Vincent espinel

Vicente Gómez Martínez Espinel (Ronda, Málaga, December 28, 1550 - Madrid, February 4, 1624) was a Spanish priest, writer and musician of the Golden Age, author of a novel picaresque, the Life of the squire Marcos de Obregón (1618). Beginning with his Various rhymes of 1591, he transformed the structure of the tenth stanza, also known as spinel , into his homage. In music, he became famous for giving the guitar its fifth string, adding a lower string to the four already existing at that time, as Lope de Vega, who was his student, refers to. In his memory, the first High School in the province of Malaga, located on Calle Gaona in that city, has been named after him since 1956.

Biography

The son of Francisco Gómez, who came from Asturias de Santillana, in present-day Cantabria, and his legitimate wife Juana Martínez, he studied his first letters and music in Ronda with the bachelor Juan Cansino and He enrolled at the University of Salamanca, where the courses of 1571 and 1572 appear registered under the name of Vicente Martínez Espinel, taking his father's second surname. He supported himself by giving singing classes, "better given than paid for", and contemplated the inquisitorial process against Fray Luis de León. He returned to his land, as he himself confesses, "walking to the apostolic". In that same year of 1572, some of his uncles granted him a chaplaincy that they had founded, on the advice of the Trinitarian friar Rodrigo de Arce.

With the favor of this religious man, he was able to return to Salamanca, where he became friends with such important figures as Luis de Vargas Manrique, the two Argensolas, Lupercio and Bartolomé; Pedro Liñán de Riaza, Marco Antonio de la Vega, Luis de Góngora, Luis Gálvez de Montalvo and many others, and his music opened the doors of the palaces of the Marquis of Tarifa, the Alba and the Girones. He also attended the house of the noble lady Agustina de Torres, a singer with whom the best musicians of the time would gather: Francisco de Salinas (1512-1590), Juan Navarro (1528-1580), Matute, Lara, Julio, Castile, etc. Espinel maintained a great friendship with his daughter, also a singer and also a poet, Ana de Zuazo y Torres (1580-1618).

He lived for some time in Zaragoza with Lupercio and Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola. He then attempted a military career and was a soldier and, in Valladolid, from 1574 to 1577, he was a squire of the Count of Lemos; he was about to accompany him when he went with King Sebastián to the unfortunate campaign in Africa that ended with the battle of Alcazarquivir, but he stayed in Seville living dissipatedly among brothels and diners, accompanied by his inseparable guitar, this stage belongs to "Satire on the ladies of Seville" the earliest known work of Espinel. That dissipated life and quite outside the law made the Marquis de la Algaba, who at that time protected him, withdraw that protection and Espinel then had to hide from justice and accepted sacredness.

The Marquis of Denia took him out of there and sent him to Italy to serve Alonso Pérez de Guzmán y Sotomayor, Duke of Medina Sidonia, appointed to govern Milan; but he was captured by the Barbary corsairs and he was enslaved in Algiers until the Genoese took him out of there; He disembarked in Genoa in 1573 and shortly after marched to Flanders, ending up with the army of Alejandro Farnesio when it was preparing to assault Maastrique. There he met his uncle Hernando de Toledo, to whom he directed a beautiful Eclogue that sings his love affair with doña Antonia de Calatayud in Salamanca and Seville.

He returned to Milan with Octavio de Gonzaga and for three years toured all of Lombardy, now as a soldier, now as a musician in the house of Don Antonio de Londoño. Tired of the trade of the pike and tired of his transient life, he obtained a benefit in Rome (1587), where they appreciated him for being "a good Latin and a good plainchant singer." His parents died and he returned to Spain disembarking in Malaga, where his friend Francisco Pacheco de Córdoba was bishop. At that time he wrote the "Canción de él a la patria de él" and the Epistle to the Bishop of Malaga, poems of repentance for his troubled life that earned him the right to be ordained a priest. He went to Madrid with that idea, and he actually did it in 1589, the same year that he resumed his studies, studying morality in Ronda, singing mass in Malaga and making a profit in this city; He graduated in Granada with a Bachelor of Arts in 1589.

In 1591 he placed a substitute in the chaplaincy of the Royal Hospital of Santa Bárbara in Ronda and went to Madrid, where in that same year he published his Rhymes, which had been censored in 1587 by Alonso de Ercilla, who He praised them as "one of the best in Spain." In 1596 they took away his benefit because of his disorderly conduct and life at Court. In 1599 he graduated as Master of Arts at the University of Alcalá and took office as chaplain of the Bishop of Plasencia in Madrid, a position that Don Fadrique Vargas Manrique had reserved for him with 30,000 maravedís per year of emoluments and the associated position of music teacher. with 12,000 more maravedíes, jobs that he assumed until his death. In Madrid, apart from belonging to the famous brotherhood of writers and intellectuals of the Blessed Sacrament, he belonged to the Poetic Academy protected by Félix Arias Girón, and attended the literary contest organized in 1622 on the occasion of the canonization of San Isidro. He was a highly respected writer and musician: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, etc. admired him. He died in Madrid on February 4, 1624, being Mayor Chaplain and music teacher of the Chapel of the Bishop of Plasencia in the parish of San Andrés, and is buried in the vault of that same church.

Work

In 1591 he published a compilation of his poetic work, the aforementioned volume Diversas rhymes. The book covers almost all the metrics of that time, rehearsing all the possible stanzas, including the so-called tenth, in a special modality called, in homage to the author himself, considered its inventor, tenth spinel or simply spinel; consists of a grouping of two limericks with this fixed structure: abbaaccddc. Samuel Gili Gaya (1892-1976), a great scholar of the author, explained that he was not the first to use this combination (Juan de Mal Lara and others already did it); «What he did was perfect it, endowing it with unity and lightness; His prestige contributed to spreading it and making it fashionable.” As a humanist, he also translated Horace's Epistola ad Pisones , better known as Poetic Art .

However, there are loose poems of his scattered in other works, following the author's busy trajectory. There are some early ones in the Cancionero de López Maldonado (1586) or in the Flowers of ilustre poets by Pedro Espinosa; Others praise books, such as Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán's Indian Pilgrim, the Way of fighting the jineta by Simón de Villalobos and other works by Gaspar de Villagrá, Gonzalo Céspedes y Meneses, Fray Hernando de Camargo, Pérez del Barrio, etc. He also censored more than eighty books; Indeed, it seems that he was an extremely kind and accessible person, open with everyone.

The editor Juan de la Cuesta published in 1618 his picaresque novel, provided with many autobiographical elements, Relations of the life of the squire Marcos de Obregón. At the time and in that same year two books were printed unauthorized editions in Barcelona, those by Jerónimo Margarit and Sebastián de Cormellas, and a translation into French was also made in that year by Vital de Audiguier, Mr. de la Menor (Povergue) (Paris: Petitpas), an edition that most Later it will inspire the Gil Blas de Santillana by Alain René Lesage. The book was still reprinted twice in Spain: Pedro Gómez de Pastrana paid in Seville in 1641, and the fifth, in 1657, was dedicated in Madrid by the printer Gregorio Rodríguez to Mr. Juan Bautista Berardo, General Treasurer of the Royal Council of the Indies. It is a more agile narration than that of Mateo Alemán and, although the author does not dispense with moralizing, he does so in such a way that he does not anger or cloy like the Sevillian. The English version was made by Algernon Langton (London, 1816), the German was made by Ludwig von Tieck (Breslau, 1827). In Spain it was reprinted more times: 1744, 1804, 1863, 1868, 1881 (by J. Pérez de Guzmán); 1922 (edition by Samuel Gili Gaya), 1944 (by Valbuena, for Madrid: Aguilar), 1970 (critical edition and introduction by María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, for Madrid: Castalia), etc.

Espinel had among his disciples Lope de Vega, who always had words of praise for him, whether for example in El laurel de Apolo, where he calls him «the only Latin and Castilian poet of these times”, or in the prologue to La viuda valenciana, where he calls him the “father of music”; he dedicated a sonnet and the comedy The Knight of Illescas (1602) to him. He was also a friend of Cervantes, who mentions him in the Canto de Calliope , as well as Góngora (whose poems he contributed to publishing) and Quevedo. As a musician, he is credited with having added a fifth string to the vihuela, but that is debatable, since Bermudo, in 1544, already mentions the five-string guitar.

Author's Bibliography

• Complete worksed. critique of Gaspar Garrote Bernal. Málaga: Diputación Provincial, 2001-2002, 2 vols.
• Life relations of the Escudero Marcos de Obregón, Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1618, but also Barcelona: Sebastián de Cormellas, 1618 and Barcelona: Gerónimo Margarit, 1618. It was reprinted in that same century (Seville: Pedro Gómez de Pastrana and its coast, 1641 and Madrid: Gregorio Rodríguez and its coast, 1657). In the eighteenth century also (Madrid, 1744) and the XIX (1804, 1851, 1863, 1864, 1868, 1881). In the XX editions of Ignacio Bauer (1901 and 1928); Samuel Gili Gaya (1922 and 1940), José Mallorquí Figuerola (1940) etc.
• Various Rimas of Vicente Espinel, benefited from the churches of Ronda, with the poetic art and some Oracio Odas, traduzidas in Spanish verse, Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1591 (there are three different emissions from the same printer and year).
• Translation of Horatio, Poetry artincluding in their Several rhymes (1591).
• Age of Liseus, Silvio and Castor.
• Song to my homeland