Francis of Quevedo
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo Villegas y Santibáñez Cevallos (Madrid, September 14, 1580 - Villanueva de los Infantes, Ciudad Real, September 8, 1645) was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer. of the Golden Age.
He was a Knight of the Order of Santiago from 1618 and Lord of Torre de Juan Abad from 1620. Together with Luis de Góngora, with whom he maintained an enmity throughout his life, he is recognized as one of the most notable poets of Spanish literature.[citation required] In addition to his poetry, he was a prolific writer of narrative and theater, as well as philosophical and humanistic texts.
Biography
Quevedo was born in Madrid, into a family of hidalgos from the village of Vejorís (Santiurde de Toranzo), in the mountains of Cantabria. He was baptized in the parish of San Ginés on September 26, 1580 He was born lame, with both deformed feet and severe myopia; perhaps for this reason he spent a lonely and sad childhood (origin of the "affective tear" that the critic Dámaso Alonso spoke of in his regard) in the Villa and Court, surrounded by nobles and powerful people, since his parents played high officials in the Palace, enduring the taunts of other children and compulsively giving himself up to reading. His mother, María de Santibáñez, was a lady of the queen, and his father, Pedro Gómez de Quevedo, was the secretary of King Felipe II's sister, María of Austria, and later he was the secretary of Queen Ana of Austria, fourth King Philip's wife. But Quevedo had to overcome a greater bitterness very soon when he lost his father at the age of six (1586), so that he was appointed as tutor by a distant relative, Agustín de Villanueva; In 1591, moreover, when he was eleven years old, his brother Pedro died.
Of precocious intelligence, he was taken to the Imperial College and between 1596 and 1600 he studied classical languages, French, Italian, philosophy, physics, mathematics and theology at the University of Alcalá, without being ordained. On October 4, In 1599 he did not show up to collect his bachelor's degree, perhaps because he traveled to Seville and Osuna in the company of Don Pedro Téllez Girón, future Duke of Osuna; he did not do so until June 1, 1600.
Between 1601 and 1605 he studied at the University of Valladolid. It is a commonplace that during the Court's stay in Valladolid, the first poems by Quevedo circulated that imitated or parodied those of Luis de Góngora under a pseudonym (Miguel de Musa) or not, and the Cordovan poet quickly detected the young man who was undermining his reputation and fame gained at his expense, so he decided to attack him with a series of poems; Quevedo answered him and that was the beginning of an enmity that did not end until the death of the Cordovan swan, who left in these verses a record of the debt that Quevedo owed him.
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Musa that blows and does not inspire / and knows that it is the traitor / put your fingers better / in my bag than in your lira, / is not Apollo, which is a lie.
However, Antonio Carreira or Amelia de Paz doubt that said enmity lasted too long and maintain that these controversies were common exercises in baroque poetry; Góngora never names Quevedo and the attributions of the satires of one and the other are quite doubtful; Upon Góngora's death, Quevedo was an almost unpublished writer (despite which many handwritten copies circulated) and, therefore, according to Professor Antonio Carreira, such enmity could never last too long beyond the disagreement between the conceptualist style that assumed Quevedo and the culterano that Góngora spread, the true source of most of these satires, whose most representative piece, Aguja de navegar cultos. With the recipe to make "Soledades" in a day (1625), he hardly entertains himself with personal attacks.
In 1605, the poetic anthology of Pedro Espinosa, Flores de poetas ilustres, was published in Valladolid, including eighteen compositions by Quevedo; Some also appear as anonymous poets in the Second part of the General Ballads and Flower of Diverse Poetry (Valladolid, 1605) compiled by Miguel de Madrigal, a student at the university; with this he is already recognized as a first class poet.
During his student life, he wrote in Spanish some burlesque, shameless and bad taste booklets, which he would later disown but which then made him very popular through handwritten copies that ended up overwhelming their author, who was forced to to denounce them to the Inquisition, not only to prevent their dissemination, but also to prevent the printers who began to print them from getting rich at their expense. The most ingenious and least lewd booklet is, without a doubt, the Letters of the Knight of the Pincers, where there are many healthy tips to keep the fly and waste the prose (h. 1606), in which a stingy hidalgo offers all kinds of excuses in writing for not giving money or gifts to his lover. He also approached prose by writing as a courtly game, in which the most important thing was to exhibit ingenuity, the first handwritten version of a picaresque novel, La vida del Buscón, some of whose passages reach expressionism and they have gone down in the history of black humor; He is degraded in this work, written from the point of view of an aristocrat, to a declassed poor who ends his career of attempts to ascend in social status by killing a person and having to emigrate to America to avoid persecution. Likewise, around those dates he held a very erudite epistolary exchange in Latin with the humanist Justo Lipsio on philological issues and deploring the wars that shook Europe, as can be seen in the Epistolario compiled by Luis Astrana Marín. In 1601, his mother, María Santibáñez, died. Around 1604 he tried to explore new metric paths by creating a book of silvas that he did not finish, in imitation of those of Publio Papinio Estacio, freely combining verses of seven and eleven syllables. In 1605 his sister María de él died.
The Court returned to Madrid, Quevedo arrived there in 1606 and resided there until 1611 devoted to letters; he writes four of his Dreams, beginning with the & # 34; Dream of the Last Judgment & # 34;, which will not come to print until 1627, and various short satires in prose; works of biblical scholarship such as his commentary Castilian Tears of Jeremiah ; a defense of humanistic studies in Spain, Spain defended and a political work, the Discurso de las privanzas, as well as love and satirical poetry. In 1610, the year in which the Duke of Osuna was appointed Viceroy of Sicily, the Dominican Antolín Montojo denied Quevedo the authorization to print the Dream of the Final Judgment. In 1611 he must move to Toledo because of the lawsuit he is holding against the Torre de Juan Abad, and there he meets Father Juan de Mariana. He wins the friendship of Félix Lope de Vega (there are numerous praises to Quevedo in the books of Rhymes del Fénix and Quevedo approved the Rimas humanas y divinas, by Tomé de Burguillos, heteronym of the Phoenix), as well as Miguel de Cervantes (he is praised in the Viaje del Parnaso, from Alcalá, and Quevedo corresponds in the Perinola), with whom he was in the Brotherhood of Slaves of the Blessed Sacrament; On the contrary, he mercilessly attacked playwrights Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, whose physical defects amused him (he was red-haired and hunchbacked), being himself deformed, as well as Juan Pérez de Montalbán, son of a bookseller with whom Quevedo had certain disputes. Against the latter he wrote La Perinola , cruel satire of his miscellaneous book For all . However, the most attacked was undoubtedly Luis de Góngora, to whom he directed a series of terrible satires accusing him of being an unworthy, homosexual priest, a dirty and obscure writer, given to the deck and indecent. Quevedo shamelessly violated the relationship, even messing with his appearance (as in his satire A una nose, in which he lashes out at Góngora's nasal appendage, since at the time it was believed that the physical trait most accused of the Jews was being long-nosed). In his defense, it can be said that Góngora corresponded with almost the same violence, calling him lame, drunk (& # 34; Francisco de Quebebo & # 34;), misshapen and a bad Hellenist:
Spanish Anacreonte, there is no one to touch you, / not to tell you (with much courtesy) / that since your feet are of choice, / that your suavities are of rice.
The feet of elegy (or "of bleach", because of the caustics) are unequal in Latin poetry, but Góngora also notes the pendular inequality of his inspiration between satirical bitterness and loving sweetness: already His disciple, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, II Count of Villamediana, himself a fearsome satirist, noted around 1620 the great distance that separated Quevedo's coarse burlesque poetry and his sublime love poetry: "El Quevedo: most unequal beast: blows in the clouds and blows in the basements". At that time he became a great friendship with the great Pedro Téllez-Girón, III.er Duke of Osuna, whom he accompanied as secretary to Italy in 1613, carrying out various commissions for him that took him to Nice and Genoa, although apparently not to Venice (J. O. Crosby and Carlos Seco have shown that he did not intervene directly in the Venice Conspiracy) and finally back to Madrid, where he will join the entourage of the Duke of Lerma, always with the purpose of getting go to his friend on III.er duke of Osuna the appointment of viceroy of Naples; for this purpose he bribes different characters; in effect, he obtains the approval of the Duke of Uceda and the confessor of the pious King Felipe III, the Dominican Luis de Aliaga, and finally achieved that position for him on April 16, 1616. He embarked in Cartagena and arrived in Naples on September 12.
Once in Italy, Osuna commissioned him to direct and organize the Viceroyalty Treasury. He was very well received by the Academia de los Ociosos, founded four years earlier by the then viceroy of the city, the Count of Lemos, and whose patronage and protection, although with less prestige, was maintained by the Duke of Osuna attending, accompanied by a large cohort of aristocrats and men of letters, to its meetings in the cloister of San Domenico. Quevedo joined it as one more member, establishing a special friendship with the Neo-Latin poet Giulio Cesare Stella (1564-1624) and also with Cardinal Doria, Filippo Paruta, Martín Lafarina, Ercole Branchiforte and Mariano Valguarnera, who, at At the behest of Don Francisco, he translated the Greek poet Anacreon into Italian. Likewise, in Naples, according to his biographer Pablo Antonio de Tarsia:
He was so assisted by the men of letters, that he did not seem to deserve a name of understanding who did not qualify himself with the friendship and approval of Don Francisco, in whom all set their eyes admiring his prodigious wit.
With varying success, Quevedo tried to attract other authors to the Academy, such as Gian Andrea De Cunzi, Carlos de Eybersbach, Vicente Mariner, Justo Lipsio and Michaël Kelker, among others, maintaining correspondence with them, and during his stay in Neapolitan he also carried out other missions, some related to espionage to the Republic of Venice, although not directly as was believed until recently. In reward for these services, and on the recommendation of the Duke of Osuna, Viceroy of Naples and Sicily, Quevedo obtained the habit of Santiago in 1618, which was celebrated by his friend Stella in his poem of the same year Ad Don Franciscum Quevedum / comitis Julii Caesaris Stellae ode.
But in that same year the great Osuna falls; Quevedo defended him before the Council of State in June for complicity in the Venice Conspiracy, but he was also dragged off as one of his trusted men and banished (1619-1621, except for a brief prison in Uclés) to the Torre de Juan Abad (Ciudad Real), whose manor his mother had bought with all her savings for him before she died. The residents of the place, however, did not recognize that purchase and Quevedo will sue endlessly with the council, although the lawsuit will only be resolved in his favor after his death, in the person of his heir and nephew Pedro Alderete. Arriving there on the back of his pony "Scoto", named for how subtle he was, as he recounts in a romance, and already isolated from the stormy court intrigues, alone with his conscience, Quevedo will write some of his best poetry, such as the sonnet «Retired to the peace of these deserts...» or «They are the towers of Joray...» and he will find solace for his courtly ambitions and his affective tear in the Stoic doctrine of Seneca, whose works he studies and comments, becoming one of the main exponents of Spanish neostoicism. In this sense, his reading, translation and assimilation of the Stoic Manual of Epictetus also works, which came to console his vehement spirit:
«They are not the same things / those that trouble man and scare him, / but the misleading opinions / that the man has of the same things; / as he sees in death, / that, if with light of truth he warns, / is not bothered by himself [...] / They are in hard death, / when fools fear it, / the opinions we have of it; / and, being this in death truth clear / (which is the most formidable and frightening) / the same you will judge of anything».
He completes the number of his Dreams and writes political treatises such as God's Policy, moral treatises such as Militant Virtue and two extensive satires: All Devils' Speech and Everyone's Time. At that time, Venganza de la lengua española contra el autor de Cuento de cuentos (Huesca, 1626) by a certain Juan Alonso Laureles, probably a pseudonym, was published, attacking the writer; neither he nor his entourage will respond, however. He did take a very active part in the controversy over the patronage of Spain with two works: Memorial for the patronage of Santiago and His sword for Santiago, 1628. The question arose when a reform of the Roman Breviary in the XVII century did not mention the preaching and burial of Santiago in Spain, which caused a crossroads of letters and pressure that lasted thirty-two years until it was revoked; The matter was revived when they tried to grant the patronage of Spain to Saint Teresa of Jesus, which ended up becoming a real battle of intellectuals in favor of one or the other, and Quevedo, always misogynistic, leaned towards the patronage of the saint. Santiago warrior who appeared in the battle of Clavijo.
In 1622 he had once again been briefly banished to the Tower, but the enthronement of Felipe IV meant for Quevedo the lifting of his punishment, his return to politics and great hopes before the new support of the Count-Duke of Olivares, whose friendship he knew how to earn by working as a pamphleteer for him. Quevedo accompanies the young king on trips to Andalusia (1624) and Aragón (1626), some of whose amusing incidents he recounts in interesting letters. On March 24, 1624, a note from the Customs Reform Board indicated that a woman named Ledesma "was cohabiting with Don Francisco de Quevedo and they have children." On September 25, Don Pedro Téllez died in prison -Girón, and Quevedo laments it in some famous sonnets. In 1627 Quevedo wrote his comedy Cómo ha de ser el privado in adulation to the Count-Duke. But his confrontation with the Carmelites over the issue of patronage becomes more and more virulent; At the end of February 1628, he wrote his Memorial for the patronage of Santiago and it was printed in Madrid with as much success as the Buscón or the Sueños, and he is again banished to the Tower, although in December he is authorized to return to Court again; Quevedo tries to ingratiate himself with the Count-Duke by dedicating to him on July 21, 1629 his edition of the Obras poeticas de fray Luis de León. The prologue contains a new attack against the Gongorinos sponsored by the Duke from Lerma:
In all tongues those alone deserved universal acclaim, which gave light to the dark, and ease to the difficult; that to darken the clear, is to delete, and not to write, and who speaks what others do not understand, first confesses that he does not understand what he speaks.
The economic reforms of the new valid soon aroused opposition, and Quevedo composed in his defense, under the name of "Licenciado Todosesabe", El chitón de las taravillas (Huesca, January from 1630). Scandalized, Lope de Vega wrote to the Duke of Sessa:
It is the most satirical and poisonous thing that has been written from the beginning of the world, and enough to kill the guilty person, that it should be a lot, because it gave such an occasion.
In May the libel was reported anonymously to the Inquisition, apart from being seditious, for "scandalous, indoctrinating, insulting, mocking sacred things". The complaint also includes a trial of the anonymous author, whom he clearly identifies with Quevedo:
It cannot be dissimulated, because the styl of speaking, the indecency of running, the freedom of satyrizing, the impiety of feeling, and the irreverence of dealing with sovereign and sacred things, manifestly say that it is the auctor month of amended Hell, of the Dream of Judgment, of the Infierno of the Marquis of Villena in the reddemic, of The.
The work was collected that same year. In 1631, Quevedo himself denounced his works to the Inquisition, since the booksellers had printed many of his satirical pieces that were handwritten without his permission, becoming rich at his expense. In this way he wanted to frighten and frighten them and pave the way for a definitive edition of his works that never appeared. On the other hand, he leads a somewhat disorderly private life as a bachelor: he smokes a lot, frequents taverns (Góngora accuses him of being a consummate drunkard and in a satirical poem he is called Don Francisco de Quebebo) and frequents brothels, despite the fact that he lives in cohabitation with the certain Ledesma. However, he is even appointed secretary of the monarch, in 1632, which was the peak of his court career. It was a position subject to all kinds of pressure: his friend, the Duke of Medinaceli, is harassed by his wife to force him to marry Doña Esperanza de Mendoza, Lady of Cetina, widow with children, and the The marriage, performed in 1634, barely lasted three months. He leads an active cultural life and is friendly with the Spanish-Portuguese soldier and writer Francisco Manuel de Melo, with whom he exchanges an intense correspondence; Melo will reciprocate posthumously, turning him into a character in his dialogue Hospital de letras (1657). He devoted himself to a feverish creative activity and in 1634 published The Cradle and the Grave and the translation of The Introduction to the Devout Life by Francisco de Sales; Works such as De los remedios de any fortuna, the Epictetus, Militant Virtue, The Four Ghosts date from between 1633 and 1635. i>, the second part of Politics of God, the Visit and Anatomy of the Head of Cardinal Richelieu or the Letter to Louis XIII.
In 1635 the most important of one of the numerous libels intended to defame him appears in Valencia, The court of just revenge, erected against the writings of Francisco de Quevedo, master of errors, doctor of shamelessness, graduate in buffoonery, bachelor's degree in filth, professor of vices and proto-devil among men, published under a pseudonym that perhaps conceals one of his numerous enemies, Luis Pacheco de Narváez. In addition, the poet Juan de Jáuregui wrote a Memorial to Felipe IV in that same year in which he also attacked Quevedo and also printed his comedy El retrato (Barcelona, Sebastián de Comellas, 1635) where he attacked The cradle and the grave published a year earlier. In this comedy The retracted one (that is, the one accepted as sacred because he is wanted by civil justice) the character of the Censor attacks each of the points made by Quevedo in his work, trying to prove that he is a heretic, the diabolical inspiration of the work and his attack against private individuals, whom he considers unworthy, condemning their illicit enrichment; it also seems to him that his Christian piety is false, because he covers up satire; what's more, he manipulates the texts he quotes; Jáuregui even descends to mention his lawsuits with the Tower of Juan Abad (whom he makes a character in the play) and his participation in the Venice conspiracy and mentions his scant knowledge of Greek; Undoubtedly, it does not seem by chance that this comedy was published at the same time as The Tribunal of Just Vengeance. In 1636 he separated from his wife, who would die in 1641 and, very disappointed, he wrote his moral fantasy Everyone's time and Fortune with brains .
On December 7, 1639, on the occasion of a memorial that appeared under the napkin of the King Sacred, Catholic, Royal Majesty..., where the policy of the Count-Duke was denounced, by the reserved order procedure, he was detained in the house of the VII Duke of Medinaceli, his books were confiscated and, barely dressed, he was taken to the cold convent of San Marcos in León until the fall of the favorite and his retirement to Loeches in 1643. Quevedo He complained that no proceedings were opened against him nor did he take any statement in the dedication "To Juan Chumacero Carrillo" from his Life of Saint Paul (1644):
I was never taken over or confessed or, after my solitude, something legally written was found...
This type of arrest could be made through the procedure of absolutism known as a reserved order. Quevedo himself described how hard his situation was, sick as he was with bone tuberculosis:
«On 7 December, the eve of our Lady's conception, at 10:30 a.m. I was brought in the rigor of the winter without a cape and without a shirt, sixty-one years, to this Royal convent of San Marcos, where I have been all this time in very rigorous prison, sick with three wounds, that with the cold and the vicinity of a river that I have to the head, in land where all year is rigorous inhibitor, I have been carved, and for lack of a surgeon, not without pity they have seen them. The horror of my work has shocked everyone».
In 1972, a letter from the Count-Duke of Olivares to King Felipe IV, found by his biographer J. H. Elliot, showed that the accusation against Quevedo was made by his friend the Duke of Infantado: he accused him of being an informer of the French. He would leave in June 1643 and soon after, in September 1645, he died. In the monastery of San Marcos Quevedo he dedicated himself to reading, as he recounts in the Moral and instructive letter , written to his friend, Adán de la Parra, painting for hours his prison and the life that in it he did:
From ten to eleven I pray a few devotions, and from this hour to that of the twelve I read in good and bad authors; for there is no book, however despicable it is, that has no good thing, as neither any lunar the best note. Catulo has his mistakes, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus his arrogances, Cicero some absurd, Seneca quite confusion; and in short, Homer his blinds, and the satirical Juvenal his disbarros; without missing from Aegcias some concepts, to Sidonio medianas subtleties, to Ennodio successful in some comparisons, and to Aristarchus property, with so many From one and the other I try to take advantage of the bad ones not to follow them, and of the good to try to imitate them.
Quevedo was a satirical writer, but he himself was also the object of his own criticism through a severe psychic self-punishment of religious and existential roots. He meditates deeply on time and seeks the consolation of Stoic philosophy by reading Zeno of Citium, Epictetus and Seneca; in his Psalms we find the purest expression of this yearning for spiritual purity:
A new heart, a new man / must, sir, my soul: / give me up from me, that it could be / that to your pity I paid what I owe!...
But Quevedo had already come out of prison in June 1643, ailing and very ill; he has his nephew Alderete very worried about his health; in 1644 he published, however, the First part of the life of Marcus Brutus and The fall to rise, the blind to give sight, the upright of the Church in the life of Saint Paul Apostle . He finally resigned from the Court to retire definitively in November of that same year to the Torre de Juan Abad. It is in his vicinity (and after writing in his last letter that "there are things that are only a name and a figure") that he died in the convent of the Dominican priests of Villanueva de los Infantes, on September 8, 1645. It is said that his tomb was desecrated days later by a gentleman who wanted to have the gold spurs with which he had been buried and that said gentleman died shortly after as just punishment for such audacity. In 2009, his remains were identified in the crypt of Santo Tomás from the church of San Andrés Apóstol in the same city.
His works were poorly collected and edited by the humanist José Antonio González de Salas, who has no qualms about retouching the texts, in 1648: The Spanish Parnassus, a mountain in two peaks, divided with the nine Castilian Muses , but it is the most reliable edition; worse is the edition of Quevedo's nephew and recipient of his inheritance, Pedro Alderete, in 1670: The three last Castilian Muses ; in the XX century, José Manuel Blecua has rigorously edited them.
In 1663 the first biography of Francisco de Quevedo was printed, by the Italian Pablo Antonio de Tarsia, a member like Quevedo of the Neapolitan Academy of the Idle. He takes his information, rich in anecdotes, from his nephew Alderete, with whom he personally met in Torre de Juan Abad; later came those of Aureliano Fernández Guerra in the XIX century, where he is portrayed as a statesman, and that of Jauralde Pou (1998) in the XX century.
Analysis of his work
The most original aspect of Quevedo's literary work lies in its style, linked to Baroque Conceptism and therefore very fond of conciseness, ellipsis and courteous play of wit with words through the abuse of amphibology. A lover of rhetoric, he sometimes tried an oratorical style full of symmetries, antitheses and isocola that he showed off more than ever in his Life of Marco Brutus . With a very abundant lexicon, he also created many neologisms by derivation, composition and stereotyping and, as Rafael Lapesa noted in his Historia de la lengua española (1942), made the mechanism of specific apposition in Spanish considerably more flexible ("cleric blowpipe, galleon shoes..."), a mechanism that later baroque writers imitated from him. In his satire he sometimes approaches the aesthetics of expressionism by degrading people through reification or reification, and animalization. It has also been pointed out, as a characteristic feature of his verse, stichomy, that is, the tendency to transform each verse into a sentence with complete meaning, which makes his poems very dense with meaning, as was a priority in his poetics., based on the principles of what was later called baroque conceptism.
Most of Quevedo's poetic production is satirical, but as Abate José Marchena already warned, his satires are poorly directed and, although he is aware of the true causes of the general decadence, for him it is more a mere exercise in style what other thing. He poured out against the lower people more than against the nobility, in which he did not have the audacity of, for example, the other great satirist of his time, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, second count of Villamediana. He also cultivated a fine courtly lyric writing a Petrarchan songbook in themes, style and topics, practically perfect in technique and background, around the figure of Lisi, who should not be identified with any specific lady, but rather with an archetype. quintessential woman, which he also baptized with other names. Above all, his metaphysical sonnets and his psalms stand out, where his most intimate existential grief and his anguish over the passage of time are exposed. The vision that philosophy gives of him is deeply pessimistic and with pre-existentialist features. The preferred channel for the abundant satirical vein that he displayed is above all romance, but also the letrilla ("Mighty gentleman is Don Dinero"), a vehicle of social criticism that does not hide the deepest motives of the decline of Spain, and the sonnet. He abhorred the aesthetic of Culteranismo whose main exponent, Luis de Góngora, was violently attacked by Quevedo in personal satires, although over time he came to tolerate an aesthetic that had become general and even cultivated it himself in a merely testimonial way. as Borges said, to indicate "that he also knew how to play that game". Louis de Leon.
Quevedo's love poetry, considered the most important of the XVII century, is the author's most paradoxical production: misanthrope and misogynist, he was, however, the great singer of love and women. He wrote numerous love poems (more than two hundred survive), dedicated to various women's names: Flora, Lisi, Jacinta, Filis, Aminta, Dora. He considered love as an unattainable ideal, a struggle of opposites, a sore and painful paradox, where pleasure is ruled out. His top work in this genre is undoubtedly his "Constant Love Beyond Death."
As scholars of anti-Semitism in Spain have pointed out, Quevedo was a fierce anti-Jew and his Judeophobia was reflected "in all kinds of writings, including his satirical poems" but it was "during the years of his fight against Olivares when he wrote his two most important anti-Semitic texts": Execration against the Jews and La Isla de los Monopantos (although this last satirical story was not printed until 1650, within the book La Fortuna con seso y la hora de todos).
His work demonstrates his obsession with defending the hegemony of the Hispanic monarchy in the world, integrating himself into «... the tradition of the laus Hispaniae, established by San Isidoro and used by himself Quevedo to try to recover the values that he thought made the nation powerful... in his defended Spain, he praised the greatness of his most prestigious compatriots, highlighting the Spanish superiority in the field of letters, visible in authors such as Fray Luis de León, Jorge Manrique or Garcilaso de la Vega, but also in the art of war». Javier Martínez-Pinna and Diego Peña.
Work
Literary work
Poetry
Quevedo's poetic work, which is made up of some 875 poems, presents examples of almost all the subgenres of his time: satirical-burlesque, love, moral and immoral poetry, a parody of heroic poetry (the Poem of the Follies and Follies of Orlando, unfinished), poems of circumstances, descriptive, religious (among which his impressive Psalms) and funerals stand out. But it also includes metaphysical and philosophical poems of a Neostoic nature. Approximately 40% of his texts are satirical; If we add to this the fact that many of them circulated publicly during the author's lifetime through handwritten copies, the reputation of Quevedo as a harsh and scathing critic of his time is partly known.
The first printing of his poems took place in 1605, in the anthology known as First part of the flowers of illustrious poets of Spain; includes seventeen poems. But the rest was published posthumously in two works: El Parnaso español (1648) and Las Tres Musas Últimas Castellanas (1670). Two manuscripts that collected his works are also preserved: the so-called Cancionero antequerano and the Cancionero de 1628 .
Quevedo tried twice to publish his poetic works. The first, in 1613, was the consequence of a great spiritual crisis. In the second he was working when he was surprised by death.
In 1613 he finished, but did not publish his Christian Heraclitus, which its author revised under the title Tears of a penitent. He only appeared in the printed edition of 1670, twenty-five years after his death; There is included the famous sonnet & # 34; I looked at the walls of my homeland & # 34;, corrected in the posthumous edition of his works.
The second attempt left the poems in the hands of his friend José Antonio González de Salas to make a posthumous edition, the first part of which came out in Madrid in 1648 under the title El Parnaso español, monte en dos cumbres dividido, with the nine Muses. He affirmed in it that he had respected the ordination that Quevedo had left when he died. It was a thematic classification into nine sections or "Muses". Clío welcomed the praise poems and dedications to past or present people, or to cities; for example "You are looking for Rome in Rome, oh pilgrim!", which portrays the decline and ruin of the capital of the Roman Empire. Polyhymnia contains moral poems, some among the author's best, such as the sonnet "Ah de la vida...! Nobody answers me?" or the essential Satirical and censorious epistle to the Count-Duke of Olivares on the customs of the Castilians:
I shall not be silent, however with my finger, / already touching the mouth, already the forehead, / silent warnings or threatening fear. / Should there not be a courageous spirit? / Is it always to feel what is said? / Is it never to be said what it feels? / Today, without fear that free scandal / can speak the ingenuity, assured / that greater power terrifies him [...] / Lord excellent, my crying / no longer consents margins or shores: / flooding will be that of my chant. / I already plunge I look at my cheeks, / the sight for two shed urns, / on the interests of the two Castiles...
Individual and collective corruption, luxury, vanity, the superficiality of women's fashions, culteranismo and in general decadence in all orders of Spain are attacked. Melpomene is dedicated to funeral poetry: epicedia of famous people. The fourth muse, Erato, is divided into two parts, both dedicated to love poetry. Based on the Petrarchan songbook, Quevedo unites love and death, the themes of the two parts of Francesco Petrarca's Canzoniere, into one. The second part of this section is titled "Sing to Lisi alone", supposed lover of the poet, who is actually an archetype of a woman, and contains what is perhaps the best sonnet by its author: "The last / shadow that the white day will take me will be able to close my eyes..." (Constant love beyond death). The fifth and sixth Muses -Terpsichore and Thalia- are dedicated to satirical and burlesque poems, dances and jokes.
González de Salas died in 1651 without publishing the second part, so Quevedo's nephew and heir Pedro Aldrete or Alderete, son of his sister Margarita, published The three last Castilian Muses. Second summit of the Spanish Parnassus... (1670). He was a somewhat careless editor, because he repeated some poems that had already appeared in the first part and introduced some disorder, but he followed the plan of the Muses: Euterpe, the seventh, prolongs the cycle of love poems that concerns Lisi. The eighth, Calliope, heads satirical letrillas and silvas morales, a meter that he had introduced before Góngora himself. They represent typically baroque values due to their theme of the passage of time and death as an end. The lyrics "Mighty gentleman is Don Dinero", "Only a giving pleases me, / which is giving in not giving anything" or "The truth is bitter":
For the truth is bitter, I want to cast it out of the mouth; / and, if the soul toucheth, it is foolishness. / Know therefore: freedom / has begotten in my laziness / poverty....
It is doubtful whether Quevedo intended to make an independent collection with them. Urania, ninth Muse, is dedicated to religious poetry, closing this volume. The "Psalms" stand out, in which new poetic peaks of the author appear:
Well I see you run, light weather / as by wide sea depalmada ship / to more fly, like arrow or bird / passing without leaving trace or trail....
Prose
Satirical-moral works
- Dreams and speeches, composed between 1606 and 1623, circulated abundantly manuscripts but were not printed until 1627. It is five short narratives of lucian inspiration where it is passed through various customs, trades and popular characters of its time. They are, by this order, The Dream of the Final Judgment (called from the publication of Children ' s Toysthe expurgated version of 1631 The dream of the skulls), The sheriff's demonic. (renamed Sheriff.), The Dream of Hell (this is, The Bolds of Pluto in its expurgated version), The world from within (who kept his name always) and The Dream of Death (known as The visit of the jokes).
- From the stretch of the Dreams are two so-called “moral ghosts”, the Speech of all devils and The time of all. Both are also lucian satires of characteristic tone jocoserio, although in their bill and creativity they exceed the Dreams:
- Speech of All Devils or Emenced Hell (1628), published in some versions as The worst hiding of death and, from 1631 onwards, in the expurgated version in which the five also appear Dreams with the changed titles listed above, with the title The intermittent and the owner and the snitch.
- The time of all and the Fortune, variation on the subject of the world backwards that the goddess Fortune regains the judgment and gives to every person what he really deserves, causing such great disorder and confusion that the father of the gods must return everything to his primitive disorder.
- The novel picaresca History of the life of the Buscon called don Pablos; example of vagamundo and mirror of tacaños, appeared printed in Zaragoza in 1626, but there are three more versions of the work with large textual differences. The problem is complex, because everything seems to indicate that Quevedo has taken up his work several times. The oldest version is the manuscript 303 bis (olim Artigas 101) of the Menéndez Pelayo Library because of the cleavage of variants and the way in which testimonies are grouped against others. The impression of 1626 was assumed, if not controlled, by Quevedo, according to the author himself states in his memorial His sword for Santiago (1628) and the sincerity of his words is confirmed by other data, so it cannot actually be held to be done without the author's permission. But this version was not the last one, because don Francisco came back on it to retouch some narrative details, to amplify the satirical portrait of several secondary characters and to alleviate the expressions that judged irreverent or blasphemous the editors of two antiquevedian libels, the Memorial sent to the Inquisition against the writings of Quevedo (1629) and The Court of the Just Revenge (1635). Of these retouchings the other manuscripts give faith. The Buscon It is a diversion in which the author is pleased to ridicule the vain social ascension efforts of a poor devil belonging to the low town; for this purpose he displays his wit courteously through a brilliant conceptualist style that degrades everything that touches him or her by sewing him, using a pre-expressionist aesthetic that approaches Goya, Solana and Valle-Inclán and not retreating to the most repugnant graces. Characterization hardly exists: it is only a vehicle for the aristocratic lucimiento of the author.
Festive plays
- Premature and tariffs, made by the faithful of whores, Tips for keeping the fly and spending the prose, Premature Time, Marital Chapters and Chapters of the life of the Court they are satires of the usual bureaucratic genres in the cancerries and which apply to grotesque themes.
- Letters from the Knight of the Tense (1625), humorous description of the epistles exchanged between a very cheap knight and his lover, who wants to take money out of him by any means.
- Book of all things and many more. Composed of the touch and experienced in all matters. The only evil master. Directed to the curiosity of the intermittent, the turbamult of the speakers, and the sluggishness of the old women.
- Thank you and arseholes. Jocous Opposition on pleasures and ailments relating to such an organ.
Theater
There is no definitive catalog of the theatrical work attributable to Quevedo, and not only because of the difficulty of recognizing its authorship but also because of the difficulties of considering some texts as theatrical. In any case, the following works are considered safe and fully theatrical:
- The comedy How to be private
- The intermes Barbara, Diego Moreno, The old Muñatones, The sick, The sale, The skill, La polilla de Madrid, The husband pantasma, The marion, The Knight of the Tense, The boy and Peralvillo of Madrid, Clothes and The sayings of the jealous old man.
In addition, various fragments of lost comedies, some praise and ten dances are also taken into consideration.
Non-literary work
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Political works
- Spain defended, and the times of now, of the slander of the novelists and seditious, better known as Spain defended...incomplete and unpublished, written circa 1609 and definitively abandoned in 1612, was first published in 1916 in Bulletin of the Royal Academy of History by the hypnist Robert Selden Rose. It is a defense of the merit of humanism and the Spanish lyrics that bravely anticipate the black legend that was already beginning to fraguar, and of which he quotes in particular the works of Girolamo Benzoni, Gerardus Mercator and Joseph Justus Scaliger.
- Politics of God, government of Christ. His first part was written about 1617 (in the dedication to Olivares, 1626, he told him that “it is the book I wrote ten years ago”) and printed in 1626 with the title of God's policy, Christ's rule and Satan's tyranny. The second part, written around 1635, was published in 1655. The two parts together were published under the heading God's policy, the government of Christ, drawn from the Sacred Scriptures for the King and the kingdom's right in their actions.
- Deciduous world and age-breaking (1621, ed. 1852).
- Big annals of fifteen days (1621, ed. 1788), analysis of the transition between the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV.
- Memorial by the patronage of Santiago (1627, ed. 1628).
- Lince de Italia y zahorí español (1628, ed. 1852).
- The scab chin (1630), often printed with the title Throw the stone and hide your hand. It defends the economic provisions of the Count-Duke of Olivares, from whom it would then distance itself. He was denounced to the Inquisition and collected that same year.
- Execration against the Jews (1633), anti-Semite claim containing an evening accusation against Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-duke of Olivares and validation of Felipe IV.
- Letter to the very, very high and very powerful Louis XIII, Christian king of France (1635).
- Breve compendio de los servicios de Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, duque de Lerma (1636).
- The rebellion of Barcelona is neither by the güevo nor by the Fuero. 1641, pamphlet against the Catalan revolt of 1640.
- Life of Frame Brutus, 1644, the glory of life corresponding to the famous assassin of Caesar written by Plutarco, written with algebraic rigor and an elevation of conceptist style little less than inimitable.
Ascetic works
- Life of Saint Thomas of Villanueva1620.
- Providence of God1641, treated against atheists who try to unify stoicism and Christianity.
- Life of Saint Paul1644.
- The constancy and patience of the Holy Jobpublished posthumously in 1713.
Philosophical works
- Moral doctrine of self-knowledge, and the decease of other things (Zaragoza, 1630).
- The cradle and the tomb for self-knowledge and decease of other things (Madrid, 1634), which is a rewriting of the previous work, published without its authorization, in which it streamlined and stylistically improved the preceding text.
- Epicteto, and Phocílides in Spanish with consonants, with the Origin of the Stoics, and their defense against Plutarco, and the Defense of Epicuro, against the common opinion (Madrid, 1635).
- The four plagues of the world and the four ghosts of life (1651).
Literary criticism
- The needle to navigate cults with the recipe to make Soledades in a day (1631), satirical against poets who use Gongorino or Cutteran language.
- The culta latiniparla (1624), manual burlesque to speak in Gongorino language.
- The Perinola (1633, ed. in 1788), attack on the For all by Juan Pérez de Montalbán.
- Story of stories (1626), reduction to the absurdity of the most empty colloquialisms of meaning.
Philological work
- Memorial of Don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas given to the General Inquisition on the books of Monte Santo de Granadawhere the imposture of the so-called Plomos del Sacromonte and suggests that they be destroyed so that they will not be sent to Rome and be ridiculous before the Pope.
Epistolary
It was edited by Luis Astrana Marín in 1946, appearing in said epistolary 43 unpublished letters from the last ten years of the author's life, which he wrote to his friend Sancho de Sandoval de Beas (Jaén).
Translations
Quevedo frequented humanists such as the distant Justo Lipsio and the closer José Antonio González de Salas; both transmitted their fervor for Propertius to him. As a Hellenist, Quevedo's translations from the Greek leave much to be desired; He dared, however, to poorly translate Anacreon (a handwritten translation that circulated and was not printed during Quevedo's lifetime, but in 1656), the pseudo Phocílides and Plutarch's Life of Marco Brutus for his Gross Mark. Greater merit has his Lamentations of Jeremiah from Hebrew, or his excellent Latinist versions of the satirists Marcial, Persio and Juvenal; his works are also enameled with reminiscences of Virgil, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Statius and, especially, Seneca, of whose Letters to Lucilius he mentions having translated ninety in the prologue to Marcus Brutus i>, although only eleven have been preserved. Seneca and the satirists are, then, the authors that he reread the most and have permeated his works the most; His erudition in the Bible is also great, although he undoubtedly preferred the Book of Job, which had been translated by one of his models, Fray Luis de León. He also did excellent Italian and French versions; in this last language, he knew the work of lyricists such as Joachim du Bellay and read and admired that of Montaigne and it is even possible that he translated the first book of his Essais . To his credit are:
- Introduction to Devoted LifeSan Francisco de Sales.
- Of the remedies of any fortune (1638), free version of Séneca.
- The Rhomulus1632, Marquis Virgilio Malvezzi.
Lost Works
- The second part of the Life of Frame Brutusmentioned by Quevedo in his last letters, in 1644.
- History of Don Sebastian, King of Portugal.
- The moth of the republics.
- History of the year 1631.
- Bears and facts of the Duke of Osuna in Flanders, Spain, Naples and Sicily.
Literary and cinematographic character
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As the prototype of the courtly intellectual who exhibited his wit and often liked to scandalize, Quevedo passed into popular literature as a character in often rude jokes, becoming a character in urban legends as well as other affections for the épater le bourgeois, for example Camilo José Cela.
He was also a character in a large number of plays and novels; during his own lifetime he had to endure being the target of attacks in Juan de Jáuregui's comedy The Retracted One (1635). And Diego de Torres Villarroel resurrected him at the beginning of the XVIII century in his Moral dreams, visions and visits of Torres with Don Francisco de Quevedo in Madrid, and in the 19th century he was the main character in the dramas Who is she? by Bretón de los Herreros, in La corte del buen Retiro (1st and 2nd parts) and The dead also take revenge by Patricio de la Escosura, Don Francisco de Quevedo (1848) by the romantic poet Eulogio Florentino Sanz, undoubtedly one of the great successes of the Spanish romantic drama; A joke by Quevedo and the zarzuela When Quevedo was hanged, by Luis de Eguílaz; of A Night and an Aurora by Francisco Botella y Andrés and Quevedo's Wedding by Narciso Serra. Already in the XX century, he stars in The Knight of the Golden Spurs , by Alejandro Casona.
He tempted the historical novel in the same way: in the 19th century Francisco José Orellana wrote Quevedo (1857) and Antonio de San Martín his serial novel Aventuras de don Francisco de Quevedo (1883–1884).
Character from the Captain Alatriste novels
Francisco de Quevedo is also, along with other historical figures from the Spain of Felipe IV, a secondary character in the saga known as The adventures of Captain Alatriste (1996), by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and in the film based on it, Alatriste (2006), directed by Agustín Díaz Yanes, where the character of Quevedo is played by the actor Juan Echanove. In this work of fiction, Quevedo is presented as a personal friend of the misnamed Captain Don Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, a veteran of the Flanders wars, who earns his living as a hit man in 19th-century Madrid XVII. Quevedo's first appearance occurs in the first title of the saga, Captain Alatriste (1996), where he is represented as an ingenious, passionate man and an excellent swordsman, who must regularly make use of the herreruza (sword) to settle the constant conflicts in which he gets involved, whether due to the unfortunate verses he dedicates to numerous people (including renowned personalities), or those related to his friend Alatriste.
In narrative terms, Francisco de Quevedo represents in the work the cheerful and uninhibited counterpoint to the reserved and rude personality of Alatriste, contributing to the reading of the text fresh moments and elegant and imaginative humor, although he also fulfills the role of determining factor in many of the events of the work, especially in the second volume of the saga Limpieza de sangre (1997). It should be noted that in the work as in its numerous epilogues, there are some works (mostly sonnets) that are "attributed" to this character, among which stands out the one that "Praises military virtue, in the person of Captain Alatriste." This poem, which Quevedo would have dedicated to Alatriste, allegorically narrates the character's life and character, praising his courage and mettle.