The Spanish Drama Collection at the Ohio State University Library: A Descriptive Catalogue (review)

374BCom, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Winter 1996) Hence, readers unfamiliar with Hebrew will have only the vaguest notion of how these words should be pronounced. In spite of the above reservations, I recommend this book enthusiastically , because it gives the reader a rare glimpse ofa significant aspect of Spanish Baroque literature that has hitherto been unduly marginalized and excluded from standard anthologies. Michael McGaha Pomona College Arizpe, Victor. The Spanish Drama Collection at the Ohio State University Library: A Descriptive Catalogue. Prologue by D. W. Cruickshank . Teatro del Siglo de Oro: Bibliografías y Catálogos 7. Kassel : Edition Reichenberger, 1990. ix + 224 pp. The comedia suelta, that most peculiar Spanish publishing phenomenon (Boyer), was introduced in the sixteenth century and survived well into the nineteenth. Printed —at least from the latter part of the seventeenth century— in a quarto-in-fours format ("cuarto sencillo") on a body of small pica ("lectura chica") with no separate title page and after approximately the year 1700 bearing a serial publication number, it reached its heyday in the eighteenth century when the number of titles published extended into the thousands. While many were linked to the performance of a particular Golden Age comedia, a large number were printed to meet the demands ofthe reading public still attuned to the dramatic style of the previous century and they proved to be a commercial success in the hands of such enterprising publishers as the Orgas in Valencia and the Quirogas in Madrid. Although the importance of seventeenth-century sueltas in the preparation of comedia editions has long been recognized, recent research has called attention to some distinguishing characteristics in later sueltas and remarked on their relevance for the study of the printing history of the unbound editions of single plays. In this latter group we find Arizpe's description of the manuscript markings which appear in some of the sueltas in the Ohio State collection. To my knowledge, Professor Arizpe is the first to include in a catalogue of sueltas a description and classification of these markings. They display prompters' notations, register ownership or identify the seller, or simply show by a number the order the play occupied in a collection. The most striking notations, however, Reviews375 are those made by the printers or editors in the preparation of new editions . Arizpe has singled out ten such sueltas originally published in Valencia or Barcelona (with one exception, Tercero de su afrenta printed in Salamanca) and used as cast-off copies by the Quirogas in Madrid to produce editions in the 1790s. All contain a manuscript notation at the end of the type "Reimprímase en la forma acostumbrada" and some extensively edited copies bear the signature of the editor (Isla?). The number "2000" which appears also at the end in El huérfano inglés (Barcelona : Carlos Gibert y Tuto, n.d.), Piedad de un hijo vence la impiedad de un padre, y realjura de Artaxerxes (Valencia: Viuda de Joseph de Orga, 1765), and Tercero de su afrenta (Salamanca: n.p., n.d.) seems to indicate the number of notes or number of copies to be printed. This is an important assumption, since, as Arizpe notes, no prior documentary evidence had existed to determine the customary number ofsueltas in a particular press-run, although it had been guessed to be around 1 500. As all these marked copies seemed to be the original castoffs used by the Quirogas , Arizpe thinks that it is safe to assume that this is the number of copies intended to be issued by this publisher (p. 9). In a separate index (p. 219), Arizpe includes, besides the cast-off copies , a complete inventory of the marked copies in the collection: those characterized by added verses; by Anibal's annotations (the copies described in this catalogue were donated by Mrs. Aníbal to the library of Ohio State University after her husband's death in 1955 and are currently housed in Special Collections); by ascription of authorship: by printer or bookseller bearing manuscript notations ofthe type "en la lonja de" or "imprenta de"; by play number changes; by prompter's annotations; by changes indicating a "refundición"; and by the owners...