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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
This play was unknown to Moratín. When it was examined by Ticknor, it was part of a volume belonging to M. Ternaux-Compans, which contained, besides, the anonymous Farça a manera de tragedia, Güete's Tesorina and Vidriana, the Radiana of Ortiz, Villalón's Tragedia de Mirrha (Medina del Campo, 1536) and the anonymous Jacinta. La Barrera's notice, probably borrowed from Ticknor, states—I believe wrongly, if I have correctly understood Ticknor—that the play was in a collection with other farces, “dos de ellas impresas en 1536.”
Taken together, the descriptions of Salvá, who has given a summary of the play and reproduced 146 lines, and of Heredia, who gave an exact reproduction of the title-page, are satisfactory. Kohler, who does not seem to have known of Salvá's extracts, speaks of the piece as though it were lost and reproduces La Barrera's notice. From Ternaux-Compans the only known copy passed, now separately bound, through Salva to the Madrid Biblioteca Nacional, where it is now preserved under the signature R.3658.
1 Ticknor, Sixth Amer. ed., II, 54, n.
2 Salvá nr. 1298; Heredia nr. 2320. The lines reproduced by Salvá are numbered 129-175, 233-252, 253-284,421-450,453-469.
3 Sieben Span. dram. eklogen, p. 164. The play is merely mentioned by Alenda, BRAE, VI (1916), 760.
4 Professor Morley (Homenaje a Menéndez Pidal, I, 510) acquainted only with the extracts in Salvá, assumes for the unit of versification in this play a very rare 'fluctuating octosyllabic quatrain, ABAB or ABBA, in which the final rhyme of one stanza is sometimes the first of the next. I suggest that the metrical unit is here an eight-line stanza, not because the printer divided the lines into groups of eight, but because these stanzas are obviously intended throughout the play as complete sense-groups. Practically all end with a logical full stop, even in the few cases where one speech is divided between two stanzas, (52-53; 167-168; 268-269) except in one case (142-143). In many cases the two quatrains are logically inseparable (especially those beginning with 61, 69, 93, 216, 301, 357, 396, 413, 445) even in four-rhyme stanzas, with two different rhymes in each quatrain, which might most plausibly be divided (160, 285, 413). It is perhaps preferable to leave the designation octavas for the Italian type abababcc, although Rengifo (ed. Barcelona, Martí, 1759, pp. 91-93) includes under octavas rimas the 'double' redondilla' on two rhymes (abbaabba) and even what he elsewhere designates as redondilla de ocho versos (p. 35), on three rhymes (abbaacca).
5 These computations cover several defective stanzas reduced to the type to which they most probably belong (see the notes to 149, 153, 170, 274, 341, 413), but not the parts of stanzas serving as introductions or transitions to the separate lyrics.
6 Eva is occasionally spelled Heva in the sixteenth century.
7 Uncertain, acc. to Robles Dégano, Ortología, p. 337.
8 Disapproved by Benot, Prosodia castellana, II, 343 f., but see Torres Naharro, Propalladia, I, 412; Juan Fernández de Heredia, ‘Visita de las damas valencianas,‘ P.M.L.A., XXIV (1909), ll. 40, 306; Güete, Tesorina, 683; Vidriana 287, 596, etc. Bello, it will be remembered, went so far as to sanction synalepha over a full stop.
9 Benot II, 471, giving two similar examples from Espronceda (heroe a) remarks: “Sinalefa durísima. Verdaderamente la e se elide, más bien que se pronuncia, en estos exemplos.” Robles Dégano, Ortología, p. 91, quotes from Montalbán: Yo he avisado a sus parientes, but observes: “Si alguna de las adyacentes es tónica, la sinalefa es aun más violenta, y debe preferirse el hiato.”
10 Cf. Espinosa, La sinalefa entre versos en la versificación española, Romanic Rev., XVI, 117.
11 “Para henchir el agudo,” says Rengifo “se compone el quebrado de cinco sílabas.” Cf. Benot, III, 388-91. For a systematic modern study see Espinosa, La compensación entre versos en la versificación española, Romanic Rev., XVI, 306-30.
12 For these last two instances see the note to 149.
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