Baroque Prose, Theater, and Lyric Poetry: A Cultural Snapshot

Baroque Prose

In the seventeenth century, prose used satire and caricature to criticize society. The preferred style was the concept, which, with its expressive concentration and verbal games, lent itself particularly well to the authors' purpose. Francisco de Quevedo and Baltasar Gracián are highlights of this kind of prose.

Picaresque Novel

As for prose fiction, there is the rise of the picaresque novel with the publication of works including Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán, and El Buscón by Quevedo, which more or less faithfully follow the model of Lazarillo de Tormes. Another important work is El Criticón by Baltasar Gracián, an allegorical novel that offers a distinctly pessimistic worldview. But the most outstanding novel of this period is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, a work that began the modern age.

Baroque Theater

The national comedy is characterized by these features:

• Division of work into three acts or jornadas.
• Mixture of tragic and comic elements.
• Breaking of the units of time and place, adapted to the situations.
• Decorum.
• Expressive metrical formula.

The theater of Lope de Vega was followed by other baroque playwrights, such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina. The latter is the creator of one of the legends of world literature: the figure of Don Juan, the protagonist of his work, The Trickster of Seville.

Galician-Portuguese Lyric

In the Northwest, Galician-Portuguese Lyric is influenced by the Provençal lyric. In the love songs, a poet sings of his lady love, in the Provençal style. In the songs of friends, more intimate and emotional, a woman expresses her feelings about the absence of her lover. The cantigas have the same number of syllables in their verses; in them, the verses are linked through the use of parallelism. This remarkably lyrical style was included in Castilian. Even King Alfonso X the Wise wrote canticles in Galician-Portuguese.

Mester de Juglaría (Minstrelsy)

The heroic theme recounts the events of the exploits of heroes in battle and in life. It was spread orally by the minstrels: people who made their living entertaining the audience with dancing, juggling, and the recitation of epic poems.

Characteristics:

• Extolling the exploits of national heroes.
• Irregular metrical verses between 14 and 16 syllables.
• The verses are divided into hemistichs separated by a pause called a caesura.
• The rhyme is assonance.
• The adjacent lines that keep the same rhyme form a tirada.
• The tiradas have a variable extension, and may be 5 or 50 verses.
• Character references popular with the public to keep their attention by appellate formulas: as you will hear singing, you would see, etc.
• Using the epic epithet serves to enhance the figure of the hero through adjectives and expressions: "the one with the flowing beard", "who in good hour was born", and so on.
• Use of exclamatory sentences with which it conveys more emotion.