Alvar Gómez de Castro's verses from the «Libro de buen amor»

Lucius Gaston Moffatt

Alvar Gómez de Castro (1515-80) was a foremost Spanish humanist of the Renaissance. Educated at Salamanca, he was a teacher in various schools in Spain before ending up as professor of Greek, Latin and Rhetoric in the University of Toledo. Besides his published works in Latin and Spanish, he left behind him a mass of miscellaneous material in manuscript form which has never been published and which now reposes in the National Library at Madrid. One volume of this miscellanea which I recently examined is an almost indescribable hodge-podge of notes, letters, poems in Spanish, Latin and Greek (some of his own, some extracts from ancient and modern authors), snatches of romances, inscriptions, comments on books ancient and modern, etc. One would judge from this volume that Gómez de Castro was a man of very broad and diversified interests.

About forty years ago, F. J. Sánchez Cantón while searching through the old archives in quest of archaeological and artistic material turned up in this volume some thirty verses of poetry which proved to be from Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor¹. Now one of the difficulties in establishing a good text of the Archpriest's work is the dearth of manuscript material, and these verses have never received the study they deserve concerning their relation to the extant manuscripts and their worth in correcting their readings.

These verses appear on a single sheet of paper, recto and verso, with no name of author, no explanation for copying them, and with no relation to the pages which precede and follow. On the blank lower half of the verso there are some words in Latin having no connection with the verses of Juan Ruiz. These thirty lines of verse contain seven which appear in no known manuscript of the Libro. Furthermore the remaining twenty-three are not in the same order as they appear in the manuscripts of Salamanca and Gayoso (the Toledo manuscript lacks the folios containing these verses). Their order, following Ducamin's² numbering, is as follows:

• 2 lines (829, c-d)
• 2 lines (appearing in no other ms.)
• 3 lines (804, a-c)
• Complete stanza (811)
• Complete stanza (796)
• Complete stanza (appearing in no other ms.)
• 1 line (appearing in no other ms.)
• Complete stanza (781)
• Complete stanza (782)
• 2 lines (711, c-d; 710, in ms. G, which is the correct order.)

The first problem presented by these seven new lines recorded by Gómez de Castro is their location in the Libro. The twenty-three identifiable lines occur scattered throughout that passage of the work where Trotaconventos undertakes, at the behest of the poet, the seduction of Doña Endrina (576-891), all of which is part of an adaptation of the Latin elegiac comedy Pamphilus de amore. After assuring the aspirant, Don Melón de la Huerta, of her ability to press his suit to a happy conclusion, the old go-between visits the young widow, artfully suggests to her the desirability of her taking a lover or a husband, and sets forth the qualities of Don Melón. Doña Endrina resists, but the old lady continues to press her, pointing out the need of a young widow to have a husband, and illustrating her point with stories. It is reasonable to assume that the seven new lines belong also in this passage. We locate them as follows:

Stanzas 764-765 are spoken by Doña Endrina in opposition to Trotaconventos' urgings, but unfortunately none of the extant manuscripts contains 765, d, and the six following stanzas, and ms. S alone takes up again in the middle of the tale de lupo pedente. We think that some of the lines from Gómez de Castro's snatches belong in these six missing stanzas, and we reconstruct the continuity as follows:

Doña Endrina ends her protest with 765, d, and Trotaconventos resumes her pressure with this stanza (as quoted by Gómez de Castro):

She then points out to her the wisdom of seizing the present opportunity rather than procrastinating while awaiting something better. This she illustrates by the story de lupo pedente, introducing it by these words (Gómez de Castro): «De mal en peor andan, como el lobo a las hormigas». (One wonders if the h(f)ormigas is not a scribal miscopying for the fornachos which appear later in the story, in S). According to our theory, then, the story of the wolf is told by Trotaconventos, and not by Doña Endrina as formerly believed³.

After the recital of the story and its moral (stanza 781), there is again a lapse of 32 stanzas in all the extant manuscripts. We can deduce from the context, however, that Trotaconventos returns to Don Melón to report her lack of success with Doña Endrina. Two lines from the hitherto unidentifiable seven from Gómez de Castro's extracts would seem to fit in nicely before stanza 782:

The other problem presented by the extracts is to ascertain from which of the extant manuscripts (S, G, T) he copied them, or if he copied from any of them. Sánchez Cantón, with no investigative substantiation, ventures the suggestion that they are taken from MS. T, since Gómez de Castro lived some time in Toledo, the repository of that manuscript. But he also lived in Salamanca, the home of MS. S; furthermore MS. T completely lacks the folios containing the extracted verses, so no comparison with it is possible. Below we give the verses of Gómez de Castro, pointing out only the significant variations in reading compared to S and G, where both are present. The figures on the margin refer to the numbering of Ducamin:

1. (829, c-d).

S omits the un before pollo, which G retains; S has envernizo; G, invernizo. The extracts are closer to G than to S.

2. (804, a-c).

Both S and G have grandes fechos and el grand trabajo; G furthermore has desesperarse.

3. (811, a-d).

Modernizations in spelling aside, this is identical with S and G.

4. (796, a-d).

For manzilla of b, G has masiella, but S has postilla. In d, S has en pos de los..., while G reads en pos los... Our extract appears to be a mixture of S and G. And in the last half of the line, G omits viene and reads grant sol e grant sonbrilla; and S: grand sol e sombrilla. But the copyist had first written down viene, then scratched it out. Does this mean that viene was actually in the manuscript from which he was copying, or more probably that he had copied wrongly from the line above?

5. (781, a-d).

Of particular interest here is the gollorias of b. The correct word for the rhyme is the synonym golosina, but S also has golloria. Were our extracts copied from S, or do they both derive from a common source? At the same time, the dizen of our extracts is better stylistically than S's desian. (These lines are missing in G).

6. (782, a-d).

The only variation here is in b -cobrar for S's aver. (G lacks these lines). It should be noted, however, that in S there are folios containing 32 stanzas missing between 781 and 782, and that our fragments continue in the same sequence as in S. But the arrangement and sequence of the stanzas in our extracts are so disordered that we believe the common sequence of the two manuscripts is fortuitous.

7. (711, c-d ).

There are so many variations here, that we think it worthwhile to set down the passage as it appears in S and G:

S.

G.

Our fragments and G coincide in the first part of a (except for ya), and all three manuscripts vary in the last word: sienta, arrepienta, consienta, with G's reading being the best. In the last line G and our fragments agree in using the older form a (ha) for S's ay (hay).

Particularly interesting is the variation carga-troxa-siella of the last line. Now troxa is an antiquated word and of rare occurrence in Old Spanish. It was doubtless what was used in the original, for a copyist would hardly substitute a rare, non-current word for a common current one; he would do the reverse, and this is apparently what happens in our fragments and G, while S retains the original.

This comparison of the significant variations between our fragments and S and G shows that sometimes they are closer to S, sometimes to G, sometimes they appear to be a mixture of the two, and sometimes they are totally independent. It is therefore safe to assume that our extracts were not copied from either S or G. We are left with two possible alternatives:

1. Gómez de Castro copied from manuscript T. But since T in its present form does not contain these passages, and it is doubtful that it did contain them in the mid-sixteenth century, any such conclusion remains in the realm of pure conjecture;

2. Gómez de Castro copied from a now lost manuscript formerly in the library of the University of Alcalá de Henares. This is an intriguing possibility and one that is entirely plausible, for Juan Ruiz lived and wrote in the vicinity of Alcalá, and Gómez de Castro spent some time there, as we know from the title of one of his books: Recibimiento que la Universidad de Alcalá hizo á los reyes quando vinieron de Guadalajara (Alcalá, 1560).