ABSTRACT
Well before the middle of the nineteenth century, the figure of the ‘clásico’ had become a stock character in Spanish literature. Satires of the (normally rigid and rule-bound) type—particularly when counterpoised against the more ‘natural’ and free-spirited ‘romantico’—grew increasingly more frequent as the debates over Ancient vs Modern literature heated up once again. Espronceda’s contribution to the discussion, ‘El pastor Clasiquino’, appeared in the first issue of El Artista in 1835, 1 where he captured with brilliant satirical flourish the dubiously-educated simple shepherd (‘“Nada como las reglas de Aristóteles”, solía también decir Clasiquino a veces, que aunque pastor, había leído más de una vez las reglas del esagirita’) who spent his time ‘recordando los amores de su ingrata Clori, en un valle pacı´fico, al margen de un arroyuelo cristalino’. Six years later, when Antonio de Iza Zamacola published his one-act comedy, El clásico y el romántico (1841), 2 the author’s note concerning the protagonists’ sartorial choices suggests that the ‘clasico’ and the ‘romantico’ had already taken shape as fixed types in the popular mind: ‘Los trages de Gervasio y Federico deben exagerarse algún tanto, para caracterizar con más perfección sus diversas inclinaciones’, the implication being, of course, that those ‘inclinaciones’ would be well-known to the audience. Gervesio, the ‘clásico’, is portrayed as boring, not only in his dress, but also in his writing and his habits: Escribe en pedestre prosa, Viste como te he pintado, charla más que un abogado, es cantárida, venturosa, y es, en fin, un avestruz que en casándose promete trocarse en buey. (10)
