The preliminaries contain three plausible but false documents: a privilege, dated Madrid, 12 March 1626; a tassa (price-certificate), dated 20 November 1626; and an errata-list, dated Madrid, 12 November 1626. Perhaps Lyra did not know the date of the original privilege (which was issued in Madrid), and did not want to draw attention to what he was doing by trying to find out. In any case, the licence granted in 1624 was not conceded for the same plays as he issued in 1627 and 1631. He probably just invented three dates which were in keeping with each other, and consistent with the 1627 of his first issue.

Cruickshank, «The First Edition of El burlador», pp. 457-58.

I am grateful to my friend Mr D. Rogers of the University of Durham for his help here, and sorry that I was not in a position to tell him what I now know about this suelta when he was working on his edition of the play (Oxford, 1974).

Paterson suggested (not on typographical grounds) that this suelta might have been printed as early as 1624; but his argument supposes that the twelve plays Tirso sent to the printers in 1624 were not immediately printed as a collected volume («Two Bibliographical Studies», p. 67, n. 40). I know of two more sueltas which use IT2 and R7, that is, Guyot's médiane italique and médiane romaine, as their text-types. The first is «Lope de Vega's» El gran cardenal de España [Don Pedro González de Mendoza] (A-E4 F2; 22 fols), bound in a Lope Parte 25 («Barcelona, Cormellas, 1631») now in Pennsylvania (Regueiro 2366; on the authorship, see V. G. Williamsen, «Lope de Vega: A "Missing" parte and Two "Lost" comedias», Bulletin of the Comediantes, 25 (1973), 42-51). The suelta has R2, R4 and IT1, all used by Faxardo. In «The First Edition of El burlador» (pp. 458-61), I suggested that this Parte 25 was produced in Seville, but found no reason to doubt the date 1631. If the parte was issued in 1631, then El gran cardenal must have been in print then. If, as seems likely, Faxardo printed both it and the Copenhagen Condenado, then the latter is also unlikely to be later than 1631.

The other suelta is of Calderón's La puente de Mantible, in an edition attributed to Lope de Vega (British Library, 11728.h.21/2). The company of Roque de Figueroa was paid on 7 July 1630 for performing this play, but we do not know how much earlier the play was performed, or if this was the first performance. I believe the suelta may be earlier than 1630, and that it almost certainly antedates the publication of the play in Calderón's Primera parte of 1636.

The attribution to Calderón is worth remarking on here. Calderón had written some of his best plays by 1635, but relatively little of his work had been published by then, so there is no telling what his reputation was in Seville. Perhaps the attribution (and the printing) dates from after July 1636, the publication date of Calderón's Primera parte, or even from after July 1637, when his Segunda parte appeared. We should remember, though, that Calderón's brother José wrote in the dedication of the Primera parte of «the annoyance of seeing many plays which are not his printed under his name».

Professor Rodríguez López-Vázquez has wondered, not unreasonably, why El burlador de Sevilla was not printed in Tirso's Primera parte of 1627, if, as seems possible, Sande bought it from Roque de Figueroa in 1626 or 1627 when Figueroa was in Seville (Andrés de Claramonte y «El burlador de Sevilla», p. 5). If I am right, the text of the Primera parte was already printed by 1626. As to why Tirso, the supposed author, did not include the Burlador in his projected Primera parte in 1624, that is another matter; but a parte contains only twelve plays, and Tirso, by his own account, had written three hundred by 1624. (One could argue, though, that El burlador was one of the plays which were originally included and later cut from the parte: but this is unprovable).