Carajicomedia

Carajicomedia is devoid of clues about the identity of its authors, but they must have been retainers of a great lord. However, even to the casual reader, it is obvious that those responsible for the first poem have a thorough education. The two poems (and prose glosses) are also more polished and sophisticated than the typical burlesque compositions of the Cancionero general, which most often carry the names of their authors. Why therefore is it anonymous? The answer must have something to do with its targets.

Although the work is concerned with the growing absolutism of kings; the encroachment of foreign interests in Castile; and the factional struggles that were then dividing the country, these are not reasons enough to account for its anonymity. After all, it is purportedly about an unthreatening lowly knight called Diego Fajardo and unimportant whores. Carajicomedia’s initial rubric, however, describes the work as “eſpeculatiua,” an adjective that ultimately derives from the Latin noun "speculum" (mirror, see speculum literature) through the verb "speculārī" (observe, consider, examine) and the late-Latin adjective "speculātīvus" (speculative). The rubric therefore mockingly suggests that the work is like a mirror whose scrutiny reveals hidden truths in its shadows about the identity of its characters: If Fray Bugeo Montesino and Fray Juan de Hempudia are and are not its authors, then Diego Fajardo, María de Vellasco, Santilario, and others may not be who they appear to be.

In reality, the shadows in the mirror reveal some of the most prominent people in the realm, among them King Fernando de Aragón and Cardinal/Regent Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. Therein lies the real reason for Carajicomedia’s false attribution of its authorship to Fray Bugeo Montesino and Fray Juan de Hempudia. The authors fear retribution for committing a crime of lèse majesté by mocking powerful individuals.

Juana la Loca, who was queen of Castile between 1504 and 1555, inherited the throne after the deaths of her mother’s two older children and their heirs. However, she was considered by many to be subject to a malady that has been variously described as a depressive disorder, a psychosis, or a case of inherited schizophrenia, and therefore unfit to rule by herself.

Isabel de Castilla's last will dealt with her daughter's infirmity by making Fernando de Aragón Regent of Castile. Juana’s husband, Felipe de Borgoña, not surprisingly, objected to this arrangement and forced Fernando to leave Castile. To balance the political scales, Fernando had married Germana de Foix but, it proved unnecessary because Felipe subsequently died under suspicious circumstances. The task of governing again came to rest in the hands of Fernando de Aragón and, at his death, was inherited by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros.

According to Frank A. Domínguez, Carajicomedia was written between the deaths of Fernando de Aragón, who was Regent during the minority of his grandson, Carlos I of Spain, and his successor in that office, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. These events and time period are those reflected in Carajicomedia.

The Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa disappeared from sight until it was republished anonymously in 1841 and again in 1843 by Luis de Usoz, a Quaker then residing in London. The few individuals who read his edition found Carajicomedia so offensive that they barely recorded its existence. Without naming the work, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo called it “the most extensive and brutal composition of the Cancionero de burlas," dismissively adding that it holds some interest for the study of the continuations of the Tragicomedia of Fernando de Rojas and the history of prostitution at the beginning of the 16th century. Scholars like Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino wondered how it could ever have been printed (18), and Erasmo Buceta considered it to be one of the two most obscene poems in Castilian literature (the other being the Pleyto del manto, The Lawsuit over the Cloak/Blanket).

Carajicomedia did not fare much better in the following decades. The Cancionero de obras de burlas prouocātes a risa was reprinted by Soler in facsimile (Valencia 1951), but it received little attention until it was edited by Pablo Jauralde Pou and Juan Bellón Cazabán (1974), and by Frank A. Domínguez (1978). Since then, Carajicomedia has been published independently by Carlos Varo (1981) and Álvaro Alonso (1995), and Frank A. Domínguez (2015). It has also become part of modern anthologies of erotic poetry that aim to make such texts more accessible to the general reading public.

For a long time Carajicomedia did not have much of a critical impact. It is not mentioned in works on pornography and erotica. It is also absent from books and essays on medieval and early modern Spanish satire, including Kenneth Scholberg’s Sátira e invectiva en la España medieval (1971, Satire and Invective in Medieval Spain) or in his Algunos aspectos de la sátira en el siglo XVI (1979, Some Aspects of Satire in the XVIth Century). It is also not mentioned in Laura Kendrick’s Medieval Satire (2007, 52-69), Alberta Gatti’s Satire in the Spanish Golden Age (2007, 86-100), or included in newer overviews on sensual love, such as the Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature of Gaëtan Brulotte and John Phillips (2006). Unwittingly, scholars like Menéndez Pelayo, Rodríguez-Moñino, and Buceta have reinforced the false notion, first stated by Henry Spenser Ashbee in the nineteenth century, that early Spanish burlesque poetry was unimportant, and that few erotic works appeared in Spain's presses at any time (Centuria librorum absconditorum 402-403, Bibliography of Forbidden Books).

As a consequence of this neglect, the first serious article devoted to Carajicomedia only appeared in 1975. In it, Alfonso Canales identified the protagonist, Diego Fajardo, as a son of Alonso Fajardo, a knight who was granted a monopoly over the whorehouses of Malaga and Granada by the Catholic Monarchs. Canales therefore conjectured that Carajicomedia might have been composed towards the end of Isabel de Castilla’s reign.

Ten years later, Carlos Varo suggested in his introduction to the first independent edition of Carajicomedia (1981) that all the prostitutes that bear the name Isabel possibly satirize the Queen. This was a tantalizing thought concerning a much revered figure in Castilian history. Faced with a vacuum of research on the work, most critics have grudgingly supported Varo's speculation and assigned Carajicomedia's composition to the end of Isabel de Castilla's reign in 1504. Of late, Frank A. Domínguez (2015) has attributed the work to the interregnum that followed Fernando II de Aragón's death (1516-1519) and preceded the Revolt of the Comuneros (1520).

As Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky have explained, high culture is always looking for ways of erasing from memory texts that it considers dangerous (216). This is true of the burlesque poetry of the Cancionero general. However, although a certain amount of hostility and reproof about Carajicomedia's obscene language and content was to be expected from the religious establishment, its explicit sexuality was really a minor concern in early modern times.

Nevertheless, early (and disorganized) attempts at its suppression by prudish readers coalesced with the publication of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1559, Index of Prohibited Authors and Books), which banned all “burlas” from being published or read. This may explain why the Cancionero de obras de burlas was not reprinted. Its suppression, however, was more because some of its poems mocked religious texts and figures, or portrayed friars unfavorably, and not because its compositions offended sexual mores. Faced with a more organized hostility from the Inquisitorial establishment, it is not surprising that the Cancionero de obras de burlas prouocātes a risa (and Carajicomedia) survives in only one copy (British Library H C.20.b.22).

Carajicomedia is the most significant satire produced in early Modern Europe before La cazzaria (The Book of the Prick) of Antonio Vignali (Marcantonio Piccolomini). Its risqué nature does not keep it from being among the most complex literary creations of any kind written between Fernando de Rojas’s La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499, Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea) and Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). One of the earliest works of propaganda, it is an excellent measure of the level of education of the nobility and the upper middle class. Its anti-religious nature makes it unlike most of the works that are consecrated by the Spanish literary tradition. It is one of the clearest reflections extant of Christian attitudes towards conversos, women, and the auto de fe. It is also one of the earliest manifestations of the controversy between Castilian and Latinizing or Italianizing poets, and the first occurrence of a narrative device in which an author, the glossator in this case, claims to be correcting a previously existing version of a story written by another character, Fray Bugeo, while adding his own material. In other words, it partakes of the same narrative game that has been heretofore associated with Miguel de Cervantes’s narrator in Don Quijote and the false Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli.

Anon. Cancionero de obras de burlas prouocātes a risa. [Facsimile of the edition of 1519.] Valencia: Soler, 1951.

Anon. Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa. Edited by Frank Domínguez. Valencia: Soler [Albatros], 1978.

Anon. Carajicomedia. Edited by Álvaro Alonso. Málaga: Aljibe, 1995.

Anon. Carajicomedia. Edited by Carlos Varo. Madrid: Playor, 1981.

Domínguez, Frank A. Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain, with and Edition and Translation of the Text. (London and Rochester: Tamesis, 2015). Paleographic (pp. 235-353) and modern editions with a translation into English (pp. 355-451).

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