El rey don Pedro en Madrid y el infanzón de Illescas. Attributed to Lope de Vega. Critical Edition of the Text of the Primary Tradition (review)

REVIEWS El rey don Pedro en Madrid y el infanzón de Illescas. Attributed to Lope de Vega. Critical Edition of the Text of the Primary Tradition. Ed. Carol Bingham Kirby. Teatro del Siglo de Oro, Ediciones Criticas, 91. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1998. 510 pp. The lengthy title of this edition is a fair reflection of the meticulousness with which Carol Bingham Kirby has approached her task as editor. She states at the outset that she worked on it over 20 years, beginning with her Ph.D. dissertation, directed by the late William C. McCrary, who passed to her materials of his earlier efforts at editing the play. She has put those years of work to good use. The result is indeed what she represents it to be: a model application of the neo-Lachmannian, genealogical approach to the edition of a Golden Age play, which she believes indicated for any work such as this that exists in at least three independent, nonauthorial witnesses. Although, as I have written elsewhere, I no longer share her belief in the validity of this approach for editing Golden Age plays, our theoretical difference does not lessen the quality and value of the contribution Kirby makes. She describes with clarity and absolute conviction the "scientific" character of this approach, the objective methodology employed to draw up the stemma of textual transmission, and the positivistic evidence on which she based her conclusions regarding the most likely authorship of the play. She calls her text a "reconstruction" of the absent authorial archetype, valid if readers remember that any reconstruction includes choices determined by the rebuilder's aesthetic preferences as well as purely objective data, both well documented in this case. Kirby determines the primary tradition to consist of Biblioteca Nacional Ms. 16.639 (N, her base text), a shorter Biblioteca Municipal manuscript (with an added folio naming Andrés 335 336BCom, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2001) Claramonte as author), and a version printed in Parte 27 of the Partes extravagantes of Lope and also as a suelta bound in the British Library copy of Lope's Décima Séptima Parte. The secondary tradition, descended from N. includes three sueltas that attribute the play to Caderón and the text in the "Barcelona" and Madrid printings of Calderón's apocryphal Quinta Parte. She also situates in her stemma Moreto's refundición. El valiente justiciero, and Hartzenbusch's edition of RDP, from which all subsequent printed versions derive. Kirby discounts the utility of stylistics in determining authorship of this play, variously attributed to Calderón, Claramonte, Lope, Tirso, and Vêlez de Guevara. Using "objective" evidence— primarily comparative versification patterns, orthoepy, and other quantifiable poetic aspects, in conjunction with comedia lists, biographies of the possible authors, and relevant historical data— Kirby concludes that Lope could be the author of the play, but that no definitive determination based on objective data is possible. Alfredo Rodríguez López-Vázquez and other less polemical proponents of Claramonte authorship may not be deterred, but subsequent debates should take cognizance of the massive amounts of data Kirby has compiled, evaluated, and cogently synthesized . She wisely confines most of it to lengthy footnotes, keeping the principal line of her argumentation clear. Kirby's introduction includes an excellent synthesis of the play's historical background in the career of Pedro I of Castile, including the major events of his reign, fourteenth- to seventeenth -century histories, ballads, legendary material, and the 19 comedias in which Don Pedro appears. Particularly interesting is her consideration of how royal discourse from the Catholic Kings forward sought to justify monarchical power inherited from the defeat and execution of Pedro by his illegitimate half-brother Enrique of Trastamara without legitimating regicide as an admissible method for achieving change. She organizes her study ofversification in a useful chart, divided by "cuadros" within each act, and her analysis of the utility of each metric form to the content and mood transmitted is generally persuasive. Kirby follows with a discussion of the staging of El rey don Pedro, both the history of recorded performances and Reviews337 her interpretation, shaped by José Ruano's work, ofhow the play might have...