(from Sp. estribo: ‘stirrup’; Old Fr. estrabot; It. strambotto; Provençal estribot).
A Spanish genre of poetic composition (AAbbba), originally known as estribote, that served as a conclusion to another poem; contrary to commonly held opinion, its character was not always satirical. The term ‘estribote’ is first documented in the writings of the 13th-century Castilian poet Gonzalo de Berceo, but the Andalusian poet Mucáddam is said to have coined, as early as about 900, the synonymous Arabic term márkaz (‘stirrup’) for the distich constituting the initial refrain of the Zajal (known in Spain as the zéjel), whose metrical structure was identical with that of the estrambote. Variant forms of the word estribote appear throughout Romance poetic literature from late 12th-century Provençal poetry to French, Italian and Hispanic literature of the 14th century, adopting different strophic combinations but maintaining the popular character of the form. Whether the Romance lyric developed from the zéjel or from medieval Latin prototypes is controversial. The metrical pattern of the estribote, cultivated also under different names (dansa in Provence, virelai in France, cantiga in Spain and Portugal, and laude in Italy), is characteristic of such estribotes as those by Juan Alvarez de Villasandino in the Cancionero de Baena, a collection of Castilian verse (1445; ed. J.M. Azaceta, Madrid, 1966). In his Prohemio al Condestable de Portugal (1445–9) the Marquis of Santillana used estrambotes to refer to musical settings of such verse, which as independent pieces with numerous variations came to be called villancicos by the turn of the century. The table of contents of the Cancionero Musical de Palacio, however, lists a group of frottolas under the heading estrambotes, probably as a result of the translation of the Italian term strambotti, by which those pieces were generally known; later in the 16th century the title-page of book five of Fuenllana’s Orphénica lyra (1554) also designates as estrambotes, sonetos and madrigales a group of works in Italian. In the 17th century, however, the term estrambote was applied to an irregular stanza added to a poem of regular structure such as the sonnet. In a detailed description of an outdoor popular festival (romería) in the province of Asturias, Gaspar de Jovellanos (1744–1811; see Nocedal) twice equated estrambote with estribillo: first as a two-line refrain sung after each quatrain of a romance while men dance, and later (while women dance) as a four-line refrain whose first verse, ‘Hay un galán de esta villa’ (‘There is a bachelor from this village’), uses the name for that kind of dance.
Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid,1732/R1963 as Diccionario de autoridades) [pubn of the Real Academia Española]
H.R. Lang: ‘The Original Meaning of the Metrical Terms Estrabot, Strambotto, Estribote, Estrambote’, Scritti varii di erudizione e di critica in onore di Rodolfo Renier (Turin, 1912), 613–21
C. Nocedal: Obras publicadas e inéditas de D. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (Madrid,1918), 298–302
H.R. Lang: ‘The Spanish Estribote, Estrambote and Related Poetic Forms’, Romania, xlv (1918–19), 397–421
H.R. Lang: ‘Las formas estróficas y términos métricos del Cancionero de Baena’, Estudios eruditos in memoriam de Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (Madrid, 1927), i, 485–523
R. Menéndez Pidal: Poesía árabe y poesía europea con otros estudios de literatura medieval (Buenos Aires, 1941, 6/1973)
A.R. Nykl: Hispano-Arabic Poetry (Baltimore, 1946)
D. Alonso: ‘“Cancioncillos” de amigo mozárabes’, Revista de filología española, xxx (1949), 297–349
G. D’Aronco: Guida bibliografica allo studio dello strambotto (Modena, 1951)
R. Menéndez Pidal: ‘Cantos románicos andalusíes, continuadores de una lírica latina vulgar’, Boletín de la Real Academia española, xxxi (1951), 187–270
A. Roncaglia: ‘Di una tradizione lirica pretrovadoresca in lingua volgare’, Cultura neolatina, xi (1951), 213–49
R.M. Ruggieri: ‘Protostoria dello strambotto’, Studi di filologia italiana, xi (1953), 321–424
S.M. Stern, ed.: Les chansons mozarabes: les vers finaux (kharjas) en espagnol dans les muwashshahs arabes et hébreux (Palermo, 1953/R)
P. Le Gentil: Le virelai et le villancico: le problème des origines arabes (Paris,1954)
T. Navarro: Métrica española (Syracuse, NY, 1956)
R. Menéndez Pidal: Poesía juglaresca y orígenes de las literaturas románicas (Madrid, 6/1957)
K. Hager: Die bisher veröffentlichten Harğas und ihre Deutungen (Tübingen, 1960)
M. Frenk Alatorre: Estudios sobre lírica antigua (Madrid, 1978)
Y. Malkiel: ‘Spanish Estribillo “Refrain”: its Proximal and Distal Etymologies’, Florilegium hispanicum: Medieval and Golden Age Studies Presented to Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, ed. J.S. Geary (Madison, WI, 1983), 29–43
J. Corominas: Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (Madrid, 1989)
E. Ferrari-Barassi: ‘Frottole en el Cancionero musical de Palacio’, IMSCR XV: Madrid 1992 [RdMc, xvi (1993)], 1482–98
ISABEL POPE/EMILIO ROS-FÁBREGAS