Cervantes y Lope de Vega: Historia de una enemistad y otros estudios cervantinos (review)

In this collection of six of his recent studies Felipe Pedraza explores the literary backdrop to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in which two of the major figures of Spanish letters wrote and published their most important works. Only the title study has not been previously published but the re-edition of the rest of these articles is justified by their quality, by the coherence of the whole and because some of the original studies are not easy to access outside Spain. They are given a short introduction by the author and have been, in most cases, lightly reworked. A consolidated bibliography rounds off the volume.

The initial (eponymous) study points first to the similarities in the backgrounds of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, for example in their lack of a university education, and traces the history of their mutual respect through eulogistic sonnets and the like up until at least 1602. Pedraza speculates that it was 'la presunción de Lope' at the dawn of the seventeenth century that awoke 'el escepticismo satírico' (34) of the older writer and argues that, whether or not the figure of Don Quijote was intended as a direct parody of Lope, the younger man must have experienced the novel as another barbed attack on him. The author's tracing of further references each writer made to the other goes over old ground, but it does so with a fair-mindedness and common sense which is characteristic of the volume and, indeed, of Pedraza's scholarship. Both writers, whatever posterity has made of them, no doubt behaved at times with pettiness and at others with generosity towards each other. Equally, each learned from his rival and their mutual influence can be traced, at least in part.

The second study, 'Cervantes y Lope: a vueltas con la génesis del Quijote' takes one strand of the Lope-Cervantes enmity and examines it in more detail. The author feels that it is an over-simplification to see, as one scholarly tradition has it, Cervantes' masterpiece as emerging from a desire to parody Lope's romanticized relationship with Elena Osorio. It has, at its root, a 'combinación de la burla y la nostalgia' (74), as Cervantes also laughs at himself in creating his best-known protagonist.

The remaining studies, though apparently more narrowly focused on Cervantes' works, never lose sight of Lope as a background presence to them, basking in popular success and its concomitant financial rewards. The first of these situates Don Quijote very usefully within the literary controversies of the period, and finishes by arguing that Persiles y Sigismunda is explicable as a return to writing for a more elite readership, after Cervantes had earlier responded, even if 'a regañadientes' (103), to the almost inevitable pull of the new mass market for literature. Far from being the return to an old romance form, which his posthumous work has often been taken to be, in the Persiles 'el viejo novelista está olfateando cierto futuro literario' (127). 'El Quijote, el realismo y la realidad' is another corrective study, the most entertaining and perhaps the most useful of these half-dozen articles to Don Quijote scholars. Pedraza is (wittily but passionately) impatient with scholars who misunderstand the nature of Cervantes' realism in Don Quijote by reading it as an attempt to reproduce truth, rather than as an element of the author's literary creativity. This article is a must for those who teach and study Cervantes' masterpiece.

The final two studies relate to Cervantes the playwright (although not the entremesista) and they constitute a serious challenge to scholars, most obviously represented by Canavaggio, who have tended to view the novelist as a dramatist who was ahead of his time. The first asserts that just because his admirers have tended to assume that Cervantes 'había de acertar en cuanto emprendiera' (172) an undue attention has...