SOURCE: Sousa, Ronald. “‘Vos outros tambem cantai por vosso uso acostumado’: Representation of the Popular in Gil Vicente.” In Literature among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age, edited by Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini, pp. 116-31. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Sousa examines Vicente's depictions of both upper-class characters and peasants, as well as the language peculiar to both groups.

The words of my title—“Vos outros tambem cantai por vosso uso acostumado” (You too sing, according to your custom)—are said by Fé (Faith), the representation of Christian belief, to the shepherds Bras and Benito at the end of Gil Vicente's Auto da Fé (Play of the Faith).¹ The play, a slight one of some 330 lines, was presented to the court of the Portuguese king Manuel after that court had celebrated Christmas matins in the year 1510.² Like much of Vicente's early “pastoral-religious” theater, it...