El teatro de Claramonte y La Estrella de Sevilla (review)

68BCom, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Summer 1996) del libro, con una gran cenefa negra en la parte superior de las páginas. Por otro lado, se ha incluido una hermosísima sección de "Documentación gráfica " con treinta reproducciones a color de diversos grabados y páginas de los manuscritos. En fin, nos hallamos ante una edición de varios textos muy valiosos para la elucidación del acontecer y la fortuna histórica de los géneros menores barrocos. Aparte de las objeciones consignadas, que se refieren sobre todo a aspectos formales, se trata de una obra necesaria, editada con suficiente solvencia y que revela una gran dosis de erudición bibliográfica y archivistica dentro y fuera del teatro breve. Juzgamos que esfuerzos como éste contribuir án, si se acometen con suficiente frecuencia, a renovar la oferta de grandes colecciones de textos de teatro menor y ajubilar obras beneméritas pero anticuadas como la clásica y todavía inevitable de don Emilio Cotarelo. Héctor Brioso Santos Universidad de Sevilla Cantalapiedra, Fernando. El teatro de Claramonte y La Estrella de Sevilla. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1993. Cloth. 441 pp. Reviled as a plagiarist during his own lifetime, the Golden Age playwright , actor, and theatrical producer Andrés de Claramonte received far more mockery and disdain from his contemporaries than he did admiration. Those contemporaries, along with entire generations of equally dismissive Hispanists, would surely be taken aback by the leading role this formerly shadowy and marginal(ized) literary figure has come to play in recent debates concerning authorship and canonicity. Modern comediantes including Charles Ganelin, Frederick A. de Armas and Alfredo Rodriguez López Vázquez have sought variously to call critical attention to Claramonte's neglected extant plays and to claim for him the authorship of long-disputed canonical texts, among them El rey don Pedro en Madrid, El burlador de Sevilla and La Estrella de Sevilla. Femando Cantalapiedra is another prominent claramontista, whose 1990 study (El infanzón de Illescas y las comedias de Claramonte (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger) attributed El rey don Pedro en Madrid to the playwright on theoretical grounds which were subsequently confirmed by the discovery of an autograph manuscript. Cantalapiedra continues his efforts in El teatro de Claramonte y La Estrella de Sevilla, a work representing the most thorough examination to date of Estrella within the context of Claramonte's dramaturgy. Reviews69 Rodríguez López-Vázquez introduces this volume with an essay surveying the disputes that have surrounded the authorship of three canonical plays conceivably written by Claramonte: El rey don Pedro, El burlador, and Estrella. Long-established literary disdain for the playwright-producer, Rodróguez López-Vázquez asserts, has over and over again resulted in failures to evaluate Claramonte's possible claim to these works either seriously or objectively. This trend is apparent in the case ofEstrella, the paternity of which was first attributed to Claramonte by Sturgis E. Leavitt as long ago as 1931 and yet remains a subject for debate today. Deploring that bias, Rodriguez López-Vázquez declares the necessity for methodological rigor in order to resolve the identity of Estrella's creator. It is precisely such rigor which marks Cantalapiedra's approach to the play. This approach is a strikingly focused one; Cantalapiedra's own introduction to his analysis is a scant two paragraphs long and he dispenses entirely with any conclusions. By his own admission, he has only one objective in this book: "que el análisis se centra únicamente en las relaciones entre esta obra y el corpus dramático de Andrés de Claramonte" (1). With this end in mind, the author analyzes the text "escena por escena, y, en ocasiones, verso a verso" (1), beginning with the play's very first words as Sancho el Bravo enters Seville and concluding with the gracioso Clarindo's final speech to the public. Along the way, Cantalapiedra enumerates the myriad parallels of plot, theme, symbolism and metaphor shared by Estrella and Claramonte's other works, among which the critic includes four plays either formerly or currently attributed to Tirso de Molina: El rey don Pedro, El burlador, Los amantes de...