic elements, or in the imitation of genres and forms. The present study is not limited to the observation of an influence; it explores the text and the very mechanisms of the show to evaluate the form through which this theatre interacts with other European cultures that nurture it. We propose a confrontation between a text- a scene with the presence of the Judge and the Girl, from Floresta de enganos- and its “hypotext”- one of the short stories from the book Cent nouvelles, offered to the Duque of Burgundy around 1461-1462. Another aim is to shed light on domains we know very little about, such as the one which refers to the culture of the playwright and poet, very badly evaluated by the serious interpretation of a largely manipulated and excessively manipulative text.