El médico de su honra (review)

In an informal poll asking colleagues to name the comedia they most enjoy teaching, the title that came up consistently and enthusiastically was Calderón de la Barca's El médico de su honra. This complex and controversial work continues to hold tremendous sway over students—both graduate and undergraduate—and scholars, to judge from the articles and editions that continue to appear with some regularity. The edition by Donald McGrady, reviewed here, is one of the most thorough and student-friendly of the many already available, including D. W. Cruickshank's 1981 edition, the bilingual edition by Dian Fox and Donald Hindley (2007), and the "Edición Crítica" by Ana Armendariz Aramendía (2007).

Once one gets beyond the generic cover with its incongruous Romantic landscape, McGrady's is indeed an attractive edition. The text is nicely laid out and easy to read, and the notes appear after the text of the play rather than as footnotes, so as to not clutter the page and distract from the pleasure of reading. The unencumbered layout of the text helps to bring certain scenes and passages into sharper focus. The notes themselves are extensive, even exhaustive, explaining everything from idioms to grammatical usage to cultural allusions. One could argue that certain terms do not, in fact, need to be explained. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not understand that "frívolo" means "vano," or that "en mi vida" means "nunca." Nevertheless, undergraduates should benefit from the meticulous clarifications. There are, in fact, two sets of annotations, "Notas" and "Notas suplementarias," the latter consisting of more in-depth commentary, including references to critical articles. There are also two separate bibliographies, one on the scholarship of the play and the other referencing the works cited in the notes. While this duplication attests to the editor's thoroughness, the effect is somewhat redundant, since many works appear in both.

The introduction includes a general account of the date of composition, a helpful description of the staging, and an examination of the sources for El médico, including the work by the same name that has been wrongly attributed to Lope (an appendix includes a summary of the plot of the earlier play). The longest part of the introduction is dedicated to tracing the critical fortunes of the play and to a discussion of the character and themes, and it is here that the introduction comes up short, in my opinion. Although the bibliography is comprehensive and up-to-date, the overview of critical approaches to the play seems limited and even dated. For one thing, McGrady completely ignores in his discussion some of the more interesting approaches to the play, including the feminist and political readings by critics such as Ruth El Saffar, Georgina Dopico Black, and Dian Fox. McGrady, in fact, takes many of the play's commentators to task for not paying attention to "la obra misma" and basing their interpretations on elements that, to him, are extraneous to the play. Unfortunately, he does not follow his own advice, offering partial, even eccentric, interpretations of the characters. For example, he tells us that Mencía "pone toda su ilusión en un casamiento [con Enrique] que ella sabe es imposible" (38). There is no evidence of this anywhere in the text. Similarly, he asserts at least three times (in the introduction and in the summaries of the plot at the end of the notes to each act) that Mencía would have eventually given in to Enrique's sexual advances. Indeed, McGrady sometimes talks about Mencía as if she had in fact committed adultery. For example, he tells us that Mencía's playful teasing of Gutierre on the matter of Leonor, his former flame, is a "truco favorito de las adúlteras" (36). While McGrady's view that there is little admirable in Mencía may be correct, these assertions are unsustainable, and much of the...