Garcilaso de la Vega: Life, Style, and Works

Garcilaso de la Vega: Themes, Style, and Works

Themes

Garcilaso de la Vega's conception of Petrarchan love follows tradition, portraying it as an impossible love inspired by his beloved. When describing his beloved, Garcilaso depicts an idealized Petrarchan beauty—feminine beauty, refined and harmonious. This is a noble escape from the courtly life, a yearning for rest and peace, a description that leads to peaceful cities. In his mythology, he recreates myths in which love combines despair and death; these myths serve as a disguise for his own feelings.

Style

Garcilaso's style is simple, serene; it expresses feelings with naturalness and elegance, and his language possesses a musical quality. He uses metaphors, epithets, hyperbaton, alliteration, and personification. His poetic trajectory can be divided into three stages:

• Influence of Hispanic Lyricism: Literary influences from Castilian traditional songbooks. He wrote amorous poems to his beloved without paying attention to exterior or physical traits—a Petrarchan mode.
• Assimilation of Petrarch and New Art: Petrarch had a great impact on Garcilaso; he adopted meters, themes, and the conception of beauty and landscapes.
• Wholeness: After the death of his beloved, he composed some of his best works. His literary maturity provided him with a serene vision of love and nature.

Works

Garcilaso composed 3 Eclogues, 2 elegies, an epistle, 4 canciones, and numerous sonnets. In his canciones and sonnets, the Petrarchan style combines the rhetoric of courtly love with that of the traditional songbook lyric. Later, his poetry evolves to a greater intensity of classicist love influence. His three Eclogues are among his most important works:

• First Eclogue: Significant because it perfectly combines the passion of love and formal perfection.
• Second Eclogue: The most extensive.
• Third Eclogue: A poem in eight-line stanzas.

Spanish Theater in the 17th Century

By the end of the 16th century, three types of theater existed in Spain:

• Religious Theater: Presented in temples and large spaces around churches during religious festivals.
• Courtly Theater: Performed in palaces and revolved around courtly themes.
• Popular Theater: Comedies written by or performed by improvisational companies. These companies traveled the countryside, performing in outdoor corrals. The demand for these works was high, leading to the emergence of a national comedy with features that differed from classical comedy.

These popular comedies broke the three unities (action, time, and place). They mixed tragic and comic elements, featured parallel actions, and were divided into a beginning, middle, and end. They lacked decorum, included poetic and lyrical elements, and varied their verses and stanzas.