Gil Vicente and the Development of the Comedia

Through a formalist structuralist analysis René Pedro Garay defines the Vicente <i>comedias</i> against their socio-historical backdrop and the literary milieu that witnessed their creation. By doing so Garay defends the un-Aristotelian medieval tradition tracing the theory behind Vicente's comedies through Dante and the pre-sixteenth Century Iberian tradition and placing it in the trajectory towards the birth of the Renaissance. He then charts this humanist comedic structure in two plays the <i>Comédia de Rubena</i> and <i>Comédia do viuvo</i> corroborating Vicente's role in determining the form of subsequent comedic drama in Spain.