An Index to the Poetic Vocabulary of the Spanish Comedia

Metamorphoseon. Recensuit J. Van der Vliet. Lipsiae , in aebibus B. G. Teubneri, 1887, 242-44. 4.See British Museum. General Catalogue of Printed Books. Vol. V. London: 1933, 570-75. 5.Cf. Antonio Palau y Dulcet. Manual del Librero hispano-americano. 2a ed. Tomo I. Barcelona : 1948, 403. 6.See the British Museum catalogue, op. cit. 578. Italian translations were made by Boiardo and Firenzuola. 7.Cf. Opere scelte di Agnolo Firenzuola. A cura di Giuseppe Fatini. Torino: UTET, 1957, 455. Five editions of Firenzuola^ translation appeared between 1550 and 1603. An Index to the Poetic Vocabulary of the Spanish Comedia by K.-L. Selig Univ. of North Carolina Concordances are certainly nothing new and both their usefulness and limitations have been amply recognized. In their general aim they differ significantly from a lexicon or an index to the poetic vocabulary of a particular author or an individual work. In recent years the research of Pierre Guiraud has again focused our attention on such research tools. The theoretical part of his work was established in his Les caractères statistiques du vocabulaire (Paris, 1954) and Problèmes et méthodes de la statistiques linguistique (Dordrecht, 1959 and Paris, 1960) and under his editorship a series of indices have been published which are devoted to the French Classical drama. (Guiraud a few years earlier published also a series of indices to the vocabulary of the Symbolist poets). There has been much mechanistic -nd positivistic scholarship devoted to the co-media (e.g. studies on versification, orthoepy, etc.) too well known to be enumerated here. It v. based on certain objective criteria hoping to give us research tools and reference works which may help us to deal with such problems as the attribution of authorship and the chronology of plays. Much of it may be necessary, but we are also aware that often this approach and method, while helping us to organize the total work of a given author or the genre, has also created a barrier that separates us from the poetic text and does little to help us understand the individual play. To quote Professor Gilman, "we really don't need to know more; we need to understand more". Overburdened as we are with accumulative, computative, and compilative scholarship, it may not be very appropriate to recommend more of it. Yet we know relatively little in precise terms of the poetic vocabulary of golden age authors. There are the well-known indices to Cervantes (Cejador ) and to Góngora (Alemany) . We have of course also the imaginative and sensitive critical studies on Góngora and other golden age poets by Dámaso Alonso. For the comedia Serge Denis has given us a fundamental book on the "lexique" of Alarcon and there have been excellent studies devoted to a particular category of vocabulary or image patterns of an author (E. M. Wilson on Calderón, Gates, Pabst, Dámaso Alonso on Góngora), to cite outstanding examples. (See also Mont óte, BRAE, XXVI-XXIX, and J. H. Farker , RR, XLIV). As we stated earlier, Professor Guiraud has established certain principles and norms for the preparation of his "lexiques". (This type of "lexique" is not to be confused with and is very different in method and scope from such studies as Albert Henry, Langue et Poésie chez Paul Valéry, Paris, 1952 and Gunnar von Proschwitz, Introduction a l'étude du vocabulaire de Beaumarchais, Stockholm, 1956 [Romanica Gothoburgensia, V] ) . In this country, Guiraud's work has been continued—some independently—by Professors Hartle and Bandy. Their norms apparently differ and have not been established satisfactorily for all critics (see Jeanne Varney Pleasants in Word, XII, 317-23, and Michael Riffaterre in Word, XII, 324-27 and in RR, L, 143-45; see also Jean Pommier —à propos of J. G. Cahen, Le vocabu5 laire de Racine, Paris, 1946—in FS, V, 33542 ). Many problems remain to be discussed and resolved: should we differentiate betweei. the so-called "mots-thèmes" and the "motscl és", and how? Are the words to be given in their context? Are accessory words (motsoutils ) to be included (Riffaterre, RR, L, 144: -"ces mots .... nous renseignent le mieux...