La Celestina and Jorge Manrique: Spanish Literature

La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas

La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, is the most significant work reflecting the spiritual climate of the fifteenth century: confusion and pessimism in a period of transition. For the first time, it expresses modern sensibility, but from a pessimistic outlook, as the radical individualism of the characters leads to pain and death.

The Author and His Times

Fernando de Rojas was a lawman. He represents the modern, urban, and university-educated writer.

The Literary Genre

La Celestina is a dialogical work that follows the model of the Italian humanistic comedy, which, in turn, imitated the Latin classics of Plautus and Terence.

The Plot

The young nobleman Calisto casually meets Melibea, falls in love, and declares his feelings, but she refuses him. Calisto goes to the bawd Celestina for help. The old bawd visits Melibea, softens her heart with lies and spells, and arranges a meeting with Calisto. The young man, happy, gives a gold chain to Celestina. Sempronio and Pármeno are killed, and Calisto replaces them with other servants. When the lovers are in Melibea's garden, there are cries in the street, and Calisto, trying to climb the wall to come to the aid of his servants, falls and dies. Melibea commits suicide by jumping from a tower. Melibea's father closes the work, expressing his pain.

Characters

The characters are realistic and evolve throughout the play. It seems that everyone is swayed by different passions and does not respond to literary models. The characters share a strong individualism and a pagan worldview.

The Theme

The work combines the three issues of the day: fortune, love, and death. It moves the characters through their passions and leads them to death.

Celestina's Intention

The intention is moralistic. However, the text also presents other aspects, such as the influence of the Renaissance and fifteenth-century pessimism.

Style

The style is the most varied of its time, reflecting the educated upper-class speech of the time. The servants and prostitutes, however, use the lively speech of the street, spontaneous and conversational. Celestina is the character who moves between those environments and adapts easily to different situations.

Jorge Manrique

Jorge Manrique, a great poet of love songs, is valued as the best poet of the century for a single poem, Verses on the Death of His Father (Coplas a la Muerte de su Padre).

The Author

He belonged to the Castilian nobility. He participated in several battles with his father and died in battle at the age of 39. He was one of the last representatives of the warrior aristocracy and educated man, as required by the humanist model. His poem is an elegy.

The Issue

The songs develop the theme of death, a common theme in the Middle Ages. Death equals all under its power, as staged in the popular dances of death.

The Structure

It consists of 40 stanzas of 12 lines. The broken foot couplets are formed by a double sextuplet of lines of eight and four syllables, known since then as "manriqueña." Rhyme scheme: 8a, 8b, 4c, 8a, 8b, 4c, 8d, 8e, 4f, 8d, 8e, 4f.

Regarding the issues, the book is organized into three parts:

• Reflection on the transience of life and the certainty of death. Recreating the Latin phrases tempus fugit and memento mori. Both reasons are inevitably linked to the reflection on the fragility and transience of worldly goods.
• Emotional and nostalgic evocation of the past, gone. It recalls its transience through interrogations representing the Ubi sunt literary topic.
• Individualization around the father figure. The final death says that he expects two ways of life: fame, and eternal and true life. In contrast, those lives and the deceptive expiration of earthly life.

Style

Simple, anti-rhetorical. The naturalness of language contrasts with the seriousness of the issue. This combination of simplicity and depth is what makes Manrique a poet of poets.

Verses' Meaning

The work reflects the sensitivity of the end of the Middle Ages, and the figure of his father embodies knightly and Christian virtues. The work reflects the contradictions of the time. Manrique shows other pre-Renaissance features, such as the valuation of fame, etc.