"Propalladia" and Other Works of Bartolome de Torres Naharro, Volume 4

Book excerpt: In this fourth volume of Joseph E. Gillet's monumental study, Propalladia and Other Works of Bartolomé De Torres Naharro, all students of Renaissance drama will find a wealth of material on the origins of the modern European theater. Torres Naharro created the cloak-and-sword play almost a century before Lope de Vega. The common­places of romantic comedy appeared, for the first time on any stage, in his Comedia Ymenea published at Naples in 1517. Two of his works, the Soldadesca and the Tinellaria—evocations of the roistering life of the barracks and of a cardinal's scullery—are remarkable examples of dramatic realism avant Ia lettre. The influence of Torres Naharro and his work on the Spanish drama of the sixteenth century was all pervasive. In this volume, all the material gleaned by Dr. Gillet in extensive research is brought into clear focus to show Torres Naharro as a man of the Renaissance and a man of the theater. Of the greatest interest is the exposition of his intuition of the distinction between poetic and historic truth—commedias a fantasia and a noticia—long before the recovery of the true text of Aristotle's Poetics, and of the substratum of primitivism in many of his plays: ritual societies, the medicine man, the right to tribute, social discipline, name changing, loss of memory, sports, games, acrobatics, sorcery, riddles, genealogies, weddings, propitiation and death song, resuscitation, license and chastity, and so on. And this dramatic activity occurred early, antedating most of the Italian plays of the sixteenth century.