SOURCE: Kassier, Theodore L. “Cancionero Poetry and the Celestina: From Metaphor to Reality.” Hispanófila 56 (1976): 1-28.

In the following essay, Kassier stresses the influence of the conventions of cancionero verse on the seminal Spanish realist novel, the Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea.

The poetry contained in the Castilian cancioneros compiled in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, consolidated by Foulché-Delbosc in his Cancionero Castellano del Siglo XV,¹ unites the conventions of the Galaico-Portuguese, Provençal, and courtly love poetical traditions, as well as Petrarchian influences.² To date, the rôle of this poesía de cancionero in the Celestina has been studied only indirectly in critical works of great scope: as related to Calisto's character or anomalies in the first Act's setting in María Rosa Lida de Malkiel's La originalidad artística de La Celestina;³ from the point of view of narrow verbal coincidences in Castro Guisasola's...