Vicente was now over 6o, but he retained his vigour and ver satility. The brilliant scenes of two of his last plays, the Romagem de Agravados (1533) and the Floresta de Enganos (1536), are loosely put together, and may well be earlier work; but the lyrical power of the Triunfo do Inverno (1529) and the long, compact Amadis de Gaula (1532) prove that his hand had lost none of its cunning and that his mind remained alert and young. The Auto da Mofina Mendes partly a religious allegory, partly a version of "Pierrette et son pot au lait," shows his old lightness of touch and penetrating charm. The Auto da Lusitania, which was acted in the presence of the court in 1532, may with some plausibility be identified with the Coca de Segredos at which Vi cente tells us he was at work in 1525. It was the last of his plays to be staged at Lisbon in his lifetime; in Lent of by request of the abbess of the neighbouring convent of Odivelas, he pro duced there his religious Auto da Cananea, but the remainder of his plays were acted before the king and court at Evora; and it was probably at Evora that Vicente died in the year of his last play (1536).
Vicente's 44 plays admirably reflect the tragicomedy of his age of change and upheaval in all its §plendour and its squalor.
Eleven are written exclusively in Spanish, 14 in Portuguese; the rest are bilingual ; scraps of church or medical or law Latin, of French and Italian, of the dialect or slang of peasants, gipsies, sailors, fairies and devils frequently occur. His drama may be divided into religious plays, foreshadowing the Calderon autos, court plays, pastoral plays, popular farces and romantic comedy. They were often elaborately staged : a ship was rowed on the scene, or a tower opened to display some splendid allegory; here too he forestalled the later Spanish drama.
The various plays of the years 1513-19, composed when he was about 5o, show Vicente at the height of his genius. He possessed a genuine comic vein, an incomparable lyric gift, and the power of seizing touches of life or literature and transforming them into something new by the magic of his phrase and his satiric force, under which lay a strong moral and patriotic purpose.
A far-sighted patriot and imperialist, and intensely national, he was also a devout son of the church ; but he belonged to the more outspoken days before the Reformation, and his satire of priests and of the abuses of Rome was frank and merciless; so that when in 1531 one of his plays, the Jubileu de Amores (which some critics would identify with the Auto da Feira) was acted at Brus sels, the papal nuncio, Cardinal Aleandro, who was present, felt "as if I were in mid-Saxony listening to Luther or in the horrors of the sack of Rome." As a lyric poet Vicente is first seen at his best in the wonderful poems of the Auto da Sibila Cassandra in Spanish. This poet, who goes to the very heart of the Portuguese people, can as a lyric poet occasionally rival and even excel CamOes, who, as Prof. W. P. Ker remarked, is "less of a miracle than Vicente" and owed more to the Renaissance. Vicente was over so when Si de Miranda brought the new forms and metres from Italy; in their rivalry Vicente remained faithful to the indigenous octosyllabic verse. He had to meet growing crit icism, and, in answer to the taunts of pedants, borrowed from Gomez Manrique the proverb, "Better an ass that carries me than a horse that throws me," and, building on it the Farsa de Ines Pereira, turned the tables on the "men of good learning."
It is Vicente's originality that he is an artist of the Renaissance untainted by its pedantry. He is at once the most imitative and the most original of poets ; we continually find him working up his borrowed material, like gold in the hands of an artist of genius, into concrete figures ; and his rapidly sketched portraits of peas ant, priest and courtier will last as long as literature. Even in his rudest plays, and when the execution is at its roughest, his bold plastic genius makes itself felt. His plays are rich in folklore, and in his love of all that was popular and indigenous he seized on the essential and eternal elements of art. His knowledge of the French language was small, the influence of France came to him through Spain, and his Barcas were inspired by the Spanish ver sion of the Dance of Death. The Spanish influence is always strong in this most national poet ; he even quotes from the Book of Job, not direct but through Garci Sanchez de Badajoz. He had studied very carefully the work of the early Spanish playwrights Gomez Manrique and Encina, although he soon surpassed them. No other country produced so inspired a dramatic poet before the second half of the 16th century. Actor, stage-manager and author, Vicente was also goldsmith and musician ; he wrote the settings for some of his own lyrics, delightful popular romances and cos santes interspersed in his plays, which often end and open with a song, and are sometimes, as in the Auto da Alma, one long lyric.
Vicente is no exception to the general rule that Portuguese literature is mainly lyrical, in prose and verse ; but in his many sidedness he delineated life in its various aspects with the skill of a master, and he is the true forerunner of writers so different as Moliere, Lope de Vega, Calderon and Shakespeare.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The only collected editions of Vicente's plays, a few of which were printed separately in his lifetime (seven of these were placed on the Portuguese Index of 1551) , are the folios of Lisbon (1562 and 1586) ; the 3 vols. of Hamburg (1834) and Lisbon (1852) ; and the modern edition by Dr. Mendes dos Remedios (3 vols., Coimbra, 1907-14). The critical edition of the 5562 text prepared by Mme. Michaelis de Vasconcellos immediately before her death has not yet seen the light. The only English translations are A. F. G. Bell, Lyrics of Gil Vicente (1914; 3rd ed. 1921) and Four Plays of Gil Vicente (1920) . See E. Prestage, "The Portuguese Drama in the 16th Century ; Gil Vicente," in the Manchester Quarterly (July and Oct. 1'897) ; M. Menendez y Pelayo, Antologia de Poetas Liricos, vol. vii. ; T. Braga, Gil Vicente e as origens do theatro national (Porto, 1898) ; J. I. de Brito Rebello, Gil Vicente (1902 and 1912) ; C. Michaelis de Vasconcellos, Notas Vicentinas, 4 vols. (Coimbra, 1912-22) ; A. Braamcamp Freire, Vida e Obras de Gil Vicente (Porto, 1919) ; and A. F. G. Bell, Gil Vicente (1921). For a fuller bibliog raphy see Fouv Plays of Gil Vicente (192o). A new Vicente play, the Auto da Festa, was published from his library in 1906 by the Conde de Sabugosa. (A. B.)