I am convinced that were it not for Juan Palomeque's comments, no one would even have suggested that the indigenous Castilian romances were read to the peasantry.
Honesty compels me to mention the proceso of Román Ramírez, summarized by A. González Palencia in «Las fuentes de la comedia Quien mal anda en mal acaba, de Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcón», BRAE, 16 (1929), 199-222 and 17 (1930), 147-74 (reprinted in his Historias y leyendas. Estudios literarios [Madrid: CSIC, 1942], pp. 217-84), yet the data it presents is so contradictory and difficult to evaluate that I prefer not to include it with my main argument. In 1595 Ramírez, a morisco of Deza, was denounced to the Inquisition. He was a farmer (labrador), the son of a farmer, and lived from an orchard «arrendado del Duque de Medinaceli», and as a curandero. According to his own declaration, he had once owned romances of chivalry, whose titles he specified (the bad spelling no doubt due to the amanuensis): «Floranuel [Florambel], los doce [!] de Amadís, Don Cristalián, Don Olivante del Aura [de Laura], Primaleón y Don Duardo [I do not believe, as González Palencia suggests, that he is referring to the Portuguese Duardos, Book VII, in Gayangos' enumeration, of the Palmerín «cycle»; rather to the same Primaleón, which on the title page promises to present as well the deeds of Duardos, prince of England], Don Clarián del Amadís [de Landanís], el Caballero del Febo, Don Rogel de Grecia, Don Felís Malo [Felix Magno]... y otros que al presente no se acuerda» (257 58). When he was tested and it was found he could only read with great difficulty, he declared that he knew these books because «antes que él supiese leer ni to hubiese deprendido, sabía ya de memoria los más libros de caballerías de los cuales dichos, porque Román Ramírez, padre deste confesante, leía muy bien y muchas veces en presencia deste y así este confesante iba tomando en la memoria lo que le oía leer» (260). He also claimed to have written a romance of chivalry, entitled Florisdoro de Grecia.
Because of his extraordinary memory, which he first claimed to have lost and then explained he never had (he memorized the main plots of the romances and then invented details to fit them), he was often called upon, as a curiosity, to recite romances of chivalry before various nobles, and as a result of a petty squabble because one evening he could not be two places at once, he was denounced to the Inquisition out of spite, as having a memory inspired by the devil. He died before his case was settled, in 1509, having confessed to being a cripto-moro (and the Inquisition, with its usual thoroughness, went on to condemn him to death posthumously).
All of this seems suspect in the extreme. An illiterate farmer could scarcely, from his earnings, afford even one of the books which Ramírez said he had in such abundance, but which he no longer owned and could not produce. It seems more likely that he claimed this extensive knowledge to make himself more in demand as the owner of a prodigious memory, which was, no doubt, highly profitable for him. I wish, likewise, that it could be concluded from his testimony alone that the romances of chivalry were regularly read aloud among the nobles of this period, but it seems that the interest was more in his memory than in what he actually recited. (Roger M. Walker tackles the always knotty problem of oral reading of written texts with regard to the Cifar, in FMLS, 7 [1971], 36-42, without reaching any firm conclusion).
I hope it is unnecessary to point out, finally, that the romances of chivalry were only incidental to his denunciation and later condemnation. [On Román Ramírez, see more recently L. P. Harvey, «Oral Composition and the Performance of Novels of Chivalry in Spain», FMLS, 10 (1974), 270-86.
Bruce Wardropper maintains that he does not, in «Cervantes' Theory of the Drama», MP, 52 (1954-55), 217-21, although F. Sánchez Escribano and A. Porqueras Mayo, without giving any reasons, reject this article as «totalmente desenfocado», in Preceptiva dramática española del renacimiento y el barroco (Madrid: Gredos, 1965), p. 21, n. 21. Wardropper is supported, on different grounds, by Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 108-27, on whom see E. C. Riley, HR, 41 (1973), 566.
This is probably what the friend in the Prologue to Part I meant by the term.
There is on the word vulgo a considerable bibliography. In a penetrating article, which deserves to be reprinted in a more accessible form, Werner Bahner discusses the change in the term from its original sense of, more or less, the peasantry, to mean the uneducated or the half-educated («Die Beziechnung "vulgo" and der Ehrbegriff des spanischen Theaters im Siglo de Oro», Omagiu liu Iorgu Iordan, ed. B. Cazacu et al. [Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romine, 1958], pp. 59-68). It might be added as well that vulgo is invariably defined negatively, as being people lacking something which the writer possesses; none of the writers who use the term include themselves in it (except, satirically, Cosme de Aldana, in a work which has been overlooked by the critics writing on the topic, despite its accessibility in BAE, 36: «Invectiva contra el vulgo y su maldiciencia», opening sonnets, p. 496: «No creas que esta inventiva [sic] / contra el vulgo, de autor compuesta sea / que se exima del vulgo, y que no crea / ser del mismo en cuanto obre, hable y escriba»), even though they might be of obscure or non-existent lineage.
[While this article was in press, two other scholars pointed to this poem in Aldana: Américo Castro, in the second (only) edition of his Pensamiento de Cervantes, p. 214, and Alberto Porqueras Mayo, in «Sobre el concepto vulgo en la Edad de Oro», an article in his Temas y formas de la literatura española (Madrid: Gredos, 1972), pp. 114-27, originally published in Actele celui de-al XII-lea congres interational de linguistică şi filologie romanică (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1971), pp. 713-22. Also on the topic vulgo may be consulted Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, «Lope de Vega and der Vulgo. Über die soziologische Bedingtheit and die emanzipatorischen Möglichkeiten der populären Comedia (am Beispiel von Fuenteovejuna)», in Spanische Literatur im Goldenen Zeitalter. Fritz Schalk zum 70. Geburtstag (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973), pp. 338-56, A. Porqueras Mayo and F. Sánchez Escribano, «Función del vulgo en la preceptiva dramática de la Edad de Oro», RFE, 50 (1967), 123-43, George Boas, Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), and A. A. van Beysterveldt, Répercussions du souci de la pureté de sang (Leiden: Brill, 1966), pp. 15-29.]
The following may also be consulted: Otis Green, «On the Attitude toward the Vulgo in the Spanish Siglo de Oro», Studies in the Renaissance, 4 (1957), 190-200; Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, Anejo 6 of the RFE (Madrid, 1925), pp. 210-12; Aubrey F. G. Bell, Renacimiento, pp. 113-17; Amado Alonso, Castellano, español, idioma nacional, 4th ed. (Buenos Aires; Losada, 1968), pp. 68-74; Werner Bahner, «El vulgo y las luces en la obra de Feijóo», Actas del Tercer Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Carlos H. Magis (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1970), pp. 88-96; A. Porqueras Mayo, El prólogo como género literario, Anejo 14 of the Revista de Literatura (Madrid: CSIC, 1957), pp. 156-58, El prólogo en el renacimiento español, Anejo 24 of the Revista de Literatura (Madrid: CSIC, 1965), pp. 21-25, and El prólogo en el manierismo y barroco españoles, Anejo 27 of the Revista de Literatura (Madrid: CSIC, 1968), pp. 17-19; Lope de Vega, El sembrar en buena tierra, ed. William Fichter (New York: M.L.A., 1944), pp. 198-99; E. C. Riley, Teoría de la novela en Cervantes, trans. Carlos Sahagún (Madrid: Taurus, 1966), pp. 178-82. Two other references to the vulgo in which the uneducated are the class referred to are found in Fernández del Castillo, p. 563: «no sólo se consumían en cenizas libros prohibidos, sino otros muchos "porque no fuesen en el vulgo ocasión de errar"», and Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de Carlos V, BAE, 80, 116: «Ninguno que lo fuese [dotor] hacía caso de Lutero, ni le tenía en más de lo que merece un... instrumento de Satanás, para ganar infinitas ánimas de predición, de gente vulgar y idiotas semejantes a él, sin letras ni entendimiento verdadero...»
Aside from a passage in the prologue to the Quijote of Avellaneda, obviously based on the passage in Cervantes' prologue quoted at the outset, and an isolated and undated scrap of information in Gayangos (BAE, 40, p. lxxii, col. a, I. 6), I have found only one other contemporary reference to the vulgo as readers of romances of chivalry, in the Florisando, Book VI of the Amadís series, a work which Cervantes almost certainly did not know (see n. 320 of my «Don Quijote y los libros de caballerías», infra). In the prologue to this work, the author says that the Amadís and the Sergas de Esplandián were read «ansi del palacio como del vulgo», and expresses his concern that «rústicos» might not have been able to tell the good in them from the bad. I think that this statement from the author of so tangential a work, who has such a hostile attitude toward the romances as they then existed (see Maxime Chevalier, «Le roman de chevalerie morigéné. Le Florisando», BHi, 60 [1958], 441-49) is of little value. (See also the prologue to Part III of Espejo de cavallerías).
[Although Oviedo in his Memorias also refers to the vulgo as readers of the romances of chivalry, it is obvious from his comments that he uses the word in the sense discussed here (ed. cit., pp. 110, 189, 192)].
I would thus accept, though for different reasons, Pérez Pastor's statement in Bibliografía madrileña (Madrid, 1891), xiii-xiv: «La falta de libros de caballerías impresos en Madrid desde 1566 hasta 1600, aunque es una prueba negativa, dice mucho en contra de la opinión generalizada por varios cervantistas, pues viene a demostrar: 1º que entre la gente ilustrada de esta época, los libros de caballerías estaban en completa decadencia; 2º que en la Corte no había un solo autor, traductor, ni editor que se atreviera a poner manos en libros de caballerías...» (If this latter argument were extended, it would imply that because romances of chivalry were printed in Salamanca, that they were read by the university community, which was on the whole quite untrue -but see n. 34 to the introduction of my edition of the Espejo de príncipes).
P. 34 of the edition cited. The qualification concerning Sancho is not Sancho.
On the evidence of his discussions with the priest in I, 1 and his use in I, 46 of a type of prophecy found in the romances of chivalry (see my edition of the Espejo de príncipes, V, 81).
Published in Quaderni Ibero-Americani, Nos. 45-46 (1974-75), 253-59. Since this article was written, William Nelson has published his intelligent Fact or Fiction. The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge: Harvard, 1973).
Bruce Wardropper, «Don Quixote: Story or History?», MP, 63 (1965), 1.
See «Who Read the Romances of Chivalry?» supra.
I mention the Caballero Cifar together with the above to emphasize my belief that its publication was not «a testimony to its enduring popularity» (Alan Deyermond and Roger Walker, «A Further Vernacular Source for the Libro de Buen Amor», BHS, 46 [1969], 194, n. 1), but rather a reflection of the sudden demand, which led printers to hunt for suitable works to issue.