In this poem we find the king's infatuation for his
Portuguese mistress treated much as Petrarch had treated the relations of
Clement VI with the allegorical Epi, except for the striking difference
that the Latin of the Italian poet is replaced by straightforward and
vigorous vernacular. Of far greater importance in the history of
literature are certain poems--_Eclogas_ they are for the most part
styled--of Juan del Encina, which belong roughly to the closing years of
the fifteenth and opening years of the sixteenth century. Numbering about
a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular
poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting
link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama.
About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some
romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited passion ending in suicide,
and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude
herdsmen. Contemporary with, though a disciple of, Encina, is the
Portuguese Gil Vicente, who wrote in both dialects, and whose _Auto
pastoril castelhano_ may be cited as carrying on the tradition between his
master and Lope de Vega.
With Lope's dramatic production as a whole we are not, of course,
concerned. He lies indeed somewhat off our track; the pastoral influence
in his work is capricious. It will be sufficient to note that the
influence, where it exists, is external; it is nowhere the outcome of
Christian allegory, nor does it arise out of the nature of the subject as
such titles as the _Pastores de Belen_ might suggest.
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