Jorge Manrique’s Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Nancy F. Marino (review)

It is not a small task to confront the mass of erudition accumulated in the literary and historical criticism over five centuries of interest on Manrique’s Coplas in a slim volume of hardly more than two hundreds pages. It is even more remarkable to succeed in this tour de force in two main aspects: by conveying huge quantities of material in a tight and structured manner, and by framing the mass of information into an interpretative context. The result allows Marino not only to make a balanced presentation on the extant bibliography, but also to reveal new dimensions and overlooked aspects of the Coplas. In analyzing Manrique’s master poem, the author not only has rendered an invaluable service to students and scholars alike by presenting and contrasting their ideas, but she has added to them also valuable new material.

The author’s selective procedure and her simultaneous reluctance to decide in favor of a line of interpretation are clearly stated at the introduction: “In the impossibility of absolute knowledge of the meaning of the Coplas, this book will explore instead the ways in which successive generations of readers–and individual reader within them–engage with the text” (IX). The point of view, which follows loosely the history of the reception approach, shows to be an aptly way of tackling the thorny issue of how and why the poem dedicated to Rodrigo Manrique became canonical, or as Marino puts it “the most recognizable poem in the Spanish language” (X). As a thorough analysis of every published item on the subject may have turned into a tedious and endless review, Marino prefers to focus on “some long-living critical discussions” and selected literary recreations, including the famous glosas. Thus the perils of exhaustiveness are avoided: omissions, on the one side, are since the beginning begged for, and, on the other, the reading does not fall into a sort of annotated bibliography or a mere repertoire, piling up chunk over chunk of other’s works, as easily happens in this sort of compilation.

Although divided into four chapters, three distinct parts can be discerned in this study. Chapter 1 provides the basics about Manrique and his poem, with especial attention to the historical setting and the early dissemination of the text. Next chapters 2 and 3 survey in chronological order literary, musical, visual and critical reactions to the Coplas. The space devoted to the Renaissance and Baroque eras are noticeable longer than the pages that deal with the Eighteenth Century onwards, even though the latter outline the critical reactions among literary critics and historians who have shaped our actual understanding of the poem. The reason seems more to lie in the fact that the latter are the object of the final part rather than that the former’s opinions being less known. Indeed, Chapter 4 “Shifting literary perceptions” wraps up the study as it contrasts the critical views of contemporary scholars regarding the most controversial issues such as its genre, meter, structure, sources, the ubi sunt topic, and the rewritings that it originated.

The study opens with a straightforward presentation of Manrique’s life, the circumstances and date of the composition of his Coplas and the doubtful attribution of the two stanzas póstumas, with reference to the major primary and secondary sources. In these pages the main questions concerning the Coplas are set out, such as the culture of the poet and his education in letters, and the ideology of the poem in relation to the age and his lineage politics, to which Marino does not offer any satisfactory answer. This part ends with a summary of V. Beltran’s 1993 conclusions on the manuscripts and early printed editions. To them are added some very interesting suggestions on the probable dissemination of the Coplas orally and in pliegos...