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Quevedo, who had obtained his copies of Luis de Leon's verses from Manuel Sarmiento de Mendoza, a canon of Seville cathedral, did his share as editor by writing two prefaces, one addressed to Sarmiento de Mendoza, and the other to Olivares who was manifestly expected to pronounce against Gongorism.
From the early part of the seventeenth century, Spanish prose became infected with that pedantry and affectation already spoken of as Gongorism, or "the cultivated style;" and from this time, everything in prose as well as in poetry announced that corrupted taste which both precedes and hastens the decay of a literature, and which in the latter half of the seventeenth century was in Spain but the concomitant of a general decline in the arts and the gradual degradation of the monarchy.
It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the world—it is hard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, saved our poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, and allegory—it is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceived and written such lovely episodes as those of the ‘Idylls of the King,’ so full of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-blood characters into symbolic abstractions.
It may please those who pretend to culture without possessing even education; but this aristocratic affectation has no roots and it is doomed to wither swiftly, as one fad is ever fading away before another, as Asianism, euphuism, and Gongorism have withered in the past.
For some reason not very obvious this collection of verses was not published till 1631 when it was issued by Quevedo, who hoped that it would help to stem the current of Gongorism in Spain. The poems, printed forty years after the author's death, appeared too late to affect the public taste. Góngora himself had died in 1627, but his influence was undiminished.
There is abundance, indeed overabundance of ridicule of affected styles, and quips, with which the literature of the day was crammed: call it Gongorism, Euphuism, or what you please. It was not even necessary for the author to "have access to the Chronicles of Monstrelet." Perhaps it will be conceded that Love's Labour's Lost is not a play which can easily be attributed to Bacon.
Olivares, however, had no reason to love Quevedo, and was resolved to take no active part in what he doubtless regarded as a scribblers' quarrel. Gongorism pursued its way unchecked. Quevedo's edition, though incomplete and disfigured by certain errors, was reprinted at Milan during the same year , and then all interest in Luis de Leon flickered out for a while.
But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote, although he yielded too much now and then to the passion for gongorism and euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the nature of his genius to be influenced by the contemporary passion for allegory.
Among his poetic works appears a whole series of historic romances, written by way of ridiculing that species of composition. Lobo stood alone, in the sixteenth century, in his efforts to improve the prose of his country. Gongorism had, meanwhile, introduced bombast and metaphorical obscurity, and no writer of eminence arose to attempt a more natural style, till the end of the seventeenth century.
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