Reinar después de morir (review)

Juan de la Cuesta is doing a tremendous service for teachers, students, and scholars by publishing editions of Golden Age comedias at accessible prices, and this particular volume is noteworthy for the high quality of its editorial apparatus and scholarship. Luis Vélez de Guevara's Reinar después de morir, a deeply moving drama that is all the more so for being based on historical events, is an especially welcome addition to the list. The play had not been edited in a single-work volume since 1775.

In his twenty-six-page introduction in Spanish, Donald Larson elaborates on the benefits and challenges that historical plots pose, following Herbert Lindenberger's 1975 Historical Drama. Larson then reviews the history of Pedro and Inés's love story, including the important detail that Inés de Castro, famously beautiful and nobly born, was nonetheless illegitimate, something the dramatist does not state in the play. This historical review allows the reader to grasp how Vélez de Guevara manipulated the facts to increase the plot's dramatic impact, and Larson also provides an ample bibliography of sources dealing with these alterations. Most of Vélez de Guevara's manipulations served to gild the character of Inés, with whom the real prince had a prolonged affair during his marriage to Constanza de Castilla, for which king Alonso IV exiled Inés in 1344. Pedro and Inés eventually had four children, two of whom were male. In the play, Prince Pedro falls in love with Inés after his wife's death, and they have two sons. Interestingly, chronicles indicate that Inés was assassinated to eliminate her family's dynastic claims on Portugal. (I add that her father was of the ambitious Castro clan and her mother was Portuguese, details that surely intensified Portuguese anxiety about a Castro takeover.) Ironically, her brothers indeed did invade Portugal in response to their sister's beheading in 1355, which produced a prolonged rebellion that Alfonso IV could quell only by pardoning his son.

Larson reviews historical and creative renditions of the Inés story with which Vélez de Guevara may have been familiar, briefly defends the idea that the innocent victim can be a tragic figure, and advances his thesis that the drama's most important theme is that of love's inevitable demise in a world ruled by other priorities. By means of a plot review, Larson highlights questions of dramatic space (city/country) and Vélez de Guevara's sympathetic associations of Inés with solitude; the natural, generative world; and the celestial. Throughout the introduction, he provides an excellent synthesis of previous scholarship, cited throroughly, and manages to add some important details of his own.

The base text of the edition by William Manson and George Peale is the 1652 Lisbon manuscript, with variants from seven sueltas, as well as the Ramón Mesonero Romanos edition in the BAE and that of Manuel Muñoz Cortés in Clásicos Castellanos. The introductory remarks relate verse form to artistic meaning, marshalling terminology that could use a little clarification in the next edition. Citing philosopher Suzanne Langer's Feeling and Form (1953), Manson and Peale borrow the notion of "virtual surface" to mean (as far as I can tell) versification schemes interpreted stylistically, and offer a rhyme scheme to signal the vast predominance of the romance in Vélez de Guevara's play. Historians of language will revel in the philological details of the edition, and the ten-page bibliography that concludes the introductory material is extremely helpful.

The text itself is easy to read, edited with the full array of stage directions, and amply spaced to respect verse forms. As is the case with most Spanish editions, the variants appear at the bottom of the page, whereas explanatory notes are relegated to the back of the book. This privileges philological interests over those of analysis and...