Gil Vicente

• Born: c. 1465
• Birthplace: Portugal
• Died: c. 1537
• Place of death: Portugal

Other Literary Forms

Many of Gil Vicente’s songs have been extracted from his plays and included in poetry anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (1960), edited by J. M. Cohen. Vicente is often, but not always, considered a Spanish writer; as he also wrote in Portuguese, his lyrics are only sometimes available in Spanish-language anthologies of verse.

In the Copilação de todalas obras de Gil Vicente of 1562, commonly called the Copilação, is a section entitled “Trovas e Cousas Miúdas” (verses and small things), containing twelve miscellaneous works. Of these, the most literary is “Pranto de Maria Parda” (“Maria Parda’s Lament”), and the most significant biographically is an untitled “Letter for Tolerance.” In addition, there is an epistolary dedication for the Copilação, which demonstrates that Vicente was planning, if not implementing, the publication of his complete works during his lifetime. In this two-page Portuguese prose piece, the author evinces the proper humility before the fact of his own success and claims that he would not think of publishing his works if it were not for the king’s request that he do so. As many of his plays are works of devotion, he reasons, their publication will not only serve the king but also work in the service of God.

Among the other pieces are a sermon, a paraphrase in Portuguese of Psalm 50 (“Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy”), a lament on the passing of Manuel I, a poem on the subsequent coronation of his son John III, and sundry verses addressed to a variety of persons.

Vicente’s “Letter for Tolerance,” sent to John III in January, 1531, helped to allay a burst of anti-Semitic hysteria in the wake of an earthquake that had shaken Portugal on January 26, 1531. To charges that the earthquake was caused by the wrath of God for the sins of the nation, which apparently included Portuguese toleration of newly converted Jews whose practice of Christianity was less than convincing, Vicente replied that earthquakes are typical phenomena of a natural world characterized by sudden changes. Furthermore, he advised that if some of the Portuguese people (namely, the converted Jews) were still not devout Christians, perhaps it was for the greater glory of God. He suggested that perhaps if they were treated gently, their eventual conversion would follow. Unfortunately, Vicente’s tolerance did not extend to the material he incorporated into his plays. In Dialógo sobre a ressurreição, for example, it is the three rabbis in their rejection of the Resurrection who bear the brunt of the play’s ridicule.

“Maria Parda’s Lament,” one of Vicente’s most fascinating works, is a 369-line poem in Portuguese about how a drunkard named Maria Parda copes with a wine shortage in Lisbon. After traversing Lisbon from end to end to no avail (she names the streets) in hopes of slaking her thirst, she decides that she is about to die and composes her last will and testament, commending her soul to Noah, who first planted the vine. Despite the morbid nature of the subject, Vicente’s characterization of Maria Parda is remarkably sympathetic.

Achievements

Gil Vicente created the national drama of Portugal one generation before the Spanish Golden Age and two generations before the Elizabethans. From 1502 to 1536, he was virtually poet laureate of Portugal in the capacities of musician, actor, lyric poet, and playwright, and the royal court did not plan any celebration without asking for his help. He has been called a Lusitanian Plautus, a medieval Aristophanes, and a Portuguese William Shakespeare. His light touch and singing verses reminded John Dos Passos of Theocritus. Observing the dramatic vitality generated by Vicente in tiny, isolated Portugal, Richard Garnett in his History of Italian Literature (1898) laments that there was no one of Vicente’s caliber among the Italians of the sixteenth century.

As a result of censorship, the changing tastes brought in with the Renaissance, and imitators who were simply unworthy of their master, the tradition of Vicente had little continuation within Portugal (although glimmers of his influence can be detected in the theatrical works of Luís de Camões, Antonio Prestes, and Antonio Ribeiro Chiado). However, his influence can be found in the playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age. Lope de Rueda was acquainted with Vicente, as was Miguel de Cervantes. Vicente’s compression of history and abandonment of chronology as seen in The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra were later a distinguishing feature in the great sacramental plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Various critics have suggested a direct or indirect influence on William Shakespeare.

Erasmus is said to have wished that he knew Portuguese in order to read Vicente’s plays in the original. The eschatological Ship Trilogy, with its angel laying bare the souls in judgment, is unsurpassed in the literature of the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century. Vicente’s Auto das ciganas is the first piece of European theater dealing professedly with the Gypsy race. Dámaso Alonso calls him one of the finest lyric poets of the Spanish language, and indeed some modern Spanish poets, such as Rafael Alberti (in whose poem “Arión,” Vicente, alongside Rubén Darío, and Charles Baudelaire, is one of eight poets whom Alberti acknowledges as his masters), have been inspired by his poetic example. If, as is widely assumed, Vicente the dramatist and poet was indeed the same person as Gil Vicente the goldsmith who made the monstrance for the Hieronymite monastery in Belem, then, as Dos Passos observes, he was one of the most versatile artists who has ever lived.

In 1838, the Portuguese romantic dramatist Almeida Garrette published Um Auto de Gil Vicente, in which he portrayed Vicente as the actor-director of a theatrical company at the court of King Manuel. This same nineteenth century writer translated Vicente’s “Ballad of Flérida” from Tragicomédia de dom Duardos into Portuguese (from Spanish) and included it in his Romanceiro (1843). About the same time, in the United States, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped acquaint American readers with Vicente’s name by including English renderings of his poems “How Fair the Maiden” (from The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra) and “If Thou Art Sleeping, Maiden” (from Quem tem farelos?) in his The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845).

Biography

Gil Vicente was born in about 1465, possibly in Guimarães, in northern Portugal, or in the western province of Beira, whose dialect he occasionally employs in his plays and which is adjacent to the area of Spain whose dialect, called sayagués, he employs in his Spanish plays. His education is a matter of conjecture, and his learning seems to have stemmed more from devotional books than from humanistic study. His knowledge of the Bible was undeniably extensive. There is even some doubt about exactly who he was, although it seems reasonably certain that Gil Vicente the playwright of the Portuguese royal court was the same person as Gil Vicente who was Queen Leanor’s goldsmith.

In June, 1502, Vicente, in the guise of a herdsman, accompanied some thirty courtiers dressed as herdsmen and bearing such rustic gifts as eggs, milk, cheese, and honey. They presented themselves in Queen Maria’s bedchamber to congratulate their sovereigns on the birth of their first-born son, later John III. Vicente in his skit related how the palace guards tried to keep his group from entering and explained how their village had sent them to verify if indeed the royal birth had taken place. The composition, written in Castilian as a compliment to the young Spanish-speaking queen, was called Monólogo do vaqueiro (the herdsman’s monologue).

Before 1502, Vicente had been in the service of the Dowager Queen Leanor; after this “new thing,” she was so pleased that she asked for a repeat performance the following Christmas, whereupon Vicente wrote another play, Auto pastoril castelhano. The dowager queen was again delighted and asked for another play for Twelfth Night. This was The Three Wise Men, and after that, no court function was complete without a dramatic production by Vicente. Following the court from palace to palace, Vicente wrote plays that provided court members with distraction in times of difficulty and in times of rejoicing gave expression to the jubilation of the people.

After the composition of his first four plays, there was a five-year lull that is generally explained as time that Vicente devoted to his activities as a goldsmith. In September, 1503, Vasco da Gama returned from his second voyage to India with two thousand miticaes of gold, and King Manuel ordered that a monstrance be crafted of it for the service of the altar. By 1506, Vicente finished his glorious monstrance for the Monastery of the Jerónimos at Belém (on display today at the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon), and from 1512 to 1516, he was master of the Royal Mint.

Vicente married twice, first to Branca Bezerra, who died in about 1512 and who bore him two sons, and then, in 1517, to Melicia Rodrigues, by whom he had three more children. Of these three, two were involved in their father’s dramatic activities: Paula as an actress and Luis as the compiler of his father’s works in the Copilação.

The dramatist’s last play, Floresta de enganos, was performed at Évora in 1536. Vicente belonged both to the Middle Ages and to the Renaissance; he loved the traditional themes of the Middle Ages, but his natural curiosity, his tolerance of others, and his love of life belonged more to the Renaissance. His versatility has already been noted; in addition to poetry, drama, and goldsmithing, he dabbled in astrology and witchcraft and wrote music for some of his lyrics.

Vicente was a profoundly religious dramatist who believed that prayers do not suffice without a “clean” soul and that people are judged by their works. He had a mystical and pantheistic bent and loved humble flowers—chicory, chamomile, honeysuckle, and wild roses—and those human beings closest to nature, such as children and peasants. Of city folk, he was less enamored, as when he speaks of “a desvairada opinião do vulgo” (“the confused thoughts of the masses”), and he abhorred the general slackness of the times. In his religious plays, he frequently satirizes the clergy for their hypocrisy and lack of commitment. The first edition of Vicente’s plays survived without mutilation by the Inquisition as a result of the support of Queen Mother Catarina, but the second edition of 1586 was severely bowdlerized and was the last printed for 250 years. This apparent irreverence, however, was not directed at the Church, but rather at its unworthy ministers. Unlike Martin Luther, he wished to reform the Church from within, and he directed his wrath and satire at abuses, not at doctrine.

Analysis

Gil Vicente divided his plays into farces, religious pieces (elaborated from medieval mimes and mysteries), comedies, and tragicomedies, but his categories overlap. For example, nothing separates some of the comedies and tragicomedies from the farces, and some of the farces are religious. The tragicomedies, or aristocratic pieces, were the result of his contact with the royal court and are more often spectacular than dramatic, depending more on music, songs, and dances, and on the lyricism of their versification. It is rather in his comedies and farces that he displays his dramatic skill, his keen powers of observation, and his generous human sympathy. Brilliant character sketches, clever dialogue, and comic situations occur in the farces Quem tem farelos?, The Sailor’s Wife, Farsa de Inês Pereira, O velho da horta, and in other plays that are devoid of conventional plot, such as The Carriers and O juiz da Beira, which are more like modern revues than any dramatic genre. The vitality of Vicente’s humorous and satiric studies is especially remarkable if indeed they lacked the stimulus of popular audiences.

Most of the plays are written in the national redondilha verse of eight-syllable lines and are introduced by rubrics stating the date, the place, the audience, and the occasion of each performance. Most of them were staged at the various royal palaces, although some were played in hospitals; Aubrey Bell believed that some were also produced in private homes, but this does not appear to be documented. The liturgical plays were performed at the great festivals of Christmas, Epiphany, and Maundy Thursday. Many of the plays contain songs, either written and set to music by the author or collected from popular sources, and often the characters leave the stage singing and dancing, as in the medieval comedies. The plays of Vicente also contain a wealth of folklore in the form of proverbs, listed by Bell at the end of his Four Plays of Gil Vicente: “Nam se toman trutas a bragas enxutas” (“One does not catch trout without getting wet”), “Grão a grão gallo farta” (“Many a mickle makes a muckle”), and “A amiga e o amigo mais aquenta que bom lenho” (“A pair of lovers makes more heat than good wood”).

One of Vicente’s most remarkable skills was his capacity to portray a type so well in so few lines, a skill that Bell compares to that of a master goldsmith accustomed to setting jewels. Vicente’s gallery of priests is unforgettable: Frei Paço, who minces with his velvet cap and gilt sword “like a very sweet courtier”; Frei Narciso, who starves and studies and stains his face an artificial yellow in hopes that his phony asceticism will win for him a bishopric; the city priest who feasts on rabbits and sausages and good red wine; and the country priest who resembles a kite pouncing on chickens. Many of Vicente’s other creations are as memorable as his priests: the witch busy at night over a hanged man at the crossroads; the chattering saloia (rustic woman) who sells watered milk and overpriced eggs; alcouviteiras (procuresses) such as Ana Dias, who promises a squire the favors of a Moorish slave and takes his money without producing results; the plowman who does not forget his prayers and is charitable to tramps but who skimps his tithes; the Jew who had been prosperous in Spain but now as a new Christian is a poor cobbler in Lisbon; and the poor farmer’s daughter who is brought to be a court lady while still stained from the winepress.

Of Vicente’s forty-four surviving plays, sixteen are in Portuguese, eleven are in Spanish, and seventeen are in both languages. Although Vicente apparently never journeyed outside Portugal, the Spanish connections of the Portuguese court and the belief that the two countries would soon be united under one throne because of a series of royal marriages between their respective ruling houses encouraged his use of the closely related—but nevertheless distinct—Spanish language. His Spanish is often peculiar; he uses the Portuguese “personal infinitive” when he writes in Spanish, and his rhymes in Spanish are often imperfect (such as parezca and cabeza, based on their Portuguese cognates pareça and cabeça). In his earliest plays, his shepherds speak the sayagués “dialect” invented or elaborated by Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández of the Salamancan school of Spanish drama. Sayagués, erroneously associated with Sayago to the north of Salamanca, is more correctly associated with the province of Salamanca itself, adjacent to the Portuguese province of Beira, possibly Vicente’s native area, which in turn allows the possibility of a childhood intimacy with a dialect very closely related to the sayagués that he placed in the mouths of his rustics.

Vicente uses language to distinguish many of his characters. While his shepherds speak sayagués, his blacks chatter in pidgin Portuguese, his Gypsies lisp, and in Auto de la fama, in which Fame is courted successively by a Frenchman, an Italian, and a Spaniard before she decides to pledge her troth to Portugal, Vicente makes an attempt to have each foreign suitor speak in his own language.

Although he picked up foreign words and mannerisms with ease, Vicente does not appear to have had much acquaintance of or even liking for fashions from beyond the Pyrenees. If he introduced a French song into one of his plays, he probably did so out of deference to the taste of the Portuguese court. Vicente was unaffected by the innovations of Giangiorgio Trissino and other Italian dramatists, and with his medieval appreciation of folkways and folk wisdom, he stood unswayed against the inevitable literary artificiality that followed the return to Portugal of Francisco Sá de Miranda with the hendecasyllabic line from Italy in 1526.

Although Vicente’s work lacks psychological depth by today’s standards, his plays reveal a grasp of characterization vastly superior to that of the medieval dramatists who preceded him. Indifferent to the rules of Aristotle, as a playwright he combined disparate elements in a way more faithful to life than to any theory of drama. Himself a man of the people, he refused to imitate the products of classical theater, choosing to absorb the critical spirit of the fast-approaching Renaissance without its erudition. In his religious toleration, he was spokesperson for the better men of his age and society. The embryonic genius in the drama of Vicente provides the modern critic with a strong temptation to hypothesize: Had he written fifty years later in the requisite Renaissance environment of freedom and sophistication, he might have surpassed Calderón and equaled Shakespeare.

Early Plays

After his first short plays, which were written between 1502 and 1504 in the pastoral manner of the Spaniards Encina and Fernández, several years passed before Vicente’s next work was staged. His first attempt at allegory, in which Faith, speaking Portuguese, explains the meaning of Christmas to peasants speaking Spanish, occurs in Auto da fé and is still much in the pastoral style of Encina and Fernández. Although his earlier plays are largely derivative, his distinctive personality soon began to emerge in his works. In 1512, Vicente wrote two plays with characters inspired by those in the Spanish play Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499, rev. ed. 1502 as Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea; commonly known as La Celestina; Celestina, 1631): O velho da horta (the farce of the old man in the orchard), which ridicules an old man who is in love with a young girl he sees in his orchard and who engages the services of the procuress Branca Gil, and the rather hilarious Auto dos fisicos (play of the doctors), which shows a love-stricken priest at the mercy of a series of outrageous doctors and a procuress, Brasias Dias. They give up on their patient and leave him to a priest-confessor, who confesses that he himself has been in love for many years and argues that since love is ordained by God, no shame need be felt for it. Later Vicente introduced other procuresses into his plays, such as Brigida Vaz in The Ship of Hell and Ana Gil of O juiz da Beira.

The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra

In 1513 or 1514, while he was under the influence of his Salamancan masters (lexically, especially Encina), Vicente wrote what is considered one of his masterpieces, The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra, which was probably performed before Queen Leanor after Christmas matins in the Convent of Enxobregas in Lisbon. In this work, Vicente skillfully blended peasant scenes and religious rhapsodies as well as love passages and biting satire, and interspersed refreshing letras para cantar (popular songs) in the play to signal dancing scenes.

Vicente’s immediate source was a fifteenth century Italian novel of chivalry, Guerin meschino (1473), translated into Spanish by Andrea da Barberino in 1512. The title translates as “Guerrino the wretched,” in reference to the hero’s wretched childhood slavery, above which he rises to discover his royal parentage, marry a princess, and die a saintly death. Cassandra, the name of one of the sibyls whom Guerrino encounters—but not the one sibyl in the Italian story intent on saving her virginity to become the mother of Christ—was a name already well-known to Vicente. The Erythean sibyl Erutea had appeared as well in a well-known pseudo-Augustinian sermon as one who foretold the coming of the Messiah, and in Vicente’s play, this Erythean sibyl recites a version of the Fifteen Signs of Judgment Day.

In Vicente’s version, Cassandra does not want to renounce her freedom for marriage. She is importuned by her handsome admirer Salomon; by her three aunts, the sibyls Erutea, Peresica, and Cimeria; and by Salomon’s three uncles, the prophets Abraham, Isaiah, and Moses. There is satire in Cassandra’s haughty disdain of marriage, as there is in Salomon’s presumption that Cassandra has no better choice than to marry him. She gives as her reason for spurning marriage the quarreling and the difficulties inherent in such a relationship, and it is only later that she discloses the real reason: She wants to be the virgin who bears the Son of God. At length, after the scriptural prophecies made by her aunts, a curtain is drawn aside and the real Virgin is revealed in the manger. Appropriately humbled, Cassandra begs to be forgiven for her presumption. The play ends with a cantiga (song) about the real Virgin’s beauty (“Tell me, sailor/ you who live in ships,/ if the ship or the sail or the star/ is as beautiful”) and, enigmatically for the modern reader, a terreiro, or call to arms (“To war,/ Ye gallant knights,/ Since the angels from heights/ Come to help us upon earth./ Go forth!”). This terreiro may be interpreted literally (especially in consideration of Portugal’s involvement in the North African religious wars) or allegorically, as symbolizing Cassandra’s acceptance of her role as both bride and soldier for Christianity. Another work written by Vicente at about the same time and continuing the theme of this final terreiro, Exhortation to War was probably performed for King Manuel I in Lisbon as a Portuguese expedition set out for Azamor in North West Africa in August, 1513.

Ships Trilogy

Vicente’s Ships Trilogy represents an apex in his dramatization of religious themes and indeed has been compared with Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). The first play of the trilogy, The Ship of Hell, in Portuguese, was presented to Queen Maria on her deathbed in 1516. This was followed by The Ship of Purgatory, also in Portuguese, which was performed on Christmas morning, 1518, before the new Queen Eleanor (who had married Manuel I), in the Hospital de Todos os Santos in Lisbon. The third, The Ship of Heaven, in Spanish, was presented to the Portuguese monarchs during Holy Week, 1519, at Almeirim. The first two ship plays are full of Aristophanic humor and irony and treat the fates of peasants and persons of middle rank as they are rewarded or punished on Judgment Day, and The Ship of Heaven deals with men of only the highest rank, representatives of church and state, including an emperor and a pope. This last play of the trilogy is the one based most clearly on the Spanish Dance of Death, an anonymous seventy-nine-stanza poem dating from approximately 1400, which achieves significant dramatic import by its antiphonal alternating of the victims’ pleas with Death’s implacable words of condemnation. The theme of death was a source of obsession in the European Middle Ages and in Vicente’s own century—a time of short life expectancy, apocalyptic visions, and millenarian yearnings—and had apparently evolved from a literal dance of the dying during the time of the Black Death to a dance-of-death motif in both art and literature, in which Death is grotesquely personified.

In Vicente’s version, the transgressions of each high-ranking person are tirelessly enumerated by the boatman of Hell, who presides as prosecutor, and their futures look bleak indeed until the Redeemer arrives to accept them. The Pope especially has been welcomed by the Devil as one of his own kind, one who has shone for his practice of simony and lust, and all of his repentant acts are ineffectual until the arrival of the Redeemer.

Auto da feira

The Papacy is again the target of Vicente’s satire in Auto da feira (play of the fair), written in Portuguese in 1528. At a fair, Time sets up a booth to sell virtuous wares (such as the fear of God). The Devil is there as well, hawking his evil wares (such as deceits of all kinds and hypocrisy). The Church of Rome appears and, as is her wont, goes first to the Devil’s booth. When she stops at Time’s booth, she tries to sell Time her indulgences: “Sell me the place of heaven, since I have power here below.” At length the Church of Rome repents of her errors, and the play ends optimistically as a group of dancing people praise the Virgin. As noted above, Vicente’s open contempt for the hypocrisy of the clergy should not be equated with the reforming spirit of Luther; rather, it reflects an elemental hostility long in evidence throughout medieval Europe toward a privileged class of men, the clergy, who, while disdainful of the ways of ordinary men, more than occasionally embraced those very ways in secret.

Farsa de Inês Pereira

Another play generally considered one of Vicente’s best is Farsa de Inês Pereira, performed in Portuguese before John III in the Monastery of the Knights of Christ in Tomar, in 1523, and inspired by the proverb, “Mais quero asno que me leve, que cavalo que me derrube” (“I prefer a donkey which will carry me to a horse which will throw me”). A woman named Inês marries the more impressive of two suitors, the stately horse rather than the solid donkey—a poor choice from which fate delivers her when her husband perishes at war, leaving her free to marry her first and more reliable suitor. The play is distinguished by its fine characterizations, its superior versification, and a unity of action that is rare in Vicente’s drama.

Tragicomédia de dom Duardos

Vicente realized before other writers the dramatic potential present in the romances of chivalry. Written entirely in Spanish, probably in 1522, and based on the Spanish novel Primaleon (1512), Tragicomédia de dom Duardos is Vicente’s longest play (2,054 lines) and displays the subtlest development and sustained lyricism to be found in his works. The play chronicles an English prince’s successful wooing of Princess Flérida of Constantinople by the ruse of his disguising himself as her gardener. When she falls in love with him after drinking from an enchanted cup which he has given her, she asks him to reveal his identity, but, romantically, he refuses to abandon his humble station until she accepts him as he is. The happy ending is punctuated by a ballad that has won the highest praise from all critics: Flérida bids a tender farewell to her homeland (“God keep you all, my flowers,/ Which once my glory were;/ I go to foreign lands/ Since fate has called me there”) and as she falls asleep in the arms of Dom Duardos to the gentle sound of rowing, the audience is cautioned, “All men who now draw breath/ Learn wisdom from my tale:/ O’er power of love and death/ There’s none that can prevail.”

Amadis of Gaul

In Amadis of Gaul, performed at Évora before John III in 1523, Vicente elaborated on one of the best episodes of the chivalric novel of the same name and converted it into a moving drama with characters that are more skillfully portrayed than those in the novel. The play deals with Oriana’s rejection of Amadis, and although in the novel Oriana does this heartlessly, Vicente gives to her an insightful soliloquy in which she wavers, so that when she revises her opinion, an immediate rapprochement is possible. Some critics have insisted on the ironic and satiric nature of Vicente’s treatment of the Amadis story, but at least one critic views it as a straight dramatization of a well-known story in which Vicente revivifies the conventions of courtly love, showing his audience that in this case these courtly lovers are dealing with deeply felt emotions. The satirization of Amadis would have to wait for the appearance of a Miguel de Cervantes.

Bibliography

Garay, René Pedro. Gil Vicente and the Development of the Comedia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1988. A study of Vicente and of Portuguese and Spanish drama in the Classical period. Bibliography and index.

Hart, Thomas R. Gil Vicente, Casandra and Don Duardos. London: Grant & Cutler in association with Tamesis Books, 1981. A study of Vicente that focuses on The Play of the Sibyl Cassandra and Tragicomédia de dom Duardos. Bibliography.

Stathatos, Constantine C. A Gil Vicente Bibliography, 1975-1995: With a Supplement for 1940-1975. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997. An extensive bibliography of materials related to Vicente.

Stathatos, Constantine C. A Gil Vicente Bibliography, 1995-2000. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2001. A continuation of the bibliography also prepared by Stathatos.

Suárez, José I. The Carnival Stage: Vicentine Comedy Within the Serio-comic Mode. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. A look at Vicente’s comedic works. Bibliography and index.