During the long reign of Juan II of Castile, which nearly coincides with the first half of the 15th century, the court was thronged with versi fiers whose methods were principally an imita tion of those of the Provençal troubadours. These had been welcome visitors in Spain for a couple of centuries before and their themes had been acceptable to high society, especially their theorizing on love. But the re-echoes of their speculation that we find in the ditties of the Spanish poetasters of the 15th century are in the main stale and unprofitable, as may be seen in a survey of the examples contained in the collection (‘Cancionero de Baena') made by the court physician and versifier, Juan Baena. In Aragon the Provencalizing methods also had vogue and they passed over to Italy with the establishment of an Aragonese court at Naples; some of the Spanish compositions written in Italy are assembled in the so-called (Cancionero de Staiga.' At the Castilian court an alle gorizing tendency, harking back above all to Dante and Boccaccio, was very marked, and the first notes of the coming Renaissance were struck when versions were made of some of the works of classic Latin. Enrique de Villena, an eastern Spaniard, related to the royal houses of loth Aragon and Castile, was in no few respects an early Spanish humanist. The Castilian Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marques de Santillana, was one of the more truly inspired writers of the time; he shows some appreciation of the popular poetry of his own land, along with an impress of Italian influences; and he used the allegorical forms with somewhat more felicity than most of his contemporaries. The most elaborate employment of allegorical ma chinery was made by Juan de Mena, court his toriographer of Juan II, as may be perceived in his poem
While with austerity the inevitableness of death is preached in the stanzas of the Castilian
The panish ballad is one of the most prized manifestatteins national literary spirit. Naturally the earliest of those preserved in print could not precede the setting-up of the press, which appears to have occurred about 1474; only very few have been handed down from antiquity in manuscript form and none of these can antedate the 15th century. The oldest extant among the more than 2,000 ballads are heroic in subject, acclaiming the national heroes whom we have seen figuring in the Old Spanish epics and in accounts embalmed in the 'Crianica General.' According to an ingenious
theory advocated by some leading Spanish scholars the most ancient among the ballads were simply portions of still older epics about the heroes, the parts of these latter that the people demanded most insistently from the popular entertainers, the juglares, who chanted and recited them; and the later ballads were modeled on these brief extracts. It has not been demonstrated, however, that ballads, that is, brief epico-lyric narratives, did not exist even as early as the very time of the heroic personages whom those known to us com memorate• such may have been the fact and they may have been kept alive by oral tradition until finally the first broadsheets) were turned off from the press in the 15th century. At all events the Spanish ballad lives on with un diminished vitality; from the 16th century trained writers have imitated their form, and wherever people of the Spanish stock are found to-day new ballads are being produced by them. Certainly one of the most important works issued from the press before the end of the 15th century was the first discoverable edi tion of the famous chivalric romance, 'Amadis de Gaula,' the parent of a numerous progeny of Amadises, Palmerines and other stories of derring-do that were to keep on appearing down to the beginning of the 17th century, when the 'Don Quijote> was to give them their quietus. In some form or other the 'Amadis de Gaula' was already in circulation back in the 14th century, for there are refer ences to it in other works of that period. Another noted novel, one actuated by a spirit which we now call naturalistic, was printed at least as early as the opening of the 16th cen tury. This was the 'Celestina) or dia de Calisto y Melibea,' which is strictly speaking an example of prose fiction in dramatic form.
Golden Under Charles V Spain attained to the proportions of a world empire, and a glorious development in literature as well as the other arts attended her great growth in political importance. During the preceding reign of Ferdinand and Isabella there were already clear signs of the inauguration of that period of literary splendor, which the Spaniards term their siglo de oro, for a large measure of the humanistic culture of Italy had been trans mitted to the Iberian Peninsula in the time of the Catholic sovereigns. In poetry a direct influence of Italian literature manifested itself ere the 16th century had proceeded far in its course, for through the efforts particularly of Juan Boscan (d. 1542) and Garcilaso de la Vega (1503-36) the various forms utilized by the Italians were imported into Spanish, and the old prosody was enriched by the addition of the 11 syllabled line, the octave, the sonnet, the ode, etc. The labors of these two poets in Spain paralleled in permanent effect those of the Pleiade in France and of Wyat and Surrey in England. Other writers such as Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Acuria and Cetina helped to acclimate the new forms and pre vailed over more conservative spirits like Castillejo who resisted the innovations.