Tan Largo Me Lo Fiais and El Burlador De Sevilla Y El Convidado De Piedra

Bulletin Of The Comediantes Vol. XIV Spring, 1962 No. 1 Tan Largo Me Lo Fiais and El Burlador De Sevilla Y El Convidado De Piedra Gerald E. Wade, University of Tennessee Robert J. Mayberry, University of North Carolina Historically, the first play on the Don Juan theme is the most important drama ever written, if its importance be measured by its well-nigh countless progeny in world literature. That the first of all the Don Juan plays was composed in Spain is a fact that few scholars in our time will dispute. This play exists in two versions, the well-known Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra and the not so well-known Tan largo me Io fiáis. It is agreed by the scholars who have examined the two versions with care that in major substance they are obviously one and the same play, even though the language in which they are composed varies substantially from one version to the other.1 Of the two versions, the Burlador de Sevilla has been the one to receive scholarly attention, including a number of editions. Tan largo me lo fiáis (to be referred to hereinafter as TL) has had, relatively speaking, little attention. It has had no careful edition at all; a strange circumstance indeed, since the play has been known since the middle of the seventeenth century as a version of the first Don Juan drama in Spain. The earliest surviving edition of TL is in the form of suelta of which there seems to exist only one copy. This is in the Biblioteca Sedó in Barcelona, and it is described as follows: "Tan largo no [sic] Io fiays. Com. Farn, de Don Pedro Calderón. Sin lugar (¿Sevilla?) ni año. (Hacia 1670.) 4.°, 16 hoj. s.n. (C[otarelo]).Unico ejemplar conocido. Sirvió, según Cotarelo, para la reimpresión de las Corns, de Tirso ? G. de Castro, hecha por Fortanet en 1878."2 The suelta, as its wording indicates, was formerly owned by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori and is identified on page 84 of his Catálogo in about the same words as those of the Sedó catalogue, omitting, of course, the typographical error that we observe in the latter.3 In passing, we shall not be concerned that the suelta claims Calderón as its author; no one now takes that attribution seriously. Nor shall we be concerned here with the authorship of TL; the consideration of Tirso de Molina's claim to one or perhaps both versions of the Don Juan play is a matter to which we see no need of giving thought as part of this article. The suelta, then, is the earliest surviving text of TL. From it the Marqués de la Fuensanta del Valle made an edition that was published in 1878 in the Colección de libros españoles raros o curiosos;* this is the Fortanet edition referred to in the description of the suelta in the Sedó catalogue. The edition does not at all meet modern standards of scholarship; except for a few introductory remarks by F. Pi y Margall, it lacks any editorial apparatus, and, as we shall see below , the text is not made with the care to be expected of a competent editor. A later edition of TL appeared in Cotarelo's Comedios de Tirso, but except for the editor's remarks in the discussion of the play in the catàlogo razonado on page vii of his volume, the edition is quite inadequate. It lacks helpful notes or other comments, and Cotarelo 1 BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES Published in the Spring and Fall by the Comediantes, an informal, international group of all those interested in the comedia. Editor Karl-Ludwig Selig University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minn. Associate Editor John E. Keller University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, N. C. Subscription: $2 a year either failed to see a number of errors in the play's text or chose not to make comment on them. The recent edition of Doña Blanca de los Ríos is no better than Cotarelo's, of which it is almost an exact reproduction.6 We should...