A Proposal for a Cooperative Project

He pioneered, aesthetically and conceptually , the vast poetic drama of the Golden Age. But his achievement is unique to him, and not a force that mainly merges with later and greater developments. Accordingly, it is his critic's task to show how he converted modest, even humble, materials into a drama of rich complexity. Professor Gimeno subordinates Enzina too much to a shaky historical concept which cannot explain him. And, finally, the "Estudio preliminar" recklessly indulges in the intentional fallacy. The words meta, propósito, designio and their synonyms superabound . An example from p. 48: "Tres eran sus designios al escribir las Representaciones II, III y IV: contar la vida de Cristo, mostrar mediante ejemplos la relación ideal entre el hombre y su prójimo y entre el hombre y Dios, y aumentar conmovidamente la fe del público. Para realizar este triple propósito . . ." That the critic's perception is not necessarily the author's intent we know from scores of chortling writers reacting to outside analysis. Further, one misses, in the above analysis and elsewhere, the sense of Enzina as an innovative artist. In him, the creator and the Christian both combine and diverge , adding to his structural ambiguity . In sum, then, one must welcome this helpfully annotated but seriously flawed edition, while awaiting the second volume for a final decision. Robert Ter Horst Univ. of Arizona A PROPOSAL FOR A COOPERATIVE PROJECT This is a proposal for a project which would have a far-reaching, facilitating effect on research in the Spanish drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . It is, I believe, a project which could be best accomplished by a community of scholars like the Comediantes . The project's purpose is to collect, prepare and store in a computer system specific types of information vital to research in our field of interest. The central activity of the program would be to make a record of the significant annotations in all extant critical editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays, creating thereby a repository of information which would be readily available to Hispanists the world over. Given the flexibility and versatility of computer programming techniques, information other than the annotations but based on the central record would also be retrievable in a variety of patterns and structures. To describe the project another way, it would essentially be an ever-growing concordance of those terms and concepts that the editors of critical and annotated editions deemed worthy of commentary. To illustrate how the information retrieval process would operate, here first is a general scheme of items to which the researcher would have access: 1.term 2.author 3.work 4.number of the verse in which the term is found 5.citation of the verse(s) containing the term 6.annotation 7.text editor 117 8.date and place of publication 9.publisher Let us suppose that one was working on a problem involving the location and use in Golden Age drama of the term cultidiablesco. One would query the computer for instances of this word, and in its turn the computer would furnish all the entered annotations on the expression: 1.cultidiablesco. 2.Lope de Vega. 3.El castigo sin venganza. 4.v. 53. 5.Cierto que personas tales/ poca tienen caridad,/ hablando cultidiablesco ,/ por no juntar las dicciones . 6.cultidiablesco: in La Dorotea Lope defined cultidiablesco as Vn compuesto de diablo y culto' (op. cit., ed. A. Castro, p. 231, 12-14), quoted by Van Dam, ed. cit., p. 298. The term is used to describe the division of adjective from noun by the verb in the previous line. — p. 123. 7.C. A. Jones. 8.Oxford, 1966. 9.Pergammon Press. 10. (Code number of libraries or collections where the edition may be found if rare or out-ofprint . ) . 1.cultidiablesco. 2.Lope de Vega. 3.El castigo sin venganza. 4.v. 53. 5.Cierto que personas tales/ poca tienen caridad,/ hablando cultidiablesco ,/ por no juntar las dicciones . 6.Cultidiablesco: invención de Lope que aparece también en La Dorotea, como nota v. D.; véase La Dorotea, IV, ed. Morby, p. 360, n.° 232, donde Morby se refiere a nuestro caso al...