Cristobal De Monroy Y Silva

diantes españoles por una comedia que representaron en mi presencia" (ibid., i. 369v; Liebrecht, p. 13). Mariemont is situated near Morlanwelz in Hainaut, more or less on their route if Lopez and his players were making their way from Brussels toward Spain. Possibly during June he had been playing in some of the nearby towns like Mons, Charleroi, Binche, perhaps even Lille, Douai, or Valenciennes, which were then part of the Spanish Netherlands. These Belgian visits are the earliest references to Francisco Lopez that I have encountered . Knowing that in the early summer of 1618 he was on his way from the Spanish Netherlands to Spain, we can presume with considerable confidence that his is the hitherto unidentified Spanish company that in August 1618 played several times before Louis XIII in Paris and remained there during that winter.2 Seven years later he was again in Paris at the head of a troupe, when he leased the theater of the Hôtel de Bourgogne from the Confrérie de la Passion for one month beginning 2 April 1625.3 Rennen (pp. 507-8) cites his presence at various places in Spain with his wife Damiana Perez in 1629, 1630, 1632, 1633, and 1635. In 1639 he led a company to Naples, whence in April one of his daughters and her husband fled the family circle.4 Sometime before November 1652 he died.5 An autor whose travels in three decades ranged from the Low Countries through France and Spain to southern Italy, Francisco Lopez must surely have left other traces in many places between ; and we may hope that more of these will some day come to light. 2 Emilio Cotarelo, "Actores famosos del siglo XVII," Boletín de la Academia Española, 3 (1916):19. 3 Jean Fransen, Les Comédiens français en Hollande au XVII« et au XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1925), p. 65. 4 Cotarelo, op. cit., 2 (1915), 282. 5 J. Gomes Ocerin, in a review of B. Croce's / Teatri di di Napoli, Revista de Filología Espa- ñola, 3 1916), 421. Cristobal De Monroy ? Silva by Gerald E. Wade, University of Tennessee Little is known of the life of Critóbal de Monroy y Silva.1 Of the usually available volumes on the comedL· and on the literature in general, only those of Schack, Barrera, Schaeffer, and Hurtado y Palencia offer something of his biography; other volumes either ignore him completely or give him bare mention.2 As will be seen below, only a few fundamental facts have been added to his biography since Barrera gave it a brief account in his Catálogo; it is apparent that discoveries still to be made must be counted on to provide further data. Of him, Barrera (p. 263) reports that he was born in Alcalá de Guadaira, of which he was regidor perpetuo in 1639 and "teniente de sus reales alcázares por su alcaide el Príncipe de Paterno, duque de Montalto y Alcalá, según expresa el epígrafe de una culterana Silva que escribió a la muerte del doctor Juan Pérez de Montalbán." He was still alcaide in 1641, states Barrera. Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, in his "Apuntes biográficos y críticos " for Monroy (pages ix-x of BAE, 49) adds nothing to Barrera, nor does Bartolomé José Gallardo, whose Ensayo de una biblioteca española de libros raros y curiosos (III, 383) has a short biography. Adolf Schaeffer (Geschichte des spanischen Nationaldramas, II, 138) speculates that Don Alonso de Saavedra of Monroy's El encanto por los celos may possibly be a portrait of the au1 I am indebted for part of the material in this brief study to Miss Rosemary Edens, whose unpublished M.A. thesis (University of Tennessee , 1951) is entitled "An Edition of Crist óbal de Monroy y Suva's El cavallero dama." This edition was made from an undated suelta in my possession. 2 There is little or nothing in Ticknor, Zarate (Manual de literatura), Fitzmaurice-Kelley, Pfandl, Mérimée and Morley, Romera-Navarro, Valbuena (Historia and Literatura dramática española), Escobar ? Lasso de la Vega (Historia del Teatro Espa...