Conclusion

The burlesque sonnet has been an effective, efficient, and extremely popular vehicle for comicity since its invention in thirteenth-century Tuscany. From that time up through the Italian Renaissance it served primarily as a parodic corrective to the sweet love and metaphysical sonnets of the Stilnovist and Petrarchan schools. Rather than expressing the sublime intimacies of the human soul, the burlesque sonnet mocked such feelings to exalt life's more earthy side: physical love, food and drink, and the pursuit of material wealth. It also established itself as a preferred medium for political and humanistic satire, for obscene and nonsense verse, for adoxography, and for personal invective.

Cervantes respected and admired this brief, rigidly structured (and hence difficult) form: two thirds of his extant poems are sonnets. He is the first Spanish poet to break with the previous Italian burlesque sonnet tradition characterized by rather violent invective and satire, by gratuitous vulgarity and frivolous themes designed to capture an easy laugh. Instead he turns to humor—the self-conscious expression of humanistic folly—to produce reflective, complex, and exemplary verse. Never one to slavishly follow inherited norms, he either rejects or adapts to his own purposes the stock topics inherited from the Italian tradition.

Cervantes's early sonnets add new vigor and intellectual depth to the burlesque. They parody certain kinds of literature (the comedia nueva ); they satirize political and social institutions (by exposing the defects of Spain's power structure and mocking several of its human types: the valentón, the false hermit, the soldier); and they air the national obsessions (appearances, ostentation, arrogance, hypocrisy) that characterize Golden Age Spain. Our author abandons the gratuitous obscenity of the Italian tradition in favor of a covert eroticism that always serves a critical, exemplary purpose. Never strident or bitter, Cervantes repudiates cruel satire to adopt more compassionate

humor in pointing out our complex, paradoxical, and quintessentially human (imperfect but vital) nature and our follies.

The burlesque sonnets that frame Part One of Don Quixote develop further both the humor and the satire of the independent sonnets. They contain a skillful combination of several types of comicity, all perfectly interwoven and reconciled in each sonnet. These comic modes correspond, in turn, to the poems' various levels of meaning: as a reflection of current literary practices, as a microcosm of the novel, and as a vehicle for personal invective.

In the Quixote sonnets Cervantes exploits Erasmian irony, ambiguity, and paradox in joining his novel to the current of humor exemplified by the literature of madness. The buffoonesque structure provided by the sonnet framework has important hermeneutic implications for Don Quixote . The sonnets do, in fact, contain the same humor that is the cornerstone of the novel. And it is a humor based on madness. As ultimate author of both the sonnets and the novel, Cervantes has transformed himself into the court fool whose function within society is to criticize and punish the ills of the "nobility," whether this nobility be social (the power structure) or literary (Lope de Vega). The humor of Don Quixote is fundamentally serious, but it is still fun. The novel is, indeed, a "funny book," but its humor has a profound and liberating significance.

An undercurrent of invective flows just below the surface of many Cervantine sonnets. This type of comicity is full of ironic insults and sarcasm, double entendres, and erotic innuendo. It provides a level of personal meaning from which Cervantes plays practical jokes on his contemporaries. Such personal satire comes to the fore in the group sonetadas written against Lope de Vega by Cervantes and his friends. These poems reveal a Cervantes who is much more human than the figure generally placed high atop the Renaissance literary pedestal. In them we find a man both willing and extremely capable of venting less-than-exalted sentiments. At the same time, we see his proficiency at a modality of Golden Age "fool" literature designed not only to castigate a victim but, more importantly, to entertain an audience in the know.

Cervantes is an accomplished burlesque sonneteer. He bril-

liantly manipulates style, tone, and language to create well-designed, well-executed poems. Obscure only when purposefully so, Cervantes's verse is lucid yet profound with the multiple levels of meaning that result in great part from the linguistic polysemy. His burlesque poetry abounds in linguistic variety, incorporating words and expressions from all registers, from the highest to the lowest.

Our poet uses both high (mock-heroic) and low burlesque. High burlesque is the ironic praise lavished upon Don Quixote and Sancho in the Quixote encomiums; low are the vulgar apostrophes that undermine the seriousness of Felipe II's tomb in Seville. And he even creates an additional modality of burlesque. In La Entretenida Cervantes sacrifices some of his own quite beautiful love sonnets to parody. In a perfect synthesis of the comic and the serious, the lovely and the grotesque, we find the ironic expression of Cervantine humor. And, finally, irony is the hallmark of all Cervantine burlesque verse. Only its complex ambiguities can capture the absurdities as well as the multifarious personality of the age and the place.

Cervantes's principal contribution to the burlesque tradition is humor: the self-conscious expression of madness through the use of irony and paradox. Humor brings about the intellectualization and subsequent legitimization of the comic mode of poetry. This ultimately frees it from its traditional marginal status and facilitates the great explosion of burlesque and satire we see in Spain's Baroque generation.

These words touched on only one small area of Cervantine poetry. These brief sonnets are few in quantity, but splendid in quality. They contain a whole world of significance. Many more such poetic worlds remain to be explored. Cervantes was and still is Spain's greatest prose humorist; his burlesque sonnets are worthy poetic counterparts. It is time that we recognize, as did his beloved knight, that in poetry as well as in prose, "Decir gracias y escribir donaires es de grandes ingenios [To give expression to humor and write in a strain of graceful pleasantry is the gift of great geniuses]."