El entremés de Los habladores, ¿de Cervantes, Lope o Lorca? Candor, picaresca, bernardinas y anadiplosis

The entremés Los habladores—attributed by some in the past to Miguel de Cervantes, but now agreed to be of unknown authorship—anchors an exploration and contextualization of versos encadenados, called anadiplosis in formal rhetoric. Such contemplations serve as both homage and scholarly coda to the seminal article of 2002 by the late Stefano Arata, "Candor y tragedia: Federico García Lorca y la poética de La Barraca," republished in this volume of the Bulletin of the Comediantes as a Touchstone of theater studies. Building on Arata's study of García Lorca's recontextualization of Golden Age theater, this article focuses on the voices of pícaros and other spontaneous versifiers enshrined in the comic theater. Of particular interest is the exploration of how the fast-taking trickster (pícaro hablador) speaking in versos encadenados would echo in comic theater of the eighteenth century, as attested in an entremés by Francisco de Castro, el Farruco, the Entremés nuevo de la burla del labrador, as well as an anonymous farce built on the same theme, titled El duque es muy cuerdo en todo. An appendix offers a selection of popular poetry built on versos encadenados from Spain, Portugal, Spanish America, and even beyond, to Malta, Italy, Iraq, and Yemen, thereby connecting an underappreciated linchpin of Golden Age comic genius to versifiers—known and anonymous—from around the world.