Comedias Parte XVII by Lope de Vega (review)

in one of the many loas collected in his El viaje entretenido (1603), the Spanish poet Agustín de Rojas Villandrando describes his compatriot Lope de Vega as "el Apolo de nuestros poetas," who had written "tantas farsas por momentos, / y todas ellas tan buenas, / que ni yo sabré contarlas, / ni hombre humano encarecerlas" (edited by Jean Pierre Ressot, 2nd ed., Castalia, 1995, p. 155). The exact number of plays that Lope de Vega wrote remains uncertain to this day: at one point he himself humbly claimed to have penned over fifteen hundred, although scholars nowadays believe it was probably closer to eight hundred. Many of them were published in large weighty anthologies; others were printed and sold individually as single plays; many others were never printed at all. In any case, Rojas's words ring true: they are good, and they are countless. It is precisely because of this condition that the student of Spanish Golden Age drama should rejoice to hear that the Prolope research group has released its new critical edition of the Comedias de Lope de Vega. Parte XVII. As is well known, at a certain point Lope decided to start reacquiring the manuscripts of his many plays in order to collect and print them himself instead of letting others reap the benefits of his playwriting success. For the most part, he did so in large twelve-play compilations known as partes, the most common publication format for comedias in Spain throughout his lifetime. The seventeenth parte out of an eventual twenty-five was first printed in Madrid in 1621, in the midst of a particularly prolific moment in the dramatist's publishing career. Its first modern critical edition appears almost four hundred years later, overseen by its coordinators Daniele Crivellari and Eugenio Maggi, in a new and elegant case containing two volumes of six comedias and approximately a thousand pages each. The twelve plays featured in this collection are the following: in volume 1, Con su pan se lo coma (ed. Crivellari); Quien más no puede (ed. Marco Presotto); El soldado amante (ed. Gonzalo Pontón); Muertos vivos (eds. Luciana Gentilli y Tiziana Pucciarelli); El primer rey de Castilla (ed. Adrián J. Sáez); El dómine Lucas (ed. Miguel Marón García-Bermejo Giner); and in volume 2, Lucinda perseguida (ed. Esther Borrego Gutiérrez); El ruiseñor de Sevilla (ed. Maggi); El sol parado (ed. Fernando Plata); La madre de la mejor (ed. Elvezio Canónica); Jorge toledano (ed. Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán); El hidalgo Bencerraje (ed. Ilaria Resta).

As the coordinators note in their introduction at the beginning of volume 1, the underlying principle governing all ofLope'spartes, this one included, is that of varietas (7). It is difficult to imagine that the playwright chose to publish these twelve plays together for their coherence; to the contrary, they single-handedly capture the impressive diversity of the eclectic comedia nueva. That said, the editors have been able to identify a few common threads that some of these comedias share. The most prominent is that most of the plays belong to Lope's early playwriting years of the 1590s and 1600s. This, Lope claims in his address to the reader (64), is due to his having recovered the playscripts only after the autores de comedias who originally purchased them had either retired or passed away. According to the editors, the dramatist's youth may account for the somewhat anarchic quality and uneven structure of many of these works. As Marón García-Bermejo Giner states in the case of El dómine Lucas, they lack "la definición de rasgos de las comedias posteriores" (980). There are other commonalities as well: some of them share a medieval Spanish setting, others foster the values of rustic life over those of city and court, and many feature the conventional trope of female characters...