Cartas, documentos y escrituras del Dr. Frey Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635) (review)

A comprehensive gathering of contemporaneous ephemera by and about Lope de Vega has been long overdue. Krzysztof Sliwa's undertaking is a welcome contribution to this end. His two-volume compilation assembles 1,031 texts in chronological order, ranging from Lope's baptismal entry (6 December 1562) to the burial records of his last surviving daughter more than a century later. Geographical and onomastic indices provide a useful reference to the letters and documents according to date.

The collection's ample scope, relative to its concise physical dimensions, is its most commendable feature. The full documentation of Lope's trial for libel, for example, comprises 37 pages as opposed to 77 in Tomillo and Pérez Pastor's standard edition of the Proceso. Improving upon the less wieldy epistolarios lopescos of the past, Sliwa offers a more inclusive and more manageable presentation of Lope's correspondence as well. Faulty editing, however, greatly impairs the collection's usefulness. Most errors are typographical – inadvertent transpositions of letters, careless repetitions or omissions – and are easily recognizable as such. Others are the result of flawed transcriptions, as comparisons with source texts confirm. The sheer frequency of inaccuracies (I gave up keeping a record of them when my list exceeded 100) impedes reading. Here I will note only those which are most likely to cause misreadings.

They are as follows: the phrase 'de qué e se entretiene' should read 'de qué vive e se entretiene' (31); 'si puerta' should read 'sin puerta' (43); 'pícanos' should read 'picaños' (83); 'çelos como esquiba' should read 'çelosa como esquiba' (94); 'estbo' should read 'estubo' (96); 'Lope de debe' should read 'Lope le debe' (124); 'i ni i guerra ni quieren que la aya' should read 'i ni ai guerra ni quieren que la aya' (309); 'nos sabe de qué' should read 'no sabe de qué' (328); 'el menor venano' should read 'el menor veneno' (329); 'vuelto el mí' should read 'vuelto en mí' (397); 'vida hay sido' should read 'vida haya sido' (420); 'pudiera parece' should read 'pudiera parecer' (453); 'ánimo me hasta baste' should read 'ánimo me baste' (455); 'sierre' should read 'siempre' (502); 'el Marqués de Guadal cazar' should read 'el Marqués de Guadalcázar' (197); 'una dama destinada' should read 'una dama desatinada' (238).

The last two instances appear in editorial synopses which preface most of the primary texts. They are instances of errors which occur in spite of the fact that Sliwa has simply copied these summaries (unacknowledged) from Ángel Rosenblat's edition of the Cartas completas (Emecé, 1948). In nearly every case, Sliwa reproduces Rosenblat's summaries word for word, except for redundantly and unnecessarily expanding the name 'Lope' to 'Lope Félix de Vega Carpio'. Unfortunately, this wholesale appropriation also has the effect of duplicating Rosenblat's inaccuracies. The scriptural allusion Lope makes in a 1616 letter to the Duke of Sessa, for example, is not to a 'pasaje del Evangelio de San Juan' as Sliwa, following Rosenblat, would have it (336), but to the third chapter of St John's Apocalypse. When Sliwa attempts to augment Rosenblat's summaries, he creates additional opportunities for error. To clarify the subject of Lope's letter of 3 September 1605, Sliwa lifts Rosenblat's notes verbatim but for one addition: whereas his predecessor simply identifies the motive of the Toledan festivities as the 'nacimiento del príncipe Don Felipe' (I.39), Sliwa specifies that it is the 'nacimiento del Príncipe Don Felipe III' (126). Consideration of the date and the full title of Lope's Relación of the event would have obviated this mistake. When a given text in the collection does not appear in Rosenblat's edition and thus lacks a ready-made synopsis, Sliwa's own prefatory notes prove to be far...