A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN: TOWARDS A BIOGRAPHY OF JACINTO CORDEIRO

Despite the efforts of Heitor Martins,7 Christophe González,8 Giancarlo Dep-retis,9 Raymond MacCurdy,10 and others,11 the lion’s share of Jacinto Cor-

7 Martins, in a 1966 conference presentation, proposed Cordeiro as the possible author of

La Estrella de Sevilla, a work now widely attributed to Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy. See “Jacinto Cordeiro e La Estrella de Sevilla (Notas sobre a ideologia portuguesa durante a Monarquia Dual).”

8 González gives Cordeiro his most thorough critical treatment to date in his unpublished doctoral thesis, “Le dramaturge Jacinto Cordeiro et son temps,” and in “Le thème d’Inès de Castro dans le théâtre de Jacinto Cordeiro”; “Notes sur quelques échos de Cervantès et de Gongora dans le théâtre de Jacinto Cordeiro”; “Héroïsme lusitanien et Comédie espagnole: Los Doce de Ingalaterra, de Jacinto Cordeiro”; “De la Comédie espagnole aux textes anti-castillans, l’itinéraire d’un dramaturge portugais entre la Monarchie dualiste et la Restauration: Jacinto Cordeiro”; and “Una comedia olvidada del portugués Jacinto Cordeiro (1606-1646): El Juramento ante Dios y lealtad contra el Amor.”

9 Depretis makes a variety of Cordeiro’s work available to the public, including La privanza merecida, “Un testo inedito di Jacinto Cordeiro: El entremés famoso de los sordos,” and “Jacinto Cordeiro ‘em 25 de março’.”

10 MacCurdy studies the Senecan tone of Cordeiro’s El mal inclinado in “La tragédie néo-sénéquienne en Espagne au XVIIe siècle, et particulièrement le theme du tyran.”

11 In addition to the Heitor Martins study, we can include my own “Lealtades divididas: Las alianzas literarias y políticas del dramaturgo portugués Jacinto Cordeiro,” and “Notes on the Staging of Jacinto Cordeiro’s El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor. ” A number of young critics have also read papers on Cordeiro at regional and international conferences. These include Anthony Smith’s “La estructura y metrificación de La entra-da del rey en Portugal del alférez Jacinto Cordeiro,” Jonathan William Wade’s “Staging the Nation: Jacinto Cordeiro and the Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Comedia,” and my own papers: “Jacinto Cordeiro, entre Portugal y la escuela lopesca,” “Between the Lamb and the Pheonix: Jacinto Cordeiro Responds to Lope de Vega’s Laurel de Apolo,” “Jacin-to Cordeiro y la comedia portuguesa,” “Lealtades divididas: las alianzas literarias y polí-ticas del dramaturgo portugués Jacinto Cordeiro,” “Staging Jacinto Cordeiro’s El jura-mento ante Dios y lealtad contra el amor,” and “E falando em nossa língua verdades:

2 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor deiro’s work still belongs to that massive corpus of well-documented12 but unedited comedias. Charles Aubrun estimated that Iberian authors penned some ten thousand plays in this genre, of which the majority remains un-touched by modern editors (9). Many are deservedly relegated to obscurity; others do not lack merit, and fail only in soaring to the heights of the genre’s greatest offerings; and some are remarkable, but neglected. For the contem-porary critic, even the worst comedia can be revelatory of the nuances of the genre, the concerns of its time, and the tastes of its public. In other words, the uncovering of lost plays and all but forgotten authors like Cordeiro presents us with a vast underexplored territory that is, nevertheless, littered with its own pitfalls and hazards.

One of these is that we often know much more about the plays them-selves than about the people who wrote them. The paucity of surviving de-tails about an unheralded author’s life can make the construction of a biog-raphy nearly impossible. It tempts one to fill in the empty spaces with con-jecture, or to unquestionably repeat accounts that may be faulty, but that have nonetheless endured for centuries. Confronted with the scarce and cur-sory nature of available sources, many critics commit the error of in turn treating these authors superficially and hastily. Despite Cordeiro being one of Lusitania’s most successful comedia authors, accounts of his life and work exhibit all of these pitfalls. The bio-bibliographies, literary histories, critical essays, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, and wide variety of miscellane-ous references to Cordeiro are emblematic of the sketchy, inconsistent, ran-dom, and often contradictory sources that confront a critic attempting to piece together the biography of a seventeenth-century segundón.

Until the 1960s, the only work done on Cordeiro appeared in bio-bibliographies. The first was Nicolás Antonio’s Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, a monumental catalogue published posthumously in 1787 and 1788, over a hundred years after Antonio’s death. His entry for Cordeiro, although brief, should be revealing considering that Antonio wrote it while Cordeiro was still alive or shortly thereafter. Instead, what we have is a snippet that men-tions only a poem that is interesting to literary historians, but seems to have had little impact in its own time:

Spanish/Portuguese Code-Switching Strategies in the Comedias of Gil Vicente, Simão Machado, and Jacinto Cordeiro.”

12 See Héctor Urzáiz Tortajada’s Catálogo de autores teatrales del siglo XVII (2002).

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 3

HYACINTHUS CORDEIRO, Lusitanus poeta, scripsit: Laurel de Apolo Lusitano: ad exemplum Lauri Apollinis Lupi a Vega Carpio, ejus demque argumenti, hoc est, de laudibus Portugalliae regni & gentis poetarum. (613)

Elogio de poetas lusitanos (1631) is Cordeiro’s only listed work, indicating that his poetic response to Lope de Vega’s Laurel de Apolo (1631) was the defining moment of Cordeiro’s career, but this piece (a supplementary list in verse of Portuguese poets excluded from the Laurel) only saw one edition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In contrast, Cordeiro’s El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor was reprinted in 21 editions between 1620 and 1822. If any one piece defines his career, it would be Juramento and not the poem cited in Antonio’s entry. Otherwise, most of the surviving information about Cordeiro comes from Diogo Barbosa Machado’s Bibliotheca Lusitana Histórica, Crítica y Crono-lógica, the source of virtually everything that we know about Cordeiro’s life: his birthplace, military rank, reception in Spain, date of death, resting place, and, of course, the names of his major plays and poems with descriptions of their imprints.13 The biographic portion of this entry reads:

Jacinto Cordeyro / natural de Lisboa, e muito instruido em todo o genero de erudiçaõ principalmente em a Poetica para cujo estudo era naturalmente inclinado compondo com summa afluencia, que foraõ veneradas pelos mais celebres alumnos do Parnasso. Na Poesía Comica excedio aos principaes cultores della como publicaõ as muítas Comedias, que compoz sendo reprezentadas em Castella com grande aplauzo dos expectadores. Foy Alferes de huma Companhia da Ordenança desta corte onde falleceo a 28 de Fevereiro de 1646, quando contava a varonil idade de quarente annos, e jaz sepultado na Parochia de Santa Maria Magdalena. (462)

Barbosa Machado cites several earlier works that make mention of Cordeiro, João Soares de Brito’s Theatrum Lusitaniae Litterarium, an unedited manu-script in Latin, and Father Antonio dos Reyes’ Enthusiasmus poeticus (1731), both of which are now lost.

Due to the lack of other sources, subsequent bibliographers, critics, and literary historians have been forced to cite or refashion Barbosa Machado’s entry. Consequently, only marginal contributions have been made to the ex-isting sketch of Cordeiro, and most of them are bibliographic and not bio-graphic. For example, Manuel García de Villanueva Hugalde y Parra (d. 1803) assures us in Origen, épocas y progresos del teatro español (1804)

13 Barbosa Machado’s entry on Jacinto Cordeiro appears on page 462 of the third volume of

Bibliotheca lusitana histórica (1741-1759).

4 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor that a collection of Cordeiro’s comedias surfaced in Valencia. Cayetano de la Barrera y Leirado (1815-1872) further explains that Agustín Durán (1789-1862), scholar and chief librarian of Spain’s National Library, possessed a fragment of that collection. Otherwise, a number of dictionaries, encyclope-dias, and catalogues have listed Cordeiro’s work without adding to or amending Barbosa Machado’s sketch.14

Domingo García Péres’s Catálogo razonado biográfico y bibliográfico de los autores portugueses que escribieron en castellano (1890) pertains to this group, but stands out by making several interesting contributions. First, García Péres disputes the claim that an edition of Cordeiro’s collected works surfaced in Valencia. In Villanueva Hugalde y Parra’s defense, two editions of El juramento ante Dios were printed by Valencian publishers in 1774 and 1781, which suggests the possibility of other Valencian editions. Secondly, García Péres identifies the partial collection held by Agustín Durán as a copy of one of the two extant collections of Cordeiro’s comedias now housed in both the Spanish and Portuguese National Libraries. Finally, the Catálogo razonado includes Jacinto Cordeiro’s complete Elogio de poetas lusitanos, which had remained unpublished since its first edition in 1631. Antonio Pé-res Gómes later reproduced García Péres’s edition of Cordeiro’s Elogio in the index of the 1959 Amores divinos (1631), a collection of poetry by seven-teenth-century Portuguese author André Froes de Macedo.

Outside of these bibliographies, other helpful discoveries about Cor-deiro’s life and work appear in the form of footnotes and offhand comments found in a variety of literary histories and studies written in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. George Ticknor, for example, brings up the popularity of Cordeiro’s Victoria por el amor as a digression to his discussion of Alarcón:

Other writers who devoted themselves to the drama were, however, as well known at the time they lived as he was, if not always much valued. Among them may be mentioned [. . .] Jacinto Cordero, whose “Victory through Love” was long a favorite on the stage [. . .]. (337)

Hugo Albert Rennert includes three of Cordeiro’s plays amongst those per-formed privately for Philip IV: Desengaño en celos (which is more common- 14 These include Innocencio Francisco da Silva’s Diccionario bibliographico portuguez

(1858-1862), Espasa-Calpe’s Enciclopedia universal ilvstrada (1930-1933), Antonio Pa-lau y Dulcet’s Manual del librero hispanoamericano (1948), and José Simón Díaz’s Bi-bliografía de la literatura hispánica (1963).

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 5 ly known as Desengaño de celos) and the two-part Próspera y adversa fortu-na de Duarte Pacheco. Rennert tells us that Antonio de Prado’s company represented the first in both February and March of 1623. Juan Martinez put on the other two plays on June 19th, 1631 (Rennert, “Notes,” 331). And final-ly, José do Canto describes a strophe found in Camões that was copied and refashioned in Cordeiro’s Entrada del Rey:

Campos bemauenturados Não tornareis a ser tristes, Que os dias, em que vos vistes Tão tristes já são pasados (ctd in Canto, 253)

Canto notes that these verses in fact predate both Camões and Cordeiro. The original is:

Campos bem-aventurados, Tornae-vos agora tristes; Que os dias, em que me vistes, Alegres, já são passados. (253)

Cordeiro’s name also comes up during a variety of discussions about authorial ascription. In The Life of Lope de Vega, Rennert lists a work as-cribed to Lope entitled Tanto hagas quanto pagues, a piece held at the Brit-ish Museum. He notes that it also exists as a suelta under the title No ay pla-za que no se llegue ni deuda que no se pague, which is attributed to Cordeiro (Rennert, Life 534). Rennert, along with his sources, favors the Lopean as-cription. C. Pitollet, in a 1907 study, disagrees: “Tanto hagas cuanto pagues, attribuée tantôt à Lope, tantôt à Moreto (La traición vengada), tantôt à Rojas Zorrilla, mais qui est du Portugais Jacinto Cordero [. . .]” (316). On another occasion, R. Foulché-Delbosc notes the confusion caused by a 1722 edition of Antonio de Zamora’s La Poncella de Orleans being published under a similar name: No hay deuda que no se pague, y Convidado de piedra (649). This similarity apparently brings up Cordeiro’s name in studies dedicated to the literary sources of Tirso’s Burlador de Sevilla. Arturo Farinelli, for ex-ample, wonders about the connection between Cordeiro and Zamora and ad-mits to not being familiar with Cordeiro’s version of the play:

[. . .] no puedo tampoco dar noticias de una comedia suelta del portugués Jacinto Cordeiro, que tiene un título semejante al de la comedia de Zamora: No hay plazo que no llegue ni deuda que no se pague. No sé si está fundada sobre la leyenda, si es imitación de Tirso u obra original. (9, emphasis added)

6 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor All of the sources described above contribute in some way to our knowledge of Cordeiro, but most mentions of his name appear in passages that present him as an inferior playwright and are intended to highlight the decadence of Iberian theater in the seventeenth century. Of these, few of Cordeiro’s detractors seem to have read him at all. Of those that had, their readings do not seem to have surpassed one play. In other words, their evalu-ations are cursory, superficial, and condemning. Rennert, for example, la-ments:

The crowd turned their backs on the great creator of the Spanish Drama [Lope de Vega] and eagerly sought the plays of Matos, of Zárate, of Zabaleta, and Godinez,—indeed, even of such obscure poets as Jacinto Cordero […] (Rennert, Review 103)

F. Sales adds: “After the time of Guillén de Castro, the theatre continued more crowded than ever. We have Jacinto Cordero; Gabriel Tellez [. . .]” (336). Frederick Bouterwek calls Cordeiro “a minute calculator of the poetic fame of his nation” (276) and “the author of several approved Spanish come-dies” (276), but warns any reader of the Elogio: “Those who wish to study the progress of Portuguese poetry, will derive no information from this book” (276). Adolfo Federico (el Conde de Schack) tells us concerning Cor-deiro’s plays that: “La única que conocemos, El hijo de las batallas, adolece de poco gusto, aunque demuestra que su imaginación era grande, aunque extraviada” (234). Leslie Bannister Walton takes it a bit further and includes Cordeiro’s name amongst a list of playwrights that should be forgotten:

The stage was given over to the fantastic plots, hollow phrases and impossible per-sonages of servile imitators of Calderón. In the work of Cañizares and Zámora we may occasionally find a spark of the old genius; but what can we say of their fol-lowers and imitators, Jacinto Cordero, Téllez Acevedo, and the absurd tailor-dramatist, Juan Salvo y la Vela? These are names to be forgotten, and their work on-ly served to pave the way to the even worse extravagances of Comella, Zavala and Valladares. (xxx, emphasis added)

Manuel de la Revilla and Pedro de Alcántara García make the same determi-nation, calling Cordeiro a writer “de inferior categoría” and “escasa im-portancia”:

A los autores dramáticos citados en esta lección, pueden agregarse otros muchos de más inferior categoría, entre los cuales merecen mencionarse Tellez de Acevedo, Vera y Villarroel, Lanini, Morales Villegas, Pachecho, Montero de Espinosa, Fran-cisco Manuel, Cueva, Fajardo, Cifuentes, La Torre, Meneses, Jacinto Cordero, Anaya, Vidal Salvador, Arboleda, Añorbe, Montesinos, Aguirre, Malaspina, Arce

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 7

Calleja, Sicardo, Gonzalez Bustos, Mesa, Arroyo, Guedeja, Reinoso, Osorio y otros muchos de escasa importancia. (615, emphasis added)

An 1840 English encyclopedia is a little more tepid in its denunciation of Cordeiro. It calls him “a dramatic writer of some eminence,” but adds that he “belong[s] to the history of Spanish [literature] rather than to that of Portu-gal,” and that he “had no influence on the literature of the country” (“Portu-gal” 441).

Despite being considered an inferior dramatist by the literary historians, critics, and reference books listed above, Cordeiro did receive some favora-ble assessments. Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera, for example, wonders why Cordeiro was not mentioned in Lope’s Laurel de Apolo (Barrera, Nueva bio-grafía 423). Rennert, who on occasion dismissed Cordeiro, adds him to the list of distinguished poets that should have contributed to Montalván’s col-lection of panegyrics in honor of Lope de Vega (Rennert, Life 373). Whe-reas Bouterwek saw no value in Cordeiro’s Elogio, Ángel Lasso de la Vega praises it: “Digno de toda alabanza es el alférez Jacinto Cordeiro por su Elo-gio [. . .] sobre todo, es obra de gran interés” (29). Lasso de la Vega even uses the Elogio as the starting point for his 1895 article on Luso-Hispanic writers. Finally, if we accept that imitation is indeed the highest form of flat-tery, then we have to conclude that Italian dramatist Giambattista Pasca held Cordeiro’s work in high esteem. Federico tells us that Pasca’s Il figlio della battaglia is a reworking of Cordeiro’s El hijo de las batallas (Federico, His-toria, 274).

In summary, the negative and positive appraisals given above have little to do with Cordeiro himself and more to do with the rhetorical strategy at hand, which is to say that he, like so many other segundones, has been used more often as a convenient reference in support of an argument than as an object of study. In a passage about the decadence of Golden-Age theater, he becomes an example of such; in one about the many noteworthy poets that slighted Lope de Vega, he joins their ranks; and in a piece about distin-guished bilingual Lusitanian writers, Cordeiro becomes an important forefa-ther. Although these writers made use of Cordeiro for their own ends, the reader still knows little to nothing about the Portuguese playwright’s life and work.

Additionally, searches across the internet and Google Books turn up a collage of Cordeiro references that may not be revelatory, but nonetheless demonstrate that during the eighteenth and nineteen centuries his name car-

8 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor ried some weight and circulated in reference books as one worthy of citation and imitation. For example, the sixth volume of the Real Academia Españo-la’s Diccionario de la lengua castellana, published in 1739, quotes the gra-cioso from Cordeiro’s El juramento ante Dios in its definition of zarapatel: “Si me pusiera a comer / morcillones y morcillas / nabos y zarapatél” (“Za-rapatel” 562). Additionally, Harbottle and Hume include verses from the second act of Cordeiro’s Amar por fuerza de estrella in their Dictionary of Quotations, Spanish (1907):

Para amigos soy amigo, Para traydores, cruel, Para valientes, valiente, y rayo para quien es Enemigo cauteloso (287)

Within the last half century, Cordeiro has only received sporadic critical attention. First, in a 1966 conference presentation and article, Heitor Martins argues that Cordeiro is the author of La Estrella de Sevilla, citing similarities between his anti-Castilianism and the author of Estrella’s anti-monarchism. This argument has been debunked by later criticism that convincingly attrib-utes the play to Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy.15 Nevertheless, this study still has value for the contemporary critic interested in Cordeiro. Firstly, Martins makes a series of important observations concerning Cordeiro’s life and career. He notes that Cordeiro’s plays were performed by a number of famous comediantes, like Tomás Fernández, Riquelme, Salazar, Valdés, Ma-nuel Simón and Cristobál de Avedaño. Citing the preface to Cordeiro’s first partes collection, Martins argues for the existence of a lost partes edition printed before 1630, and speculates that it was published in Valencia (114). Furthermore, he proves the existence of a relationship between Cordeiro and a merchant from Madrid, a vendor of comedias called Pedro Rosete. Addi-tionally, Martins demonstrates that the brunt of Cordeiro’s work was written in the 1620s and calls into question the 1606 birth date given by Barbosa Machado. And finally, Martins’s description of Cordeiro’s “anti-castelhanismo” (110) has greatly influenced subsequent critics who have studied the Lusitanian dramatist. Like Martins, Christophe González’s work attempts to introduce Cordeiro to contemporary critics. He describes the Lu-

15 This is discussed in the introduction to Rodríguez López Vázquez’s edition of La Estrella

de Sevilla.

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 9 sitanian poet against the backdrop of his historical context in a doctoral dis-sertation completed in 1998.16 He has since then published a series of articles that underscore anti-Castilianism,17 Lusitanian heroism,18 textual allusions to Cervantes and Góngora,19 and the use of the figure Inês de Castro (1325-1355)20 in Cordeiro’s plays. González tends to highlight both the influence of Spanish authors in Cordeiro’s work and his employment of Lusitanian ele-ments. González provides accounts of two of Cordeiro plays: Los doce de Ingalaterra21 and El juramento ante Dios.22 These descriptions are com-mented plot summaries that establish the number of lines, describe versifica-tion, analyze characters, and identify major themes. One laments that Gonzá-lez did not take these introductions to Cordeiro’s theater a step further and attach them to editions of these plays. Giancarlo Depretis explores manu-scripts of Cordeiro’s unpublished work. Based on these, he has published editions of a variety of dramatic and prose pieces, including La privanza merecida,23 El entremés famoso de los sordos,24 and the genealogy “Em 25 de março.”25 Of these, Privanza is the most important because it constitutes the first modern edition of a Cordeiro comedia in centuries. Raymond Mac-Curdy studies Cordeiro’s Mal inclinado in his analysis of tyrants in neo-Senecan plays.26 Particularly, he identifies the plot of that comedia as a re-fashioning of events from Seneca’s own life. Finally, José Ares Montes in-

16 Le Dramaturge Jacinto Cordeiro et son temps (Aix-en-Provence, 1998) 17 See “De la Comédie espagnole aux textes anti-castillans, l’itinéraire d’un dramaturge

portugais entre la Monarchie dualiste et la Restauration: Jacinto Cordeiro.” 18 See “Héroïsme lusitanien et Comédie espagnole: Los Doce de Inglaterra, de Jacinto Cor-

deiro.” 19 See “Notes sur quelques échos de Cervantes et de Góngora dans le théâtre de Jacinto

Cordeiro.” 20 See “Le Thème d’Inès de Castro dans le theatre de Jacinto Cordeiro.” 21 See “Héroïsme lusitanien et Comédie espagnole: Los Doce de Inglaterra, de Jacinto Cor-

deiro.” González refers to the play as Los doce de Inglaterra, which utilizes a moderniza-tion of the word Ingalaterra. Unfortunately, this choice loses the octosyllabic verse pre-sented by the original title.

22 See “Una comedia olvidada del portugués Jacinto Cordeiro (1606-1646): El juramento ante Dios y lealtad contra el Amor.”

23 See La privanza merecida (1999). 24 See “Un testo inedito di Jacinto Cordeiro: El entremés famoso de los sordos.” 25 See “Jacinto Cordeiro ‘em 25 de março’.” 26 See “La tragédie neo-sénéquienne en Espagne au XVIIe siècle, et particulièrement le

theme du tyran.”

10 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor cludes Cordeiro’s La entrada del Rey en Portugal in his analysis of poems and plays about Philip III’s 1619 visit to Lisbon.27 Like Martins and Gonzá-lez, Ares Montes notes Cordeiro’s praise of Portugal at the expense of Cas-tile. He also describes La entrada del Rey as one of many artistic representa-tions of the excitement surrounding this historical event.

Taken all together, the corpus of Cordeiro studies consists of a number of short, offhand evaluations, one paragraph-length account of his life, one modern edition of a comedia, a handful of essays peripherally interested in his work, and another handful dedicated exclusively to him. Even if we draw from all of these sources, the surviving particulars of Cordeiro’s life do not make up a real biography. At best, they give us a synopsis of his professional endeavors. Leaning heavily on Barbosa Machado, here is what we can say with a degree of certainty about Jacinto Cordeiro: He was born in Lisbon, possibly in 1606. He garnered fame as an accomplished poet, especially in the realm of dramatic verse. He excelled in the authoring of comedias, hav-ing his plays staged in Castile to great applause. The publication of suelta editions of these comedias in Lisbon indicates that his work was also staged in his native city. In addition to his literary career, Cordeiro was a soldier, an alférez. The rank tells us that he was charged with carrying the Lisboan Company’s flag at the center of their formation during war. He used this title in the majority of the plays published during his lifetime, which allowed him to appeal to the patriotism of his countrymen. Cordeiro embraced the cause for Portuguese independence, as evidenced by the poems Silva a el Rey Nos-so Senhor Dom Ioam Quarto (1641), honoring the newly crowned King of Portugal, and Triumpho françes (1641), which celebrates diplomatic ties with France. Cordeiro died in Lisbon on the 28th of February in 1646, only six years after the restoration of the Lusitanian Monarchy. He was, according to Barbosa Machado, only forty years old. He was laid to rest in his native city’s parish, Santa Maria Magdalena, but this distinguished burial did not protect his remains from the ravages of time: Magdalena was destroyed by the 1755 quake and subsequently rebuilt in 1761. Traces of a life otherwise buried by time surface in the dedications to La entrada del Rey en Portugal and Silva a el Rey Nosso Senhor. In the first, Cordeiro indicates that he lived in India:

27 See “Los poetas portugueses, cronistas de la Jornada de Felipe III a Portugal.”

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 11

Se a que offereço for recebida com a beneuolencia que mereçe a singeleza de meu

comesadas, de Heroes valerosos, que na India me cõuidarão cõ obelicoso som de suas valerosas Proezas. (“Prologo ao leytor,” emphasis added)

Portugal’s sixteenth and seventeenth-century Indian possessions28 con-sisted of Goa, Damão, and Diu. Cordeiro most likely lived in Goa, the ad-ministrative capital of his country’s ventures into Africa and Asia. During his lifetime, this city was in the midst of its own Golden Age. It became a center of both religion and education (Wheeler 105). It is possible that Cordeiro penned La entrada del Rey en Portugal as either a young student or soldier stationed at the distant outpost. The dedication to Silva a el Rey Nosso Senhor gives us another glimpse into Cordeiro’s life. In it, he explains to King John IV of Portugal that his two sons, soldiers like their father, were currently fighting in the continued battles with the Spanish and even offers to join them in war:

Lhe ofereço esta Silva, que nem por fazer versos me isento do maior risco como não isentey eu dos filhos de seu Real serviço, hum que está servindo em Ceilão, e outro nas fronteiras, e eu o farei com excessivo gosto quando V. Magestade seja servido despacharme. (“Dedicatoria”)

From these two quotes we can gather that: 1) Cordeiro’s experiences extend-ed beyond Portugal’s borders, and 2) his literary alliances to Spanish theatre did not preclude his political allegiance to Lusitanian sovereignty. Critics have called into question some of the information presented by Barbosa Machado. Martins, as I mentioned earlier, doubts that Cordeiro was born in 1606:

Todos os bibliógrafos datam o seu nascimento de 1606, o que nos parece pouco provável em vista de ter publicado uma comédia em 1621, a qual apresenta características de ser refundição, já que partes do primeiro acto e todo o segundo, onde se descreve a entrada do rei Filipe III em Lisboa, parecem ter sido interpoladas numa comédia anterior [...]. (114-15)

As Martins implies, Cordeiro would have only been fifteen years old when his first play, La entrada del Rey en Portugal, was published. This fact, cou-pled with the observation that the comedia in question is evidently a refash-

28 The use of the singular na India in the above quote leads me to believe that Cordeiro is

referring to India proper and not in a broader sense to the many Portuguese footholds in Asia.

12 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor ioning of an earlier piece, leads Martins to deduce that Cordeiro did not pen the play as a teenager. Depretis concurs, calling the 1606 birth date “poco convincente” (25). Regrettably, no documental evidence has surfaced to ei-ther confirm or disprove this supposition. In the absence of such, we can only speculate about the veracity of Barbosa Machado’s dating. Still, I join Martins in doubting the 1606 birth date. I concede that a teenager could have written a comedia. Lope de Vega reportedly wrote his first play when he was twelve. Nevertheless, in the prologue cited above, Cordeiro promises to finish some plays about “heroes valerosos” (“Prologo ao leytor”) that he had already started. Here he presumably refers to the two parts of Duarte Pacheco published that same year and/or to some of the plays that appeared in his first collection Seis comedias famosas (1630). Are we to believe that a fifteen-year-old poet had already built up a repertoire of at least three comedias, the first of which commemorates an event that oc-curred two years earlier, when he was only thirteen? It is possible, but not probable. Furthermore, Matos Sequeira indicates that the comedias produced by Cordeiro in the 1620s became a staple of Lisbon’s foremost theater, the Pátio das Arcas: “De 1620 a 1630, entre as comédias exibidas nas Arcas contam-se as famigeradas obras de Jacinto Cordeiro” (113). This period would have been the height of Cordeiro’s career. Should we believe that it occurred dur-ing his teens and early twenties? Once again, it is possible, but not likely. It is more probable that Barbosa Machado erred. A closer look at his entry re-veals another mistake: he attributes El valiente negro en Flandes to Cordeiro. According to current scholarship, this comedia is strongly ascribed to Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy.29 In other words, there is reason to believe that the 1606 birth date may be inaccurate. While most of Cordeiro’s life remains a mystery, his literary endeavors are well documented. Extant texts housed in the Austrian, British, French, Portuguese and Spanish National Libraries bear witness to a brief but active career. His first three plays, La entrada del Rey and the two-part Próspera e adversa fortuna de Duarte Pacheco, were staged in 1621. Rodrigues, a pub-lisher from Lisbon, prepared sueltas of these that same year. The most pro-ductive period of Cordeiro’s career began a year later, probably in Madrid: in 1622, Avedaño’s company reportedly performed Cordeiro’s El mayor trance

29 See Manuel Vicente Guerrero’s edition of El negro valiente en Flandes (2003).

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 13 de honor for the Queen;30 in 1623, Antonio de Prado may have put on Desengaño de celos for Philip IV of Spain (Rennert, “Notes” 337); in 1626, Cordeiro wrote El favor en la sentencia for Bartolomé Romero’s company (Rennert, The Spanish Stage 582); in 1630, Pedro Craesbeeck published Cordeiro’s Seis comedias famosas, a collection of desglosables containing—in addition to La entrada del Rey and Duarte Pacheco—Non plus ultra, El juramento ante Dios y lealtad contra el amor, El mayor trance de honor, and El hijo de las batallas; in 1631, Juan Martinez staged the two parts of Cor-deiro’s Duarte Pacheco for Philip IV (Rennert, “Notes” 339); in 1631, Cor-deiro responded to Lope de Vega’s Laurel de Apolo; and in 1634, Cordeiro published his Segunda parte de las comedias famosas, adding six more plays to his corpus: El secretario confuso, Con partes nunca hay ventura, El mal inclinado, Los doce de Ingalaterra, La victoria por el amor, and Lo que es privar. During this fourteen year period, Cordeiro reportedly also wrote a number of plays which no longer appear to be extant. These include No hay plazo que no llegue ni deuda que no se pague, El soldado revoltoso, and El príncipe jardinero.

In addition to his popularity in Madrid, Cordeiro garnered notoriety in Portugal. His most celebrated comedia was El juramento ante Dios, as evi-denced by Gustavo de Matos Sequeira’s reference to it in his portrait of a typical performance day in seventeenth-century Lisbon:

Em dia de função, quando o troupe do Hospital de Todos-os-Santos, vinda de Sevilha ou de Madrid, com um Gonzalez qualquer por cornaca, anunciava no patio de D. Catarina El Juramento ante Diós ou outra qualquer famosa comédia do nosso Jacinto Cordeiro, de Calderon, ou de Rojas, a pacatez habitual da rua das Arcas alterava-se de todo. (92)

The latter part of Cordeiro’s life coincided with the widespread clamor for independence, a cause that he passionately advocated. Although the Por-tuguese nobility readily accepted Spanish control at first, continuous eco-nomic decline and attempts at centralization by the Count-Duke of Olivares (1587-1645) made Habsburg rule fall out of favor with Lusitanian elites. We

30 Rennert includes in a list of plays performed for the Queen in 1622 a title followed by a

question mark: Trances de amor? He speculates that the piece could be Calderón’s Lanc-es de amor y fortuna, published in 1636. Still, both Avedaño and Romero, who was once a member of Avedaño’s company, performed plays written by Cordeiro. With this in mind, it seems possible to me that Trances de amor was indeed El mayor trance de hon-or.

14 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor can only assume that the rebellion and subsequent proclamation of the Duke of Braganza (1603-1656) as King John IV of Portugal in 1640 were momen-tous events for Cordeiro. However, extant texts do prove that it was a period of heightened poetic activity for him. In 1641, he published 1) a series of décimas in the collection Varios effetos de amor, edited by Alonso de Alcalá y Herrera, 2) a tribute to the newly proclaimed King of Portugal, Silva a el Rey Nosso Senhor Dom Joam Cuarto, and 3) Triumpho françês, a poem honoring the arrival of French ambassadors in Lisbon. With these pieces, Cordeiro abandoned Spanish and shifted to writing exclusively in Portu-guese. Cordeiro’s career was cut short by his death in 1646. Later, his work was anthologized alongside that of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Francisco Rojas in the forty-fourth volume of Comedias de diferentes auto-res (1652), in the sixth tome of the famous Comedias escogidas de los mejores ingenios de España (1653), and the twenty-eighth installment of the Comedias nuevas de los mejores ingenios desta corte (1667). Cordeiro’s co-medias, particularly El juramento ante Dios, became more popular in the century after his death than during his own lifetime. This last play was re-published in 1652, 1653, 1731, 1740, 1746, 1753, 1770, 1774, 1781, 1796, and 1822. And at least ten more undated editions survive. Eight of these were also produced during the eighteenth century.31 El hijo de las batallas and A grande agravio gran venganza reappeared in 1750, and, finally, Non plus ultra was reissued in a 1760 edition. The strongest evidence of Cordeiro’s popularity in the eighteenth century lies in Tomas Pinto Brandão’s Comedia de comedias, a curious play whose humor is based on its references to the titles of the most popular plays amongst Lisboan theater-goers in the 1720s. Calderón’s plays dominate, and only two Portuguese playwrights make the cut: Matos Fragoso and Cordeiro, whose El juramento ante Dios appears in verse 429, a hundred years after its premiere. In contrast, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were un-kind to Cordeiro. His work fell out of the critical consciousness, save for the miscellaneous and mostly unflattering allusions cited above. In the past,32 I attributed this neglect to five factors: 1) that his plays are largely unavailable to the public, 2) that he wrote mainly in Spanish instead of Portuguese, 3) that he penned a relatively small number of plays, 4) that he had spent his 31 See the section on “Textual Transmission” in my dissertation for details. 32 I discuss this in the introduction to my dissertation.

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 15 entire literary career in Lisbon instead of Madrid, and 5) that his use of the comedia to promote Portuguese identity did not fit well into traditional narra-tives that present this genre as a vehicle for Spanish nationalism. Subse-quently, newly surfaced evidence has changed my opinion on several of these factors. Still, below I describe them all and explain how the new infor-mation has impacted what we know about Cordeiro. The first factor, the unavailability of his work, is self-explanatory, but the second (his language choice) requires some discussion: like most of his Lisboan contemporaries, Cordeiro wrote principally in Castilian instead of his native language. Consequently, both Spanish and Portuguese critics have largely ignored him. Since his plays seem to reside on the border between their respective fields of study, Cordeiro has been considered not Spanish enough for one and not Portuguese enough for the other. Most of his bilin-gual and bicultural contemporaries have suffered the same unhappy fate. In fact, histories of Portuguese theater are generally sparse in their accounts of the seventeenth century. Spanish histories are even less favorable, by and large ignoring Portuguese comedia authors altogether. Scant literary production is the third factor that may have mitigated in-terest in Cordeiro. Only sixteen comedias,33 two entremeses,34 three long poems,35 a prose genealogy of Portugal’s monarchy,36 and a variety of déci-mas, sonetos, romances, canciones and glosas37 survive him. This output is moderate in comparison with that of the era’s major dramatists.38 In other

33 These plays include: Non plus ultra (1630), El juramento ante Dios y lealtad contra el

amor (1630), El mayor trance de amor (1630), El hijo de las batallas (1630), La primera parte de Duarte Pacheco (1621), La segunda parte de Duarte Pacheco (1621), El secre-tario confuso (1634), Con partes nunca hay ventura (1634), El mal inclinado (1634), Los doce de Ingalaterra (1634), Victoria por el amor (1634), Lo que es privar (1634), A grande agravio, gran venganza (n.d.), La entrada del Rey en Portugal (1621), La privan-za merecida (n.d.), and Viva quien vence (n.d.).

34 Entremés de Don Roque and Entremés de los sordos. Both appear in a manuscript in Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional (RES. 185).

35 Here I refer to Cordeiro’s Elogio de poetas lusitanos (1631), Silva a el Rey Nosso Senhor Dom Joam Quarto (1641), and Triumpho francés (1641).

36 “Em 25 de março” also appears in the manuscript described in note 27. 37 Ibid. 38 Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Luis Vélez de Guevara (1579-1644) both produced some

four hundred, Tirso de Molina (1579-1648) eighty, Mira de Amescua (ca. 1578- ca. 1636) sixty, Guillén de Castro (1569-1631) forty-three, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (1581-

16 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor words, it is possible that Cordeiro did not produce enough to attract serious attention. That notwithstanding, his corpus measures up well to that of the seventeenth-century’s secondary playwrights. A comparison to the authors described in Williamsen’s Minor Dramatists of Seventeenth-Century Spain will illustrate this point.39 Cordeiro’s sixteen comedias fall slightly above the average of fourteen for the ten dramatists described by Williamsen. Still, even the least active of these minor dramatists has received more critical at-tention than Cordeiro. This leads me to believe that his small corpus cannot completely explain his omission from the canon of minor dramatists. Addi-tionally, Cordeiro’s output is not minor at all when compared to that of his countrymen. Competing with Spanish dramatists was a discouraging task, one that most Portuguese comedia authors abandoned after only one or two attempts. Only a handful of these playwrights produced as much as Cordeiro. In my dissertation, I gave geographical disadvantage as the fourth factor in my list of five. My reasoning went like this: although his work was staged and well received in both Lisbon and Madrid, Cordeiro never ventured out-side of Lusitanian territory.40 Other playwrights from peripheral Spanish dominions have been able to secure a place in literary history, but largely through direct contact with Madrid, where they benefited from mentorship under, collaboration with, or, at the very least, the direct influence of the co-media’s greatest proponents. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, born and raised in New Spain, belongs to this group. Although his colonial background and his de-formed appearance greatly hindered his acceptance in Spain’s capital, Alar-cón’s interaction with the likes of Lope de Vega and Mira de Amescua (even as the object of their ridicule) helped both further his dramatic art and keep his name in print. Additionally, I argued that Juan (João) de Matos Fragoso (1608-1689) offered a better point of comparison with Cordeiro than Alar-cón. I pointed out that Matos Fragoso, born in Alvito, a town in the southern

1639) twenty-four, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) a hundred, and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla (1607-1648) eighty-seven.

39 Miguel Sánchez has three extant plays; Damián Salucio del Poyo (ca. 1550-1614) four to five; Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy (d. 1626) fifteen; Felipe Godínez (1585-1637) about twenty-seven; Luis de Belmonte Bermúdez (1587-1650) twenty to twenty-five; Alvaro Cubillo de Aragón (1596-1661) twenty-six; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) two; Diego Jiménez de Enciso (1585-1634) eleven; Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza (1586-1644) thirteen; and Agustín de Salazar y Torres (1642-1675) thirteen.

40 In the prologue to La entrada del Rey en Portugal, Cordeiro does mention having lived in India.

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 17 part of Alentejo, was also Portuguese. But unlike Cordeiro, Matos moved to Madrid, where he penned more than forty plays on his own, and collaborated with many Spanish playwrights. Consequently, Matos garners mention in critical narratives from which Cordeiro continues to be absent. I concluded that, in Lisbon, Cordeiro enjoyed the most famous comedias through the ef-forts of traveling acting troupes frequenting the newly established corrales that spread across Portugal during the Dual Monarchy. Still, he did not par-take in the literary mentorships, alliances, and rivalries that would bring him into the scope of the comedia historian, or so I thought. Since only a few paragraphs penned long after Cordeiro’s death consti-tute all we know about his life, we are forced to draw conclusions about him based on this brief biography and on the clues that he left in the dedications to his poems and plays. None of these mention Cordeiro living in Madrid. So I assumed that he had never spent time there, and deduced the above argu-ment accordingly. Later, the discovery of an obscure source from the turn of the twentieth century challenged that assumption. Braamcamp Freire and Silva Pessânha’s Archivo historico portuguêz (1906) documents, by way of a 1622 pastoral novel, Cordeiro’s stay in Madrid:

Os negocios mais ponderosos eram debatidos e julgados em ultima instancia em Madrid e por isso muitos dos nossos compatriotas se viam obrigados a ir áquella cidade, onde residiam mais ou menos temporariamente.

Entre os portuguezes que assistiam na villa coronada no primeiro quartel do seculo XVII contava-se Affonso Ribeiro Pegado, que parece ter ido ali no sequito do conde de Feyra, de quem era secretario como elle se declara na poesia dedicada a Herrera Maldonado. Miguel Botelho de Carvalho no seu romance pastoril El pastor de Clenarda (Madrid 1622), enumerando os poetas que em seu tempo fulgiam n’aquella côrte, cita diversos portuguezes, entre os quaes Affonso Ribeiro Pegado. Os restantes compatriotas eram: dr. Miguel da Silveira, Antonio Lopes da Veiga, Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Francisco de França, Rodrigo Herrera e Jacinto Cordeiro. (81)

This is an exciting discovery, and, if true, invalidates the entire line of rea-soning presented above. Unfortunately, my inspection of Carvalho’s El pastor de Clenarda has not confirmed that Cordeiro lived in Madrid in the 1620s. At the very least, he was not one of the various Portuguese poets to dedicate preliminary vers-es to Carvalho’s pastoral novel, as the above quote implies. Nevertheless, I believe that supporting evidence can be found elsewhere: namely, in Rennert and in the manuscript of Cordeiro’s El favor en la sentencia, recently made

18 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor available again by the Biblioteca Nacional after having been digitized. The manuscript is dated 1626 and dedicated to Bartolomé Romero, “a celebrated actor and autor de comedias” (Rennert, The Spanish Stage 582) who spent most of his career between Seville and Madrid. He did travel to Lisbon on several occasions, but Rennert tells us that Romero took his troupe there only from 1638 to 1639 and from 1640 to 1641 (582), long after Cordeiro wrote El favor en la sentencia. It seems very likely, then, that Cordeiro befriended and collaborated with Romero during his time in Madrid, which lasted throughout the 1620s and ended in the early 1630s when his first partes edi-tion was published in Lisbon. In retrospect, Barbosa Machado seems to al-lude to Cordeiro’s stay in Madrid when he stated that his plays were “re-prezentadas em Castella com grande aplauzo dos expectadores” (462). I assumed that these comedias were first put on in Lisbon and later trav-elled to Madrid on the backs of the seasonal acting troupes. This notion seemed to bolster Cordeiro’s achievements: he was, I thought, a local Lis-boan playwright competing in a second language with Spain’s most celebrat-ed authors for space in Portugal’s patios. Not only did he find success at home, his work traveled against the current of in-pouring comedias and made their way to Madrid, Seville, and Valencia. It seemed that culture during the Dual Monarchy did not only flow from Madrid to Lisbon, and Cordeiro’s career was a provocative counter-argument to Spanish literary hegemony.

But the picture offered by the discovery that Cordeiro’s most productive decade and a half was spent in Madrid is quite different. It seems that he gar-nered moderate success in Madrid, even having a handful of plays staged for the royal family. Upon his return to Lisbon, Cordeiro’s accomplishments abroad were magnified through the lens of national pride. His story implies that for a young Lusitanian dramatist to find success in Lisbon, he would have to travel to Castile, and for him to receive the applause of Portuguese theater-goers, he would have to write in Spanish.

The final reason for Cordeiro’s marginalization has to do with the nature of literary histories. Nineteenth-century Romanticism’s desire to trace the trajectory and literatures of nations influenced early narratives about the de-velopment of the comedia. This “nationalist” perspective characterized the literary histories produced both in Spain and across Europe for a century.41 41 These histories include: the second volume to Friedrich Bouterweck’s Geschichte der

Neueren Poesie und Beredsamkait, published in Germany in 1804; the third and fourth volumes of J. Ch. L. Simonde’s De la Littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813), entitled

A NAME TO BE FORGOTTEN 19 The first generation of these emphasized the comedia as one of the most na-tionalist of all European theaters. As Ticknor explains:

The most prominent, if not the most important, characteristic of the Spanish drama, at the period of its widest success, was its nationality. In all its various forms, including the religious plays, and in all its manifold subsidiary attractions, down to the recitation of old ballads and the exhibition of popular dances, it ad-dressed itself more to the whole people of the country which produced it than any other theater of modern times. (437)

Spanish nationalism has since then become a fundamental ingredient in criti-cal descriptions of the comedia. Reichenberger even declares the genre “the most powerful national theater in existence” (10). So, the qualifier “Spanish” (although vaguely defined) and the lexeme “comedia” are inextricably tied. I am not interested in challenging this narrative. What I want to point out is that the nature or Cordeiro’s work unfortunately relegates him to footnotes for any critic interested in Spanish theater as an expression of Spanish na-tionalism. His plays are decidedly nationalist, but not always in favor of the Spanish. He was a staunch advocate of Portuguese sovereignty against in-creasingly unpopular Habsburg rule and employed the norms of Spanish the-ater in praise of Lusitanian identity. This type of play, which I call the Por-tuguese comedia, vacillates between celebrations of Iberian kinship and defi-ance in the face of foreign domination. If the comedia lent itself to nationalist discourses, as the historians mentioned above emphasize, Cordeiro proves that it also allowed for counter-arguments and competing claims about the role of Portugal in that nation.

Hispanists have dismissed the Portuguese comedia by omission, ac-knowledging its existence only in passing. The few critics who have com-mented on it generally present this phenomenon as a defective copy of the Spanish template: “los pocos [portugueses] que cultivaron el teatro, casi siempre en español, no destacaron por su valor ni por su originalidad” (Ares Montes, “Portugal” 12). Lusitanian critics consider the appearance of the comedia in Portugal to be a sign of the “decadence” of their own national theater: “É sabido que, depois de Gil Vicente, o teatro entra em decadência ao longo do século XVII” (Moisés 114, emphasis added). Teófilo Braga

Histoire de la littérature espagnole; George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature (1849); Alberto Lista’s Ensayos, or essays on Spanish Theater; Moratín’s Orígenes del teatro español; and Adolfo Ferderico’s (Conde de Schak) Historia de la literatura y del arte dramático en España.

20 El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor takes this conclusion a bit further in the following scathing appraisal: “A influência do theatro hespañol não se deve considerer como uma causa de decadência, mas sim de degeneração do nosso theatro nacional” (qtd. in Ares Montes, “Portugal,” 14, emphasis added). This sentiment also seeped into traditional English evaluations of the period, as seen in the following ap-praisal by Aubrey Bell in 1922: “nowhere was the decadence of literature in the seventeenth century more marked than at Lisbon” (251).

Seventeenth-century Portugal, the era that suffers Braga’s wholesale de-nunciation, saw the widespread displacement of Portuguese by Spanish as a literary language. This leads Giancarlo Depretis to suspect that critics like Moisés and Braga denigrate the Portuguese comedia not for its lack of liter-ary merit, but for having abandoned the national tongue. Deptretis notes that in the 21 volumes of the Diccionario bibliográphico portuguéz (1858-1914), “vennero sistematicamente esclusi i nomi e le opera di tutti quegli scrittori lusitani che non si limitarono a scivere nella lingua nazionale” (12). In light of the modern appreciation for ambiguous identity politics, it seems anachro-nistic to continue marginalizing Cordeiro’s work because it fails to meet out-dated linguistic and, frankly, nationalistic standards. In addition to what Cor-deiro has to teach us about the Dual Monarchy, he is also emblematic of the dilemma faced by those of us attempting to move towards a biography of an unheralded comedia author. Surviving descriptions of their lives offer little, and each new discovery leads to even more questions. It seems that as we approach these writers, they recede further into the distance. Nevertheless, the futility of our efforts is offset by the fact that the smallest of finds can be the most rewarding.