New Life In Drama and Music: From Poetry To Theatre

Abstract

Even by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the medieval legend of King Roderick had lost none of its vigor. While the specter of the last Visigothic king of Spain’s passion for the beautiful La Cava continued to haunt early modern historians just as much as it had obsessed medieval chroniclers, the fictional possibilities of the story began to expand and develop in exciting new ways. Its vibrant poetic expression in the ballad form was not the only manifestation of the legend in verse. Renaissance humanists such as the fifteenth-century Juan de Lucena had already reiterated the similarity between the perceived catastrophe caused by La Cava and the fall of Troy caused by the rape of Helen identified in the earliest chronicle, the Crónica de 754. The classical analogy chimed with the Renaissance fascination with Greek and Roman culture and manifested itself in two imitations of the Horatian ode, one by a Sevillian priest, Francisco de Medrano (1570–1607), in the second half of the sixteenth century and the second by the celebrated religious poet Fray Luis de León. Medrano’s poetry was mostly made up of translations or paraphrases of classical originals, and his offering, entitled Profecía del Tajo en la pérdida de España [Prophecy of the River Tagus on the Loss of Spain], is of this kind. In his poem the river addresses King Roderick as he lies with La Cava on its banks, and Menéndez Pidal justly comments: “Toda originalidad falta y el conjunto es duro y frío” [Any originality is lacking, and as a whole it is hard and cold]. The poem consists largely of rhetorical exclamations and questions, as well as lines that have been infelicitously translated directly from Horace and applied to the Spanish context. It is not successful either as a translation or as a poem in its own right.