The Spanish book trade has a long history of tailoring its products to attract more readers. Before printing was invented, books were very expensive, and only the wealthy could afford them; in any case, only a small percentage of the population could read them. The arrival of the printed book did not change this situation overnight: items ostensibly intended for leisure reading were still big and costly. Thus, the first “plays” to be printed appeared at the end of Juan del Encina’s Cancionero (1496), a folio of 116 leaves (the eight plays filled only seven leaves). Most early books had very little paratext; some had no title-page. Encina’s did: a leaf with only the words Cancionero de las obras de Juan del enzina in the middle, in small type; verso blank. The plays had headings in the same type as the text, but some had no identifiable titles, e.g., Otra de la mesma noche y por los mesmos pastores comiendo y beviendo y festejando mucho aquella fiesta, which made good sense only in the context of the previous item: the headings were more résumé than title. Another, even bigger (and more expensive) cancionero was the Cancionero general, a folio of 242 leaves (1511) containing over a thousand poems (but no plays). Both of these large items had several reprints, but in the fifteen years between them, the printers, or the “book merchants” who paid them, had realised that the educational revolution fostered by Ferdinand and Isabella had helped create a new public, literate but impecunious (some of them university students), who wanted smaller and cheaper reading-matter: comedias sueltas (“loose plays”) or pliegos sueltos (“loose folds”), i.e., single-sheet chapbooks containing a few poems.
For a long time, it was thought that the first comedias sueltas dated from the second decade of the sixteenth century, but recent research indicates that the oldest survivor is the Égloga interlocutoria (Alcalá, about 1503) attributed to Diego Guillén de Ávila; it collates a8 b8 c2, a quarto in eights of 4½ sheets.1 The printers were not quite able to fit the play into four sheets, and would have left 3½ empty pages in the half-sheet c, except that they put in a risqué poem (which had nothing to do with the play) by Rodrigo de Reynosa as a filler. Dr Szmuk shows what printers would have done three centuries later with this space.
Items which appeared in suelto/suelta format usually did so without the authors’ approval, and frequently had no imprint. In 1502 Ferdinand and Isabella introduced the first law requiring a printing licence, but not until 1627 did the law demand imprints for all items, including ephemera (although printers who had not paid for a licence continued to omit them, secure in the knowledge that they were unlikely to be traced).
If the laws governing the production of printed matter failed to keep up with book trade practice, at first the trade was almost as slow to develop new ways of attracting purchasers. The concept of the numbered series, at least of collected volumes of plays, could be said to have begun with Juan de la Cueva’s Primera parte de las comedias y tragedias (Seville, 1583; reprinted 1588). Numbering is a useful feature in the promotion of sales: the issue of an item which, unlike a serially-published novel, is complete in itself, but which also encourages collectors, as Dr Szmuk points out, to do just that: collect the parts of the series. However, despite the fact that Cueva lived and wrote until 1610, no second part saw the light, and in any case the concept of the numbered series of volumes catered only for the wealthier reader: his Primera parte sold at 5 blancas, or 2½ maravedís, per sheet. With 82½ sheets and at 34 maravedís per real, the book cost approximately 6 reales. Braudel reckons the annual income for a Castilian village family of four in the late 1570s as 44 ducats, or 484 reales: not much more than 9 reales a week.2 A century after printing had come to Spain, few labourers could read, but fewer could readily afford even a medium-sized book; however, a pliego suelto cost 2½ maravedís, while a whole comedia suelta could be had for 10. There is evidence that the rare literate villagers might read aloud to their assembled neighbours: we can see where the much later “public performance parties” suggested by Dr Szmuk might have had their origin.
The Valencian book merchant Juan Bautista Timoneda may have come across Juan de la Cueva’s Primera parte, but in any event he extended the idea of the numbered series to pliegos sueltos. The casualty rate among early pliegos is so high that complete details are elusive, but the first examples seem to be of 1592.3 Even so, a century went by before the producers of comedias sueltas realised that they too could encourage sales by introducing series with numbers.
One reason for the initially slow development of the paratext in plays was the fact that drama made up a very small percentage of the output of printers throughout the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth, everything changed. Between 1604 and 1625, twenty partes (collected volumes of twelve plays) by Lope de Vega were printed: 240 comedias in all (though not all were authentic). The first volume carried no number, but the second announced itself as his Segunda parte, and the rest followed. Lope probably wrote more plays on his own than all of the other sixteenth-century Spanish dramatists did together, and it certainly seems that his huge output triggered the boom in the suelta format. By the time his plays were being published, the cost of the printed sheet had risen to 4 maravedís, bringing a four-sheet suelta to 16 maravedís, nearly half a real, almost exactly what it cost to see the play, standing, in the theatre.
Lope invented a new kind of play and founded a new school of drama. Soon there were many other dramatists to fill the theatres and feed the printing industry. However, although Calderón, the last great classical Spanish dramatist, died in 1681, the printers’ output of sueltas did not decline; on the contrary. The printing of collections of plays, on the other hand, did decline: the last volume of the great series (576 plays) of Comedias escogidas, number 48, appeared in 1704; the second-last had appeared as early as 1681. Calderón, it is true, was something of an exception: between 1715 and 1731, eight of the nine volumes of his plays edited by Juan de Vera Tassis were reprinted; between 1760 and 1763, all the plays were reprinted by Juan Fernández de Apontes. Complete six-volume editions of his autos sacramentales appeared during the same period: 1717 (Pando y Mier) and 1759–1760 (Fernández de Apontes). All these volumes of plays, and to some extent of autos, provided copy for suelta editions, which appeared in much greater numbers.
Here we see one of the mysteries associated with the publication of Spanish drama in the first half of the eighteenth century: compared with the period 1601–1650, few new plays were being written, and yet the numbers of suelta editions continued to rise. In 1720, for example, the Seville printer-bookseller Lucas Martín de Hermosilla had stocks of sueltas amounting to just under 211,000 copies; and he was only one of half-a-dozen printers in Seville who regularly printed plays.4 And although Seville was perhaps the most important city in this respect, there were others: in particular, Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, Salamanca.
Reckoning the total number of suelta editions of comedias printed in eighteenth-century Spain is difficult. The Institut del Teatre in Barcelona apparently has 70,000 sueltas in its collection, but this includes seventeenth- and nineteenth-century editions, as well as multiple copies of editions. On the other hand, there are hundreds of editions of which the Institut possesses no copy. Guesses for the total number of editions of plays printed in eighteenth-century Seville are 1,300–1,500.5 Even the number of different titles involved poses problems. The total number of surviving dramatic pieces from the classical English stage up to 1660 is some 750. Lope de Vega and Calderón together reach almost 600 in the century 1582–1681, if surviving dramatic pieces are taken to include autos sacramentales as well as secular plays. The total number of titles for Spain must be anyone’s guess, whether the texts have survived or not (and the number of lost plays which are known to have existed is huge).
Attempts to catalogue classical Spanish drama, especially in suelta format, go back a long way. The list most often consulted is Francisco Medel’s Índice general alfabético de todos los títulos de comedias, which was published by Medel’s heirs in 1735 and reprinted in the Revue Hispanique in 1929, as well as being digitized by the Biblioteca Nacional.6 Medel’s Índice is a bookseller’s catalogue: the compiler had not merely handled the items, he had them in his shop. Autos sacramentales were included as well as comedias, and although it is never said so explicitly, it is possible that some of the texts were manuscript: we know that some of those involved in the book trade at this time made, or had made for sale, manuscript copies of texts which were rare in print, or not in print at all. These are not likely to have been numerous, however. The total number of Medel’s titles is around 3700.
Medel’s catalogue was anticipated by the Índice de todas las comedias impresas hasta el año de 1716, prepared for publication (?) by Juan Isidro Fajardo. This Índice has remained in manuscript for 300 years, although the Biblioteca Nacional has digitized it. Fajardo’s total is around 2,200, partly because he excluded autos, and listed only what was printed. He often notes that he owns a copy, and provides much more information than Medel, saying whether a play was a suelta or part of a volume, as well as which volume, and notes which booksellers had which plays. He evidently had access to the royal library, since he often refers to items in the palace collection, which still has them: probably the same copies. Sometimes he mentions titles owned by individuals, perhaps acquaintances or friends, or items he has not seen, giving as his source Nicolás Antonio’s Biblioteca hispana. Many of his titles have not survived: for example, he quotes four sueltas of plays by Calderón. Now lost, their authenticity is validated by Calderón’s own lists. Occasionally Fajardo gives enough detail for us to identify, at least provisionally, the suelta edition he is describing: for example, La flecha del Amor, written, he says, in Vienna, “por pluma española”, and printed there in 1672. The “pluma” is anonymous, but the Biblioteca Nacional has a copy (R/18195) of an edition printed in Vienna in 1672. Another is listed as “Retraído, de don Juan de Jáuregui, en libro antiguo, Fajardo”. This is Jáuregui’s only surviving play, El retraído, alias La comedia famosa de don Claudo. The Biblioteca Nacional has a suelta (T/12527: Barcelona: Sebastián de Cormellas, 1635), as does the Hispanic Museum and Library.7 If it is objected that this is a suelta, not a “libro antiguo”, the fact is that this edition is fat enough at 48 folios (96 pages) to be called a book, while Fajardo regularly describes items more than fifty years old as “antiguo”.
Editors of texts have tended to look down on sueltas, since their texts so often came from the volumes printed for the upper and middle parts of the market, volumes which provided the first editions. However, many plays survive only in sueltas, first appeared in sueltas, or preserve their most reliable texts in sueltas. For example, Lope’s masterpiece, El castigo sin venganza, first appeared as a suelta (Barcelona, 1634); the first surviving text for Calderón’s masterpiece, La vida es sueño, is not the author’s own Primera parte de comedias of 1636, but a suelta printed in Seville around 1632–34, while the best text for his El príncipe constante is not that of the same Primera parte, but a suelta of perhaps thirty or forty years later, which has a branch of the textual tree all to itself because it derives from a source which must have been closer to the original.8 It is worth noting that one of the selling features mentioned by Dr Szmuk, the naming of the actors who took the roles, is found in the 1634 suelta of El castigo sin venganza: eight actors are named, including the autor (the company-manager Manuel Álvarez Vallejo, who played the duke), and the autora (his wife María de Riquelme, who played the duke’s unhappy bride Casandra). Since Lope wrote the actors’ names in his original manuscript, we can deduce that he wrote the play for this company, and probably that Álvarez Vallejo (the new “owner” of the play) agreed to return it to him for printing.9 We cannot be certain that these friendly arrangements were normal a century later.
In the later eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, Dr Szmuk records that several changes took place. First, authors began to write, and to have performed, new and different kinds of play. While the printers printed these new plays in the traditional suelta format, they began to advertise their product, either by using spare space at the end, or—in a small departure from the old format—by adding printed wrappers. Finally, newspapers also began to advertise the publication and performance of plays, both old and new, and to publish criticism. This criticism is sometimes of performances, but also of plays as literature. Advertisements and criticism published in newspapers might seem far enough from the matter which accompanies a play’s printed text, but it is only a step from the self-advertising “Comedia famosa” which appeared in the headings of so many of them. Properly called the epitext, it forms part of the paratext.10
In 1500 the paratext was minimal and the epitext in particular non-existent; by 1600 not much had changed. By 1700 some changes had occurred, notably the numbering of suelta series, but by 1800 the pace had quickened enormously, and continued to do so until 1833, noted by Dr Szmuk as the cut-off point for the suelta period. No-one has tried, until now, to examine and describe the numerous developments during the period 1700–1833, when the paratext became an important part of the publication of plays. To do this effectively requires the study of a very large number of sueltas. Dr Szmuk’s suelta project at present takes in three collections, amounting to a total of over 4,200 items: the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York Public Library, and her own collection. In the longer term, her website will embrace the collections of all academic and research libraries in the United States.
Don William Cruickshank
1942-2021
1 See María Elvira Roca Barea, “Diego Guillén de Ávila, autor y traductor del siglo XV”, Revista de Filología Española, 86 (2006), 373–94.
2 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols (London: Collins, 1972–73), II, 456.
3 Carlos Romero de Lecea, La imprenta y los pliegos poéticos (Madrid: Joyas Bibliográficas, 1974), pp. 105–41.
4Hannah E. Bergman, “Calderón en Sevilla: apuntes bibliográficos”, in Estudios sobre el Siglo de Oro en homenaje a Raymond R. MacCurdy, ed. A. González, T. Holzapfel and A. Rodríguez (Albuquerque: University of N. Mexico/Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), pp. 126–7.
5 Francisco Aguilar Piñal, in Sevilla y el teatro en el siglo XVIII (Oviedo: Cátedra Feijoo, 1974), p. 28, suggests 1500; using existing data more precisely, Germán Vega García-Luengos, in “Impresos teatrales sevillanos del siglo XVIII: pautas de un estudio”, in Trabajos de la Asociación Española de Bibliografía, I (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura / Biblioteca Nacional, 1993), p. 373, suggests 1082 plus an estimated 18% lost, or about 1277. Including entremeses, his projected total comes to around 1660.
6 See J. M. Hill in Revue Hispanique, 75 (1929), 144–369.
7 Jáuregui, Juan de. El retraido, comedia famosa de Don Claudo [pseud.?]. Barcelona, Sebastian de Cormellas, 1635 Jerez p. 54 (HSA cop.) in Penney, Clara Louisa. Printed Books 1468-1700 in the Hispanic Society of America: A Listing. New York, The Society, 1965.
8 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El príncipe constante, edición crítica de Isabel Hernando Morata (Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2015), p. 62.
9See the first paragraph of Dr Szmuk's Introduction.
10See, for example, Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 103.
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