Rueda'ss theatrical work develops under the influence that the Italian style theater.  During his lifetime, Italian comedians and theatrical companies abound who came to Spain to stage a theater inspired by all kinds of picturesque traditional sources. It is this type of theater that gives rise to Spanish comedy. Giving the author's influence on this kind of theater, it is possible that he had at some point come into contact with one of those companies of Italian origin.

Theater making is his profession in the most existential sense, he lives from the theater and for theater. He soon creates a company with which he toured towns and small cities in 16th century Spain. His aim and purpose is always to delight and amuse people his audience. Rueda is a comedian for hire, who entertains on the occasion of different festivities. His most outstanding compositions are the small theatrical pieces know as  "pasos" or "entremeses", designed to entertain the audience in between scenes of the larger play. Their arguments are based on brief skits from a traditional environment, without the text having a clear common thread, kind of like a comic story.

The goal of theater professionals like Rueda becomes to satisfy the their audience, the staging becoming profitable for the first time. Cathedral councils, city councils, and brotherhoods become entrepreneurs and at the end of the 16th century, the theater stage moves to what will be called the “corral de comedias”, a kind of cull the sac in between three apartment buildings. Rueda creates a popular language for that kind of theater in which fools, ruffians, and braggarts abound and the lexicon, syntax, and pronunciation are a transfer from the street to the stage. The rusticity, the picturesque, and the picaresque with which these characters are characterized primarily have a comic function. His theater begins to perceive the divorce between the classic precepts of making comedies and the taste for the vulgar, which later authors like Lope de Vega would later develop in his 'Arte Nuevo'. 

The short dramatic piece tells the story of two hungry thieves who eat a simpleton's food without him realizing it because they entertain him with the detailed description of the fictional wonders of the Land of Jauja.

Humor

Theater play

During the 16th century, the medieval vision of the world enters into crisis. The Renaissance was defined by a substantial and absolute division between Nature and Spirituality. The world of the senses and the world of the spirit was intimately fused in the man of the Middle Ages, to the point that there was one and the same thing. The Renaissance, with its radical individualism, signified a revolutionary change of position that separated the human being from the omniscient spirituality of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance proclaimed that the Middle Age was only a dark period between Antiquity and its time. In this sense, the Renaissance is not a mere cultural period, but a new conception of life that manifests itself in aspects such as politics and science, as well as literature. There is a conscious search for a language full of natural elegance, with a predominance of the novel in different types, chivalry, pastoral, Moorish, and the picaresque among the most popular ones.

During the Renaissance, an enormous effort was made to clearly delimit the world of the individual, separated from the spiritual realm. The independence of the human being was proclaimed on the basis that God and man are two incommunicable entities.  Following Calvin's thought, the creature could not influence the behavior nor the inscrutable decisions of the Creator, the first one predestined from birth.  It was the task of the Spanish theologians at the Council of Trent who fought such a doctrine, proclaiming an intimate connection between God and man. The consequences of Trento were incalculable for the world of culture in Spain, the country exempt from heresy by the council but its cultural future was also determined by it. As the sixteenth century progressed towards its end, the natural and the supernatural world tended to draw closer together for the Spaniards, with the scientific pursuit, and the mere intent of rational thinking viewed with deep suspicion.

Notwithstanding, there is also in Spain an advance in science and discoveries are made, accompanied by a development of urban life and incipient capitalism. The reign of the Catholic Monarchs and later during the  Empire there was a development of humanism, man becoming the center of the universe, with the courtier as the ideal Renaissance man, and a renewed interest in the study of the authors of Antiquity.  The discovery of the printing press in Europe triggered movements of reform, propitiating in Spain a response with the development of particular religious literature known as mysticism. 

Renaissance

Cancionero musical de palacio

Cancionero General, by Hernando del Castillo

Propaplladia, by Bartolomé de Torres Naharro

Retrato de la Lozana andaluza, by Francisco Delicado

Diálogo de la doctrina cristiana, by Jan de Valdés

Relox de príncipes, by Fray Antonio de Guevara

Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, by Fray Antonio de Guevara

Obras from Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega

Vida del lazarillo de Tormes (anonimous)

Publication of Indice de libros prohibidos by the Spanish Inquisition

First edition of Diana, by Jorge de Montemayor (Abencerraje include)

First part of Araucana, by Alonso de Ercilla

The  Inquisition jails fray Luis de León for translating The Song of Songs into Spanish

Obras, by Cristobal de Castilejo

La vida es sueño, by Calderón de la Barca

Soledades, by Góngora

Empresas políticas, by Saavedra Fajardo

Civil wars of Granada (first part), by Ginés Pérez de Hita

El Parnaso español, by Quevedo

Las Meninas by Velazquez

Edition of the first French encyclopedia. Diderot's work, although widely criticized, can be considered the first modern encyclopedia.

Samuel Johnson publishes the Dictionary of the English language, with uses, customs and definitions of the words that make up the English language. Includes terms that appear in Shakespeare and other great authors of British literature.

The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

Aminta, by Tasso

The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare

Spanish Bites

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La tierra de Jauja (1547)

By Lope de Rueda

Time Period: Renaissance

Genre: Humor, Theater play

Spanish Bites

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