El texto del 'Quijote': preliminares a una ecdótica del siglo de oro (review)

Cervantes and Don Quixote stand in the same relation to Spanish culture as Shakespeare and his plays to English culture. Both produced works of universal genius that transcend time and space, and within the same period, since, interestingly, they were contemporaries of each other, dying on the same date of 23 April 1616 (though not on the same day, since England and Spain followed different calendars then). In addition, Shakespeare is credited with having written with John Fletcher a lost play Cardenio (performed by the King's Men in 1613) based on a character from Part One of Don Quijote. But there the similarities end. For if Shakespeare has benefited from centuries of performance and careful textual editing, the same is not true of Cervantes's masterpiece. To an English reader it will seem strange that at the start of the twenty-first century and some four centuries after its publication (in Madrid in 1604/05) we still do not have a truly critical edition of Don Quijote.

It is to remedy in part this lamentable state of affairs that Francisco Rico has dedicated the last ten to fifteen years of his scholarly endeavours to bringing the editorial practices of Anglo-American textual bibliography into a Spanish context. Most of this work is collected together in the present volume, El texto del 'Quijote', which provides to date the best analysis of the text of Don Quijote. The book is accompanied by some seventy-seven photocopied plates and ends with a group of six excursos, recent articles by Rico on the text of the novel that complement the main text.

The early chapters are dedicated mainly to instructing a Spanish readership on what happened to an author's original once it set foot in the print shop. That is to say, we follow the journey from the author's original manuscript to the copy made by a professional scribe for use as the printer's copy (original de imprenta, in Spanish), from which the compositors would prepare the printed text to be checked both by themselves in a first proof and then by the print shop's own corrector in subsequent proofs, to finally the printed text ready to be bound and sold. Since every stage in this process is subject to human error (the professional scribe fails to understand a particular word or phrase of the author's manuscript original; the compositors fail to read correctly their copy produced by said professional; the corrector fails to spot an error in the proof), the probabilities of a text being produced without major or minor errors in it are small. At the same time, the presence of the author in the print shop overseeing the production of his text could also lead to errors appearing: the author would often make changes to the printer's copy even after (as in the case of Spain) it had gone to the Council of Castile to be approved and signed off page by page (to prevent precisely these last-minute and unapproved alterations); the author might spot an error during the actual printing and have the press stopped, the forme removed, and the error put right (since the gatherings already pulled would not be thrown away but would end up being bound indiscriminately with the rest, no two copies of the work will ever be the same). To those familiar with the practices of early modern print shops none of this will come as a surprise or a novelty, and it is precisely because no two copies from the same edition of a printed text will ever be identical that in order to produce a truly critical edition one has to consult all the available copies of a particular edition, draw up lists of variants by forme, come to a view as to their...