Juan Pérez de Montalbán's «Segundo tomo de las comedias»
Victor Dixon
University of Manchester
Problems of authorship -and of date- continue to befog and bedevil the study of Golden Age drama, for all the scholarship which has been brought to bear upon them. A newcomer will not easily be forgiven for adding to them; in my defence I can only plead that it was far from my original intention to do so. I had hoped -I still hope- to determine so far as possible which of the hundred-odd plays attributed to Juan Pérez de Montalbán were in fact written by him. But this meant re-examining, in the first place, the «certainly authentic» ones amongst them; and in so doing I decided that those in his posthumous Segundo tomo must be removed from that category. Montalbán 's «Second Part» -like Tirso's- was not necessarily what it seemed.
Till now it has been assumed that Montalbán himself prepared Segundo tomo for the press1. But there is no evidence for such a supposition. He showed concern, certainly, for the proper publication of his plays, and was personally responsible for two previous collections. In 1632, he included four comedias, together with two autos, in his miscellany Para todos2. By this means, he suggested in his preface, he intended to expose and confound those publishers who had already pirated various of his plays3. In 1635, he published his Primero tomo, a collection of twelve more comedias4. There again, in his Prólogo largo, he inveighed against the pirates, adding this time that many plays by other writers had been published as his5.
Later remarks in this prologue confirm what the very title Primero tomo implied, that he hoped eventually to publish a further collection of plays6. But there is no indication that he had such a collection in preparation. A Second Part of Para todos was what he expected to publish next7; after that he had rather uncertain plans8.
Only one more work by Montalbán, however, appeared during his lifetime; this was Fama posthuma, the anthology of tributes to the memory of Lope de Vega which he published early in 16369. In the prologue we find him promising again the Second Part of Para todos10; but this never appeared, and neither the «prodigiosa vida de Malhagas el embustero» which he had announced in Para todos11, nor an «Arte de bien morir» which he was to leave unfinished12, has ever come to light.
Nevertheless, within a month of his death on 25 June 1638, a further collection of twelve plays was offered for sale -the quarto volume with which this article is concerned13.
I have seen five copies of the first edition: one at the Biblioteca de Palacio, one at the Nacional, one at the London Library, and two at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsénal. The title-page reads as follows:
The verso is blank. The second preliminary leaf-none of the preliminary leaves bears any signature -has on its recto an «INDICE / De las Comedias que van en este segundo Tomo,» and on its verso the Suma del privilegio (dated 14/10/1637), Fee de erratas (5/7/1638) and Suma de la tassa (13/7/1638). The third leaf bears an aprobación by Valdivielso (22/9/1637) on its recto, and another by D. Alonso de Guevara y Arellano (5/10/1637) on its verso14.
The fourth leaf (recto and verso) has a dedication subscribed by Alonso Pérez «AL / EXCELENTISIMO / SEÑOR DON RODRIGO DE SILVA, / Mendoça, y Cerda...» In the London Library copy (only) this fourth leaf is replaced by one bearing a different dedication, subscribed by Alonso Pérez, «A / LA MVSA LVSITANA. / DONA BERNARDA FERREYRA / DE LA CERDA, SEÑORA / PORTVGVESA»15. In the Biblioteca Nacional copy (only) the fourth leaf is followed by a non-conjugate leaf bearing on its recto an engraving of Montalbán by Juan de Courbes16.
A prologue -occupying two whole leaves- by Montalbán's «amigo íntimo» Francisco de Quintana, completes the preliminaries17; the following 272 (wrongly numbered 274) fols. contain simply the twelve plays and (on the last verso) this colophon: EN MADRID. / [Rule] / En la Imprenta del Reyno. / Año 163818.
Segundo tomo was reprinted with Primero tomo at Valencia by Claudio Macé in 1652; but it is only superficially a «companion volume». Nothing in it is said to have been contributed by Montalbán, except the plays themselves. These do not bear (as do those in Primero tomo) the names of the autores who performed them. They are not dedicated (as are those in Primero tomo) to twelve different individuals. Instead, the collection as a whole bears dedications and a prologue written after Montalbán's death by his father and his closest friend19.
Neither suggests that Montalbán took any part in the publication of Segundo tomo. Alonso Pérez, whose dedications consist mainly of flattery and expatiation on his own grief, states merely -in the one addressed to Don Rodrigo de Silva- that his son had always wanted to dedicate the volume to that gentleman20.
Quintana in his
prologue is altogether more informative. After lamenting
Montalbán's death, enumerating his works21
and eulogizing his plays, this friend anticipates -significantly,
we may think- that one or other of those in Segundo tomo may seem
untypical, and attempts to explain: «...si se hallare entre las demás
alguna Comedia en que parezca que desdize del estilo que despues
obseruò, facilmente respondo, que fue parto de sus primeros
años, pues quando la escriuio apenas tenia diez y siete; y
ha sido acertado acuerdo, dar a la estampa las primeras flores, de
este ingenioso Pensil...»
22
He seems at this point almost to avoid saying who had caused the
plays to be published: «Dandose estauan a la
estampa quando la muerte nos le
quitò...» But soon he makes it clear
that Alonso Pérez was responsible: «Digo
que a este tiempo de su muerte se dauã a la estampa estos
partos luzidos de su entendimiento, para ocasionarme a afirmar que
fue piedad de su padre Alonso Perez de Montalvan, que quiso darnos
assi para vn sentimiento doze consuelos, y para vn dolor doze
alibios».
The privilegio and aprobaciones show that Segundo tomo was prepared for publication some nine months before Montalbán's death; but they tell us also that it had not been Montalbán (as in the case of Primero tomo) but his father who had sought permission to publish. Valdivielso's aprobación, moreover, reminds us that by October 1637 Montalbán was almost certainly incapable of publishing anything, by reason of the mental illness which preceded his death23.
The first symptoms of this progressively worsening condition seem to have appeared early in 1635. Quintana in his Oración panegírica24 suggests that it began with an acute attack from which his friend quickly recovered25; but Montalbán himself, in his prologue to Fama posthuma (written, presumably, late in 1635) had spoken of a chronic disability which had already affected him for over eight months26.
In any case the condition must have been a serious and permanent one from about the beginning of 1637, for Quintana writes in the prologue just quoted that Death took Montalbán «...ò para que èl tuuiesse descanso felicissimo (assi nos lo prometemos quantos sabemos sus preuenciones antes que la enfermedad de su frenesi se le confirmasse de que padecio despues año y medio) o para que sus amigos grangeasemos nueuo dolor en la vltima perdida de su ya casi apagada luz».
Some of the
contributors to Lágrimas panegíricas27
throw further light on the nature and duration of
Montalbán's malady. Josef de Arriaga suggests
-sentimentally, perhaps- that he was spared to write Fama posthuma and then
stricken with loss of memory28.
Calderón describes his condition as a «gentle
lethargy», an «imagen de la muerte»29.
Antonio Coello calls it a «sueño»30,
and Francisco Diego de Sayas writes that Montalbán was
brought to «vna vida tan
candida, y sincera como esperimentò la cuna de su Oriente, y
pudiera merecer la mas justa, y madura decrepitud, preuiniendo este
como sueño de las potencias, el apacible que le esperaua en
el Señor»
31.
Quintana, the best authority of all, confirms that his affliction
reduced Montalbán to a state of childishness32;
deprived of «el vso ingenioso de sus
potencias»33,
he was unfit for his normal work34,
incapable, for instance (although it was now his custom to receive
the Sacrament daily), of officiating at Mass35.
Clearly Montalbán in the year or so prior to the appearance of Segundo tomo was in no state to have prepared it for publication. The plays it contains do not carry his personal guarantee of authenticity. They were published as his, admittedly, by witnesses whom we should normally regard as unimpeachable, his father and his life-long friend; we shall need strong evidence to the contrary to shake their testimony. But such evidence exists, as I shall now hope to show, in the case of three of the plays -conceding, for argument's sake, that the remainder, like the Para todos and Primero tomo plays, may still be considered authentic. In each case familiarity with all Montalbán's works confirms me in the belief that the plays are not his; but without a detailed analysis of his «manner» I should not convince any reader that this is more than a subjective impression. I shall therefore rely, so far as possible, on «objective criteria» alone.
One play, Amor, lealtad y amistad, had been published before it appeared in Segundo tomo, as the work of Sebastián Francisco de Medrano. It had been included, with the title and attribution found in Segundo tomo, in both editions of Parte Veynte y Cinco de Comedias recopiladas de diferentes Autores, e Illustres Poetas de España... (Zaragoza, 1632 & 1633)36; but earlier still, I have discovered, in 1631, the identical play had appeared, as Lealtad, amor y amistad37, in Favores de las Musas..., a collection of poems and plays by Medrano published by Alonso de Castillo Solórzano38.
In an Epístola al que leyere therein Castillo wrote: «Van interpoladas con las rimas, algunas de sus Comedias, que son las que he podido auer a las manos, no fiandomelas su modestia por parezerle, auia de darlas al Teatro, o a lo menos a la estampa como lo hago. Tenialas dirigidas a diferentes Señores, embiandoselas, para que las leyesen...» On p. 191, moreover, we find: «LEALTAD, AMOR Y AMISTAD, COMEDIA DE S. SEBASTIAN FRANCISCO DE MEDRANO. A la Ilustrissima Señora Doña Leonor de Portugal Marquesa de Villanueva de Arizcal y de la Piouera»... and overleaf a dedication, subscribed by Medrano, beginning: «Esta Comedia escrita en mis niñezes con mayor caudal de ingenio, que valentía de versos, auiendo de salir a luz no podra ser de otra manera, que dedicandola a V. S....»
Both Castillo and Medrano were asserting, in other words, that the play which followed (on pp. 193-292) -the play later included in Segundo tomo as Amor, lealtad y amistad -was written by Medrano.
Medrano had long been a close friend of Montalbán's, as he averred in a letter to Castillo published in this same volume39. He and Montalbán had been rivals in at least one contest at each of the three justas poéticas held in 1620 and 1622 in honour of the beatification and canonization of San Isidro and the canonization of San Ignacio and San Francisco Xavier. Montalbán had undoubtedly attended the Academia de Madrid under Medrano's presidency, and Medrano had been eulogized in Orfeo en lengua castellana (Canto 4, Stanza 37). He was to be mentioned in Para todos in Montalbán's Indice de los ingenios de Madrid, with praise for both his verse and his plays40. He was to contribute to Fama posthuma, though not to Lágrimas panegíricas.
Castillo, too, was an intimate associate of Montalbán's. He had been praised in Orfeo en lengua castellana (Canto 4, Stanza 82). His Tardes entretenidas (1625), Jornadas alegres (1626), and Tiempo de regocijo... (1627) had been published at Alonso Pérez's expense, and for the last of these Montalbán had written a laudatory prologue. He was to be praised again in Para todos, in the course of the Seventh Day as well as in the Memoria de los que escriven Comedias en Castilla solamente. He was to contribute to Lágrimas panegíricas.
Some seven years, then, before Montalbán's death, two of his closest acquaintances published Amor, lealtad y amistad as not his, but Medrano's (without thereby provoking, it seems, any breach in their friendship with him).
They cannot, obviously, have mis-attributed it by mistake. But whoever included it in Segundo tomo may very well have done so; for he took his text, and the attribution, from one of the editions of Parte XXV. Apart from the inevitable misprints, and a few well-meant «corrections», his version is identical with the Parte one. They represent, broadly speaking, a single text of the play, clearly inferior to the one in Favores de las Musas. This lacks, admittedly, two passages -one of twelve lines, one of four- which they contain, but it has a total of thirty-nine other lines which they do not. Its variant readings, moreover, are consistently closer to what the author presumably wrote, as a few examples will show.
Where Favores de las Musas gives (p. 254):
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Parte XXV has (fol. 58r), and Segundo tomo copies (fol. 189r):
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Where it gives (pp. 271-272):
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Parte XXV has (fol. 61v):
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and Segundo tomo «corrects» (fol. 193r):
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Where it gives (p. 274):
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Parte XXV has (fol. 62r):
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and Segundo tomo «corrects» (fol. 193v):
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The versification of the play cannot help us greatly in deciding whether or not Medrano was the author, for we can learn little of his use of metres. His other extant dramatic works are, so far as I can discover, only three -three plays quite different from each other and from the comedia palaciega we are discussing. Two appeared in Favores de las Musas: Las venganzas de Amor, a mythological drama in which various Metamorphoses are combined, and El luzero eclipsado, a neo-classical tragedy on the death of John the Baptist. The third is an allegorical representación in memory of Isabel de Borbón, El nombre para la tierra, y la vida para el cielo41.
The versification does on the other hand suggest, in some ways, that Montalbán was not the author. Among his authentic plays, none contains, as does Amor, lealtad y amistad, both six- and seven- syllable endechas. None has so many redondillas or so few romances. None, except the Segundo tomo play La deshonra honrosa, ends each act in a different metre42.
One piece of internal evidence -a matter of fundamental dramatic technique- argues unequivocally for the attribution to Medrano. Castillo drew special attention to it in his proemio to the play:
Now in no play certainly by Montalbán is the action confined to twenty-four hours. No act certainly by Montalbán is a continuous scena; in no act by him, that is to say, is the stage not at one point at least left empty, indicating (by convention) a change of time or place43. But Medrano, we find, did attempt to follow neo-classical precepts in these respects. Of one of his three other plays, El luzero eclipsado, Castillo was similarly able to write, in a proemio44: «...tiene los cinco actos, que dispone el arte, y no passa de veynte y quatro horas con la igualdad y medida que piden las Scenas». Of a second, El nombre para la tierra..., the Marqués de Villamayor remarked in a preface that it had been written «en tres Actos, que cada vno es vna Scena, con la gala de no dexar el tablado solo».
This surely confirms that Amor, lealtad y amistad, though included in Segundo tomo, was the work of Sebastián Francisco de Medrano.
A second play, El divino portugués, San Antonio de Padua, is attributed in a manuscript apparently much earlier and more authoritative than the Segundo tomo text, to one Bernardino de Obregón. The manuscript, No. 15.222 at the Biblioteca Nacional, lacks very few lines which are to be found in Segundo tomo, but has over 280 which are not; and in as many as four places it tells us, in more or less the same terms each time:
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Dº Bernardino de obregon conpusso esta comedia de el dibino portugues San Antonio de Padua en 27 de julio de MDCXXIII45. |
Metrically the play is unremarkable, except that it contains, like Amor, lealtad y amistad but unlike any authentic play, both six- and seven-syllable endechas46.
The problem is complicated by a fact that neither G. W. Bacon nor J. H. Parker seems to have been aware of, though Restori pointed it out in 189847, that another quite different play about St. Antony, with the same title or titles, was also published as Montalbán's. The Segundo tomo play -the one examined by Parker- was also published in Parte Cuarenta y Quatro de Comedias de diferentes autores..., Zaragoza 1652, and a few now very rare sueltas48. The other -the one summarised and discussed by Bacon- appeared only in sueltas49.
This play, metrically, might equally well have been written by Montalbán, despite some unusual features. Act III has two stanzas of the lira AbbAcC -not found, it seems, in any authentic play50- and Act I two extended (twelve-line) décimas. Act II has the abnormally low total of 521 lines -but probably our text is defective51.
This is not, as Restori suggested52, the Segunda parte promised at the end of the Segundo tomo play; it uses none of the same characters, except the Saint and his father, and gives a rather different account of his life, although including some of the same episodes. We must consider it most improbable, in fact, that Montalbán wrote both. The «Bernardino de Obregón» play -or the other- may have been attributed to him in error.
A third play, El sufrimento premiado, was published only in Segundo tomo; but I believe it to be a «lost» play by Lope de Vega. Lope had written a play with this title before 1604, for he mentioned it in his first Peregrino list53; and an El sufrimiento premiado, attributed to Lope, was in the possession of Roque de Figueroa and his wife Mariana de Avendaño on 1 March 162454.
The metrical structure of our play may be described in detail as follows: Act openings and closings: I, red.-oct.; II, red.-qu.; III, oct.-red. Number of metres per act: I, 4; II, 5; III, 2. For the body of the play we have the following:
| Number of Passages | Number of Lines | Type | Percentage |
| 5 | 2536 | Red. | 79.2 |
| 1 | 80 | Rom. | 2.5 |
| 2 | 305 | Qu. | 9.5 |
| 2 | 232 | Oct. | 7.2 |
| 1 | 51 | Su. | 1.6 |
| — | — | — | — |
| 11 | 3204 | 100.0 |
The one passage in Rom. is monologue of address, wholly quaternary, with assonances in «a-a ». Total Italianate lines 8.8. Longest passage in Red. 928 lines. Longest passage in Qu. 260 lines55.
Such a system of versification is so «early» and so completely at variance with Montalbán's normal practice as to demonstrate almost beyond question that the play is not his. Above all, it has hardly any romance but almost 80% redondillas; no authentic play has less than 25% romance or-except for El mariscal de Virón, with 47.2% -more than 40% redondillas. Professor S. G. Morley has commented, in a private letter: «It seems to me most unlikely that any [play of the period when Montalbán was writing] would show so large a percentage of redondillas, so small a percentage of romance and no décimas at all».
The versification is consistent, however, in every way, with its having been written by Lope, at one of the periods 1588-97(8) and 1601-04 when he wrote plays with a great predominance of redondillas56.
The characters are quite untypical of Montalbán, but, I suggest, quite typical of Lope. Their very names are revealing: Tancredo, Fabio, Leonato, Torcato, Vitorino, Laurencio, Basilio, Hipólito, Marcela, Ginebra, Carpio and Celio. Of these only Fabio and Celio are names used by Montalbán in authentic plays; Lope used them all, except Vitorino, repeatedly57.
Carpio, the escudero of Acts I and II, is surely Lope himself, a «personaje de sus comedias» again. As well as the Don Félix del Carpio who appears in La villana de Getafe, Morley found characters called Carpio as servants or soldiers in ten mostly early plays; one of them, in El amante agradecido (ca. 1602), is an escudero. Mostly these characters show no «Lopean self-consciousness», but the one in El gallardo catalán (1599-1603) says in Act I:
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The Carpio of El sufrimiento premiado says in Act I:
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Lope is describing again the escutcheon derived from his supposed ancestor Bernardo del Carpio, emblazoned on the title-pages of five works59 and mentioned in at least six more60. These «indiscretos geroglí-» are «Lopillo's» trade-mark.
Ginebra, a
guileful crone bent on the cynical exploitation of her daughter's
charms, represents a type totally unknown in Montalbán's
theatre but familiar throughout Lope's; variations on the character
and allusions to its archetype occur in a score of his
works61.
She is described, moreover, in terms almost identical with those
used of her counterparts. She is the «tercera de Calisto», like
Teodora in El
rufián Castrucho62;
and if Saluscia in La
victoria de la honra is «aquella vieja en cecina/
retrato de Celestina»
63,
Ginebra is «...vieja verde /de
Celestina vn retrato».
Torcato, the veteran returned from Flanders «con mas valaços que escudos/y mas papeles que galas», belongs to another large family of Lope characters, that of the soldado fanfarrón, a comic type based in part on observation, in part on the Miles Gloriosus of tradition64. He has distant cousins in a few of Montalbán's plays -Don Pedro Guiral, or the Mariscal de Virón; but these are very different characters, subjects for the serious study, not the satirical sketch.
From the characters mentioned El sufrimiento premiado derives much of its humour; for it has no gracioso. (Tancredo's servant Fabio, who is killed in Act II, has a very minor role and none of the anti-hero's characteristics). Now the fully-developed gracioso is found in every authentic play by Montalbán; but he has notoriously not yet appeared in Lope's early plays -in all those before 1593, and many of those before 160465.
Much of the language, and particularly the abundant allusions in El sufrimiento premiado, could be shown to be typical of Lope; we find for instance characteristic lists of famous friends, lovers and heroines of history and legend. The last includes a clear allusion to the story of Doña María Coronel, in terms which recall its dramatisation by Lope in 1603 as La corona merecida:
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I have no faith in the critical tradition that Montalbán shamelessly put his name to works in fact by Lope. (The «evidence» for instance on which scholars assert that this happened in the case of Orfeo en lengua castellana is scandalously flimsy). But at least two plays published as his -Lucha de amor y amistad (La amistad y obligación) and Sin secreto no hay amor- were certainly Lope's. The same is surely true of El sufrimiento premiado.
G. W. Bacon, supposing it of course to be Montalbán's, criticised it severely; but his strictures demonstrate only his own insensitiveness and incomprehension66. To me it seems an able treatment of an excellent comic idea -the story of a lover so improbably unselfish as to put his beloved's happiness literally before all else. As an entertaining example of early Lope comedy, it deserves to be rescued from the oblivion of Montalbán's Segundo tomo67.