Spanish Golden Age Literature: Authors, Works, and Themes
**Culteranismo and Conceptismo: Two Pillars of Baroque Literature**
**Culteranismo**
Maximum Representative: Luis de Góngora. This movement sought to create a poetic language for its own cult, tending towards formal beauty, colorful brilliance, and sensory experience. It involved careful elaboration of language and the use of various literary resources.
**Conceptismo**
Representatives: Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián. This movement tended towards concise and expressive density, seeking sharpness and wit.
**Metrics in the Baroque Period**
In the Baroque period, Italian meter and stanzas coexisted with the verses and lyrical forms of Castile.
- Italian Metrics: Hendecasyllable, agreed metrics such as the sonnet, the *octava real*, and the *silva*.
- Castilian Metrics: Limericks, quatrains, satirical verses of burlesque character. Scheme of a stanza: the tenth.
- Popular Lyric Forms: *Letrillas*, ballads, carols, *seguidillas* introduced to illustrate the feelings of the people.
**The Picaresque Novel**
This genre features a narrative in the first person, recounting the life of the protagonist. It has an open narrative structure, where stories are independent of each other. The protagonist’s acts have a realistic character. The source of the rogue is often from the lower class, and he is a victim of his own actions.
**Key Authors and Their Works**
**Luis de Góngora**
Characteristics of Culteranismo:
- Letrillas: Wide variety of themes. They maintain the vitality, beauty, grace, and charm of these verses. Góngora renounces the expressiveness of language and develops his *culterano* style.
- Sonnets: Of perfect and sometimes complicated structure. They show Góngora’s formal perfection, artifice, and all the baggage of *culteranismo* lyricism.
**Francisco de Quevedo**
Quevedo has no equal in our satirical poetry. His wit and acuity are inexhaustible, as is his ability for critique, derision, and grotesque distortion, ranging from the serious to the most trivial and insignificant. He refers to characters of 17th-century society, writers, myths, and historical figures.
*The Swindler* (*El Buscón*): Quevedo’s picaresque work.
**New Comedy and Theater**
**New Comedy**
Lope de Vega introduced innovations to the theater. The three unities of place, time, and action are not respected. It is structured in three acts, and comedy and tragedy can be mixed. It is written in verse. Polimetry is used, utilizing stanzas and meters that fit various dramatic situations (quatrains for love scenes, tenths for complaints, romances for stories).
**Theater Topics**
Topics of popular and national character, drawn from tradition, history, and Spanish legend. Honor, in the theater of the Golden Century, was focused on marital fidelity, a case nearest to the listeners.
**Characters**
- The King: Embodies authority and usually delivers justice.
- The Noble Knight: Powerful, abusing their power.
- The Villain, the Gallant: Young, noble, handsome.
- The Funny One: Usually a servant, uneducated, cowardly, boastful, loyal.
**Lope de Vega**
Comedies of Spanish History and Legend: *Fuenteovejuna*, *El caballero de Olmedo*, *Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña*. *The Dog in the Manger*. Characteristics of Theater (New Comedy). National comedy creator.
Narrative Work: Pastoral genre: *The Arcadia*. Byzantine type: *The Pilgrim in his Homeland*. Cards in the style of Cervantes: *Marcia Leonarda*. Work in prose: *La Dorotea*.
**Calderón de la Barca**
Auto Sacramental: *The Great Theater of the World*. Philosophical question: *Life is a Dream*. Spanish history and legend: *The Mayor of Zalamea*. Characteristics of comedies (New Comedy). Calderonian theater values: In most of them, three feelings are accommodated: religious, monarchical, and honor.
**Tirso de Molina**
Playwright. *The Trickster of Seville* (*El Burlador de Sevilla*) remains in literary history for its didactic aspect of doctrine, but also because Tirso, following the thread of legends and romances, started with his lover and libertine character one of the most important myths of universal literature: the myth of Don Juan.