The Creation of Character in Francisco de Quevedo's Biographies [electronic resource].

9781088381922

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (673 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

This dissertation examines how Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) constructed character in the four biographies of ancient and modern personages that he published during his lifetime. Biography was a popular literary genre in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and one in which not only Quevedo, but writers such as Lope de Vega, Fernando de Herrera, Mateo Aleman, and Baltasar Gracian also took part. In this study I focus on Quevedo's lives of Fray Tomas de Villanueva (chapter 1), Romulus (chapter 2), Marcus Brutus (chapter 3), and Paul the Apostle (chapter 4), and seek to understand what Quevedo's writerly and political motivations were in composing these works, how—from a technical and narratological standpoint—he wrote them, and what he said about his subjects that was new. I show that in each of these cases Quevedo relied on previous authors and texts (among them, Livy, Plutarch, the Acts of the Apostles, and biblical commentary) to form the very contents of his works; that beginning with El Romulo (1632) he displayed a heightened interest (as compared to the ancients) in portraying his subjects' inner lives as well as the often-hidden reasons behind their decisions; and that one of his main techniques was to translate and summarize unfaithfully, though without letting on that he was doing anything but following his source material and transmitting the accounts as he found them.Chapter 1 explores the textual relationship between Quevedo's first biography, Epitome a la vida de Fray Tomas de Villanueva (1620) and his main sources, Miguel Salon's De los ejemplos (1588) and Vida (1620). In this chapter I examine the specific ways in which Quevedo imitates—and deviates from—Salon's two accounts of Tomas's life and investigate the effects of these various decisions on his depiction of character. I find that Quevedo's Tomas is markedly different than Salon's—he is happier, even more charitable, more frugal, and more financially astute—and that Quevedo achieves this unique rendering by omitting key elements that Salon includes, by modifying select details, and by adding in new, unsupported information.Quevedo would discover another way of creating character while reading, and subsequently translating, the Bolognese Virgilio Malvezzi's Il Romulo (1629). The result was El Romulo which, as Quevedo's second biography, is the subject of chapter 2. Here I attempt to connect Quevedo's prologue comments about Malvezzi's work (that it was original for being the first to capture Romulus's interior life) with details found in the actual text of El Romulo, which I then compare to Malvezzi's principal source, Livy's History of Rome. What I observe is that Malvezzi's Romulus does indeed differ from the Romuluses of Antiquity in that he possesses a wider range of interiority, has a more acute understanding of human nature, and is more independent, calculating and politically ambitious. This Malvezzi accomplishes, I argue, by inventing thoughts, emotions, and motivations, as well as the reasons for his subject's decisions.Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to Quevedo's longest and most complex biographies—Marco Bruto (1644) and Vida de San Pablo (1645), respectively. In these two works Quevedo makes heavy use of previous texts—about a quarter of Marco Bruto is comprised of a translation of, and commentary on, Plutarch's Life of Brutus, and 25% of his biography of St. Paul is a rewriting into Spanish of the Bible's Acts of the Apostles. Yet in each case Quevedo's representation of the protagonist differs from his source material in important ways. His Brutus, for example, is driven throughout by private concerns, is subject to negative emotions, and often dissimulates; his Paul is worse before his conversion to Christianity and better after it, and unlike in Acts, sees Jesus preach during his lifetime and is present at his arrest and crucifixion.While the traditional way of viewing these four writings by Quevedo is as belonging, first and foremost, to the categories of ascetic works (the lives of St. Paul and Tomas de Villanueva), political texts (Marco Bruto), and translations (El Romulo), I contend that it is above all as biographies that they should be thought of, studied, and read. Doing so, I argue, is not only more precise but also expands the current understanding of the range of Quevedo's intellectual and artistic work and adds an important dimension to his profile as a writer. A crucial aspect of which is that he was more than just a stellar poet, satirist, and picaresque novelist; he was also the foremost biographer of Spain's Golden Age.

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English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Spanish and Portuguese.