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Reviewed by:
  • La comedia segunda de Los agravios perdonados by Gaspar Aguilar
  • Jennifer Darrell
Aguilar, Gaspar. La comedia segunda de Los agravios perdonados. Ed. C. George Peale. Santa Barbara: Publications of eHumanista, 2016. E-book. Pp. 128. ISSN 1540-5877.

C. George Peale unites past and present in his edition of La comedia segunda de Los agravios perdonados, embracing modern technology while demonstrating sensitivity to the cadences of Spain’s Golden Age. Peale’s digital edition anticipates the future of scholarship; the electronic format not only makes this lesser-known comedia widely accessible for the first time, but also allows links to other online resources to be embedded within the text. Peale only partially takes advantage of this capability, as hyperlinks are both sparse and unmarked, but given that the electronic publication of academic works is in its fledgling stage, Peale’s recognition of the value of digital editions is laudable, even if he does not fully exploit their potential.

Unfortunately, there are several typographical errors in the text, ranging from minor issues with hyphenation and diacritical marks to a glaring mistake in the running head, which replaces “agravios” with its antonym “desagravios.” Given the reluctance of some scholars to take electronically published texts as seriously as their printed counterparts, more care might have been given to proofreading so as to not provide fodder for those predisposed to doubt its quality. [End Page 495]

Peale has two primary objectives for his edition: to make the work accessible “al mayor público posible” (24), and to propose a new theory for the play’s authorship. These goals frequently seem to be at odds, as each necessitates different editorial choices that counteract rather than complement each other. Peale is most successful in his arguments regarding the play’s attribution. While Los agravios perdonados has traditionally been attributed to Luis Vélez de Guevara (1579–1644), Peale asserts that it was not Vélez, but rather the Valencian playwright Gaspar Aguilar (1561–1623) who penned the play between 1601 and 1607.

Peale has dedicated the majority of his career to Vélez, having prepared critical editions of over forty of the playwright’s comedias, collaborating with William R. Manson until Manson’s death in 1984. The quality of these editions is inconsistent at best; previous reviewers have noted numerous errors and questionable editorial choices in Peale’s work. Nevertheless, the intimate familiarity with a playwright’s voice that comes with decades of singular focus lends credence to Peale’s assertions that Vélez did not write Los agravios perdonados. Peale’s meticulous cataloging of the versification of this play in comparison with that of other works by both Aguilar and Vélez provides compelling evidence in support of his hypothesis.

This in-depth metrical analysis, however, occurs at the expense of a broader introduction to the playwright and his work. Though Gaspar Aguilar is not widely known beyond a subset of Golden Age specialists, Peale provides only his birth and death dates and city of origin, remitting the reader to external sources for any further biographical information. Likewise, there is little discussion of the historical and intellectual context of the work. The lack of background information in the critical apparatus makes the edition more appropriate for specialists, rather than the wider public Peale claims to have in mind.

Peale’s writing lacks focus, and following his train of thought from one point to the next can be difficult. For example, Peale raises the possibility of an ironic political subtext, but rather than examine this theme in Los agravios perdonados, Peale explicates the multiple levels of political significance in another work by Aguilar, La expulsión de los moros de España por el Rey Don Felipe III (1610). He quotes the text at great length—eighty verses—but drops the topic without discussing the cited octaves or drawing any connection to Los agravios perdonados. Instead, Peale begins to comment on the stylistic defects of the comedia, though this topic is also given short shrift before he declares that “juicios críticos han ser de [sic] para otras ocasiones” (7).

Peale’s research is meticulous and comprehensive, but the quantity of citations is...

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