En torno a la imagen literaria de Alfonso V de Aragón: Fortún García de Ercilla y su traducción castellana del De dictis de Antonio Beccadelli. Edición y estudio

Alfonso V of Aragon (1396-1458), who won from his contemporaries the title “the Magnanimous”, became one of the most brilliant fifteenth century monarchs, not only because of being a shrewd politician and king of one of the main kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula, but also due to his cultural activity. Thanks to him the Aragonese territories were extended throughout the Mediterranean up to Naples, where he established a magnificent court that turned into maybe the most remarkable centre of intellectual vitality and development of Humanism. His patronage attracted a considerable number of leading poets of the period, as well as the most important Italian humanists. The presence of so many writers and outstanding scholars, together with the academic environment that the monarch encouraged, promoted an enormous literary production in four languages: Latin, Spanish, Catalan and Italian. Additionally, the valuable library gathered by the king and the Academy founded in order to spread knowledge illustrate part of his intellectual concerns. This way, through his love to literature and generosity to men of letters, Alfonso the Magnanimous boosted the culture of that time. The principal protagonist in the cultural activities of the circle of erudites formed around the sovereign was Antonio Beccadelli, called Panormita (1394-1471). He, one of the most prominent personalities of Italian Humanism, assumed the role of main royal advisor. His work De dictis et factis Alphonsi regis (The sayings and deeds of king Alfonso), which will be studied in our dissertation, became a very popular text about Alfonso’s personality, as a kind of biography based on anecdotes of the Magnanimous’ life by way of exempla to be imitated. The success of these episodes lasted for a long time and they are appreciated even nowadays. The work was valued as specula principum and had great impact in sixteenth century, when De dictis was republished several times and translated from Latin into Spanish. One of these translations, the one by Fortún García de Ercilla, caught our interest since it is in a manuscript signed by Ercilla himself and this version is still unpublished...

‘You, my body, and my mind, one of these will go’: Madness as Disguise in Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Endgame

ithin the wide topic of disguise in literature, we could signal a subcurrent which can be found in a number of literary texts: the idea of madness as a disguise, i.e. the creation or invention of a ‘false self’ as a mask which is presented to the world and which conceals the real self. In The Divided Self (1960), R. D. Laing deals with the “personality, false self, mask, front or persona that (...) [schizophrenic] wear” (73). Using as a basis Laing’s theories on schizophrenia and the creation of a false-self system, we will analyze two works by Samuel Beckett: Murphy and Endgame, where we find the uses of madness as disguise in a series of ways: through the usage of ‘disguised’ language (what we could refer to as schizophrenese) which acts as a mask for real meaning; through odd ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour on the part of the characters (which screens real intentions), and, mainly, through the creation of a ‘false self’ which acts as a disguise and barrier between the inner self and the real world. These two works by Samuel Beckett, where real intentions and meanings are continuously concealed and disguised in a desperate attempt to preserve the inner self, lend themselves to an analysis of madness as disguise, precisely the one we attempt to carry out in our paper.