Calderón, copyists, and the problem of endings

Margaret Rich Greer

University of Texas at Austin

In the study of Spanish epic poetry and romances, we know that variants frequently occur at the end of the poem. Furthermore, we often find that the special charm of ballads such as «El conde Arnaldos» stems precisely from the loss of the original ending, and the aura of mystery and romance they thus acquire. When attempting to establish a definitive text of a Calderonian play, editors may face a similar pattern of ending variation; the resulting mystery is, however, something less than charming.

Alterations of Calderonian texts can and do occur, of course, at any point in the comedia, but observations indicate that they appear with notable frequency in the final pages-of-the play as a whole, or of the individual acts therein. These changes can be sorted into three major groups:

1. Rewriting of the text by Calderón¹ and/or an autor de comedias.
2. Alteration of the play for different sorts of productions.
3. Errors on the part of the copyist and/or printer of the comedia.

The last of these three -copyist's or printer's error- is the least complex, theoretically, although it may involve the most irreparable loss. An excellent case in point is that of La fiera, el rayo y la piedra, as printed in the two editions of the Tercera Parte of Calderón's comedias.

Various scholars have noted that the second edition of about 1674 is a line-for-line reprint of that of 1664. Five folios are different, however- folios 241-246, the ending pages of La fiera, el rayo y la piedra. Wilson noted the physical divergence in these five folios, but did not examine their contents².

The reason for the divergence is that the compositor of the first edition, probably losing his place in his copy-text, has printed 30 lines twice (about one column of type), and apparently omitted part of a scene at the same time. Thirty lines is about the average number of lines that Calderón, and many scribes, usually fitted on the small quarto sheets normally used for manuscript copies. The simplest explanation for the compositor's error would be that he was working with loose sheets, and that after some break in work -perhaps for lunch, a night's rest, or a holiday- he mistakenly set the first side of the sheet twice and omitted the second side³.

The duplicated section begins with Zéfiro's line «Como, si quando ambos ven», at the bottom of f. 244v, vol. 2, and the repetition begins at the bottom of f. 245r, col. 2. As the text stands, (even ignoring the repeated section), Yrífile leaves the stage, then speaks and exits again, without ever having re-entered. The printer of the second edition, having noted this error, rearranged the lines in a seemingly logical order⁴. He deleted six more lines from folio 245r, column 1:

These lines he replaced with sixteen lines from folio 245v, columns 1-2:

Although the second edition reads smoothly, a few ragged edges remain which betray the loss. The stage direction «Vanse las dos» makes little sense in either version, because the speaker immediately before is Estatua (Anajarte turned to stone) who cannot move and whose removal is then discussed by «Todos.» Subsequent editors have solved this problem by changing it to «los dos,» reassigning lines and relocating the stage direction so that it refers to Yrífile and Zéfiro. This does not entirely solve the problem, for it means that two major characters exit and do not return for the grand finale. The conventional ending for the spectacular mythological plays calls for the assembly on stage of all major characters except those that have been killed, metamorphosed, or otherwise permanently disposed of. Hence, it would appear likely that the first printer's error caused the loss of lines taking several characters offstage to worship Venus and then bringing them back again for the finale.

The only known manuscript -that used for the 1690 performance in Valencia to celebrate the wedding of Carlos II and Mariana (Biblioteca Nacional Ms. 14.614)- follows the second edition ending, with the addition of new lines in praise of Carlos and Mariana: it therefore offers no help in retrieving the lost lines.

Shergold compared the Vera Tassis edition with the first edition, and noting the superficial difference, used it as one piece of evidence for his argument that Vera Tassis often based his texts on additional manuscripts⁵. He apparently did not see the second edition, nor examine the pages in question closely enough to realize that Vera Tassis has not added extra text, as he believed. This of course does not mean that his case for Vera Tassis is invalid, but simply that La fiera, el rayo y la piedra is not admissible evidence.

Calderón condemned similar publishing errors in the preface to the Quarta Parte, saying that:

The second case -that of the alteration of a play for different sorts of production- confronts the editor with more complex theoretical decisions. Many of Calderón's comedias -particularly in the later years- were originally written for palace performances on occasions of state. They were elaborate productions that involved complex scenery and stage machinery, and could last as long as 7 hours from the opening loa to the final baile⁷. Subsequent repetitions at court or in the corrales often required simplification and/or shortening of the comedias. Sometimes this was done by shortening the long expository speeches or cutting out other non-essential segments. Often, as in Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo, whole scenes might be omitted.

The handsome deluxe suelta of this play in the Harvard library gives us a marvelous vision of its first production⁸. By comparing it to our standard editions of the play, we see that the endings of both the second and third acts were later simplified. The change in the second act is relatively minor, involving the omission or alteration of only ten lines. In the first production, the goddess Palas appears crossing the heavens in a magnificent chariot drawn by two lions. She stops, and sends down a cloud to raise Perseo to the heavens to receive her gift of the mirrored shield with which he will combat Medusa. The simplified version has her appear «en una apariencia en alto,» and then descend to the stage to present her gift.

The beginning of the third act has also been altered, omitting references to the perspective scenery that opened the act, and in the middle of the act, a scene centering around La Discordia has been deleted.

The major cut, however, was that of the grand finale at the end of the third act. In the suelta version, the temple of Jupiter appears on high, then descends to the stage, and from it emerge Danae, Polítides, Cardenio, three graciosos, and other residents of Acaya whom Júpiter has thus transported to Trinacria to celebrate Perseo's victory. At the end of the play, they return to the templo, which again wafts them away into the heavens. Obviously, this is not an effect that could easily be repeated in subsequent performances, and some 150 lines have been cut in order to omit it. With its excision, however, the play loses something of its unity, for it is in this scene that all the threads are tied together and we see the blameless Danae rewarded with marriage to Polítides. Who made these changes?

In such cases of cropping, one's inclination is to attribute the surgery to an autor de comedias rather than to Calderón, for the evidence of such directorial shortening abounds in manuscripts, with large chunks boxed off for omission -up to a third of the play, in some cases. That this would sometimes be an incorrect assumption, however, is proved by one manuscript which Manuel Sánchez Mariano, head of the manuscript section of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, kindly showed me. This is a scribal copy of the third act of El mayor encanto amor⁹, in which the last folio has been crossed out, and a drastically shortened ending substituted in what is clearly Calderón's hand. Thus we have evidence that Calderón participated in at least some of the reduction processes, and that when two ending versions of a play exist, they may have virtually equal authority.

Was this also the case in Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo? The nature of the revision of various sections of the second and third acts (in the first act, I have noticed no significant variants) -the occasional excision of a few unnecessary lines in several places, the relocating of part of a speech by Perseo, and the rewriting of other lines) suggest it as at least a possibility. For illumination on this subject, we can look forward to the modern edition based on the Harvard suelta, now being prepared by John Varey and Jack Sage.

Although Calderón of course felt free to reshape his own works, he did not consider them part of the public domain, nor did he view with equanimity the unauthorized changes made by other pens -or hatchets. In the same preface, Calderón complained bitterly of the practice of artistic piracy, and of those who buy comedias not from their owners, but from «el apuntador que la traslada, ó el compañero que la estudia, ó el ingenio que la contrahaze¹⁰».

How, faced with alternate ending versions at a distance of some 300 years, does the editor know whether he is «buying» from the «dueño» or the «ingenio que contrahaze»? The question is of vital importance in instances of the third sort of ending variation, that of the rewriting of the text by Calderón and/or an autor de comedias.

An examination of a number of autograph or partly autograph manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional reveals that the majority of these manuscripts show evidence of substantial alteration at the end of one or more acts. The manuscripts are of three kinds: 1) those which are all in Calderón's hand, with alterations in his hand also; 2) scribal manuscripts with alterations in Calderón's hand; and 3) those in Calderón's hand with sections or pages in another hand. In the wholly autograph manuscript of La desdicha de la voz¹¹, Calderón has made substantial alterations at the end of the first act, by crossing out some lines and inserting others in the margins. At the end of the second act, he has gone even further, cancelling a whole page by gluing another sheet to the back of folio 42. This practice of cancelling a page or part of a page by pasting on another sheet was also noted by D. W. Cruickshank in his edition of En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira¹², and can be seen in a number of autograph manuscripts. Since the La desdicha manuscript is all in Calderón's hand, we know that the changed endings were his creation.

We can be equally sure that the ending was Calderón's invention in the second sort of autograph, such as the partially autograph manuscript Basta callar¹³. Here we have a case like El mayor encanto amor, in which Calderón has reworked a scribal copy. S. N. Treviño demonstrated convincingly that the manuscript constitutes a revision made in the 1650's of an original dating from about 1640¹⁴. It contains some 600 lines which do not appear in any of the printed editions, all of which derive from the version in the Vera Tassis Verdadera Quinta Parte of 1682¹⁵. Most of these lines probably belonged to the original version, but had been cut from a copy shortened for performance. One passage on folio 19v, however, is an addition to the earlier version referring to the recapture of Barcelona by Don Juan José in 1652¹⁶. This addition is written in the principal scribal hand, from which we can deduce that Calderón revised his original version of the play, and had a scribe make a fair copy, on which he then made a number of further revisions.

The title page is in Calderón's hand, as are scattered corrections throughout the text, including a list of four «Personas nuebas desta Jornada» at the end of Act II. The major alteration occurs, however, at the end of the first act. Ten lines from the bottom of folio 21 verso, the handwriting changes from that of the scribe to that of Calderón and the last three folios of the first act are in his hand. Why did Calderón write this act ending himself? My conjecture is that he had already altered the page to the point of illegibility, or that he planned to rework it again while writing it out. Whatever the reason, we can be sure that this second act ending is as he wanted it to be in the 1650's.

We do not have such absolute assurance of authority in the third sort of autograph manuscript -that in which the body of the manuscript is in Calderón's hand, but with important sections in another, presumably scribal, hand. This is by far the most common pattern among the «autograph» manuscripts I have seen. I will mention only 3 cases. The manuscript of El secreto a voces¹⁷ has had the last folio of the third act altered by having part of a sheet of Calderón's original lines covered up with a pasted-on sheet, written in another hand and in double columns, so that more verses fit in the same space. The first two verses on this sheet copy lines added in the margin by Calderón and still visible (although scratched out) above the paste-on. We can logically assume that the second act has also been changed, since the first and last folios are in a hand other than that of Calderón.

A more complex case is that of El mayor monstruo los celos. By comparing various editions of this play with the partly autograph manuscript¹⁸ on which Hesse based his edition, we can see evidence of multiple versions of its melodramatic climax. The work had already been published in the Segunda Parte of 1637, but in a corrupt form, and the manuscript, a revision dating from about 1670¹⁹, ends with a four-line proclamation that it is:

Believing this declaration, we may well disregard the early editions. Yet a problem remains: this same declaration concludes two different versions of the climax. Which is really «como la escribió su autor» -or are they both? And if so, which do we consider the definitive version? One form appears in the manuscript, and the other in the Vera Tassis Segunda Parte of 1686, for which Hesse believes Vera Tassis made use of the manuscript. While the events and the order of the ending are the same in these two versions, the wording differs significantly.

The last six folios of the manuscript in and of themselves demonstrate extensive alteration. The first two are in Calderón's hand, with some revisions, also in his hand. The last four are in another hand or hands. At the bottom of the fourth folio appears the word «Finis» and the approval of the censor Avellaneda on 23 April 1672. We could assume that this was an authorized ending, merely recopied by a scribe because Calderón had altered the pages until they were illegible. But after the supposedly finished manuscript was sent to the censor for approval, further changes were apparently added. The scribal fifth and sixth folios (called «trial sheets» by Hesse) include an alternate version of a section of the last folio written and revised in Calderón's hand. Hesse has incorporated them into his text (without indicating precisely their source), and the result is certainly the most aesthetically satisfying version. But can we confidently assume that this composite version is really «como lo escribió su autor?» Before attempting to answer, we should look at another manuscript which, at least physically, appears to present a similar case.

El gran príncipe de Fez²⁰ also shows evidence of alteration in stages. Virtually all of this manuscript is in Calderón's hand, except for the last folio and a half, which was apparently written by two different scribes. Much of the last 2 1/2 folios has at some point been marked for omission, but the supposedly cancelled lines appear in the Quarta Parte text and derived editions. However, these editions differ substantially from the manuscript, which substitutes for the scene of the vision of Abraham and Isaac a short exchange between El Buen Genio and Religión. Perhaps the autor de comedias requested a rewrite to cut this spectacular but difficult-to-stage scene, which requires that El Buen Genio and El Mal Genio fly up on tramoyas, that a mountain appear and open to reveal Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and that an angel arrive to halt the sacrifice.

It is also possible that the rewrite resulted from censorial objections -or the fear of such objections- to the extravagance of the Abraham-Isaac scene, for the approval of the censor contains a statement that: «Senor he Visto esta comedia del Gran Príncipe de Fez de D. Pedro Calderón y lo que le da que hacer al censurar son muchos discretos rreparos a la admiración. Su Autor es tan rriguroso Fiscal de su Papel que lo que va atajado de su mano le quita de aplausos a la discrecion del auditorio, este es mi sentir». From handwriting alone, we cannot prove which -if either- of the two endings was written by Calderón. Yet the dramatic Abraham-Isaac scene could hardly have come from a lesser pen than that of Calderón, and the play would surely be the poorer for the loss of it.

Can we legitimately, however, accept as authorial the Quarta Parte ending of El gran príncipe and reject the Vera Tassis ending of El mayor monstruo los celos? In order to answer this question intelligently, it seems to me that we need to take into consideration another issue, which extends beyond the technical tasks of editing to the aesthetic questions of the nature of authorship and the integrity of a work of art, as the eminent bibliographer James Thorpe has posed them²¹.

Let us imagine a scenario that we know occurs in 20th century theatre. A director acquires a play from its author, begins rehearsal, and in the rehearsal process, decides to make changes, with or without the collaboration or approval of the author. Now we know that Calderón attended rehearsals of at least some of his palace plays-there are archival records of payments to him for attending rehearsals, and to cocheros for transporting him back and forth²². Then who made changes? Did Calderón, either before giving his manuscript to the autor or during rehearsals, notice that a change was needed and write the necessary lines? Did the autor de comedias desire the alteration, and have Calderón make it? Did the autor himself make the change and secure Calderón's approval? Did the autor make changes which Calderón did not approve but for practical reasons did not reject? Or were the changes of the sort that Calderón vehemently disclaimed, as in the preface to the Quarta Parte? We say that as editors our goal is to approach as nearly as possible a hypothetical original text of Calderón. The aesthetic question involved is-at what point in this scale from absolute authority to absolute corruption does the text cease to be that of Calderón? In editing plays such as El mayor monstruo los celos or El gran príncipe, we should perhaps consider that the true situation may fall somewhere in the grey middle of the scale.

Finally, if variants -whether introduced by printers, copyists, autores or Calderón himself- do indeed tend to cluster at endings, why does this occur? Perhaps because some printers, copyists and autores viewed endings as the end of a task, to be finished as expeditiously as possible. As we have seen, the printer of the Tercera Parte mutilated the ending of La fiera, el rayo y la piedra; Calderón complained that printers regularly shortened endings to make them fit the page; and innumerable manuscripts show that autores abbreviated texts to shorten their performance time. Calderón, on the other hand, viewed endings as the climax of a work of art, as that which gave shape to the whole, and therefore dedicated particular attention to them. Finales are structurally very important in any play for the establishment of the desired dramatic tension; they may demand special care in Golden Age plays, which often require the intermeshing of a number of story lines at the ending of acts.

Endings, therefore, also demand the close attention of the modern editor. Because of the number of variables potentially involved in comedia text variants, no single formula can be devised to guide Calderón's editors. When confronted with ending variants, however, their judgments should be based on a thorough knowledge of the nature and frequency of such variation²³, and should carefully record the differing texts and their reasons for preferring the form selected as authoritative. If this procedure is followed, subsequent editors will be able to rely on an ever-increasing body of knowledge about the transmission of Golden Age texts. So armed, they will be able to move away from eclectic editorial methods based heavily on aesthetic judgment, and toward a more scientific approach to the problem endings of Calderón's plays. Calderón obviously paid these endings special heed, and his 20th century editors owe them the same thoughtful attention.