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  • La niña de Gómez Arias by Luis Vélez de Guevara
  • Christopher Kozey
Luis Vélez de Guevara, La niña de Gómez Arias. Edited by William R. Manson and C. George Peale, introduction by María Carrión, Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs 2015. 229 pp.

In 1597, Luis Vélez de Santander was a young page in the service of Cardinal Rodrigo de Castro, Archbishop of Seville. Vélez, who graduated as a bachelor of arts thanks to a scholarship from the University of Osuna, had just penned the comedia, El Príncipe transilvano, the first of over four hundred works for the Spanish stage that the native of Écija would write during his lifetime. After several years' service as a soldier in Italy, Vélez found himself in Madrid in 1608, and like many other aspiring courtiers, he dropped his mother's surname for that of an ostensibly noble ancestor: Guevara. Henceforth Luis Vélez de Guevara, he would explore these anxieties of ethno-religious identity and social status in another, little-known play, La niña de Gómez Arias (1608–1614), which is the most recent addition to Juan de la Cuesta's series of modern critical editions of Vélez de Guevara's works.

La niña de Gómez Arias is being brought to a wide audience for the first time in the present volume, edited by William R. Manson and C. George Peale, with a critical introduction by María Carrión. This drama, which recounts the depredations of a poor Andalusian nobleman in 1492, is a welcome addition for critics familiar with Vélez de Guevara's corpus; moreover, as Carrión's introduction demonstrates, the work stands on its own as a potent interrogation of the fraught religious and sexual codes of Golden Age Spain. [End Page 525]

This Juan de la Cuesta edition of La niña de Gómez Arias includes a new transcription of the play itself, complete with notes indicating textual variations between the three loose, unnamed copies of the work printed in the seventeenth century that served as the editors' primary sources. As C. George Peale indicates in his excellent "Bibliographical Study" prefacing the text of the comedia, the editors' goal was to correct the errors of older transcriptions while celebrating those scholars' contributions to our understanding of Vélez de Guevara's work. For instance, in reference to Ramón Rozell's edition of the play, Peale writes: "su anotación…pese a las erratas tipográficas, es una verdadera tour de force filológica" (Peale 74). Peale and Manson have made their own philological mark on the play's reception—the critical bibliography that precedes the text, the explanatory notes accompanying it, and the index that follows will be of great use to specialist and non-specialist readers alike.

In addition to Peale and Monson's precise rendering of Vélez de Guevara's text, María Carrión's "Estudio introductorio" offers this edition a far-ranging critical assessment of its import and implications. At 59 pages, "La niña de Gómez Arias de Luis Vélez de Guevara, teatro casi imposible" is no mere introductory note. Carrión is well versed in the scholarship of the play, but hers is both a welcome addition to and departure from a critical corpus that limits itself to a more strictly philological project. Carrión's study is broken into two main sections—"Descripción" and "Interpretación"—the first of which is a diligent précis of the comedia's plot and metrical composition. Carrión recounts how the poor hidalgo Gómez Arias seduces doña Gracia, the sister of his friend, only to break his promise of marriage. In her despair, Gracia completely submits her will to that of Gómez Arias, who then sells her as a slave to Abenjafar, ruler of the fortress at Benamejí. Through recourse to Queen Isabel and the happy coincidence of the proposed mission with that of the Reconquista, Catholic forces liberate Benamejí and stay Abenjafar's hand before he can assault Gracia. With the Queen's blessing...

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