The first item of interest is that this is a framed poem, a frame created by the first and the last stanzas. The content of the first stanzas is an interrupted narrative, a bit of gossip that involved a gentleman and his Portuguese manservant. In the interruption, mention is made of Inés, the poet's interlocutor and companion. The last stanza abandons the purported telling of the story of the Portuguese manservant altogether; the teller is sleepy, he can no longer care, or perhaps better said, he no longer needs to tell it.

The voice curtails the story in order to direct itself to the ritual that is about to take place, that of a succulent supper. The celebrant of this ritual directs his attention to the items on the table much as a priest might review the articles on the altar before beginning to say mass. As in a mass, bread and wine are essential. By slicing bread the ceremony of supper commences, and it will end with the lines "The supper is over" (Ite misa est), "the table cloths may be removed." Before the eyes of the reader the victuals parade in the order dictated by the gastronomy of the times; the hors-d'oeuvres, and the appropriate wine make an early appearance. But this order is also interrupted so the poet may sing the praises of the tavern. The social phenomenon of the tavern was, according to the Spanish critic Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo "ennobled" by Alcázar's poetry (Rodríguez Marín 80). In his poetic tavern, Inés was the undisputed Queen, and Alcázar her "buffoon" (the role of the buffoon has been discussed by Francisco Márquez Villanueva); it represents a concrete manifestation of what R. Jammes has defined as a "magic circle" in which "that which is forbidden … may be tolerated" ("lo vedado … puede ser tolerado"; La risa 9). Through its disrespect for societal prohibitions, the tavern is a variant of the-world-upside-down, an eternal Carmina Burana in which a goliardic bonhomie dictates the terms of the game; the tavern is both a cultural pre-text and a rhetorical pretext for an escape from "good taste" and the prevailing ethical code. And best of all, the joys of this little unorthodox paradise are accessible to all who can pay for them! "They measure my drink, they serve it, / I drink, I pay, and I leave happy." In other poems it becomes evident that the purchasable pleasures of the tavern are not limited to food and wine; Inés is also a commodity.

After the second interruption comprising the mention of the tavern, the poet proceeds with the ritual, relishing every new delicacy, and lamenting only how little everything lasts: "it all ends in a hurry." When the teller of the story returns to the story of the manservant of the Portuguese gentleman, he is, literally, full: full of food and wine, and also full of enjoyment.

The zigzagging structure of the narrative, which takes the reader from the interrupted gossiping to the food, the account of which is also interrupted by the encomium of the tavern only to return to the food and later to the story that is left unfinished, suggests a lack of organization, a mind that refuses to concentrate in any linear fashion. The "disorder" of the poem provides a sense of arbitrariness, of casualness, of that which is joyfully and intentionally disarrayed.

The poem is practically devoid of jokes. The only construct that could be seen as one occurs in the 20^th stanza, when the voice asks, "Didn't you put an oil-lamp over there / How come there are two of them?" Of course, with the "damned drinking," the drunkard sees two lamps instead of one. But the poem's tone, its atmosphere, is decidedly festive, and one of the techniques Alcázar has employed is commonplace in the burlesque epics. Two procedures are essential to the way burlesque epics (whether they be Pope's Rape of the Lock, Lope de Vega's Gatomaquia, or Tassoni's Secchia Rapita) make fun of their subjects: the elevated treatment of vile themes, and the vulgar treatment of elevated subjects. Alcázar utilizes the first technique throughout his poem; the food at the tavern is in no way exotic, but the cheese is "excellent," and the blood sausage is "illustrious and rich," "a blood sausage for courtiers," "seated next to the King."

The poet will resort to the same procedure in order to add a blasphemous note to the ambiance of his tavern: three times he invokes the name of god in vain ("By God") and in another instance he swears ("Oh, by Our Lord") in praising the tavern; when Inés follows his advice and drinks the well-aged wine, he commends her ("God save you"). Additionally, the lexicon of the devout is mixed in with the descriptions: the salad is "heavenly"; Inés should give her "blessing" to the new wine; and the poet tells us that "It is my devotion / To bless what I drink"; "Don't you adore … the blood-sausage?" he asks. With all these blessings and devotions it is not surprising that the wine in the pitcher is a "lofty, celestial liquor." The vocabulary emanating from religious practices became mundane in the Renaissance; many a love poem would employ "to adore "in a non-theological sense. In the Neoplatonic scale from the divine to the feral, "to adore" could signify, at its highest manifestation, the love of God; in descending order, the blinding love between two lovers; and at the bottom of the scale, it could have the coarse meaning it has here: simply something to satiate our appetite. "To bless" follows the same pattern: it could mean the sacramental gesture of a priest, the making the sign of the cross by a believer, or simply the tasting of the wine, a "blessing" that is gloriously profane.

There is another passage in which a ritual dear to many Andalusians might be being mocked. This has to do with the way the blood sausage arrives at the table:

In Andalusia —— and most certainly in Seville, Alcázar's home town —— during Holy Week the church authorities parade the religious images that are normally kept in the churches. It is not uncommon for he people gathered for the procession to complement aloud the images. When the response is rhymed it constitutes a saeta (the Spanish word for "arrow"). Susan Verdi Webster has pointed out how the common folk's religiosity can be translated into "a variety of vocal responses" to the circulating of their favorite saints; sometimes these responses may be quite profane. In this case, Alcázar's praise, which has the contours of a saeta, is not in any way coarse, but the recipient of the praise, she who is a "great lady worthy of veneration," smug and beautiful, is just a virginal sausage. Alcázar's saeta is prompted not by devotion, but by salivation.

It is also noteworthy that this blood sausage is made of out of pork. The Diccionario de Autoridades (The Dictionary of Authorities) explains the blood sausage could be made out of the "tripe of the pork, mutton or some other animal, filled with blood and cooked with spices" ("tripa de puerco, carnero u otro animal, rellena de sangre y guisada con especias"). Alcázar could choose the type of sausage he wanted in his poem, and he deliberately chooses pork. This is not uncommon in his poetry, and we have discussed elsewhere his choice of "ham" in another poem (Comicidad). As has been indicated, the poet's ancestors were Jewish, and this gives rise to some questions: is the sausage made of pork because it was important to Alcázar to remind the listeners in the Spanish tavern that this food was not forbidden to him, since he too was a Christian? Or is it rather that in the amoral ambience of the tavern we may ignore and deride all prohibitions?

With respect to the eroticism of the piece, it is obvious that there is nothing overtly sexual or even provocative in this poem. There is, however, a certain suggestive power in the description of the dinner, and the listener/reader experiences a sensation akin to watching the voluptuous banquet in the classic film Tom Jones. Let's see how this experience is transmitted in the poem.

In other Alcázar burlesque poems, as we have indicated, it is clear that Inés' favors may be rented, and that her company often satisfied the sexual instinct. The relationship between food and sex is as old as civilization itself; Soledad de Montalvo has dated it back to the Sumerians, who held banquets and participated in sacred prostitution, as the Israelis did. In studying a poem by another Spanish Renaissance poet, Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, Olympia González has noted that in the Mendoza work "to sit down at the table and cohabitation are forms of sharing that may be compared to each other, one being analogous to the other" ("reunirse a la mesa y cohabitar son formas de compartir que muchas veces se describen comparablemente, siendo una analogía de la otra"; 239). The woman in this poem, according to González, "enjoys eating more than making love" ("se siente más a gusto comiendo que haciendo el amor"; 240). The relationship between Bacchus and Venus is clearly stated by the Spanish Renaissance aesthete and theorist Alonso López Pinciano. Although El Pinciano did not value highly minor works of humor, he does give a "scientific" explanation for the nexus between both instincts in his Philosophía antigua poética (Ancient Poetic Philosophy). In discussing "appetite" as an interior sensitive potency, he explains that "[Appetite] has its site and main dwelling in that which is common to all men, from where it grows and sends its seeds to other parts, to the reproductive organs and the stomach —— where it affects the areas pertaining to Venus as well as gluttony, and the other areas of concupiscence" ("[El apetito] tiene morada y asiento en el sentido común, de cuyo nace y crece y envía sus semillas a otras partes, a los miembros de la generación y al estómago —— adonde mueue a la Venus y a la gula y las demás pasiones de lo concupiscible"). In another Alcázar poem, he tells us how his dining pleasures and Inés are practically undistinguishable; to him, "It is all the same: Inés, ham, [again, pork] and eggplants with cheese" ("Todo es uno, Inés, jamón, y berenjenas con queso"; 544). For this poet in his imagined tavern, food and sex truly are one.

The presence of Inés, then, constitutes the other element in this banquet, subtly pointing to the "other pleasure." Inés, is, of course, a willing participant, and her male table companion exhibits a certain degree of courtesy towards her: "But let's dine, Inés / If that's all right with you," "God save you, since you wisely / Follow my advice." And she is treated with familiarity and affection, as revealed in the last stanza: "as I was telling you, Inés, my sister." All they do in this poem is eat. The act of eating, however, consists in placing —— inserting —— food in the digestive tract of a person, and when one eats "so well and with so much pleasure," "the empty guts" "swell" and our hearts "burst with happiness." There are two references to the moment when food "enters" the person "the dark olives are going in," and the order to the blood sausage to reduce itself: "In you go, sausage, Nice and tight, / the path is narrow." Following the trajectory of the morsel, the poetic voice advises Inés not to water the wine, "So your belly won't get upset." The Spanish word vientre has more than one meaning: it can mean "belly," but it also means "womb," and "pregnancy" (Casell's). The polyvalence of this term is a reflection of its triple semiotic dimension; it is, at the same time, the stomach, the uterus and —— in the Hail Mary —— the virginal womb of Mary; Jesus is "the fruit of her womb." A woman's vientre is the Alpha and Omega, the destination of food and the place where life is originated, and the goal of this banquet has been to fill Inés' belly.³

But perhaps the most erotic sensation the poem produces is the poetic voice's desire to satisfy Inés. This voice requires her active participation step by step, and repeatedly entices her to partake in the olfactory and tasting pleasures ("And this garlicky salmagundi,/ Doesn't it smell wonderful?") and praises her when she acts uninhibitedly ("You helped yourself well"; "So, Inés, do as you usually do; / Take from the full wine-skin / Six drinks"). The happiness of the poet seems to depend entirely on hers, and he can only judge hers by his own:

By the time the poetic voice reaches the truncated story of the Portuguese gentleman and his servant, the juicy piece of gossip is no longer so appetizing. Not only because we have dined and drunk so well, but because we have shared and enjoyed each other, we have lived our own life to the fullest in every sense of the word, and we longer needed someone else's in order to feel happy.⁴ One of the main purposes of gossip is to establish an intimacy between the gossipers, and here it is achieved through more material means, the joys of the supper. These shared moments, this intimate encounter, is the greatest pleasure of the poem. As James W. Brown has noted,

In the poet Góngora's treatment of ordinary food items Robert Jammes sees "the mocking rejection of a naive and idealized view of life" ("el rechazo burlón de cierta concepción ingenua a idealizante de la vida"; 159). In contrast, Alcázar's simple delicacies affirm sensuality, affirm carnal pleasure, and thereby affirm at least that aspect of life. The most succulent victual in his Joyful Supper is a delectable immanence that will transitorily satisfy the senses, creating a poetic milieu where wine will suffice, so there is no thirst of the transcendental. "Let's leave it for tomorrow," the last verse, predicts that there will be a tomorrow. The supper hasn't been in any sense a "last supper," and this tomorrow is not likely to bring about repentance or a rejection of the pleasures of the flesh; it will be just another tomorrow without epiphanies, in which, with any luck, there will be another supper with Inés, and another day without sacrifice —— human or divine —— in the refuge of the dolce far niente.

The analysis of one poem is not sufficient, of course, to lead us to any conclusions concerning the period in which it was written, or even the sub-genre of comic/erotic poetry. But it certainly offers a good example of the type of relief that the burlesque provided from the dictates of an inhibited and repressive society. It flaunts coy rebelliousness, mockery of the sacrosanct, and a good dose of just plain fun. The spirit of the tavern reigns supreme.

1 The studies addressing the burlesque-erotic in Spanish literature of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period are by now too numerous for acknowledgment here. Among a few that are essential to our improved understanding and first on the list as a precursor to these other studies is Donald McGrady's edition and study of Cristóbal de Tamariz's "novelas," followed by the compilations of erotic poetry by Pierre Alzieu, Robert Jammes, and Yvan Lissorgues, first with the Floresta (see Works Cited below) and later with the Poesía erótica. The same year the Spanish edition of the Poesía erótica appeared, Ignacio Arellano Ayuso published his two-volume study of Francisco de Quevedo, and José L. Labrador Herraiz and Ralph DiFranco began a collaboration that would later on bring about the publication of several cancioneros (poetic anthologies) rich in pertinent material, including the important works of Melchor de la Serna. Soon after appeared Robert Jammes' study of Luis de Góngora. The collection of essays gathered by Luce López-Baralt and Francisco Márquez Villanueva have been equally important, as they detect aspects of the erotic from a cantiga de escarnio (a mocking song) dating back to Alfonso X (13^th century) to the writings of Gabriel Miró (1879-1930), with contributions by contemporary artists such as Juan Goytisolo and Severo Sarduy. Between 1989 and 1990, three studies of significance were published, by Agustín Redondo, Malcolm Read, and Paul Julian Smith, concerning issues of gender and physicality, and in addition, a series of studies were published by the journal Edad de Oro 9 (1990). In 1992, Luce López-Baralt published her finding of the Kama Sutra in Spanish, and in 2000, María José Delgado and Alain Saint-Saëns published another indispensable collection of essays in Lesbianism and Homosexuality. Adrienne L. Martín, who has already examined Cervantes' burlesque sonnets, is now finishing a study with the title Sexuality and Transgression in Early Modern Spanish Literature.