A Reappraisal of Tirso's Relations to Lope and his Theatre

Bulletin Of The Comediantes Vol. XVIII Spring, 1966 No. 1 A Reappraisal of Tirso's Relations to Lope and his Theatre (Continued) Ruth Lee Kennedy The University of Arizona Tirso, on his part, must have re sponded gladly for the admiration he felt for Lope and his comedy in 1620-22 recognized few limits. Just how beautiful Gabriel Téllez considered Lope's creation at that time has, I believe, been summed up for us in the oftquoted passage of El vergonzoso en palacio (II, xiv), one that was almost certainly penned not around 1611, by which date the play itself was undoubtedly in existence, but instead in 1620 when it was put on by the noble actors of Toledo. It is a controversial point, and since the date of El vergonzoso 's composition is pivotal for any discussion of Tirso's relation to Lope, I must now develop at some length the reasons that have led me to such a conclusion. Tirso himself, in giving the circumstances under which El vergonzoso en palacio was put on at Buenavista, tells us (ed. cit., I, 136) this play had been "celebrada con general aplauso (años había) no sólo entre todos los teatros de España pero en los más célebres de Italia y de entreambas Indias . . . ." In this passage of defense Cotarelo y Mori saw Tirso's answer to Mariana's "virulent diatribe" of 1609, De spectaculis .29 Doña Blanca de los Ríos argued that the play was revised between March and October of 1621 (I, 298): "Para mí es indudable que El vergonzoso en palacio . . . fue redactada dos veces por su autor: la primera en 1611 y la segunda en 1621 (entre marzo y octubre, como indicaré)." Some pages earlier (p. 291), she had spoken of "la más que probable refundición, o mejor, intencionados retoques que el autor puso en su célebre farsa en 1621 antes de entregarla a la imprenta." Yet it does not seem to have occurred to her that Tirso's defense of the Lopean theatre may have been inserted at the time it was revised. Instead, she will use, as the very cornerstone for her argument that Cervantes was at war with Tirso (because of his support of Lope), this same passage of the Vergonzoso (p. 295) : "Importaba consignar . . . que El vergonzoso 'marcó fecha' en la guerra por el teatro, la cual se concentrò desde aquel año de 1612 [sic] hasta el de 1616, es decir, desde El vergonzoso al Persiles, pasando por todas las obras de Cervan^ tes . . . ." Much rests, then, on when this passage was written. As Prof. Americo Castro pointed out many years ago, in his second edition of El vergonzoso en palacio™ there are in the Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid two manuscripts of this play. At first glance they would seem to create a serious hurdle for any assumption that Tirso added this passage when revising his play in 1620-21; in reality, if they do not actually give support to this assumption, they at least in no way negate it. The two manuscripts, nos. 16912 and 14996, are, as Prof. Castro indicated, copies one of the other. No. 14996 has all three acts written in the same hand; in No. 16912, act II is in the same neat script as are the three of no. 14996, whereas acts I and III are in a much looser, sprawling 1 BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES Published in the Spring and Fall by the Comediantes, an informal, internatonal group of all those interested in the comedia. Editor William M. Whitby Romance Languages University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721 Editoh Pro Tem Karl-Ludwig Selig Romance Literature Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14850 Business Manager Karl Gregg Romance Languages University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721 Subscription: $2 a year. hand. In both manuscripts there is found in the first act a letter dated July 15, 1611—instead of the March 12, 1400, found in the princeps. The copyist of 1611 presumably wrote down, in absent-minded fashion, the day, month, and year of the time he was making the copy rather than the historical one...