Samuel Pepys's Spanish Plays (review)

Reviews213 scholarship, not about just one playwright but about the entire age. This book, no doubt, will influence critical study on many of the other lesserknown Spanish dramatists. Henryk Ziomek University of Georgia WILSON, EDWARD M., and DON W. CRUICKSHANK. Samuel Pepys's Spanish Plays. London: The Bibliographial Society, 1980. 196 pp. Samuel Pepys, the noted seventeenth-century English diarist, was an avid book collector. At his death in 1703, he left his nephew John Jackson a library of 3,000 volumes which included a collection of chapbooks and which, after Jackson's death in 1726, passed to Magdalene College in Cambridge. In 1921, Stephen Gaselee examined Pepys's library collection and called attention to a volume of Spanish plays found among the chap-books (Pepys 1553). The purpose of Wilson and Cruickshank's Samuel Pepys's Spanish Plays is to provide a complete description of the twenty-six separate seventeenth-century sueltas and two vejámenes in Pepys 1553 and to identify printers and establish dates of publication. The unreliability of the texts of most seventeenth-century partes (due largely to the low printing standards prevalent in the heyday of the comedia), and the rarity of comedia manuscripts (particularly holographs) point to the necessity, in the compilation of definitive and reliable comedia editions, of taking into account variant readings from all possible contemporary sources, including sueltas. Most seventeenthcentury sueltas, however, are undated, bear no imprint, and lack a title page. Pirate printings were very common, not only in the partes, but even more so in the printing of the sueltas for which the standards were even more relaxed, and plays were often ascribed to the author who appealed to the tastes of the reading public at the time. The editor of the comedia is thus faced with a formidable task. Important collections of seventeenth-century sueltas exist in many libraries, but they are geographically distant from each other and, in many instances , are not properly catalogued. An acceptable standard for the bibliographical description of the sueltas, including publication informa- 214 BCom, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter, 1 984) tion for undated sueltas, is a necessary first step so that scholars may know what texts to use in the preparation of an edition. Over the years, the late Professor Wilson and, more recently, Professor Cruickshank have developed, with precision and ingenuity, a reliable methodology for the description and dating of sueltas. Samuel Pepys's Spanish Plays is a laudable continuation of this endeavor. After examining in detail the printing practices in Seville from approximately 1477 through the seventeenth century, the authors conclude that historical information alone is not sufficient to identify the printers of Pepys's plays. They proceed then to survey the typographical evidence. In a remarkable piece of meticulous research (Chapter iii, «The Printers of Pepys 1553 and Their Type»), the authors list «all the typefaces and typographical ornaments used in the sueltas, noting wear, damage, adulteration, and, where relevant, body size» (p. 40). They identify the printers who used this material particularly during the years 1670-1684 (when the sueltas in Pepys 1553 were most likely printed, as shown in Chapter i), and bring this information together in a set of tables grouping typefaces (roman and italic), metal ornaments, and woodblocks. These tables are followed by a series of lists that give the reader an overview of the method followed by the authors in identifying the printers of each suelta. The incidence, within the same suelta, of several typefaces and ornaments known to have been used by a particular printer allow the authors to pinpoint the approximate date of printing. In the fourteen pages that close this chapter, there appears a series of illustrations of type samples and ornaments found in the sueltas under study. Chapter iv («The comedia suelta: History of a Format), although described by the authors as «notes,» is one of the most complete and authoritative studies on the printing history of the suelta. It contains some information that is already known (in most instances in previous publications by Wilson and Cruickshank themselves), but it is organized with such care and discretion that even the informed bibliographer will profit from its reading. Chapter ? («Bibliographical...