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When we turn to the literature of the western peninsula during the early years of the sixteenth century, we find it characterized by a temporary but very complete subjection to Italian models. This phenomenon, which is particularly marked in pastoral, is readily explained by the fact that the similarity of the dialects made the transference of poetic forms from Italian to Spanish an easy matter. Thus when among the nations of Europe Italy awoke to her great task of recovering an old and discovering a new world of arts and letters, it was upon Spanish verse that she was able to exercise the most immediate and overpowering influence. Under these circumstances it was impossible but that she should drag the literature of that country, for a while at least, in her train, away from its own proper genius and natural course of development. Other countries were saved from servitude by the very failure of their attempts to imitate the new Italian style; and Spain herself, it must be remembered, was not long in recovering her individuality and in endowing Europe with one of the richest national literatures of the world.

It is important, however, to distinguish from the pastoral work produced under this dominating Italian influence certain other work in the kind, which, while to some extent dependent for its form upon foreign models, bears at the same time strong marks of native inspiration. In this earlier and more popular tradition the tendencies of the national literature, the pastoral possibilites of which appear at times in the ballads, mingle more or less with elements of convention and allegory drawn from Vergil or his humanistic followers. Little influence of this popular tradition can as a rule be traced in the later pastoral work, but it acquires a certain incidental interest in connexion with another branch of literature. It is, namely, the remarkable part it played in the evolution of the national drama that makes it worth while mentioning a few of its more important examples in this place.[63]

An isolated composition, in which lay not so much the germ of the future drama as the index of its possibility, is the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, the composition of an unknown author. It is an eclogue in which two shepherds, representing respectively the upper and lower orders of Spanish society, discourse together on the causes of national discontent and political corruption prevalent about 1472, at the latter end of the weak reign of Enrique IV. In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and vigorous vernacular. Of far greater importance in the history of literature are certain poems--Éclogas they are for the most part styled--of Juan del Encina, which belong roughly to the closing years of the fifteenth and opening years of the sixteenth century. Numbering about a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama. About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited passion ending in suicide, and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude herdsmen. Contemporary with, though a disciple of, Encina, is the Portuguese Gil Vicente, who wrote in both dialects, and whose Auto pastoril castelhano may be cited as carrying on the tradition between his master and Lope de Vega.

With Lope's dramatic production as a whole we are not, of course, concerned. He lies indeed somewhat off our track; the pastoral influence in his work is capricious. It will be sufficient to note that the influence, where it exists, is external; it is nowhere the outcome of Christian allegory, nor does it arise out of the nature of the subject as such titles as the Pastores de Belén might suggest. It is found equally in the religious or quasi-religious plays--such as the Vuelta de Egypto with its shepherds and gypsies, and the Pastor lobo, an allegorical satire on the church Lope afterwards entered--and in such purely secular, amorous, and on the whole less dramatic pieces as the Arcadia--not to be confused with his romance of the same name--and the Selva sin amor, a regular Italian pastoral in miniature, both of which were acted, besides many others intended primarly for reading, though they may possibly have been recited after the manner of Castiglione's Tirsi.

While on the subject of the drama I may mention translations of the Aminta and Pastor fido. Tasso's piece was rendered into Castilian by Juan de Jauregui, and first printed at Rome in 1607, a revised edition appearing among the author's poems in 1618. The Pastor fido was translated by Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa, the best version being that printed at Valentia in 1609, from which Ticknor quotes a passage as typical as it is successful. It was to these two versions of the masterpieces of Italian pastoral that Cervantes accorded the highest meed of praise, declaring that 'they haply leave it doubtful which is the translation or original.'[64] There likewise exists a poor adaptation of Guarini's play, said to be the work of Solis, Coello, and Calderon[65]. The pastoral appears, however, never to have gained a very firm footing upon the mature Spanish stage, no doubt for the same reason that led to a similar result in England, namely, that the vigorous national drama about it overpowered and choked its delicate and exotic growth[66].

Apart from the dramatic or semi-dramatic work we have been reviewing, the pastoral verse which possesses the most natural and national character, though it may not be the earliest in date, is to be found in the poems of Francisco de Sâ de Miranda[67]. He appears to have begun writing independently of the Italian school, and, even after he came under the influence of Garcilaso, to have preserved much of his natural simplicity and genuineness of feeling. He probably had some direct knowledge of the Italians, for he writes:

Liamos. …

… os pastores italianos

Do bom velho Sanazarro.

He may also have been influenced by Encina, most of whose work had already appeared.

The first and foremost of those who deliberately based their style on the Italian was Garcilaso de la Vega, whose pastoral work dates from about 1526. To him, in conjunction with Boscán and Mendoza, the vogue was due. At his best, when he really assimilates the foreign elements borrowed from his models and makes their style his own, he writes with the true genius of his nation. The first of his three eclogues, which was probably composed at Naples and is regarded as his best work, introduces the shepherds Salico and Nemoroso, of whom the first stands for the author, while in the other it is not hard to recognize his friend Boscán. This poem, a portion of which is translated by Ticknor, should of itself suffice to place Garcilaso in the front rank of pastoral writers. Yet he does not appear to occupy any isolated eminence among his fellows, and Ticknor may be right in thinking that, throughout, the regular pastoral showed fewer of its defects in Spain than elsewhere. It is also true that it appears to have been endowed with less vital power of development.

Garcilaso's followers were numerous. Among them mention may be made of Francisco de Figueroa, the Tirsi of Cervantes' Galatea; Pedro de Encinas, who attempted religious eclogues; Lope de Vega; Alonso de Ulloa, the Venetian printer, who is credited with having foisted the Rodrigo episode into Montemayor's Diana; Gaspar Gil Polo, one of the continuators of that work; and Bernardo de Balbuenas, one of its many imitators, who incorporated in his Siglo de Oro a number of eclogues which in their simple and rustic nature appear to be studied from Theocritus rather than Vergil.

In spite of the fashion of writing in Castilian which prevailed among Portuguese poets, we are not without specimens of pastoral verse composed in the less important dialect. Sâ de Miranda has been mentioned above. Ribeiro too, better known for his romance, left a series of five autobiographical eclogues[68] dating from about 1516–24, and consequently earlier than Garcilaso's. They are composed, like some of Sâ de Miranda's, in the short measures more natural to the language than the terza rima and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets. Later on Camoens wrote fifteen eclogues, four of which are piscatorial, and in one, a dialogue between a shepherd and a fisherman, refers in the following terms to Sannazzaro:

O pescador Sincero, que amansado

Tém o pégo de Prochyta co' o canto

Por as sonoras ondas compassado.

D'este seguindo o som, que póde tanto,

E misturando o antigo Mantuano,

Façamos novo estylo, novo espanto.

Whereas in the case of the verse pastoral the Italian fashion passed from Spain into Portugal, exactly the reverse process took place with regard to the prose romance more or less directly founded upon Sannazzaro. The first to imitate the Arcadia was the Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro, who during a two-years' residence in Italy composed the 'beautiful fragment,' as Ticknor styles it, entitled from the first words of the text Menina e moça. This unfinished romance first appeared, in the form of an octavo charmingly printed in gothic type, at Ferrara in 1554, though it must have been written at least thirty years earlier. It differs considerably from its model, the verse being purely incidental, and the intricacy of the story anticipating later examples, as does likewise the admixture of chivalric adventure. It is, indeed, to a large extent what might have arisen spontaneously through the elaboration of the pastoral element occasionally to be met with in the old chivalric romances themselves. On the other hand it resembles the Italian pastoral in the introduction of real characters, which, though their identity was concealed under anagrams and all manner of obscurity, appear to have been traceable by the keen eye of authority, for the book was placed on the Index. Such knowledge of Sannazzaro's writings as Ribeiro possessed was of course direct, but before his fragment saw the light there appeared, in 1547, a Spanish translation of the Arcadia. It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works.

The next and by far the most important contribution made by the peninsula to pastoral literature was the work of an hispaniolized Portuguese, who composed in Castilian dialect the famous Diana. 'Los siete libres de la Diana de Jorge de Montemayor'--the Spanish form of Montemôr's name and that by which he became familiar to subsequent ages--appeared at Valencia, without date, but about 1560.[69] As in the case of its Italian and Portuguese predecessors, some at least of the characters of the romance represent real persons. Sireno the hero, who stands for the author, is in love with the nymph Diana, of whose identity Lope de Vega claimed to be cognizant, though he withheld her name. The scene is laid in Spain, and actual and ideal geography are intermixed in a bewildering fashion. Sireno is obliged, for reasons not stated, to leave the country for a while, and on his return finds his lady-love married by her parents to his rival Delio. In his despair he seeks aid from the priestess of a certain temple, and receives from her a magic potion which drives from him all remembrance of his passion. This very simple and somewhat unsatisfactory story is interwoven with a multitude of episodes and incidental narratives, pastoral and chivalric, and the whole ends with the promise of a second part, which however never came to be written, the author, as it appears, being either murdered or killed in duel at Turin in 1561.

Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric tradition with the fashionable Italian pastoral, and also to certain graces of style which it possesses, the Diana held the field until the picaresque romance developed into a recognized genre, and exercised a very considerable influence on pastoral writers even beyond the frontiers of Spain. Googe imitated passages from it in his eclogues; Sidney translated some of its songs, and took it as the model of his own romance; Shakespeare borrowed from it the plot of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the land of its birth its popularity was shown by the number of continuations and imitations to which it gave rise. Irresponsible publishers swelled the bulk of their editions with matter purloined from less popular authors. The year 1564 saw the appearance of two second parts. One in eight books, by the physician Alonzo Pérez, only got so far as disposing of Delio, and appears to exaggerate all the faults of the original in compensation for the lack of its merits. The other, from the pen of Gaspar Gil Polo, is in five books, and narrates, in a style scarcely inferior to its model, the faithlessness and death of Delio, and Sireno's marriage with Diana. Both alike promise continuations which never appeared. A third part was, however, published so late as 1627, as the work of Jerónimo de Texeda, but it is nothing more than a rifacimento of Gil Polo's continuation, altered apparently with a view to its forming a sequel to Pérez' work. Furthermore, in 1599 there appeared a religions parody by Fra Bartolomé Ponce, and there are said to be no less than six French, two English, and two German translations, not to mention a Latin one of Gil Polo's portion at least.

Besides continuations, there are extant nearly a score of imitations of varying interest and merit. In 1584 appeared the Galatea of Cervantes, imitated from Ribeiro and Montemayor; which in its turn is supposed to have suggested the Arcadia, written a few years later at the instigation of the Duke of Alva by Lope de Vega, and published in 1598. Each is more or less autobiographic or else historical in outline: 'many of its shepherds and shepherdesses are such in dress alone,' Cervantes confesses of his romance, while Lope announces that 'the Arcadia is a true history.' Lastly may be mentioned the Portuguese Primavera of Francisco Rodrígues de Lobo, which appeared in three long parts between 1601 and 1614, and is pronounced by Ticknor to be 'among the best full-length pastoral romances extant.'

All these works resemble one another in their general features. The characteristics of the genre as found in Spain, in spite of a real feeling for rural life traceable in the national character, are the elements it borrows from the older chivalric tradition, combined with an adherence to the circumstances of actual existence even closer than was the case in Italy. Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances the whole mise en scène consists of the actual surroundings of the author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism. Thus the ideal element, the desire to escape from the world, is no less absent from these works than from the Latin eclogues of the renaissance, and the chivalric pastoral in Spain advances far along the road towards the fashionable pastoral of France. Not only are knightly adventures freely introduced, and the devices of disguise and recognition employed, but the hint of magic in Sannazzaro is developed and made to play a prominent part in the tales, while the nymphs and shepherds display throughout an alarming knowledge of literature, metaphysics, and theology. The absurdities of the style were patent, and did not escape uncomplimentary notice from the writers of the day, for both Cervantes and Lope de Vega, in spite of their own excursions into this kind, pilloried the fashion in their more serious and enduring works.