Miguel de Cervantes: Comedias y tragedias by Gómez Canseco, coord Luis (review)

For cervantistas in general and especially for those interested in the full-length plays of Miguel de Cervantes, the two-volume Real Academia Española edition, coordinated by Luis Gómez Canseco, is a superb tool for reading and research. Timed to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, the edition is complete, systematically organized, and as critically sound and as varied in scope as one could wish. Volume 1 contains Cervantes's prologue, the texts of the eight comedias (with copious and detailed notes), and three manuscripts belonging to the period 1580–86: El trato de Argel, Tragedia de Numancia, and La conquista de Jerusalén por Godofre de Bullón. The last of these plays, attributed to Cervantes, is an adaptation of Torquato Tasso's epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata (1581). The editors of the individual plays deserve to be recognized. They are Fausta Antonucci, Alfredo Baras Escolá (2), Sergio Fernández López, Ignacio García Aguilar, Luis Gómez Canseco (2), Valentín Núñez Rivera, María del Valle Ojeda Calvo, José M. Rico García, and Adrián Sáez. Each has done a rigorous job with care and skill. Volume 2, labeled "Volumen complementario," is filled with an abundance of additional information that incorporates analyses, historical notes and commentary on Cervantes's theater, plot summaries, explanation of the critical apparatus and criteria, and other materials, together with a laudably comprehensive bibliography. The collaborators are those named above, plus Marco Presotto, Debora Vaccari, Martina Colombo, and Beatrice Pinzan.

Cervantes's plays warrant this painstaking treatment, from the perspective of literary history and of evaluation, both aesthetic and thematic. Cervantes writes of the success of his early plays, but there is little or no documentation of public response to his youthful ventures into drama. Sadly, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses bear the subtitle of "nunca representados." The writer's dramatic efforts fall between the sixteenth-century attempts to emulate classical structures and the "comedia nueva" of Lope de Vega. Utterly overshadowed by Lope, Cervantes makes his disappointment obvious in the thinly veiled attack on his rival in the dialogue between the priest Pero Pérez and the canon from Toledo in Don Quijote, 1:48. Cervantes's plays themselves are worthy of discussion and, it could certainly be argued, worthy of praise. A patriotic allegory, La Numancia, the most celebrated of Cervantes's plays, juxtaposes the inhabitants of the town with the Catholics of imperial Spain, in an act of theatrical prefiguration. The work has stronger ties with classical tragedy than with Lope's "new art of writing plays." Similarly, Cervantes's four plays on captivity (El trato de Argel, Los baños de Argel, La gran sultana, and El gallardo español) place the abstract concept of religious sacrifice within the parameters of the stage, and, on the whole, their design does not resemble that of Lope's comedias. Perhaps the most archetypal of Cervantes's plays is Pedro de Urdemalas. As in the case of many plays in the "comedia nueva" mold, there is a dual plot, but in Pedro de Urdemalas the connection is conceptual—built around questions of identity—rather than formal. The link is analogy, not contiguity, unlike the interdependent stories of Rosaura and Segismundo in Calderón's La vida es sueño, to cite a notable example. In his later plays, Cervantes cedes to reality, that is, to the reality of Lope's enormous popular and critical triumphs. In El rufián dichoso, the personified Comedia admits, "Los tiempos mudan las cosas / y perficionan las artes" (vv. 1229–30; 1:413), and in other plays Cervantes seems cede to shifting standards and to satirize, if somewhat gently, the conventions of the competing style.

Over the centuries, critics have more often maligned Cervantes's comedias than praised them. With prominent exceptions, directors regularly...