Reminiscing: Comedia, BCom, Everett, Other Players, and a Strong Supporting Cast

Y pues Vuestra Merced escribe se le escriba y relate el caso muy por extenso, … porque se tenga entera noticia de mi persona. … But no, that will come incrementally, as things progress. My introduction to the Comedia was under the tutelage of Lewis A. Ondis, my advisor at Ohio University for both the B.A. and M.A. He held what was, to me, the imposing title of Professor of Romance Philology. He had received his doctorate in that specialty from Columbia, at the same time as another young Italian-American, Mario Pei. In directed studies with Ondis, I read a number of plays and reported on them, always handing in a written commentary in Spanish, which he corrected meticulously and returned. The Comedia was not one of his research interests. There was little critical commentary given or expected, mostly reflections on the theme or “the moral” and an acquaintance with characters and plot. I recall taking a seminar with him on Old French—much more his forte—and having to trace MF words to CL, in reverse chronological order, step by often-speculative step. I would sometimes overhear Ondis and my Latin professor, Paul Murphy, conversing in Latin as they paced the hallway.¹

During my M.A. work, Tony Zahareas, whose dissertation on the Libro de Buen Amor was then underway at Ohio State, accepted a visiting lectureship at OU and offered a couple of courses that opened up Spanish literature to me in new and intriguing ways. This was a turning point. I decided to follow Tony and some of my professors of English in their approach to literature. Two of those courses in English were on Shakespeare. Tony rented quarters for a time in a rooming house I happened to be managing, adjacent to campus, and we became friends, bonding primarily over literary and cultural commentary and Frisbee (with many a session devoted to playing burnout). Tony was instrumental in securing a nice package for me to pursue the doctorate at OSU, in a field I saw as a bit more tractable at the time, linguistics, but that summer Stanley Sapon, the professor with whom I had planned to work, left for Rochester. Fortunately, the offer of a Mellon fellowship at Pittsburgh was still pending, and that would allow me, in theory, to finish sooner, because there were no teaching duties. At Pitt, I did further work on the Comedia (and the Quixote) with Fred Abrams, a recent protégé of Edmund de Chasca. Abrams soon took a position at George Washington University, however. I began work on a dissertation on Juan Ruiz de Alarcón with John Lihani and also became a protégé of Rodolfo Cardona. Both John and Rudi were generous with their time and insightful advice. While working on the dissertation, I had access at different times to three visiting specialists—Jack Sage, Bruce Wardropper, and William Fichter—each of whom was helpful. I rewrote an overblown first draft, boiling it down to 135 sheets that, not unlike the miracle of the loaves and fishes, provided material for four articles.

Otis H. Green’s postdoctoral seminar for the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SIMRS) at Duke, summer of 1968 (his year as MLA president), centered on his four-volume Spain and the Western Tradition and was an invigorating and revelatory experience. He liked my work and also the fact that I had carefully proofread and corrected quite a number of misprints in his four volumes. Green was instrumental in accepting one of the four articles mentioned above for publication in Hispanic Review and also in assigning me the review of a book of his essays (a mini S&WT, edited by John Keller), then, in 1970, writing the letter that likely clinched the position at the University of Southern California. He also arranged my appointment to the first MLA commission on the job market. Several times at both USC and the University of California, Riverside. I have offered a seminar grounded in S&WT, with related studies by the usual...