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Reviewed by:
  • Arte nuevo de hacer comedias by Lope deVega
  • Jonathan Thacker
Lope deVega. Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, edición crítica y anotada de Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez. Fuentes y ecos latinos: Pedro Conde Parrado. EDICIONES DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE CASTILLA-LA MANCHA, 2016. 978 pp.

LOPE DE VEGA'S SPEECH, "dirigido a la Academia de Madrid," was first printed as the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo in his Rimas in February of 1609. In this extensive new edition, a late-maturing fruit of the fourth centenary celebrations of the publication of the poem, the Arte nuevo receives its most minute critical scrutiny and its fullest assessment, at the hands of one of the most influential of modern-day lopistas, Felipe Pedraza.

This is a mammoth volume: Pedraza's preliminary remarks trace the gestation of the project (9–14); an introductory study situates the work and records its reception from the seventeenth century to our own (17–81); the text itself follows, unencumbered by footnotes other than the variants from the 1609, 1613, and 1621 Madrid editions (83–100); next come the "notas y escolios" for which the editor breaks the text into its thirty short sections of hendecasyllables for commentary and analysis (101–635); there follow four Latin texts which are "singularmente importantes para su intelección" (81), with their Spanish translations (on facing pages) and appended notes by Pedro Conde Parrado, and in the case of the Alfonso Sánchez text, with Xavier Tubau (637–889); and the volume ends with a bibliography (891–964) and indices (965–78).

The initial "estudio"—some of it repeated from earlier work by Pedraza on the text—proves to be a very useful overview of Lope's poem. While the editor does not provide new evidence for its dating or the circumstances of its composition, he reviews what we do know with characteristic good sense, rejecting the theory that the Arte nuevo came about as a response to Don Quijote I, 47–48, or indeed that Cervantes was himself inspired to invent the canon of Toledo by Lope's text. He believes that the work was first read as late as 1608 or [End Page 163] even 1609, given the state of the text and its status as an addition to the 1609 edition of the Rimas (21). Its genre, a "discurso académico" (21), is adduced to defend the content of the poem in the face of those who have found it slight. This genre, argues Pedraza, employed by Horace and Aristotle, no less, permits its author a discursive freedom. Why should we expect a treatise?

In its day the Arte nuevo would have been widely read, but it was not so frequently quoted because it stated the obvious about the comedia nueva; and subsequently, misconceptions about the poem became old chestnuts. Indeed, in a whistle-stop journey through the poem's reception Pedraza demonstrates how frequently it was seen, erroneously, as an apologetic work, how poorly Lope's rhetorical strategy was understood, and how, above all, his irony was missed until comparatively recent times. If it was late twentieth-century scholars who began to analyze Lope's dramatic theory more penetratingly, it was the interest surrounding the quatercentenary—the conferences, the polyglot edition of 2009, and the publication of popular modern editions by García Santo-Tomás (Cátedra 2006) and Rodríguez Cuadros (Castalia 2011)—that galvanized scholarship and led to a sea change in the Arte nuevo's reception. Those readers belonging to this reviewer's generation will vouch for the fact that the most readily available publication of the work was the unannotated Austral edition in which the poem rubbed shoulders with the equally unadorned La discreta enamorada. Many will have first read the poem in this text, and at a time when helpful guides to what was evidently, to even an uninformed reader, a fascinating and seminal work of early modern dramatic theory were few and far between.

The text of the poem itself is clear and very attractively presented. Like García Santo-Tomás (but unlike Rodríguez Cuadros, who opted in her recent edition to...

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