Renaissance Dialogue Into Novel: Cervantes's Coloquio

Abstract

In her book on Renaissance genre theory, The Resources of Kind, Rosalie Colie observes that Renaissance is rich in uncanonical (76). In Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, as in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, principal kinds exploited are non-poetic: they carry an early humanist preoccupation into a later age, insisting on elevating to belletristic status kinds which had slipped below the level of artistic attention. In the literature of the late Renaissance there are many examples of such elevation (82). One example that Colie might have cited is El coloquio de los perros. Cervantes's novel in dialogue form is one of the many indications that Marcel Bataillon was right in asserting that La obra de Cervantes es la de un hombre que permanece, hasta lo uitimo, fiel a ideas de su juventud, a habitos de pensamiento que la epoca de Felipe II habia recibido de la del Emperador (Erasmo y Esparia 2: 401). For a modern reader the title Coloquio de los perros is likely to recall Erasmus's Colloquia, as the momentary doubt over whether the de in the title is to be taken as subjective or objective genitive recalls his Moriae Encomium or its alternative title Laus stultitiae. The Moria, as Erasmus usually called it, is an oration on the subject of folly delivered by Folly herself; the participants in Cervantes's Coloquio are dogs and its subject-one of its many subjects-is a dog's life in a world controlled by men. The first readers of the Novelas ejemplares, however, were probably less inclined to associate Cervantes's title with Erasmus. In 1613, when the Novelas ejemplares were first published, many of Erasmus's works had been for more