5 - The Lusiads and the Literature of Portuguese Overseas Expansion

Summary

The new age of the Renaissance was characterised by three important factors: the systematisation of existing Western learning and aesthetics, the emergence of a canon of literary doctrine and the growing recognition of Europe's coming role in a wider world. Linked to these was the demand, which in the sixteenth century grew to a noisy clamour, that the great realities of man's achievements should be immortalised in verse. It is within this vast context that we shall examine the contribution of Luís Vaz de Camões (1524–80) in Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, i.e., the Portuguese). This late-Renaissance or Mannerist epic of 1572 celebrates Vasco da Gama's discovery of the searoute to India in 1498, itself one of the major events of the new age, especially in that it achieved what Columbus had failed to do, namely to reach the Orient by sea. That contribution is particularly relevant under four headings: (i) literary theory, (ii) Neoplatonism, (iii) the humanism of reform, and (iv) political thought.

The literary theory of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was dominated by a conflation of the precepts of Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry), though the former was not truly understood till the seventeenth century, and though its influence on the composition of Os Lusíadas may legitimately be doubted. There were, however, two significant modifications: the first was a firmly stated preference for epic poetry over tragedy; the second was a preference for the modalities of Virgil's Aeneid over those of Homeric epic. The primordial expression of this consensus came from the pen of an Italian cleric, Girolamo Vida, in his De arte poetica (1527, The Art of Poetry). We have no idea whether Camões had resort to this manual, but, if he had not, then the end-product in Os Lusíadas is a remarkable coincidence. Certainly, the overall structure of the work and the nature and sequence of the episodes are closely modelled on the recommended Aeneid, with flashback narrations of Portuguese history corresponding to Virgil's account of the Trojan War. Just as Aeneas relates those events to Dido in Carthage, so, in Cantos III and IV, Gama recounts his nation's past to the friendly Sheikh of Malindi in East Africa.