On the Application of Stylostatistics to the Analysis of the Comedia

ON THE APPLICATION OF STYLOSTATISTICS TO THE ANALYSIS OF THE COMEDIA JOHN G. WEIGER University of Vermont A recent essay by John B. Wooldridge presents some hypotheses with intriguing and illuminating possibilities for students of the comedia. ' Before proceeding, I should like to set forth some assumptions for the present article. First and foremost, what follows is in no manner to be read as a rejoinder. Although I shall present some points of disagreement, what moves me to write is precisely the thought-provoking nature of the Wooldridge study. In this spirit, I seek to build upon Professor Wooldridge's original insight. I suspect that a considerable number of our colleagues share with me a bias with respect to the analysis of poetic ingenuity in mathematical terms. Almost, but not wholly, by definition we were attracted to the world of literary aesthetics by the pathos, the creative spirit of the individual genius, the beauty of the artistic recreation of human emotions and conflicts, the ideological and psychosociological motivating forces which propel humankind, in a word, by the art of the writer. Having said this, I must also point out that in our specific field of specialization, the comedia, most of us early on discovered willy nilly that the art is only one side of the coin, the obverse of which is the craft. The comedia, far more so than the novel or even other forms of verse, is founded on numerical determinants. The work of Morley and Bruerton is only the most remarkable of the many valuable studies on the uses of versification and in its time it provoked no little controversy. Aside from its merit, what is irrefutable is that this massive work is based on one of the most obvious traits of the comedia : every play is made up of lines of verse, calculated in numbers of syllables per line, in turn comprising numbers of lines per strophe. Like it or not, the minimal structural units of the comedia are numerical. At the other extreme lies the caveat which confirms that the comedia is not only a formulaic art, literally an art form, but as well a humanistically rather than statistically based form of art. That is, no scientific analysis will allow us to draw systematic conclusions about the number of lines which make up an act or a play. Beyond the three-act format, we can only generalize that a play takes up somewhat more than two hours of the audience's time or approximately three thousand lines of written verse. At this point, satistics becomes a dangerous guide. Even though we qualify the number by a word 63 64Bulletin ofthe Comediantes like «approximately,» it is well documented that the total number varies considerably and, according, any attempt to divide by three in order to arrive at an«average» length per act is correspondingly distorted. Nevertheless, to point out the danger of an uncritical reliance on statistical observations is not to preclude the application of such data to the analysis of the comedia. Generalizations do tell us general truths and we may thereby perceive artistic tendencies, an insight of no little significance for us. One such observation has been ventured by Rozas: Centrándonos en Lope, me parece poder dar una norma —repito, sin comprobaciones estadísticas—que tiene una cierta lógica. Las obras históricas en las que inventa poco y sigue sobriamente la crónica suelen ser cortas. Llamativamente breve es su Fuenteovejuna, que tiene 2.453 versos solamente, frente a la de Cristóbal de Monroy, que tiene 3.270. Sin embargo, en obras de amor y enredo, o simplemente urbanas, en que no sigue una fuente y, por tanto, inventa mucho, hace obras mucho más largas. Un modelo sería El perro del hortelano, con 3.383 versos. Las comedias mejor escritas de Lope, tipo El caballero de Olmedo o El castigo sin venganza, se aproximan a las medidas que da Pellicer, entre 2.700 y 3.000 versos.2 This illustration places into relief the two sides of the coin. The conclusion about Lope's art could not have been ventured without a calculation of the number of lines per...