Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (review)

Last year was the 400th anniversary of the inclusion of Lope's short 389-line poem in the third (1609) edition of his lyric poems, the Rimas. A cycle of conferences and seasons of performances in Almagro were organized to celebrate this fascinating reflection on the state of dramatic theory at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Lope's decision to publish the poem appears to have been taken hurriedly, since it does not appear in the table of contents and is plagued by errors. Or it may be that Lope did everything with immodest haste. Most editors use the cleaner 1613 edition.

The poem is the record or echo of a discourse Lope gave before the Madrid Academy about his dramaturgy and the comedia nueva. It is a response to neo-Aristotelians, the canon and priest's critique of the comedia in Don Quixote, and anti-theatricalists who opposed the theatre on a variety of moral grounds. The critical history of the poem has departed from the notion of the text as an apology for the populism of Lope, for his apparent lack of respect for the precept of the drama of the Classical world. This ignores the keynote of irony that runs through the whole text. Characteristic of its complexity is the way he turns the metaphor employed to explain the generic hybridity of Spain's corrales, their characteristically tragicomic mode, and of the minotaur, monstrous fruit of Pasife's bestiality with Zeus in the form of a bull, into a reflection on how variety is delightful in nature and a reflection of life.

This edition by Enrique García Santo-Tomás is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of Lope's output available in easily accessible editions; another recent one by Felipe Pedraza Jiménez forms part of his multi-volume edition of the Rimas. García Santo-Tomás leaves the reader in no doubt about the riches of dramatic precept and theory from the period when Lope wrote and of Lope's own addition to the genre. The latter is carefully situated, first in relation to the Valencian world in which Lope's triumphant formula emerged, and secondly in relation to the history of its reception from the resurgent neoclassicism in later seventeenth-century France to the Romantic celebration of Lope's fecundity. The Arte nuevo is ultimately a performance whose contradictions and uncertainties demonstrate the shifting and multiple relationships of the theatre with authority 'en este tiempo', a phrase that proclaims its modernity and resistance to definition. It is 'arte', not 'el arte', an ambiguous term in any case, depending on whether it is read as meaning practice or precept. The section of the introduction in this edition that analyses the text takes up only 6 of its 110 pages, reflecting the erudite market at which it is aimed, although there is no doubt that it contains a treasure trove of reflections on poetics, literary history, theatre history, reception, the classical tradition in the Renaissance and Lope's life and work. Ultimately, as Lope himself wrote in the exordium to his speech 'oyéndola se pueda saber todo' about his dramaturgy; our role, then, is to listen attentively to these plays to decipher the art enclosed in each one in its own way.