El mito de Edipo en la tragedia barroca española. Alejandro Arboreda: "No hay resistencia a los hados." (review)

Reviews193 durante el reinado de Felipe II: aspectos bibliográficos") discusses the only three dramatic texts printed in the Corte during the reign of Felipe II: Torres Naharro's Propaladla, Jerónimo Bermúdez's Primeras tragedias españolas, and the Comedia de la vieja hechicera (appropriately, for this collection, this play was also titled La Philippina) by Andrés de Alarcón y Rojas. In all, the present edition offers the reader an excellent look at various aspects of the theater of the "Generación del '98 avant la lettre" (125). Although theatrical documentation from the period is scant in comparison with that ofthe later Hapsburgs, this volume illuminates many issues that are key for future investigations in the social, cultural, and literary phenomena ofthe Spanish stage in the time ofFelipe II in its own right, and as a precursor to the theatrical forms and formulas ofthe seventeenth century . Vincent Martin University of Delaware El mito de Edipo en la tragedia barroca española. Alejandro Arboreda: "No hay resistencia a los hados." Introducción, edición y notas de Pasqual Mas i Usó y Javier Vellón Lahoz. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.219 pp. This book is an edition, with introduction and notes, of Alejandro Arboreda's play on the Oedipus myth, No hay resistencia a los hados. The introduction comprises a total offifty-eight pages, the play text ninety -six, the textual variants five, and the explanatory notes thirty-one pages. The editors, Pasqual Mas i Usó and Javier Vellón Lahoz, have provided Comedia scholars another tool in expanding our knowledge of Arboreda and the late Valencian Golden Age dramatists. Arboreda's play exists in only two extant manuscripts, one dating from the eighteenth century (Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, MS.16.8 18) and the second from the nineteenth century and included in the volume, Teatro antiguo valenciano (Biblioteca Municipal de Valencia, TAV: 2950-144). The editors have chosen the eighteenth-century manuscript (A) as their base text. While this appears to be a good decision, readers deserve to know more about the nature ofboth manuscript texts than the 194BCom, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2003) skimpy descriptions provide (57-58). In addition, the editors should have determined what relationship, if any, exists between these two versions. Since neither manuscript is autograph and the editors have not demonstrated any direct relationship between either text and the author's original , I have found the editors' decisions regarding modernization and regularization of the play-text and variant readings to be unnecessarily artificial . For example, double consonants, as in desassosiegos, the ç sibilant , and quanto over cuanto have been retained, while b/v, as in llave/llabe, have not been regularized, and the h oíhoy has been supplied in brackets. It would have been most helpful ifthe editors had described the spelling practices found in the respective manuscripts and then had regularized and modernized the base text according to the practices that have now become standard in most comedia editions (see the studies ofI. Arellano and J. Cañedo). This would have eliminated, I believe, the necessity to establish a rather confusing apparatus with two sets of asterisks to indicate variant readings (see the editors' norms, 57-58), since a good number of these variants are in fact only spelling differences with no phonetic value. The editors would have done well to state clearly in their norms that brackets indicate text, and not just stage directions, supplied by them (see v. 2655). They employ the symbols with several readings (e.g., w. 1476, 1906, 2905, 2978), presumably to indicate an illegible, deleted, or masked letter, but they do not indicate this in their norms. These procedures would have made the reading ofthe text much simpler and more understandable. The variants are published after the explanatory notes in a separate apparatus. I have found the variant apparatus difficult to read in some instances, while in others some of the readings marked with double asterisks have no entries, and in still other cases the variant readings have been printed out ofsequence. There are, unfortunately , occasional typographical errors throughout the book. The play-text itself is good reading for scholars interested in the...