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Tirso de Molina, Literature and TextualCriticismAlan K. G. Paterson aa University of St AndrewsPublished online: 26 Jul 2013.

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Tirso de Molina, Literature andTextual Criticism

ALAN K. G. PATERSON

University of St Andrews

At various discussions between scholars of Tirso de Molina’s theatre I havebeen increasingly aware of certain areas which remain undiscussed or oflimited exposure and at the same time seem to require the attention thatonly a serious exchange of views would provide. All three areas are inter-connected. One is the pseudonym, whose unobtrusiveness on our awarenessof the playwright’s identity is a testament to its quite exceptional success ineffacing his family and fraternity self. Yet to bring onto the foreground theguise adopted by Gabriel Tellez helps focus an understanding of the literarynature of his work. At the same time the very ease we feel with the alias mayhave resulted in a failure or reluctance to attend to issues of real-life identity,which prove particularly serious when it comes to textual criticism (in thesense that textual critics such as Jerome J. McGann have given to this term).My incentive to tackle this set of problems lies partly in a reengagement withTirso’s great play La venganza de Tamar.1 As I reconsidered material thathad been collected, sifted and arranged into critical argument many yearsago, I now see a particular order within it that had eluded me then. In

1 Tirso de Molina, La venganza de Tamar, ed. Alan K. G. Paterson (London:Cambridge U. P., 1969). This edition was designed for use by students and so lacked thecritical apparatus that would make accessible the complex textual phenomenon representedby the variant texts that come down to us. Hence my ready acceptance of the invitation fromthe Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos to make good the deficit by publishing a variorum edition.The edition will be published as part of Tirso de Molina, Obras completas. Tercera parte decomedias by the Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos/GRISO of the Universidad de Navarra. Thepublication date is not available yet. In effect, this project has led to my original workundergoing radical alteration. In the sixties, I also published an article dealing with thetextual facts of the play: ‘The Textual History of Tirso’s La venganza de Tamar’, MLR, 63(1968), 381�91. I see that analysis now as suffering from an excessively mechanicalattachment to stemmatics, not uncommon in those days of Bowers’ strong influence, but ithas the virtue of making clear a complex textual phenomenon and explaining how it arose.There is, therefore, no need to replicate the detail, but only to summarize when necessary theessentials of that article.

ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/13/04�05/000821-12# 2013 Bulletin of Spanish Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2013.802595

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XC, Numbers 4�5, 2013

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addition, the recent publication of Calderon’s first three partes de comedias,an important event to which Don Cruickshank, along with Luis IglesiasFeijoo and Santiago Fernandez Mosquera, have brought a deep knowledge ofCalderon’s textual history,2 makes timely a review of Tirso’s late burst ofpublishing energy with reference to the circumstances that surroundCalderon’s own entry into the world of print. The author’s self-naming, orrenaming, is the starting point of an argument which will lead us throughthe literary guise, Tirso de Molina, to certain fundamental conditions thatcharacterize his texts and their progress into print.

Tirso’s biography splits between the barely noteworthy PresentadoFr. Gabriel Tellez and the brilliant literary career of the Maestro Tirso deMolina. Fray Gabriel and Maestro Tirso do not fit comfortably within thesame biographical perspective. Naturally so, for this Maestro Tirso has nobiography. He was a being invented by Fr. Gabriel, a literary artefact wholived and lives by grace of fictions, sustained above all by the stuff of theatre.We do not know with any certainty when Fray Gabriel chose to invent thenom de plume nor what his motives were, though we could all makeenlightened guesses, as I hope I will do later. What we can state is that asharp distinction was made between the pseudonym and the professionalreligious, because the attribution of fictions to the former, on one hand, andreligious acts, responsibilities and career status to the latter, on the otherhand, is consistent, a partition that was no doubt deliberate and calculated.The assumed name was not a short-term affectation, as Belardo or Ellicenciado Burguillos were in the case of Lope de Vega, but points to a long-term strategy for preserving an alternative identity. Suffice to say that in hisreligious curriculum vitae he is never referred to as Tirso de Molina, but thatin his literary activity the writer does not deliver himself as Fr. GabrielTellez, nor do those who refer to him in that context. (There may beexceptions, such as the engraved title-page of Deleitar aprovechando [1635],but considering the pious subject-matter, that particular and qualifiedexception proves the rule. The use of the literary alias is waived, on rareoccasions, in preliminary documents required by law to accredit literaryworks.) The assumed name not only marks a distinction between dramatistand friar, but carries connotations which distance it from the religiousprofession denoted by Fray Gabriel Tellez. What does the alias mean? ‘Tirso’,for sure, is a borrowing from pastoral poetry that leads back to Virgil’s‘Thyrsis’, the protagonist of the seventh bucolic, whose own antecedent lies inTheocritus. So the pseudonym lends rustic credentials, together with a

2 The three volumes in order of mention are as follows: Pedro Calderon de la Barca,Tercera parte de comedias, ed., with intro., by D. W. Cruickshank (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro,2007); Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Primera parte de comedias, ed., with intro., by LuisIglesias Feijoo (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 2006); Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Segunda partede comedias, ed., with intro., by Santiago Fernandez Mosquera (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro,2007).

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joking association with the vine branch worn by Bacchus, the bibulous deityof the pastoral Arcadia. This Tirso (more at home in Spanish onomastics thanthe culto ‘Tirsi’) comes from Molina, a place that conforms to his rusticidentity and which in a conceited literary geography may well be locatednear the Vega cultivated by Lope. Thyrsis, the Virgilian predecessor of Tirso,was poet and musician, worthy competitor of Corydon in amoebean song,that is, in the art of improvisation whereby poetry becomes publicperformance. So by association Tirso’s name is a metonym for poetry inperformative mode. Lope de Vega must have savoured the allusions, for inlapidary verses that head up Cigarrales de Toledo Lope argues thatGarcilaso is reborn in Tirso, as Tirso takes his art to the waters of the Tagus:

La lira de Garcilasojunto a su cristal lucientehallo de un laurel pendienteTirso, y esta letra escrita:‘Fenix en ti resuscita;canta y corona tu frente.’Digno fue de su decoroel ingenio celestialque canta con plectro igualtan grave, dulce y sonoro.3

The appearance by Tirso at the water festival described in Cigarrales deToledo corroborates the several aspects of his pastoral identity, as shepherdand gardener. What catches the attention is how Fray Gabriel is transmutedinto his secular alter ego, trading his place of birth (‘humilde pastor deManzanares’) and his habit, the voluminous white robe of the Mercedarians,now changed into the shepherd’s ‘blanco pellico’ that bears the arms of theOrder of Mercy on its chest. In the emblematic role played by Tirso at thewater festival, the performative attribute of his name stands out. In a boatmade up as a garden, Tirso arrives before his audience, climbs the palm-treemast up towards the laurel crown, aided in his ascent by two wings on whichare written ‘Ingenio’ and ‘Estudio’. As the winged shepherd it is probably theselfsame emblematic Tirso who appears as one of the figures on the title-pageof Cigarrales de Toledo, dressed in a voluminous robe and cape covered inwings, crowned in laurel, and standing on a plinth named ‘Ingenium’.

The easy play evident in Cigarrales de Toledo between the religious selfand the literary invented self would seem to put paid to any suggestion thatthe pseudonym was designed in the first place to conceal the friar’sindecorous involvement in worldly entertainment. Nevertheless, we cannot

3 Cigarrales de Toledo, ed., intro., and notes by Luis Vazquez Fernandez (Madrid:Clasicos Castalia, 1996), 101 (punctuation modified). Accents have been added to the originaltexts for ease of reading.

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help recognizing that a dividing line was set up by Tirso, a boundary, on oneside of which he practised his vocation, and on the other he practisedliterature. The partition drawn is a symbolic gesture, signalling a certainliberation from the conventions and conditions of his religious calling. As hispseudonymous self, Tirso exercises, perhaps more energetically than anyother contemporary dramatist, a right of entry into an extreme form ofimaginative freedom, namely that offered by theatre. But there is no doubtthat the literary space he creates is hazardous. There are those who thoughtthat the guise allowed the Mercedarian licence to express himself in amanner unbecoming his profession. The evidence is in the wording of thefateful ruling delivered by the Junta de Reformacion in March, 1625, inwhich the target of severe reproof is a Mercedarian Tellez, ‘por otro nombreTirso que hace comedias’, and again ‘Maestro Tellez, por otro nombre Tirso’.And to sharpen the axe of moral reform, the Junta recommends the threat ofex-communion (well chosen for one ordained in holy orders) should he write‘comedias ni otro genero de versos profanos’.4 With forensic precision, Tirso isexposed as Fray Gabriel, as if to remove any cover the pen name couldprovide from the judgment of an outraged authority. Doubts may be raisedabout how far, if at all, the Junta’s ruling was applied, but there is generalagreement that the accusation of scandalous activity marked an end for allintents and purposes to Tirso’s active career writing new plays for thetheatre. Yet Tirso’s literary involvement with his theatre was far from over,and that takes us into textual criticism.

If we construe the pseudonym as a token of Tirso’s own highly developedawareness of the writer’s engagement with literature, then we take to thefield of textual criticism a notion that will hopefully prove its worth. Toexplore this further, I return to the play that first brought me to anawareness of the complex textual condition of a Tirso play, namely Lavenganza de Tamar. Three versions exist. They are: the version printed in Laparte tercera de las comedias del Maestro Tirso de Molina (Tortosa: FranciscoMartorell, 1634), an edition of a variant text attributed to Felipe Godınez,printed by Leefdael in Sevilla, and a manuscript text probably from 1632.The second act of Calderon’s Los cabellos de Absalon is an important textualwitness, lifted as it was in great part from Act III of Tirso’s La venganza deTamar. Leaving recapitulation of the extensive material data and theirorganization into an argument on affiliations to the previously publishedtextual history of the play,5 we can move on to the explanation, the only

4 Comedias de Tirso de Molina, ed. Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, 2 vols, NBAE, Vol. IV & IX(Madrid: Bailly/Balliere e hijos, 1906�1907), I, xlii. It should be borne in mind that Olivareshad revived this committee to reform manners and morality in 1624. Its first year was devotedto studying relevant documents. So the judgment on Tirso is an early strike by a body keen toshow Olivares its mettle. See John H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares (Newhaven/London:Yale U. P., 1986), 187.

5 Paterson, ‘The Textual History of Tirso’s La venganza de Tamar’, 381�91.

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explanation may it be said with some confidence, that can account for theasymmetrical pattern created by the variants between all three versions:they all relate to an underlying and lost text of the play that could best bedesignated as palimpsestic, that is as a text that carried legible alternativereadings. Whenever a copy was made from it, the copy could incorporate, ornot incorporate, alternative readings, which may, or may not, correspond tothe selection made in another copy that used the same palimpsest as its copy-text. The case of Act II of Los cabellos de Absalon is evidence of the sameprocedure: it affiliates strongly but not always with the version that wouldappear printed in the Parte tercera, it affiliates on occasions with Leefdael’s,and at others with the manuscript. If we could corroborate this procedurefrom another source, then in those four texts we would have a paradigm forTirso’s modus operandi. And indeed, we have published evidence of aneditorial process that fits the phenomenon presented by the four texts.A problem, however, has been a prolonged reluctance to lend credibility tothe editor in question, Tirso’s nephew, Francisco Lucas de Avila.

Francisco Lucas de Avila appears on the title-page of the Segunda parte(1635) as Tirso’s nephew, who has collected together the plays for thatvolume. In fact he had been busy before that, inasmuch as the licences forprinting La parte tercera were being acquired by the autumn of 1633, andthat parte was published in Tortosa in 1634, as La parte tercera de lascomedias del Maestro Tirso de Molina. Recogidas por Don Francisco Lucasde Avila, sobrino del autor.6 It is in the preliminares to this parte that thenephew gives a detailed account of his participation. (Since the Segundaparte is notoriously problematic, we do best to skip round it, even perhaps toregard it as an anomalous item introduced retrospectively into the series, onthe coat-tails of the Tercera parte.) For reasons which are not altogethermade clear, the existence of the nephew has been called into question, byCotarelo for example:

Abrigamos casi la certeza de que este sobrino es solamente imaginario; unhombre elegido para honestar el hecho de que un fraile sexagenarioimprimiese libros de comedias.7

Well, indeed, if Tirso could invent himself, it is not beyond his imagination toinvent a nephew. But in such a public deception was there not an equallyserious risk of being exposed for falsifying the family record? The resistancepersists, jeopardizing the credibility of the account of how uncle and nephewcollaborated.8 Otherwise, why have the important statements Lucas de Avila

6 There is a variant title-page issue of this edition, but the variant has no bearing onthis argument.

7 Comedias de Tirso de Molina, ed. Cotarelo (NBAE, IV), I, xi.8 If I may be permitted a hearsay interjection here: Blanca Oteiza Perez, of the

Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos, assures me I am the only one who believes in the nephew. In

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makes on the process of publishing the Parte tercera not received theattention they deserve? Before examining this account of how his uncle’stexts were prepared for print, let us observe certain circumstancessurrounding the Parte tercera.

The first thing to note is the place and date of publication: Tortosa, 1634.In the light of Jaime Moll’s definitive study,9 the bibliographical data wouldmake the parte one of those volumes of plays intended to evade the banimposed by the Consejo de Castilla in 1625 and still in force when thelicences to print were being sought. Publishers and printers outside thejurisdiction of the Crown of Castile took advantage of their immunity tosatisfy the frustrated appetite for printed theatre. The Tercera parte is oneoutstanding example of the practice, financed by a bookseller in Zaragoza(Pedro Escuer), executed by a printer in Tortosa (Francisco Martorell). Inaddition one notes the prestigious array of locally supplied approvals,licences and dedications that reassure the reader that although the playsare by that most Castilian and Madrilenian of authors, they are fullysanctioned by Tortosa and Barcelona. One also notes that the licences are notgranted in the name of either Lucas de Avila or Tirso, a reasonableprecaution on their part, for though the publication is legal the businesstactic defies the spirit of Castilian law. The second circumstance is containedin the dedication to Julio Monti ‘caballero milanes’, contained on thecancellans leaf $4.10 There, Lucas de Avila tells the story of the theft hemade of his uncle’s plays the previous summer:

El hurto que como ladron domestico de mi Tıo, autor destas dozecomedias, hize el verano passado, fiandome de sus originales: mepareze quedara restituydo con mejores llenandose a Vs., porque meconsta de su misma boca que es tan dueno de los alinos de su pluma, comode todas sus acciones.11

Now some care is needed here, for when Lucas calls himself a domestic thiefhe qualifies the act: Tirso entrusted him with his originals (‘fiandome de sus

this, she is not wholly correct, for I know that Henry Sullivan is currently working onrevealing the identity of Lucas de Avila. It seems that a motive for relegating the nephew tobeing a figment of Tirso’s imagination may be to avoid casting the shadow of illegitimateoffspring over Tirso’s family.

9 Jaime Moll, ‘Diez anos sin licencias para imprimir comedias y novelas en los reinos deCastilla: 1625�1634’, BRAE, 54 (1974), 49�107. Luis Iglesias Feijoo includes an account of theprohibition, its consequences (clandestine production outside the kingdoms of Castile,infringements, falsified title-pages, etc.) and the particular effect of delaying Calderon’spublication of his plays. See his introduction to his edition for Biblioteca Castro of Calderon’sPrimera parte de comedias.

10 Copy consulted: BL 11726.e.61. This is a volume with the variant preliminaries,dedicated to Monti, not to Urrea.

11 Accents have been added to the original text for ease of reading.

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originales’), and, as Lucas then says, while his uncle was busy with otherstudies ‘saco a bolar sin su noticia, debajo de las alas de Vs. estas dozecomedias’. He adds that this action ‘ha de costarme no pocas reprehensiones’.So Lucas’ admission of theft must refer to his sending the plays away to beprinted outside Castile without informing his uncle, though we must assumethat Tirso had given his originals to his nephew for the very purpose ofpublishing them (presumably legally, if and when the ban was lifted).Lucas’ action was far from dishonest. His way of proceeding protects hisuncle from any recrimination on the grounds of defying the prohibition. But,furthermore, he does not thereby eliminate Tirso from the process of makingfit his plays for publication. Tirso’s collaboration, already inferred from thedetail that he provided originals, is further enhanced when we turn to a keypassage in the prologue ‘A Qualquiera’.

This prologue is skilfully written. The description of how Tirso’s textswere put into order is a lively evocation of a literary task. The task takesplace in a domestic setting well adapted to a writer’s needs. The space isfurnished with two escritorios, equipped with navetas in which are stored themany papeles belonging to Tirso. These are also referred to as ‘cuadernosescondidos y olvidados’. Picking up the metaphor of the silk-worm whichrecurs in Tirso’s own writing, the nephew tells us that he unwrapped thesepapers from the cocoons in which they had slept for ten years. Workingtogether, uncle and nephew prepare traslados (the term is used explicitly inLa cuarta parte). At this point Lucas conscientiously broaches the issue ofliterary property:

Escuse v.m. aueriguaciones sobre si de vna, y otra fabrica ha de ser elAlarife mi tıo el Maestro, o su sobrino, que quando me arroje a afirmarque entrambos poniendo de su parte aquel quadernos escondidos, yoluidados, y este nueuas anadiduras, no sera mentira que me execute enla restitucion, ello dira: y como v.m. se entretenga con prouecho delentretenedor, quien le mete en ligitimidad, o bastardıa de los inquilinosque no pretenden Canonicatos, ni Colegios? (Parte tercera, ’3v)

The restitution of the plays is a shared labour. Tirso selects the material,handing forgotten folders over to Lucas, Lucas copies, putting in ‘nuevasanadiduras’. Here, with reference to additions, we should respect theaccuracy of the account: there are ‘nuevas anadiduras’ which are due toLucas, and by implication ‘anadiduras’ (emendations and/or alterations)which were there already in the manuscripts and therefore due to Tirso. Aswe read, an editorial process unfolds. Turning again to the case of Lavenganza de Tamar, the process Lucas describes seems to support a historyfor the transmission of the texts involved. An original borrador bore and/orcame to bear palimpsestic variant readings. At various stages in theexistence of the borrador, copies were extracted which together, when

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compared with each other, reflect an eclectic contact with the palimpsesticoriginal. This correspondence between the abundant textual data supplied byLa venganza de Tamar and the nephew’s reconstruction of this process makethis play particularly unique from a textual-critical perspective. But theparticularity of the case should not deter us from seeing a general paradigmfor the publication of the partes of Tirso’s plays under Lucas’ editorship(three, four, five, but not alas the promised but never delivered six). There isa textual-critical phenomenon in Tirso’s theatre of lightly variant texts, textswhich are not so different as to be called refundiciones but different enoughin detail to suggest that they had been ‘tinkered’ with, had been subject tosecond thoughts, had given rise to ongoing concerns about style rather thancontent.12 And this, too, is embedded in Lucas’ account. In it, he creates amemorable place devoted to writing. This place bears no trace, incidentally,of his uncle’s calling. It is a secular place, where two men pursue a commonliterary task, a lengthy one that must have been uncommonly daunting, andone which may well have begun to occupy Tirso on his own during the lostdecade Lucas refers to so often. Perhaps the most surprising part of thisliterary story is that at one stage, they are joined by a third person, whomakes his own copy from the borrador of the third act of La venganza deTamar. This is Calderon. Like others who have done so, his transcription is atext which reflects the same phenomenon we have observed, reflecting eachof all the other versions but consistent with no one text.13

The novelty of editorial involvement is not lost on the nephew. He makesa remarkable statement in the final sentence of the passage quoted above:‘como v.m. se entretenga con prouecho del entretenedor, quien le mete en

12 The Quinta parte text and the autograph of Part I of La santa Juana are animportant example of this procedure; see Alan K. G. Paterson, ‘Transmision tirsiana:peripecias textuales de Tirso’, in Varia leccion de Tirso de Molina. Actas del VIII seminariodel Centro para la Edicion de Clasicos Espanoles. Madrid, Casa de Velazquez, 5�6 de julio de1999, ed. Ignacio Arellano y Blanca Oteiza (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Pamplona: Instituto deEstudios Tirsianos, 2000), 129�42 (pp. 139�40). In notes taken of yore, I observed the similarphenomenon in El amor y el amistad, Como han de ser los amigos, Amor por razon de estadoand Celos con celos se curan.

13 The textual evidence would rule out that Calderon acquired his copy from a sourceother than the palimpsestic borrador in Tirso’s possession. If the case is construed otherwise,then we have no possible explanation for the second act of Los cabellos de Absalon displayingthe same eclectic process as the other three versions of La venganza de Tamar. A motive forCalderon’s borrowing was proposed by Albert Sloman in The Dramatic Craftsmanship ofCalderon. His Use of Earlier Plays (Oxford: The Dolphin Book Company, 1958), Chapter IV,and recently supported in an outstanding essay on the play by Felipe B. Pedraza, ‘Laatribucion del tercer acto de La venganza de Tamar’, in Tirso de Molina: Textos e intertextos,ed. Laura Dolfi y Eva Galar (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Pamplona: Instituto de EstudiosTirsianos, 2001), 215�36. I am not in agreement with the motive both share for Calderon’sborrowing, but the matter is deferred until publication of the new edition of the play by theInstituto de Estudios Tirsianos.

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ligitimidad, o bastardıa de los inquilinos que no pretenden Canonicatos, niColegios?’ (‘Vuestra Merced’ is the reader, ‘los inquilinos’ are the playshoused in the Tercera parte). Here is Lucas broaching the subject of authorialauthenticity in view of his own intervention in the process of publication. Heturns to a metaphor that has deep social significance for his times:legitimacy. In contrast to the scruples over being born in wedlock thatgovern preference in the ecclesiastical and academic establishments, Lucasimplies that, at least in the literary circle formed by himself and his uncle,there has been a certain promiscuity which was indifferent to the offsprings’possible bastardy. This is witty writing, for in the conceit of in/out of wedlockis intuited the word ‘natural’, and so by qualifying the plays of the Partetercera as natural children Lucas’ statement takes on the meaning thateditorial intervention is a natural process that has taken place as theauthor’s plays were transferred to print. Naturally, we must not overlookthe complementary message of reassurance conveyed to the reader by thenephew, that though the children may be of mixed paternity, they are, all thesame, family. By being Tirso’s nephew, as well as editor, he gives the producta certain warranty of genuineness.

Thus far, we have contained issues of a textual and bibliographical kindwithin the bounds of the Parte tercera, inferring a paradigm that could applyto plays in the other partes edited by Francisco Lucas de Avila. There aregood reasons, however, to extend the significance of the Tercera parte. Let usreturn to one of the nephew’s frequent references to the ten years duringwhich his uncle has ‘slept’ and forgotten the promised publication of hisplays: ‘se ha echado a dormir no menos tiempo que el de diez anos,escarmentado de trampas y mohatras’ (Tercera parte, $3r). We should notthink immediately of the ten-year period when no licences were issued topublish plays in the kingdoms of Castile, for remember that Lucas wrotethose words in 1633 or early 1634 at the latest, and lacked the benefit offoresight that the ban would be lifted. Rather than computing Tirso’s decadeof inactivity in terms of a decade of prohibition, we should think of Lucascalculating his uncle’s retreat from publishing from the time the committeeof moral reformers cast their uncompromising judgment over the dramatistand silenced him (March, 1625). As Lucas hints at various reasons why hisuncle has failed to follow up early plans to publish, it is clear he sees himbeset by a traumatic experience, among other things. This distinctionbetween a period of silence imposed on an individual and a decade ofprohibition defined with historical hindsight is not purely academic, for weshould remember that all the signs attribute the preparation of the Terceraparte to the period preceding the lifting of the ban. The earliest approvalfrom Tortosa is September 1633, so the preparations of text must date frommuch earlier that year, if not back to 1632. This is a roundabout way ofsaying that the first volume of twelve Tirso plays published after the ban hadbeen lifted is (skipping round the ever problematic Segunda parte), the

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Cuarta parte, Madrid, 1635. By February of that year the process ofacquiring aprobacion, licencia, privilegio for the Cuarta parte hadcommenced (entrusted to worthy Madrid men of letters and of the cloth),and by the first of August Murcia de la Llana issued the Fe de errataswithout demur. The volume was printed by Marıa de Quinones and costed byPedro Coello and Manuel Lopez, booksellers. The contrast between theTercera parte and Cuarta parte is noteworthy, above all in that the expedientstrategy of printing outside the kingdoms of Castile has been abandonedand replaced by thoroughly Castilian credentials. The volume is an earlyarrival on the newly liberalized publishing scene in Madrid. That said, themodel is familiar. The editorial collaboration with the nephew isacknowledged. This time, the privilegio is granted to Tirso de Molina.What is more, Tirso openly pens the dedication. The author and his editorare in harness together. With hardly a pause between publications, Lucasis busy again, this time at the Quinta parte, as the book points out in theprologue to the Cuarta when it refers to its state of advanced pregnancy:‘tienenme tan embarazado los traslados de mi Quinta parte [. . .]’. This nextvolume will be on sale at the bookshop of Gabriel de Leon. By July 1635,Lucas has received the privilegio for ten years. Duly, in early 1636, theQuinta parte de comedias del Maestro Tirso de Molina. Recogidas por DonFrancisco Lucas de Avila sobrino del Autor is published. Among itspreliminaries is the well-known and high approval of Calderon de laBarca. But hang on, by the time he wrote his praise of Tirso, Calderonmust have registered more than a passing awareness of the Tirso deMolina-Francisco Lucas de Avila project. The hard evidence for this lies ina coincidence between bibliographical circumstances. Only two months orso after Tirso’s Cuarta parte was published, Calderon’s Primera parte decomedias entered into production, in the same printshop (Marıa deQuinones), costed by the same two booksellers (Pedro Coello and ManuelLopez). The texts are under the care of a family member, Calderon’sbrother Jose. The suggestion of a copy-cat exercise comes to mind. It couldbe as if Calderon used the Cuarta parte of Tirso and his nephew as hisstalking-horse, whose progress across the newly-opened terrain of literarylegislation could be watched attentively for lessons to be learned. But atthis point the story really belongs to Luis Iglesias Feijoo, SantiagoFernandez Mosquera and Don Cruickshank.

The attention these scholars have given to Calderon’s entry intoplay-publication in the 1630s allow us greater command of the genericfield in that particular period. The socio-political circumstances, thelegislative pressures, the textual-critical consequences are expressedvigorously and imaginatively, to the point that those who deal only inliterary hermeneutics (or literary criticism in old-fashioned parlance) haveno reason to ignore the realities that underlie the physical texts they read.These introductory studies to the Bibioteca Castro volumes have refined key

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areas of debate over the issue of how plays evolved into print. In that respect,their own perceptions about models and processes strengthen the case I havemade for Tirso de Molina’s Cuarta and Quinta parte having exercised asignificant part in play-publication as that activity emerged from a period ofrepression. Santiago Fernandez Mosquera’s statement about the role ofeditor as part of a strategy shared with other genres to authorise a printedtext would be a case in point:

La estrategia para publicar y autorizar un texto impreso, independiente-mente del genero que fuere, se basaba en unos mismos procedimientos:la presencia de un amigo o familiar; el desarrollo de unos topicos sobrela obra del escritor; la ponderacion de la tarea del editor [. . .].14

When the identity and task of editor are construed as part of a publicationstrategy, one response in the case of Tirso could be to consign Lucas de Avilato being a public relations invention; even if he did not exist (and manybelieve he did not), he would have had to be invented. Yet as we haveargued, Lucas de Avila develops a clear position about his activeparticipation. His collaboration with Tirso is in marked contrast to howFernandez Mosquera sees Jose Calderon’s editorship in terms of a ploy usedby writers to conceal themselves ‘en el distanciamiento de la figura de untestaferro, como hace Calderon con su hermano Jose, por ejemplo’.15

Throughout the preliminaries to the partes Lucas prepared for printing, hedwells on the close relationship he enjoyed with his uncle. But, of evengreater significance is how he places himself inside what McGann has calledthe ‘scene of writing’.16 The passages he writes to that effect set up a closerelationship with the writer, the place where writing occurs, the shared actof restitution, all of which characterizes this editorial activity in terms verydifferent from the intention of creating distance as alleged in the case of thetwo Calderon brothers. That difference is itself a useful distinction to beintroduced into the debate on the passage of plays from theatre to print. Inthe case of Tirso, the editor enters as an equal into the unfinished task ofwriting, making choices which the borradores had left undetermined, addinghis own. In this scene of writing, the authenticity of the texts that emergelies in the promiscuous intertwining of writer and editor. It is as if Lucassenses and justifies the necessary process that McGann calls the‘socialization’ of texts, the marks left progressively on them by others,

14 Fernandez Mosquera, in Calderon, Segunda parte de comedias, ed. FernandezMosquera, ‘Introduccion’, ix�lxxxvi (p. xx).

15 Fernandez Mosquera, in Calderon, Segunda parte de comedias, ed. FernandezMosquera, ‘Introduccion’, xv.

16 As distinct from ‘the scene of reading’. The reference is to Jerome J. McGann, TheTextual Condition (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton U. P., 1991), 4.

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including authors themselves. There lies precisely the textual condition thatCalderon dreads,17 that his texts escape his control, which explains (asFernandez Mosquera does) one reason Calderon had for naming brotherJoseph as his editor was that he did the work himself.

17 See in particular my study ‘La socializacion de los textos de Calderon’, in Calderon:innovacion y legado. Actas selectas del IX Congreso de la Asociacion Internacional de TeatroEspanol y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro, en colaboracion con el Grupo de InvestigacionSiglo de Oro de la Universidad de Navarra, ed. Ignacio Arellano y German Vega Garcıa-Luengos (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 17�29.

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