About thirty years after his death, his sons, Parda and Luís Vicente, published a volume, already planned by the author, which brought together a significant part of the texts of his works – the Copilation of All the Works of Gil Vicente, printed in Coimbra and Lisbon by João Álvares in 1562. Rare are the texts published in pamphlet form in Gil Vicente’s lifetime that we know of today: Barca do Inferno, Maria Parda, Inês Pereira, História de Deos, Ressurreição de Cristo and Festa, and of these only the last is not also included in the Copilation.
Five hundred years after the first performance, INCM and the Centre for Theatre Studies of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon are preparing a five-volume edition of the Works, coordinated by José Camões and a team of researchers from the Centre. The work will be brought together in two large-format volumes, with only the edition notes. The third and fourth volumes will contain facsimiles of the 16th century editions (the 1562 Copilation in one, and the 1586 Copilation and loose leaflets in the other). A fifth volume will contain philological and complementary notes for understanding the texts, various indexes (of characters, historical and mythological figures, quoted texts), a glossary and a bibliography.
The aim is to produce an edition of the autos in the 21st century that is the result of rigorous philological research and systematic investigation of the Vincentian bibliography; to offer readers a transcription of the work following criteria that allow us to restore the production conditions of the autos in their historical moment. In this way, the aim is to recover the memory of the theatrical actions that gave birth to them, giving priority to the texts’ specificity as theatre objects, giving an account of what the phonetic reality may have been at the time of the author, using, as far as possible, the orthographic standard in force in 2002.
Garcia de Resende said of Gil Vicente: he was the one who invented it here and used it with more grace and more doctrine.
