Jerome of Cancer and Velasco

Jerónimo de Cancer y Velasco (Barbastro, 1599?-Madrid, 1655) was a Spanish playwright and poet of the Golden Age.

Life and work

He was from a noble family and a close relative of the famous jurist Don Jaime Cancer. He served the Count of Luna as an accountant, but he fired him with intemperate boxes. In 1620 he was in Madrid, and in 1625 he married a young widow, María de Ormaza, and had a daughter. Although he enjoyed the protection of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and Count of Niebla, he had to live with economic hardships, since in the dedication of his poems he asks him for the great mercy of a dress; and in another romance, a cost aid to the King, on the merits of having performed a comedy in the palace with His Majesty's servants in front of the monarch Philip IV himself. For the Buen Retiro Academy, gathered for Philip IV in 1637, he composed the Vejamen de la Academia Castilana de Madrid (dedicated to Sebastián Rodríguez de Villaviciosa), a very popular piece in those jousts or poetic contests of buffoonish nature. He died so poorly that it was necessary to pay for his burial with alms.

He excelled in festive and humorous poetry, in which he lavished conceptualist misunderstandings and puns. He compiled his poetry in the book Various Poems (Madrid, 1651), where romances, jácaras, limericks of a blind man and sharp epigrams stand out.

His burlesque comedies and his hors d'oeuvres are justly famous, some of which are This one pays. (Laurel of various hors d'oeuvres, Zaragoza, 1660) The courtier. (Peaceful afternoons of pleasant entertainment, divided into several hors d'oeuvres... Madrid, 1663) or Los Putos. (Entertained idleness, in various hors d'oeuvres, dances..., chosen from the best mills of Spain ... -Madrid, 1668.) He has very funny ballads, blind man limericks and jácaras; of these some happily imitated by Francisco de Quevedo. Notable of his Relations in limericks is that of the birth and baptism of the Infanta Doña Ana María Antonia of Austria, year 1635.

He was also a frequent author of comedies of various wits; He collaborated in these tasks with Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Agustín Moreto, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Juan de Matos Fragoso, Juan de Zabaleta, etc.: by himself, he only made two burlesque comedies, The Death of Baldovinos, which is a parody of The Marquis of Mantua by Lope de Vega with so many absurdities that it was condemned by the Inquisition, and Las mocedades del Cid. In the year 1651 he published them along with a collection of his poems and the appetizer from La Garapiña, under the cover Various works by Don Jerónimo de Cancer y Velasco, dedicated to the Duke of Medina Sidonia , Madrid, 1651. It has a prologue by Don Juan de Zabaleta at the front and was reprinted later the same year without the entremés and with variants in the comedy, and finally in Lisbon, in 1675, also without the entremés; It is a measure of the esteem of his works that the volume saw ten editions until 1761. The poems are dominated by the festive and burlesque and the mythological parody, but there are also religious poems and serious mythological fables such as the Fable of the Minotaur i>. This work also includes his famous Vejamen, where the burlesque profiles of Martínez de Meneses, Luis Belmonte Bermúdez, Alfonso de Batres, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Zabaleta, Pedro Rosete, Juan Vélez de Guevara, Juan de Matos Fragoso or Antonio Sigler de Huerta, that is, his main friends and literary collaborators. Cancer died four years later, in 1655, victim of a stroke. He was very short and quite thin, according to what he says in his poems.

Other poems by Cancer are found in the Certamen de Nuestra Señora de la Cogullada de Zaragoza, in the Alfai Collection, and in the one titled: Delicias de Apolo. Of his pieces written in collaboration, The best representative, San Ginés (1688) stands out, composed with Pedro Rosete Niño and Antonio Martínez and inspired by Lope de Lope de Vega. It develops the story of the saint who was converted when he was playing the role of a Christian martyr, and is interesting because of the play between fiction and reality, whose dividing lines become confused at a given moment.