A stronger argument in
favour of the Portuguese case is drawn from the existing Spanish
text. In book I, chapters 40 and 42, it is recorded that
the Infante Alphonso of Portugal suggested a radical change
in the narrative of Briolanja's relations with Amadis. This
prince has been identified as the Infante Alphonso who died in
1312, or as Alphonso IV. who ascended the Portuguese throne
in 1325. Were either of these identifications established,
the date of composition might be referred with certainty to
the beginning of the 14th century or the end of the 13th.
But both identifications are conjectural. Nevertheless the
passage in the Spanish text undeniably lends some support
to the Portuguese claim, and recent critics have inclined to
the belief that
Amadis de Gaula was written by Joao de
Lobeira, a Galician knight who frequented the Portuguese
court between 1258 and 1285, and to whom are ascribed two
fragments of a poem in the
Colocci-Brancuti Canzoniere
(Nos. 240 and 240b) which reappears with some unimportant
variants in
Amadis de Gaula (book II, chapter 11). The
coincidence may be held to account in some measure for the
traditional association of a Lobeira with the authorship of
Amadis de Gaula; but, though curious, it warrants no
definite conclusion being drawn from it. Against the Portuguese
claim it is argued that the Villancico corresponding to
Joao de Lobeiro's poem is an interpolation in the Spanish
text, that Portuguese prose was in a rudimentary stage of
development at the period when --
ex hypothesi -- the
romance was composed, and that the book was very popular
in Spain almost a century before it is even mentioned in
Portugal. Lastly, there is the incontrovertible fact that
Amadis de Gaula exists in Castilian, while it remains
to be proved that it ever existed in Portuguese. As to its
substance, it is beyond dispute that much of the text derives
from the French romances of the Round Table; but the evidence
does not enable us to say (1) whether it was pieced together
from various French romances; (2) whether it was more or
less literally translated from a lost French original; or
(3) whether the first Peninsular adapter or translator was a
Castilian or a Portuguese. On these points judgment must be
suspended. There can, however, be no hesitation in accepting
Cervantes' verdict on
Amadis de Gaula as the "best of
all the books of this kind that have ever been written."
It is the prose epic of feudalism, and its romantic spirit,
its high ideals, its fantastic gallantry, its ingenious
adventures, its mechanism of symbolic wonders, and its
flowing style have entranced readers of such various types
as
Francis I. and Charles V., Ariosto and Montaigne.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. -- Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcellos and
Gottfried Baist in the Grundriss der romanischen Philologie
(Strassburg, 1897 ), ii. Band, 2. Abteiluna, pp. 216-226
and 440-442: Ludwig Braunfels, Kritischer Versuch uber den
Roman Annadie von Glallien (Leipzig, 1876); Theophilo Braga,
Historia das novelas portuguezas de cavalleria (Porto,
1873), Curso de litteratura e arte portugueza (Lisboa,
1881), and Questoes de litteratura e arte portugueza
(Lisboa, 1885); Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, Origenes de
la novela (Madrid, 1905); Eugene Baret, De l'Amadis de
Glaule et de son influence sur les moeurs et la litterature
au XVIe et au XVIIe siecle (Paris, 1873). (J. F. K.)
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