Cristóbal de Castillejo

Cristóbal de Castillejo
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Born	1491 (1491) Ciudad Rodrigo
Died	June 12, 1550(1550-06-12) (aged 58–59) Vienna
Occupations	Poet, writer, playwright

Cristóbal de Castillejo (Ciudad Rodrigo, 1490 – Vienna, June 12, 1550) was a Cistercian monk, writer and poet, and Secretary to Ferdinand I of Habsburg.

From the cosmopolitan humanism of the Renaissance, Castillejo advocated a poetic renewal based on the octosyllable, considering unnecessary the importation of the Italian meters carried out by Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Along these lines, Castillejo is the author of a famous "Reprehensión" ("Reprimand") against the Spanish poets who write in Italian verse, in which he reviews the great poets who had written in Castilian trovas (Juan de Mena, Jorge Manrique, Garci Sánchez, Pedro de Cartagena and Torres Naharro). These poets, although at first sight they considered Boscán and Garcilaso to be "gentle Spanish gentlemen," "on hearing them speak a new language / mixed with foreign poetry, / looked upon them with the eyes of foreigners."

Biography

There are no records of his ancestry. It is only known that his education and care were in the hands of other people, perhaps close relatives. The ties of the Castillejo family to the Church, and specifically to the cathedral of Ciudad Rodrigo, are attested by his brother, Luis, who was chaplain of the Chapter, so it is likely that the boy's education took place in that setting.

At the age of fifteen, he was taken to the Court of Ferdinand the Catholic, where he served as a page to the Archduke Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, second grandson of the King and brother of the Emperor. During this period he professed as a Cistercian at the Monastery of Santa María de Valdeiglesias. Proposed by his friend Martín de Salinas, the Archduke's ambassador in Spain, in 1525 he left his retreat to become secretary to his former lord, who in 1526 would become King of Hungary and the following year King of Bohemia, and who in 1531 would accede to the German crown with the title of King of the Romans as lieutenant of his imperial brother.

He traveled throughout Europe, visiting England (1532) and Italy with his lord, and stopping in Rome, Milan and Venice; in these last two cities two of his most accomplished works first saw the light: the Lamentación a la muerte del marqués de Pescara and the Diálogo de mujeres, respectively. He then passed through France, Flanders and a considerable number of German cities and towns, where he became familiar with the texts of Germanic humanists.

He was in direct and epistolary contact with important cultural figures such as the brothers Juan and, especially, Alfonso de Valdés, a resident of the court of Vienna, Luis Vives, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Erasmus of Rotterdam, and it is very likely that he was one of the figures who at some point attended the gatherings with intellectuals of the time that Jérôme de Busleyden organized in his Busleyden Palace.

It is very common to find in his texts traces of humanists such as Ulrich von Hutten; the Italians Enea Silvio Piccolomini (secretary of the German imperial chancery of Frederick III), Poggio Bracciolini, Ludovico Ariosto and Pietro Aretino; the Englishman Thomas More; or the aforementioned illustrious Dutchman Erasmus of Rotterdam, above all with regard to his anti-courtly work, the Aula de cortesanos, inspired by Hutten's Aula of the same name and Piccolomini's De curialium miseriis. With Aretino in particular he maintained an important correspondence, since they not without reason coincided in ideas and aesthetics: both reacted against the Petrarchan idealism radiated by Pietro Bembo and against courtly life, something the Frenchman Joachim du Bellay also expressed in his "Contre les Pétrarquistes" (1553).

He eventually settled in Vienna, where, although a monk, he led a dissolute life with various love affairs and a natural son. Vienna was then an Erasmian center, and he went through financial difficulties, since he squandered all the income from the prebends that his post as secretary provided him; indeed, Martín de Salinas on several occasions asked the Emperor on his behalf for benefices, encomiendas and pensions that were slow to be granted, and obtained for him a pension in the bishopric of Ávila, an ecclesiastical benefice in the Austrian collegiate church of Ardegge, which he soon renounced, and a pension in the bishopric of Córdoba. Charles I, for his part, granted him a coat of arms with three golden nightingales. Finally, a year before his death he received from the Archduke a pension of two hundred florins, which he never managed to collect in full.

It is known that he fell in love with a young German lady, Ana de Schaumburg, who left him for a Bohemian nobleman, although he apparently also pursued a certain Ana de Aragón; in the end he lost hope of ever returning to Spain, as he recounts, evoking a famous romance: "Tiempo es ya, Castillejo, / tiempo es de andar aquí" ("It is time now, Castillejo, / it is time to be going from here"). Disillusioned, he withdrew to a Viennese convent, where he died in 1550. He is buried in Wiener Neustadt, near the city.

Work

Las obras de Christoval de Castillejo, 1600.

Although he is a poet who belongs to the cancionero lyric of the 15th century and writes in arte menor, predominantly in simple octosyllables or octosyllables combined with pie quebrado, though on occasion in dodecasyllables, his spirit and themes are fully Renaissance, as are his genres (he was an assiduous cultivator of the dialogue), and he departs from the usual cancionero conceptismo in pursuit of greater clarity of expression, in keeping with what Juan de Valdés advocated; he mocks the cancionero commonplaces and even writes that when Juan Boscán himself cultivated them he considered them a consummate art: "The compliments and refinements / of Boscán, who denies them, / and that gallant style / with which he tells of his loves? / But once composed / a very sorrowful stanza, / he himself will confess / that he does not know where it is going / nor is it founded on anything."

He wrote only one composition against the new Italianizing aesthetic: Contra los que dexan los metros castellanos y siguen los italianos ("Against those who abandon the Castilian meters and follow the Italian ones"), which nevertheless includes some burlesque sonnets in hendecasyllables, such as "Garcilaso y Boscán siendo llegados." In it he laments the new rhythm imposed by the aesthetic of Petrarchism ("They may well be punished / as Anabaptists, / since by a law of their own / they have themselves baptized again / and call themselves Petrarchists") and its new language full of metaphors, antitheses and periphrases, and the subtleties or conceits of love it imposed, that is, circumlocutions that avoided the everyday names of things:

Our language is very devoted / to clear brevity / and this verse, in truth, / on the contrary, denotes / obscure prolixity.

As the good poet he was, however, he does not fail to point out the beauty achieved by this "new versifying" and "gibberish from beyond," and so he says to the Italian and Latin Muses, "How have you come to our Spain / such new and lovely carnations?" But he is bothered, for example, by blank verse ("they now use a certain prose / measured without rhymes") and points out the reason that moved most of the Petrarchists: the lack of a long, flexible and dignified verse with which to treat major themes:

And that the Castilian meter / did not have the authority / to say with majesty / what is said in Tuscan / with greater felicity

But Castillejo was in reality a convinced Renaissance man who sought to revitalize the Castilian tradition of octosyllabic poetry, whose language he took pride in with legitimate nationalism, comparing the empire of Spain with that of Rome, as Antonio de Nebrija had done:

Since Spain reigns and has dealings in so many parts, not only of the world known before, but outside it, which is in the Indies, and the Spanish language is now so widely spoken and taught as Latin was before, it is fitting to understand it and adorn it in every way, as has been done for some years now, and as the Romans did with theirs after they began to have dealings with Greece and the other foreign lands outside Italy.

What concerned Castillejo was not so much the success of the Italianizing poetic revolution, to whose potential a cultured and cosmopolitan man like him could not be insensitive, but rather the possibility that it might mean, on the linguistic and literary plane, a loss of prestige for the Castilian language; and so in the "Aula" he has his experienced Prudencio say that the "pilgrim courtiers," "once ended / the appointed time / at the court where they were, / return to what was past."

He gathered all his work into three groups: Obras de amores (Works of love), Obras de conversación y pasatiempo (Works of conversation and pastime) and Obras morales y de devoción (Moral and devotional works). In the first group most of the compositions are devoted to Castillejo's platonic love, the lady Ana de Schaumburg, but also to a certain Ana de Aragón and other ladies. He made translations of Ovid (his famous Fábula de Polifemo translates and amplifies an episode of Ovid's Metamorphoses) and composed a very celebrated Sermón de amores, published in 1542, which earned him a reputation as a racy and not very clean writer. It is a work with a Celestina-like setting, with traces of Giovanni Boccaccio and the two archpriests, Juan Ruiz and Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, and it paints far from edifying pictures of convent life (it should be noted that he knew the subject he was speaking about); he also translated into prose two dialogues of Cicero, De senectute and De amicitia, and also wrote a Carta en latín y romance; these works can be read in the modern edition by Rogelio Reyes Cano for the Biblioteca Castro, in the first volume. In addition, he translated into verse several episodes of the Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso (the "Canto de Polifemo," the "Fábula de Acteón" and the "Historia de Píramo y Tisbe"), and a translation of the Amores of the same Roman poet, published in 1598, is also attributed to him.

Among the Obras de conversación, the verse dialogues stand out, for example the misogynistic Diálogo que habla de las condiciones de las mujeres (1546), or the Diálogo entre el autor y su pluma.

The third group includes more dialogues: Diálogo entre la memoria y el olvido, Diálogo entre la verdad y la lisonja and the Diálogo y discurso de la vida en corte, perhaps his most personal work. His works were read in every era: he earned the praise of Luis Gálvez de Montalvo in his El pastor de Fílida and of Lope de Vega in La Dorotea, where he says of him that "his works still live" and that "he was not unworthy of fame among the ancients."

The first edition of his complete works (whose license for publication a nephew of the poet had requested in vain from Philip II in 1552) did not see the light until 1573, after severe inquisitorial corrections and deletions. He also wrote some dramatic works that were lost, although not many years ago a manuscript copy of the Farsa de la Constanza was found in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria of Modena (Italy); it was edited by Blanca Periñán and Rogelio Reyes Cano in 2012.

Editions

Castillejo's complete works were published posthumously: the aforementioned expurgated Las obras de Christoual de Castillejo, corregidas y emendadas por mandado de la Santa, y General Inquisición, Madrid, Pierres Cosin, printing house of J. López de Velasco, 1573.

But earlier, during his lifetime, the best-known ones had already been published separately: the Sermón de amores in 1542, without place of printing, perhaps Venice. These works were reprinted many times, quite a few of them expurgated by the inquisitorial censorship. In 1544 the first edition of the Diálogo de mujeres was printed in Venice.

In the 17th century, separate editions were made of the Diálogo entre la verdad y la lisonja (Alcalá, 1614) and the Historia de Píramo y Tisbe (Alcalá, 1615).

At the end of the 18th century, the neoclassical critic Pedro Estala edited many of his works in Madrid, Imprenta Real, 1792. There is also a voluminous body of correspondence between Martín de Salinas, ambassador of the Infante Don Fernando, and the poet, edited in modern times.

Apart from his appearance in various anthologies, the first modern edition, which also gathers his abundant work scattered in manuscript cancioneros, is that of Jesús Domínguez Bordona of all of the author's complete poetic Obras in four volumes, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1958. Also modern is the edition of the Obra completa by Rogelio Reyes Cano, Madrid, Turner, 1998.

References

Part of this article was obtained from WikiSalamanca, which publishes under the CC by-sa 3.0 license

Bibliography

• Reyes Cano, Rogelio. Estudios sobre Cristóbal de Castillejo: tradición y modernidad en la encrucijada poética del siglo XVI. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Salamanca, 2000. ISBN 84-7800-907-8.
• Reyes Cano, Rogelio. "Algunos aspectos de la relación de Cristóbal de Castillejo con la literatura italiana", Cuadernos de Filología Italiana, special issue (2000), pp. 211-224
• Beccaria Lago, María Dolores. Vida y obra de Cristóbal de Castillejo, Madrid, Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 1997. ISBN 978-84-88292-11-7.
• Martínez Navarro, María del Rosario "El antipetrarquismo en España. El caso de Cristóbal de Castilejo", Esfera, 2, (2009), p. 8. ISSN 1988-7671
• Castillejo, Cristóbal de, Farsa de la Constanza, edited by Blanca Periñan and Regilio Reyes, Madrid: Cátedra, 2012. ISBN 978-84-376-3057-1
• Castillejo, Cristóbal de, Obras. 4 vols. (ed. by J. Domínguez Bordona) Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1960.
• Castillejo, Cristóbal de, Diálogo de mujeres. Ed. by Rogelio Reyes Cano. Madrid: Castalia, 1986.
• Nicolay, Clara Leonora. The life and works of Cristóbal de Castillejo. The last of the nationalists in castilian poetry. A thesis. Philadelphia: Lancaster Wickershan Press, 1910.
• Periñán, Blanca. "Un caso de imitación compuesta: el Aula de cortesanos", in Crotalón, 1 (1984), 255-281.
• Prieto, Antonio. La poesía española del siglo XVI. I. Andáis tras mis escritos. Madrid: Cátedra, 1984.
• Reyes Cano, Rogelio. Medievalismo y renacentismo en la obra poética de Cristóbal de Castillejo. Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 1980.

External links

• Works by Cristóbal de Castillejo on Spanish Wikisource
• Cristóbal de Castillejo at the Real Academia de la Historia
• Works by Castillejo at the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
• Poetic anthology I
• Poetic anthology II
• Díalogos de Castillejo. Review in the Montaner encyclopedia
• Digitized works of Cristóbal de Castillejo in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain
• Castillejo, Cristóbal de on the Digital Portal of the History of Translation in Spain.