Plot
The main characters of the Galatea are Elicio and Erastro, best friends and enamoured with Galatea. The novel opens with her and her best friend, Florisa, bathing, talking of love. Erastro and Elicio reveal to each other their desire for Galatea, but agree not to let it come betwixt their friendship. Eventually, all four of them begin their journey to the wedding of Daranio and Silveria, along which, in the pastoral tradition, they encounter other characters who tell their own stories and often join the traveling group.
The vast majority of the characters in the book are involved primarily in minor story lines. Lisandro loses his love, Leonida, when Crisalvo mistakenly kills her instead of his former love Silvia. Lisandro avenges Crisalvo in the presence of the main party. Astor, under the pseudonym Silerio, feigns attraction for Nísida’s sister Blanca in order to avoid the scorn of Nísida’s lover Timbrio, who dies following the confusion present after a successful duel against his rival Pransiles. Astor’s grief thrusts him into hermitage, waiting to hear from Nísida. Arsindo holds a poetry competition betwixt Francenio y Lauso, which is judged by Tirsi and Damón, lauded by many within the novel as some of the most famous poets of Spain, and is determined to have no single winner. The wedding has controversy as Mireno is deeply in love with Silveria, yet Daranio’s wealth guaranteed him the hand of Silveria.
These stories sometimes have characters that cross over, resulting in the sub-plots being intertwined at times. For example, Teolinda, whose sister Leonida played in an integral role in separating Teolinda from her lover Artidoro, finds Leonida much later with a group of soldiers. The fame of Tirsi and Damón instantly connects them with the hired wedding bards, Orompo, Crisio, Marsilio, and Orfenio, as well as the teacher Arsindo.
Read more about this topic: La Galatea
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)