broke all the Commandments, how he found himself stranded in
Madrid, how his fine air captivated Lope de Vega, who housed
him for eight months and dedicated to him a play entitled Rey sin
reino, and how the ex-captain ended by “resolving to retire to a
lonely spot and there serve God as a hermit.” Every convention
of the picaresque novel is faithfully observed, and the incidents
are no doubt substantially true, though Contreras, like most
converts, judges his own past with unnecessary harshness. This
subtle form of vanity also pervades the Comentarios de el desengañado
de sí mismo of Diego duque de Estrada, a rakish soldier
and inferior dramatist whose autobiography (begun in 1614 and
continued at intervals during many years) was not printed till
1860. A far higher order of talent distinguishes the Capitulaciones
de la vida de la corte y oficios entretenidos in ella, a bitterly
unsparing review of picaresque life written by the great satirist
Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas (q.v.). These thumbnail
sketches were the preparatory studies worked up into the more
elaborate Vida del buscan Don Pablos (1626), the cleverest and
most revolting book of its class. There is no attempt to scare
the wicked by means of awful examples, the moral lesson is contemptuously
thrown aside; the veil of romance is rent in twain,
and the picaro-the nephew of the public executioner-is revealed
as he is, gloating in cruelty and revelling in the conscious enjoyment
of crime. But though Quevedo detests mankind, his
morose vision of existence rarely degenerates into caricature.
In his repugnant, misanthropic masterpiece the sordid genius
of the Spanish picaroon finds absolute expression. Nothing
further remained to be donein the matter of realism; henceforth
the taste for picaresque novels grew less keen, and later writers
unconsciously began to humanize their personages.
The Varia fortuna del so/dado Pindaro (1626) added nothing
to the established reputation of Gonzalo Cispedes y Meneses.
A clever anonymous story, Don Raimundo el entretenido (1627),
missed ire, even though it was attributed to Quevedo; yet the
author, Diego Tovar y Valderrama, compiled a sprightly diary
of the events which make up a picaroon's crowded day, and failed
solely because the interest in rogues was waning. Other writers
of undoubted gifts were slow to see that the fashion had changed.
Alonso de Castillo Solórzano (q.v.) tempted the public with three
picaresque stories published in quick succession: La Niña de los
embustes, Teresa de Manzanares (1634), the Aventuras del Bachiller
Trapaza (1637) and a sequel to the latter entitled La Garduña de
Sevilla (1642). Clever as Castillo Sol6rzano’s stories are, their
tricky heroes and heroines were no longer welcomed with the old
enthusiasm in Spain, the Bachiller Trapaza was destined to be
continued by Mateo da Silva Cabral in Portugal and to be exploited
by Le Sage in France, and to these two accidents it owes
its survival. Le Sage likewise utilized in Gil Blas episodes taken
from El Siglo pitagórico (1644), the work of Antonio Enriquez
Gomez (q.v.), but most of El Siglo pitagórico is in verse, and as it
was published at Paris by an exiled Portuguese Jew, its circulation
in Spain must have been limited. The normal primitive
rogue returns to the scene in La Vida y hechos de Estebanillo
Gonzalez (1646), which is no doubt the genuine autobiography that
it purports to be. If he is still occasionally read by students he
owes it to the fact that Le Sage drew upon him in the Histoire
d’Estevanille Gonzáles. By the general public he is completely
forgotten, and the same may be said of many subsequent Spanish
writers who adopted the picaresque formula. The Buscón is the
last great book of its kind.
Meanwhile, the rogue had forced his way into other European literature's. The Antwerp continuation (1555) of Lazarillo de Tormes brought the original to the notice of northern readers, and this first part was translated into French by Jean Saugrain in 1561. A Dutch version was issued anonymously in 1579, and it seems extremely likely that the book had been translated into English before this date. This follows from a manuscript note written by Gabriel Harvey in a copy of the Howleglass given him by Edmund Spenser; Harvey here mentions that he had received the Howleglass, Skoggin, Skelton and Lazarillo from Spenser on the 20th of December 1578. The earliest known edition of David Rowland's version of Lazarillo de Tormes is dated 1586, but as a licence to print a translation of this tale was granted on the 22nd of July 1568/1569, it is probable that a 1576 edition which appears in the Harleian Catalogue really existed. Numerous reprints (1599, 1639, 1669–1670, 1672, 1677) go to prove that Lazarillo de Tormes was very popular, and that Shakespeare had read it seems to follow from an allusion in Much Ado about Nothing (Act. II., sc. i.): “Now you strike like the blind man; ’t was the boy that stole your meat, and you will beat the post.” To Thomas Nash belongs the credit, such as it is, of being the first to write a picaresque novel in English: The Unfortunate Traveller; or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594). Nash carefully points out that his work is a new experiment, “being a cleane different veine from other my former courses of writing ”; the only possible Spanish model that he can have had was Lazarillo de Tormes, but he has nothing of his predecessor's sardonic brevity, and he anticipates later Spanish writers by his emphatic insistence on the pleasures of eating and drinking to repletion. Nash led the way, and a reference to “Spanish pickaroes” in Middleton’s Spanish Gipsie indicates that the picaroon type had speedily become familiar enough for London playgoers to understand the reference. Interest in picaresque literature was kept alive in England by a translation (1622) of a sequel to Lazarillo de Tormes published at Paris two years earlier by Juan de Luna, who came to London to supervise the English rendering; by James Mabbe’s admirable version (1622) of Guzmán de Alfarache, by The Son of the Rogue or the Politic Thief (1638), an anonymous translation, done through the French, of La desordenada codicia; and by another anonymous translation (1657), likewise done through the French, of Quevedo’s Buscón. The result of this campaign was The English Rogue described in the Life of M eriton Latroon, a witty Extravagant (1665), by Richard Head and Francis Kirkman. The authors of this farrago insist on the English nationality of their chief character, and repudiate the idea that they are in any way indebted to Aleman and Quevedo. It is no exaggeration, however, to say that almost all the material in the text is taken from Spanish sources, and even the thieves’ vocabulary is stolen from John Awdeley’s Fraternitye of Vacabondes or Thomas Harman's Caveat, or Warning for Common Cursetors. It is not till Defoe's time that the English picaresque novel acquires any real importance, and the picaresque intention informs much of his work that contravenes the accepted rules of composition. There is a female picaroon in Moll Flanders, and, as Defoe read Spanish, it is conceivable that Moll Flanders was suggested by the Pícara Justina; but this resemblance does not make a picaresque novel of Moll Flanders. The satirical spirit which is lacking in Moll Flanders is abundantly present in Colonel Jack, which bravely aims at exhibiting “vice and all kinds of wickedness attended with misery.” Henceforward the picaroon is naturalized in English literature, and is gloriously reincarnated in Fielding's Jonathan Wild and in Smollett's Ferdinand, Count Fathom. The classification of Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Morier’s Hajji Baba as picaresque novels is not strictly accurate; like Pickwick and Oliver Twist and Barry Lyndon, they are rather varieties of the peripatetic novel, but many incidents in all five recall the pleasing wiles of the Spanish picaroons.
The Dutch translation of Lazarillo de Tormes (1579) did not enable the picaresque novel to strike root in Holland, yet from it is derived one of the best Dutch comedies, De Spaensche Brabander Jorolimo (1616) of Gerbrand Bredero. A German translation of Guzmán de Alfarache was published by Aegidius Alberitnus in 1615; both Lazarillo and Rinconete y Cortadillo were translated by Niclas Ulenhart in 1716, and in 1627 there appeared an anonymous version of the Pícara Justina. The Spanish tradition was followed by Martin Frewden in a continuation (1626) of Guzmán de Alfarache, but the only original picaresque novel of real value in German is Grimmelhausen’s Simplicissimus. The attempt to acclimatize the picaresque novel in Italy failed completely. Barezzo Barezzi translated Guzmán de Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes and the Pícara Justina in 1606, 1622 and 1624 respectively, and Giovanni Pietro Franco did the Buscan into Italian in 1634; but there was no important native
