Recent Publications on Portuguese Language and Literature

Abstract

The lyric play continues to dominate the Portuguese stage. This is one of the reasons for the ever-renewed success of a playlet written by Jillio Dantas in 1902, A Ceia dos Cardeais, which was reprinted in 1947 for the thirty-eighth time. Nor is it surprising therefore to find that most critical literature about the theatre still concerns Gil Vicente, the sixteenth-century dramatist, who wrote the first and best lyric plays in Portugal. Only recently, between 1942 and 1944, had Vicente's complete works been made available to a larger public by Marques Braga. In 1947, A. J. da Costa Pimpdo announced that he would undertake the long-awaited critical edition. In the meantime, Paulo Quintela, who like Costa Pimpio teaches at the University of Coimbra, edited one of Gil Vicente's religious dramas, the Auto de Moralidade da Embarcaqdo do Inferno, a Portuguese treatment of the most gripping satiric themes, the voyage in Charon's barge, Judgment Day, and the Dance of Death. Carolina Michaielis de Vasconcelos had promised a critical edition in 1912. Quintela intended to put at the disposal of the public, not the critical edition which only D. Carolina Micha'ilis de Vasconcelos could have given us, but merely the texts upon which such a work should rest and a personal attempt at fixing the definitive text after confrontation of the different editions. He did more, however, than publish the diplomatic transcriptions of the four texts of Gil Vicente's Auto-the editio princeps of ca.1517, the edition of 1572, and the editions of 1586 and ca.1600, both of which were emended by inquisitorial censors. Besides his own version, written in moderately modernized spelling and with revised punctuation, he reproduced the text of an enlarged Spanish adaptation of the play, composed probably by a Spanish humanist, which was first printed in 1539 in Burgos. Though not exhausting the possibilities for research, Quintela added a great many notes, explaining allusions and archaic usages, pointing out arbitrary changes made by modern editors, and drawing on his own experience to give valuable hints as to the