1 Hernàn Nùñez, in his commentary on Mena's famous line O vida segura la mansapobreza (taken literally from Lucan), gives a long list of other authorities in support of the idea that poverty is blessed. Commenting on Mena's copla LXXX, he remarks: ‘persons of lesser station participate more directly in the various virtues than those of lofty station; the truth of this could be established by quoting many authorities'. See Mena's, Obras (Anvers, 1552), pp. 450 and 162Google Scholar. (Here, and throughout this article, translations are my own.) On the pobres de Dios see Herrero García, M., Sermonario clásico (Madrid, 1942), p. 110 (year 1613)Google Scholar.

2 See below, n. 4.

3 Galpin, Stanley L., Cortois and vilain. A Study of the Distinction Made between them by French and Provencal Poets of the l2th, 13th, and 14th Centuries (New Haven, 1905)Google Scholar. For Spain, see de Malkiel, Maria Rosa Lida, Juan de Mena (Mexico, 1950), pp. 118–119 Google Scholar: ‘The role of the peasants was no less immanent than that of the other classes and therefore the … authors of medieval literature show no pity—as is well known—for the rustic or villano. Over against this medieval attitude which will be renewed after Trent …, the religious writers, thinkers and poets of the 15th century (and early 16th), already touched by humanism, open their eyes to the wretched lot of the peasants.’ In n. 30 she adds that this new note involves no social protest; it merely gives honor to the toiler. For Mena, as for all the siglo de oro, intellectual excellence goes hand in hand with social distinction.

4 On the blessedness of shepherds, see Oliva, Hernán Pérez de, Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, LXV, p. 394bGoogle Scholar. On shepherds, A. de Torquemada's Colloquio entre dospastores in Orígenes de la novela, II, 512a: ‘since the pastoral life is closer to the life which nature has wished men to lead, those who lead it are guilty of no error and should be esteemed no less than those who follow after riches, delight, pomp, and honor, all of which are mere worldly vanities.’ Cf. Bataillon, Marcel, Erasmo y España (Mexico, 1950), II, 258–259 Google Scholar, esp. n. 21. Spitzer, Leo, in ‘A Central Theme and its Structural Equivalent in Lope's Fuenteovejuna ’, HR, XXIII (1955), p. 275 Google Scholar, n. 1, has shown that ‘the meaning of the debate of rustic characters on courtesy and love must be that true courtesy … is found, not in the ciudad (or corte) but only in the aldea [village], and that similarly true love is better known in the latter than in the former. The peasants also philosophize without any schooling in philosophy… they are born poets Fuenteovejuna itself is an idyllic island of primitivism in which the values of the Golden Age are still miraculously preserved… In this ideology… biblical… and classical themes are fused.… Lope's own cultural heritage is entirely at their disposal.'

5 Bataillon, M., ‘El Villano en su rincón’, BHi, LI (1949), p. 9 Google Scholar. Castro, Américo, in El Villano del Danubio y otros fragmentos of Antonio de Guevara (Princeton, 1945), p. xxiv Google Scholar, reproduces an important text from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella: ‘It was indeed a thing to be marvelled at that a simple peasant could thus reason and express himself.’ ‘These and similar ideas', says Castro (p. xxi), ‘rested on the belief in man's natural goodness when he still preserves fresh and unspoiled the recollection of his divine origin, the whole being viewed from a Neo-platonic and Stoic point of view … . The faith in the human worth of both the savage and the peasant was a corollary of the faith in a spiritual inner life.” On the selfishness and malice of peasants, see de Vega, Antonio López, Paradoxas racionales, ed. Buceta, Erasmo (Madrid, 1935), p. 15 Google Scholar.

6 Paulina, Mary St. Amour, A Study of the ‘Villancico’ up to Lope de Vega (Washington, D. C., 1940)Google Scholar.

7 Gallaher, S. A., ‘Vox populi, vox Dei’, PQ, XXIX (1925), p. 14 Google Scholar. The Latin proverb (of ecclesiastical origin) means not that the voice of the people expresses heavenly wisdom, but that it is irresistible.

8 Introducción a la sabiduría (Madrid, 1944), p. 34.

9 Bell, A. F. G., El Renacimiento español (Zaragoza, 1944), p. 116 Google Scholar.

10 Mena, , Obras, ed. cit., pp. 52–53 Google Scholar. Yet Núñez was a collector of refranes, vehicles of what was later to be called—and quite respectfully—filosofla vulgar. See below.

11 Much more bitter than any text cited by Bell are the words of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, in the introduction to the first volume of his Comedias (1628): ‘Listen, you ravening beast… . Here are my plays; treat them as is your wont, not as is just but as your whim dictates; for they look upon you scornfully free from fear, having survived the danger of your whistles and having to face now only the dangers of your dark closets. If they displease you it will delight me to know that they are good; if they don't, I will consider myself avenged by the money that they cost you.’ Cf. the diatribe, much less effective, in the prefatory pages of Mateo Alimán's picaresque novel, Guzmán de Alfarache (1599).

12 El pensamiento de Cervantes (Madrid, 1925), p. 211, n. 7.

13 Fray Luis here refers the reader to Galatians, 1, 10.

14 Cf. Calderón: ‘ungrateful monster, apparition of many heads’; ‘from your rattlebrained opinions, oh vulgo, it is obvious that you are a monster of many heads'. See Silva, R., ‘The Religious Dramas of Calderón’, Liverpool Studies in Spanish Literature, Second Series (Liverpool, 1946), p. 184 Google Scholar.

15 Obras (Madrid, 1768), I, 536.

16 Don Quijote, ed. Rodríquez Marín (1947), II, 16. The text is well known. Bell cites it on p. 115.

17 Cf. Gracián, El Criticón, ed. Romera-Navarro, II (Philadelphia, 1939), p. 178:’ “What did you think?”, asked the Wise Man, “that by riding in a litter one becomes wise, or that fine clothing bestows understanding? Some men are as ordinary and as ignorant as their own lackeys. Be assured that though one be a prince, if he makes bold to speak of things whereof he knows not, to give his vote regarding matters that he understands not, he is at once declared a vulgar and plebeian man; for the vulgo is nothing but a congregation of presumptuous fools who speak the more readily in proportion as they understand the less.” ‘

18 Gallardo, Ensayo de una biblioteca española de libros rams y curiosos, 1, col. no.

19 Pp. 210-212.

20 New York, 1944, n. to line 1258, pp. 198-199.

21 Dámaso de Frías, a contemporary of Cervantes, defines discreción as follows in his Diálogos de diferentes materias: ‘Action is the province of the will; but the how and the why of action are the province of the understanding. Because discreción is none other than a habit of the practical understanding whereby we act upon things when and how, where and with whom, and with such other attendant circumstances as we ought.’ Cervantes has Periandro say in the Persiles: ‘She is so discreet that she appears to possess divine understanding.’ See Bates, Margaret, ‘Discreción’ in the Works of Cervantes: a Semantic Study (Washington, D. C., 1945), pp. 1–4 Google Scholar. The intellectual quality of discreción, as understood by Cervantes, is fully documented.

22 Gracián holds a radically different view (op. cit., II, 195): ‘But lo and behold, all that concentrated ignorance and folly was stirred into motion, without why nor wherefore, for the vulgo is easily moved to turbulence, and this is all the more true if it is as credulous as the vulgo of Valencia, as barbarous as that of Barcelona, as silly as that of Valladolid, as disrespectful as that of Zaragoza, as fond of novelty as that of Toledo, as insolent as that of Lisbon, as given to chattering as that of Seville, as dirty as that of Madrid, as noisy as that of Salamanca, as prone to lying as that of Cordova, and as contemptible as that of Granada.’

23 Rangier, William, ‘ Poeta nascitur non fit: Some Notes on the History of an Aphorism’, JHI, 11(1941), 497–504 Google Scholar.

24 See Don Quijote, ed. cit., 1, 25, n. 12. It is necessary to inquire as to the amount of irony back of these words. Cervantes is speaking, of course, only of possibilities: the soul of a tailor is capable of poetic expression. He proceeds immediately to expound the doctrine of the equality of souls in perfectly serious language, and he adds that poeta nascitur nonfit. The equality of souls was stoutly defended by Spanish theologians of the Counter-Reformation (see Iriarte, Mauricio de, El doctor Huarte de San Juan, Madrid, 1948, pp. 153–154 Google Scholar). Cervantes would naturally be favorably inclined to this teaching, since he himself had been declared to be a man ‘of little Latin and less Greek'. Yet there is more here than meets the eye. To be sure, a tailor—Montoro—and a muleteer—Mondragón—had been known poets even in the 15th century. In Cervantes’ own 17th century there existed a very formidable ‘Tailor of Toledo', friend, protégé, and even collaborator of Lope, and the butt of much satire on the part of men of letters of the ‘learned’ or Aristotelian school. This sastre even used amanuenses to write down his poems (which sometimes won prizes) and his plays (which he managed to sell). Cervantes resented him and gently satirizes him in the Viaje del Parnaso with jibes intended, almost certainly, for Lope. In my opinion we may confidently believe this: Cervantes honestly held that poetae nascuntur and regarded himself as a born cultivator of the muses ‘who exceeded most in inventiveness’, albeit without benefit of university training; he also could not forget that Lope had become ‘monarch of the stage’ and that Lope's tailor-protégé could sell plays to producers while Cervantes’ own dramatic works lay in the most regrettable of limbos. See San Román, Francisco de B., Lope de Vega, los cómicos toledanos y el Poeta Sastre (Madrid, 1935), p. lxxxix ffGoogle Scholar.

25 That there is expressed here a very real resentment against Lope is well known. Irony is almost certainly present and the words about artisans would have to be discounted were it not for the fact that Cervantes in other places defends the theory of natural poetic inspiration. See above. In Don Quijote, ed. cit., II, 43, Cervantes grants to the vulgo, as Juan de Valdes had done ca. 1535, power and authority to shape the Spanish language.

26 The refrán had been used with highly artistic effect in poetry by the 14th-century Juan Ruiz, in fiction by Fernando de Rojas (1499), and in the drama by Bartolomé de Torres Naharro (d. after 1530).

27 Fichter says, in his n. on this line: ‘The difference between Lope's and Cervantes’ comments on the vulgo is but one instance of the essential dissimilarity of these two great writers’ (p. 199).

28 Apud Hugo Albert Rennert and Américo Castro, Vida de Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1919), p. 191.

29 Don Quijote, ed. cit., 1, 24 and n. 10.

30 Alonso, Dámaso, ‘Lope en vena de filósofo’, Clavileño, Año I, núm. 2 (marzo-abril 1950), 10–15 Google Scholar.

31 Cf. Pfanfl, Ludwig, Cultura y costumbres del pueblo español de los sighs XVI y XVII (Bareleona, 1929), p. 234 Google Scholar.

32 Riley, Edward C., ‘The Dramatic Theories of Don Jusepe Antonio González de Salas’, HR, XIX (1951), p. 199 Google Scholar. Georges de Scudéry (1601-67) wrote in his Didon: ‘ayant satisfait les sçavants, il faut parfois contenter le peuple'. See Rousset, Jean, La littérature de l'âge baroque en France: Circe et le Paon (Paris, 1953), p. 76 Google Scholar.

33 Authors who had eaten humble pie in the presence of the shuffling feet and the actual or feared whistles of the musketeers were glad to have their revenge when they printed books over which the groundlings could have no jurisdiction. Alarcón, several of whose plays pay obeisance to the mosqueteros in their final verses, published the attack which has already been noticed. Another instance is the case of Luis Vélez de Guevara, whose Diablo cojuelo has a prologue addressed ‘A los mosqueteros de la Comedia de Madrid'. It begins: ‘Thank God, my musketeers (or your own musketeers, for I will have none of you), judges of theatrical applause by force of custom and abuse, thank God, I say, that for once I take up my pen without fear of your whistles, since this account of the Limping Devil sees the light of day, conceived without taint of original theater, and far removed from your jurisdiction; for by yourverynatureyouwillnotevenreaditsincenoneofyouknowshowtospell; for you were born but to increase the number of the population, to act as gaping fish in the aquaria of the playhouses, taking your cue from the gestures of the actor and not by any power of intelligence you might flatter yourselves as possessing.'

34 It was customary, at the end of a play, to appeal for benevolence in terms flattering to the audience, e.g., ‘illustrious senate'.

35 Rennert, Hugo Albert, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (New York, 1909), p. 118 Google Scholar.

36 Bell, , op. cit., p. 113 Google Scholar.

37 Rennert, , The Spanish Stage, pp. 118–119 Google Scholar.