Auto sacramental

An sacramental play is a religious play, more specifically a kind of liturgical drama, with an allegorical structure and generally in one act, with a preferably Eucharistic theme, which was represented on the day of the Corpus between the 16th and 18th centuries until the prohibition of the genre in 1765. In its most common form, each piece began with an introduction (loa), an interlude, the car itself, and culminated with a series of songs and dances (mojiganga). that ended in the exit to the stage of the actors or in a tremendous finale.

The auto sacramental used a large scenographic apparatus and the representations generally comprised biblical episodes of religion or conflicts of a moral and theological nature. Initially they were represented in temples or church porches. The oldest testimony of the genre is the so-called auto or, more precisely, Representation of the Magi, from 1145. After the Council of Trent, numerous authors, especially from the de Oro Spanish (16th and 17th centuries), they wrote orders destined to consolidate the ideology of the Counter-Reformation; among them stand out: Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega, etc. The most active Enlightenment of the 18th century fought them and managed to ban them.

History

Medieval origins

The auto was originally a medieval theatrical representation of both a religious and secular nature. In the Middle Ages they were also called mysteries or moralities, especially when they dealt with religious themes; from the second half of the XVI century they began to be called autos sacramentales.

The origin of the allegorical auto, still not specific to the theme of Corpus Christi, must be sought, although with limitations, in the Auto de la Pasión by Lucas Fernández, composed around 1500. Some innovation that Fernández introduces regarding the procedures of Juan del Enzina is later used by Gil Vicente in his Auto pastoril castelanho (1502); Another step is taken by the Portuguese author in Auto de la sibyl Cassandra , in which he abandons submission to chronological limits. In addition, according to the Hispanist Ludwig Pfandl, the sacramental acts

They are the only truly symbolic dramas. They present the allegorical life and, therefore, perceptible by the senses, to the dogmatic set of Catolicism; they contain the world and nature, affections and feelings, intelligence, will and imagination as powers of the soul, religious history and profane, the past, the present and the future as the whole of the Church, purgante, militant and triumphant, under the protective roof of that great universe and.

There was not, properly speaking, a sacramental act consecrated to the Corpus Christi festivity until the Sacramental Farce of Hernán López de Yanguas (1520-1521) and an anonymous Sacramental Farce from 1521. The one from Yanguas is an adaptation of the Christmas liturgical drama for Eucharistic purposes. It was represented during the Corpus Christi party that year. Of course, it is essential that, in 1551, the Council of Trent, in session XIII on October 11 -with a predominantly Spanish composition- recommends:

To celebrate the feast of the Corpus as a manifestation of the triumph of the truth about heresy and to confuse the enemies of the Sacrament by seeing the universal rejoicing of the church.

In 1557, the 28 works of Diego Sánchez de Badajoz were published posthumously under the title Recopilación en metro. Ten of them are supposed to be performed in the capital of Extremadura on the day of Corpus Christi: Farsa del Santísimo Sacramento, Farsa de la iglesia, etc.

Rise during the Golden Age

The trajectory of the car began to gain momentum between 1525 and 1550. The aforementioned Diego Sánchez de Badajoz is the first to truly outline a Eucharistic action, although he limits himself to narrating it and does not involve allegorical characters; another milestone is marked by the Auto of Adam's Irons from the Códice de Autos Viejos, because the only real character is Adam, who moves between ten personified symbols (the Free Will, Desire, Work, Ignorance, Faith, Wisdom, Hope, Charity, Error and Mercy). The enumeration of these characters illustrates the panoply of abstract roles that the auto will reach in the century that goes from 1550 to 1650. Likewise, it is necessary to highlight the names of Juan de Timoneda, whose pieces represent an improvement of the old sacramental farces and the definitive impulse for the settlement of the sacramental genre in Spain. Then come Lope de Vega, who uses music for significant purposes and not just for decoration, stage work and costumes, etc.; Antonio Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, who represents an intermediate stage between the first phases of the auto sacramental and the period of Calderon's heyday, and José de Valdivielso as precursors of the great master of the genre, Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Subsequently, a series of epigonal writers still cultivated the car, but without the same success. Among these are: Francisco Rojas Zorrilla, Agustín Moreto, Francisco Bances Candamo and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Decline during the Enlightenment

The autos sacramentales were becoming less and less narrative and, as a consequence of the counter-reformation conclusions of the Council of Trent, the playwrights were intensifying their doctrinal and allegorical contents until authors such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca gave them their definitive form in the XVII century. In its classic form, the auto sacramental develops an authentic psychomachy between symbolic characters that embody abstract concepts or human feelings in the midst of a luxurious set design to develop an allegorical idea of a theological or even philosophical nature, at times. Lope de Vega, at the beginning of the configuration of the genre, in a praise between a villain and a farmer, introductory to the auto El dulce nombre de Jesús, defines it as follows:

And what are cars?- Comedies / honor and glory of the bread / that so devote celebrates / this crowned Villa / for its praise be / confusion of heresy / and glory of our faith / all divine stories

Pedro Calderón de la Barca risked a more precise and already classic definition of the genre in the praise of The Second Wife:

Sermons / placed in verse, in idea / representative questions / of the priest Theology, / that do not reach my reasons / to explain or understand / and the joy has / applause this day.

Ángel Valbuena Prat recast these definitions in 1924 when he formulated the following: «Dramatic composition in a day, allegorical and generally related to Communion». Despite the fact that the exaltation of the Eucharist was the central theme, other motifs also enriched the list of the records —Holy Supper, lives of saints, episodes from the Old Testament, evangelical parables, historical events, even matters taken from Mythology. The real elements were losing more and more their reality and even their reference to temporality. The auto sacramental lacks the notion of time, as Bruce W. Wardropper has rightly observed ("The Search for a dramatic formula for the auto sacramental", in PMLA, 1950, LXV, pp. 1196 and ss.) and for this reason it is constituted in the opposite pole to a certain extent to the hors d'oeuvre, impregnated by all its pores of realistic concrete life. This unreality and implausibility prompted the attack of the authors of Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment in the XVIII century: in 1749 Blas Antonio de Nasarre, in the prologue to his edition of Cervantes' comedies, says that the autos sacramentales are a "comic interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, full of allegories and violent metaphors, of horrible anachronisms". In 1762, José Clavijo y Fajardo says that the sacramental pieces are irreverent and blasphemous, and that they harm "good customs". In 1764, Nicolás Fernández de Moratín questions the literary and doctrinal values of the sacramental genre and wonders: "Is it possible for spring to speak? Have you ever heard a word to Appetite in your life?..."; All this led to their being prohibited by Royal Decree on June 11, 1765.

There was a great debate in the Spain of the Enlightenment, actually a section of a larger debate on the reform of the theater, about the convenience or not of sacramental acts; the enlightened obtained a great triumph with their prohibition in 1765 after two centuries. In the attack against the sacramental orders, the enlightened José Clavijo y Fajardo and Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, protected by the Count of Aranda, especially distinguished themselves; among those who defended them were Francisco Mariano Nifo and the Aragonese casticista Juan Cristóbal Romea y Tapia. Despite this, some modern authors, particularly those of the Generation of '27 and later, have tried to revitalize and revive the genre, sometimes desacralizing it: Rafael Alberti, with El hombre deshabitado and Miguel Hernández, with Who has seen you and who sees you and shadow of what you were, they wrote autos sacramentales and more modernly, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester.

Classification

Ignacio Arellano distinguishes the following types of auto sacramental according to their theme:

• Philosophical-theological cars (The Great Theatre of the World, The Great Market of the World)
• Mythological cars (The divine Jashon)
• Biblical cars (The Supper of King Baltasar)
• Circumstances (The Holy Year of Rome)
• Hagiographic and Marian cars (The Holy King Don Fernando, To Mary the heart)