El pensamiento humanístico y satírico de Torres Naharro (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ZIMIC, STANISLAV. El pensamiento humanístico y satírico de Torres Naharro. Santander: Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 1979. 2 vols. Originally published in BBMP, 52 (1976), 21-100; 53 (1977), 61-306; 54 (1978), 3-279. The point of departure for this study is Torres Naharro's depiction by Menéndez Pelayo, Gillet, and other critics as a careless juggler of commonplaces , whose principal intention is to achieve a comic effect. Professor Zimic argues that Torres Naharro is a conscious dramatic artist who uses the theater to treat moral.religious, and social problems. Characterization is never an end in itself, but rather the means by which the characters are made to incarnate moral problems. Even the introito, the most overtly comic part of each play, often serves to introduce one or more of the major themes of the play proper. Where appropriate, Zimic turns to Torres Naharro's poetry in order to demonstrate the extraordinary unity of the playwright's thought. Joseph Gillet had argued that the Diálogo del Nascimiento was an early, still «medieval,» play in which Torres Naharro merely shuffles various topoi in a more or less random fashion. Zimic counters that the Diálogo was composed later than Gillet believed (the war-mongering pope referred to is Julius II), and that in this play Torres Naharro develops typically Erasmian religious ideas. Through his satirical treatment of Betiseo, Torres Naharro criticizes a mode of piety based on the external manifestations of religion. Through his exaltation of Patrispano, the author extols a mode of piety based on the cultivation of an inner spirituality. Zimic is convinced that Torres Naharro was familiar with the thought of Erasmus, but he does admit the possibility that the Spanish playwright could have arrived independently at a critical attitude similar to that of Erasmus. While critics have traditionally viewed the Comedia Soldadesca and the Comedia Tinellaria as amusing examples of costumbrismo, Zimic underscores the moral concerns behind the comic scenes of the two plays. The Soldadesca is an indictment of militarism in general and of the bellicose policies of Pope Julius II in particular. The absence of any sort of ethical principles on the part of the papal mercenaries is merely an echo of the lack of Christian morality on the part of Julius II. The notion that the highest ecclesiastical authorities, who should be setting an example for all of Christendom to follow, are not carrying out that task similarly informs the Comedia Tinellaria. Behind the burlas of the 143 144Bulletin ofthe Comediantes Tinellaria, Torres Naharro treats the veras of ecclesiastical corruption, overweening pride in lineage, and mistaken notions of honor. The fact that the unscrupulous, irreligious thieves who appear in the play form part of the household of a cardinal is even more damning, for it suggests that the cardinal permits or even serves as the model for such behavior. After his analyses of the Soldadesca and Tinellaria, Zimic inserts a short excursus on Torres Naharro and the picaresque. By rejecting the notion that the pseudo-autobiographical form is a necessary component of the picaresque, Zimic can assert that Torres Naharro is the first Spanish author who wrote completely picaresque works. In his analysis of the Comedia Jacinta, Zimic severely criticizes the basic argument of Stephen Gilman's «Retratos de conversos en la Comedia Jacinta de Torres Naharro» (NRFH, vol. 17), but himself fails to give a satisfactory account of the references to the converso phenomenon that appear in the play. Without flatly denying that Torres Naharro himself could have been of New Christian origin, Zimic insists on the certainty that Torres Naharro was an erasmista. Surely some further speculation would not have been without interest , for many, if not most, of the Spanish erasmistas were also cristianos nuevos. The ideas of Erasmus were all the more attractive to that social group that was able to perceive most clearly the gulf between the Christian beliefs and the un-Christian practices of its Old Christian neighbors. In his own interpretation of the play, Zimic argues that Jacinto, Precioso, and Phenicio represent the frustration and disappointment of three moments in Torres Naharro's life. The only redeeming feature in an otherwise...