University of Virginia Library

On the Tercera Parte of Calderon — 1664
by
Edward M. Wilson

There are two distinct editions of the Tercera parte of Calderón dated 1664.[1] The problems of the two editions of the Segunda parte dated 1637 led H. C. Heaton in 1937 to suggest that what he found in the earlier parte might also be true of this later one.[2] I wish to re-examine this suggestion.

The ordinary edition of the Tercera parte may be found in the following libraries: there are two copies in the Vatican (Barb. KKK. vii. 23 and R. G. Lett. Est. IV. 261), one each in the Biblioteca Nacional Madrid (R / 10637), in the Ticknor collection in the Boston (Mass.) Public Library (D. 140. b. 40), in the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris (Yg. 223), in the private collection of Arturo Sedó (formerly in that of Emilio Cotarelo), in the British Museum (C. 57. c. 40), in the University Library Cambridge (Hisp. 5. 64. 3) and in my own collection.[3] The U.L.C. copy formerly belonged to Norman Maccoll, who also owned a different edition with a similar but varying title-page; this book also is in the U.L.C. (Hisp. 5. 68. 12),[4] and I know of no other copies of it. It was mentioned by Heaton in his article on the Segunda parte, and it has also been referred to by Professor E. W. Hesse.[5] I shall adopt their nomenclature for the two editions. That which I have called the "ordinary edition" has in the title-page dedication to a Spanish nobleman the abbreviation Excelmo , whereas in the other the word Excelentissimo is fully spelled out. Excelmo and Excelentissimo will make convenient names for the purposes of this enquiry.

I have based the following description of the Excelmo edition on the copies in the British Museum, the University Library, the Biblioteca Nacional and my own collection.

Title page: see plate 1.

• Collation: 6+A—Z8 Aa—Ll8. [Gg4 mis-signed Ff4]
• Foliation: [vi+] 1-33 43 32 36-63 63 65-69 61 71-89 87 91-123 [124] 125-144 148 146-149 190 151-161 154 163-165 154 167-191 188 193-208 219 210-224 [225] 226-246 257 248-257 260 259-268 266 270 267 272 [vi+272 fols.]
• Contents of preliminaries:
• Title-page verso blank.
• 2r.-v. Al Excmo Sr Don Antonio Pedro Aluarez . . .
• 3r. Papel al autor . . . 2 de Agosto de 1664 . . . Don Sebastian Bentura de Vergara Salzedo.
• 3v. Aprobacion del doctor Don Manuel Mollinedo y Angulo, . . . Santa Maria de Madrid, a 15. de Iunio de 1664.
• 4r. Licencia del Ordinario . . . en Madrid a diez y siete de Iunio de mil y seiscientos y sesenta y quatro años. Lic. D. Garcia de Velasco. Por su mandado Pedro Palacios.
• 4v.-5v. Aprobacion del licenciado Don Tomas de Oña . . . Madrid, y Iulio 2. de 1664.
• 6r. Suma de la Tassa . . . à cinco marauedis cada pliego . . . En Madrid, a 9. de Agosto de 1664 años . . . en el oficio de Luis Vazquez de Vargas, Escriuano de Camara del Rey N. S.
• Ibid. Fee de Erratas. Madrid 9. de Agosto de 1664. Lic. Carlos Murcia de la Llana.
• Ibid. Suma del Priuilegio.
• 6v. Titulos de las comedias Que se contienen en esta Tercera Parte.

There are minor variations in the foliation and catchwords of the copies examined.[6] I have not discovered any textual differences between them.

A description of the possibly unique Cambridge copy of Excelentissimo follows:

Title page: see plate 2.

• Collation: as in Excelmo.
• Foliation: [vi+] 1-33 43 32 36-63 63 65-69 61 71-94 56 96-144 148 146 174 148-149 [?190] 151-160 165 162-165 154 167-208 219 210-218 216 220-246 257 249 249-267 265 266 270-272 [vi+272 fols.]
• Contents of preliminaries: as in Excelmo, with differences of spelling etc. For variants in the Licencia and Fee de erratas see below.

It will be noticed that the title pages differ in lineation but not in wording. The two editions have the same collation, and many of the wrong folio numbers are common to both. In fact one edition is—except for a short gap on fols. 241-246—a page-for-page reprint of the other. Professor Hesse asserts that Excelmo is the earlier edition,[7] but he does not give reasons for

his statement. The dates of the various documents in the preliminaries are identical, but there are a few differences in wording in them. The Licencia of Excelmo refers to "vn Libro de Tercera Parte de diferentes Comedias", whereas that of Excelentissimo describes it as "vn Libro de diuersas Comedias". As neither adjective occurs on either title page, the difference proves nothing. More important, perhaps, is the fact that Excelmo lists ten errata in its Fee, whereas Excelentissimo gives none at all. This would be significant if the errata in Excelmo were all corrected in Excelentissimo. Before this question can be decided the errata themselves must be examined in Excelmo.

The Licentiate Carlos Murcia de la Llana badly bungled his job with this volume. Of the ten errata listed, six are given wrong line-references. Other misprints are so obvious that no compositor who took Excelmo for his copy could fail to correct them.[8] Four of them are miscorrections: the corrector is altering what the author intended to say. Three do not appear in the text of any of the four copies of Excelmo examined. The following examples may show how unreliable official corrections could be: for, for one play in this volume—En esta vida todo es verdad y todo mentira—we fortunately can consult the author's autograph manuscript.[9] It seems to prove conclusively that the corrector never saw the original used by the printer. Here are three instances:

There is only one column on the part of the page in which the supposed erratum occurs. Again a clown is speaking. The form "moger" occurs also in a clown's speech in La púrpura de la rosa (Excelmo, fol. 209, wrongly numbered 219, col. 2. line 27). Clearly this too is a deliberate rusticism of Calderón's which the corrector has misunderstood. Here Excelentissimo (fol. 120v) follows the corrector. No reliance can be placed on the errata of the two editions, but there is nothing here to contradict Professor Hesse's theory of the priority of Excelmo. Example (c) might seem to support it.

There are many textual differences between the editions. I have examined some passages that occur above the catch-words on some pages, and whenever there is a significant divergence, Excelmo gives the better reading. At the foot of 53 recto a line which occurs in Excelmo does not occur in Excelentissimo; at the foot of 87 recto the "viua" of Excelmo makes sense, whereas the "vida" of the other edition makes none; at the foot of 120 recto Excelmo reads "no quedes oy" which makes sense, whereas the "no quedes yo" of Excelentissimo makes neither sense nor grammar. Similar instances can be found in comparing the readings at the right-hand bottom corners of fols. 137r, 207r[10] and 231 verso. It seems unlikely that Excelmo could have been set up from the other edition, even if it had been corrected by an intelligent reviser for that purpose. Almost certainly, then, Excelmo was the earlier.

The autograph manuscript of En esta vida provides the definite proof of Excelmo's priority. At one point in the second act of this play the two clowns Luquete and Sabañón are asked whom they are waiting for by the two young men Eraclio and Leonido. They ought to reply "Cintia, Queen of Trinacria", but as they are clowns Calderón intended them to make nonsense of their answer. Here is the dialogue according to the manuscript:

Instead of the queen's name they say "ribbon", instead of Trinacria an "antidote". The Excelmo printer again made nonsense of the joke: The compositor of Excelentissimo, misunderstanding completely the dramatist's intention, changed the last line to: This single example proves the priority of Excelmo. It also shews that the corruption of Calderón's texts began before Vera Tassis.

The falsely-dated editions of the Primera and Segunda partes (dated 1640 and 1637 respectively) had certain characteristics in common which differentiate them from the genuinely-dated editions of those years. The editions I have called QCL (1636) and VSL (the genuine edition of 1640) of the Primera parte, as well as those Heaton called QC (the genuine edition of 1637) and S (1641) of the Segunda parte, have no such suspicious features.[12] The falsely-dated editions are VS (Primera parte dated 1640) and Q (Segunda parte, dated 1637). If the Excelentissimo edition of the Tercera parte has peculiarities in common with those of VS and Q, then we may claim that it too is falsely dated, as Heaton supposed.

VS and Q are shorter books than their originals VSL and QC; Excelentissimo has the same number of pages that Excelmo has. VS and Q either suppress or greatly abbreviate the dedications previously printed in the preliminaries of VSL and QC; Excelentissimo reprints in full the dedicatory material of Excelmo. VS and Q suppress the name of the bookseller given on the title-pages of VSL and QC; Excelentissimo reprints the names and addresses of the printer and bookseller of Excelmo. VS and Q incorporate a number of stylistic and textual emendations that do not occur in VSL and QC; I have not detected a single variant in Excelentissimo for which such a claim can be made. The revised spelling of VS and Q as against VSL and QC is both more marked and more consistent than the variations in spelling incorporated into Excelentissimo.[13] None, then, of the most typical common features of the falsely-dated editions is to be found in this one. It seems more probable that it was an ordinary reprint of Excelmo, in much the same way that VSL was a reprint of QCL and S of QC.

In my study of the problems of the Primera parte I attempted to shew that the two falsely-dated editions VS and Q were probably printed by

Joseph Fernández de Buendía, who also printed the genuine Quarta parte of 1672 and the Primera parte de autos sacramentales of 1677. He is known to have worked between the years 1658-1679, and books printed by his widow appeared in 1680. I established that two wood-blocks in Q also occur in works undoubtedly printed by Buendía. In VS there is also a peculiar form of the minuscule letter j with two dots instead of one, which (although it was occasionally used by one or two other Madrid printers after 1648) can also be found in some of Buendía's books. Excelentissimo has no woodblocks except for an initial letter P in the preliminaries and the shield of Don Antonio Pedro Álvarez Ossorio on the title-page. The other clue, however, is more promising, because there are some double-dotted js in the preliminaries and in the text. They do not, however, occur uniformly through the book as they do in VS but only in some gatherings: a, A-F, Cc-Ff. There is, then, a possibility that Buendía may have set up some gatherings of this volume, but there is no indication that he was the only printer involved in the whole. This is the only link that I have been able to discover between Excelentissimo and the falsely-dated partes VS and Q.

Perhaps the most important common feature of Excelmo and Excelentissimo is the shield of Don Antonio on their title pages. This appears to be identical in the two editions. We may therefore assume that even if García Morrás did not print both books, he at least permitted, and possibly arranged, the printing of the second. Possibly Excelentissimo was an ordinary commercial reprint of Excelmo, and as it was a page-for-page reprint of the earlier book, there could have been no difficulty in apportioning the different gatherings among several printers, of whom Buendía may have been one. Calderón was a famous man in the sixties, and there is no reason why his Tercera parte should not have gone into two editions, if not between 9 August (the date of the Fee de erratas) and 31 December of that year, at least between 1664 and the expiry of the privilege in 1674. If so, the two editions of the Tercera parte would parallel the two editions of the genuine Primera parte (1636, 1640), of the Segunda parte (1637, 1641) and of the Quarta parte (1672, 1674). So that though Excelentissimo may also have been falsely dated, it may not have been falsely dated in order to deceive either intending purchasers or even the licensing authorities. The false date could conceivably have been accidental. Another printer, told to copy Excelmo page-for-page, might scrupulously reproduce a date on a title page also, even if it were no longer the date of issue. If this argument can be accepted, then the parallel is not so much with the relation of VS to VSL or Q to QC as with that of VSL to QCL or of S to QC. The extreme rarity of Excelentissimo remains unexplained, but its mere existence does not seem very hard to account for.

notes