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The Orthoëpy of the Holographic Comedias of Tirso de Molina
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
So far as is now known, only two comedias from the pen of Tirso de Molina have survived in holographic form; they are the first and the third parts of the Sancta Juanna trilogy. In the study to follow, the two comedias will be investigated in their orthoëpic aspects. The findings may serve as a check on those discovered by previous investigators in texts which are not in holographic form. Some years ago Mr. Morley published a study of the orthoëpy of five of Lope's plays. The present investigation resembles that of Mr. Morley, and the excellent outline which he developed for his compilation is followed below; the deliberate parallelism of our procedure with his facilitates comparison between Tirso and Lope in the matter under discussion. In Part I there will be presented a tabulation which concerns the individual word with its various combinations of vowels, weak and strong, tonic and atonic, in pretonic, tonic or post-tonic syllables, in diphthong, dieresis, syneresis or bisyllabism. In Part II of the compilation there is offered a consideration of the combinations of the words in synalepha or hiatus under varying conditions.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940
References
1 Las Quinas de Portugal is not in Tirso's hand; a comparison of its MS with Tirso's other holographs quickly reveals its spurious quality.
2 The first part is all in Tirso's hand; the third part is entirely from his pen with the exception of the last three and one-half folios.
3 S. Griswold Morley, “Ortologia de cinco comedias autógrafas de Lope de Vega,” Estudios Eruditos in Memoriam de Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (Madrid, 1927), i, 525–544.
4 No attempt has been made here to examine the holographic editions of Lope which have appeared since Mr. Morley's investigation, with the exception that those volumes of the Teatro anliguo español which Señor Montesinos has edited from Lope's MSS have been consulted. They offer little detailed information of the sort provided by Mr. Morley's study.
5 In NBAE, ix, 238–275, 304–332.
6 The MS version of the second of the two holographic plays varies rarely from Cotarelo's text; when there is a difference, this is due to Cotarelo's misreading of the MS. The first play, to the contrary, differs considerably in the two versions. For a description of them see “Tirso's Sancta Juanna. Primera Parte,” MLN, xlix, 13–18.
7 Among the 108 examples of diphthong, the MSS offer for comparison with enuïará no form of a verb with accent on í or ú in the present tense.
8 Diablo is always bisyllabic. There are sixteen instances of the word (as diablo or “sayagués” diabro, diabros) in the two MSS. Those which appear only in the MSS and not in the Cotarelo texts of the plays are as follows: ¿Fáitante al diabro agujeros? (8 syllables); Mucho sabe este diabro. ¿Que pensauas (11 syllables); de la çeuada ogaño. Señor diabro (11 syllables); Pues, ¿ay diablo mayor que vn estudiante? (11 syllables); Chicharrones nos pide el diabro, hermano. (11 syllables); Que no es jodio el diabro determino (11 syllables). In addition to that at 239b, 41, those instances of the word which appear both in Cotarelo and in the MSS may be located in the former's text as follows: at 266a, 51 (the MS has diabro for Cotarelo's diablo); 268a, last line (supply y l- at the beginning of the line); 268b, 17 (the MS reads mi for Cotarelo's su); ibid., 23 (the MS reads a bit differently: ¿Que tanbién come carne el diabro, Crespo?); 269a, 5 and 23; 307a, 9; 314b, 14. In the first six plays of Cotarelo ii, diablo and its allied forms appear fifteen times; they are invariably bisyllabic.
9 The MS reads se muestra for Cotarelo's le vende.
10 The MS omits a before sus.
11 The MS omits un.
12 Robles Dégano (op. cit., p. 21) declares that Cautela contra cautela and Los amantes de Teruel are not Tirso's because their orthoëpy varies from that of other plays in the BAE collection of Tirso. The three unusual words which Robes cites as proof are fïel, puntual and orïente. The first two occur in the MSS, fiel in diphthong, reproduced in Cotarelo ii at 306b, 28; 309b, 31; 315a, 54; 327b, 30, and puntilal, as we have seen, in dieresis, in the section of our compilation just examined. To the extent that the MSS represent Tirso's orthoëpy, we might consider that fïel and puntual are un-Tirsonian, except that in the non-holographic texts of Cautela contra cautela and Los amantes de Teruel the words may not be the same as were originally written. Oriente, either in dieresis or diphthong, does not occur in the MSS, but it is used, in diphthong only, in Cotarelo ii, 86a, 17; 88b, 37; 96b, 35; 112a, 18; 133b, 53; 146a, 44; 146b, 17; 202b, 5; 203a, 1; 206a, 55. On the whole, the orthoëpy of Cautela contra cautela as represented in the BAE text is not Tirsonian—we have not examined Los amantes de Teruel-. A striking feature is the use of sea (seas, sean) in bisyllabism only; there is no syneresis in a total of twelve examples of one or another form of the word. This contrasts notably with the same forms in our holographs, in which, of a total of twenty-eight instances, ten are to be read in syneresis. The entire question of the authorship of Cautela of course deserves close investigation. It is reported that a scholar in Spain has made extensive studies of Tirso's orthoëpy; his findings should be most intriguing. As Mr. Anibal suggested in a recent note to the writer, the importance of the individual word as a clue to authorship has never been sufficiently looked into. Not only an author's orthoëpy, but also his tendency to employ certain favorite words, may furnish a hint; consider, for example, the word átomo(s), which, although relatively uncommon in Tirso, is used four times in Act i of Cautela.
13 The MS reads don Jorge vbiera destruydo.
14 The verse in the MS is El Angel fuí de la Guarda.
15 Robles Dégano (op. cit., p. 244) seems to have found in Tirso sixteen cases of -os in bisyllabism.
16 Also in syneresis are Latin Deo (Deo graçiasl ¿Quién da estas voçes?—8 syllables), and one of the two occurrences of mea in 269b, 2, the other being bisyllabic. (The MS reads . . . sum; hec . . . for Cotarelo's . . . maneo; haec. . .)
17 The verse is the MS version of Cotarelo's 247b, 17. It is of the metro de gaita gallega (see P. Henríquez Ureña, La versificatón irregular en la poesía castellana, Madrid, 1933 (2d. ed.), p. 233), and is of ten syllables. This type of metro, being dependent on beats rather than on the number of syllables, may range from nine to twelve syllables per verse; cf. op. cit., pp. 52, 88, 179 ff., 227.
18 Again the metro de gaita gallega. It is the MS version of Cotarelo's 247b, 2.
19 Cotarelo's ¿Hablarla? reads Ablenta in the MS.
20 See, for example, 259b, 1; 271b, 3; 272a, 7; 306b, 47.
21 The form aora, as seen, occurs only three times in the MS, and is bisyllabic. When Tirso wishes to use the word as of three syllables, he writes agora. This latter form is employed twenty-six times in the MSS of the two plays. Of the three uses of aora, the first two are in the phrase aora bien; the phrase stress is on bien, and this helps explain aora in two syllables. The remaining aora apparently has no special shade of meaning for Tirso which would show why he used it rather than agora; the choice of the former word seems to have been determined solely on the basis of syllabic length.
22 Tirso's usage in the holographs forms an exception to Robles' statement (paragraph 269) that “es más frecuente . . . la sinéresis cuando la vocal tónica precede a la átona [con excepción de ahora.]” For in the MSS there is relatively more syneresis, thirty-six per cent, when the second strong vowel is stressed than when the first is stressed: twenty-four per cent. Real, then, in its apparently excessive tendency toward syneresis, is not entirely an isolated case of its type; if the MSS are really representative of Tirso's orthoëpy in this respect, real seems to betray a general liking on Tirso's part for combining into one syllable two strong vowels when the second is tonic. This tendency, if real be taken as typical, and if Robles' statement in his paragraph 269 is true, differentiates Tirso from Alarcón, Mira, Vélez, Guillén de Castro, and likens him to Calderón, Matos, Rojas; cf. Robles' page 242.—Real might possibly prove to be a key-word to help determine the authorship of Tirso's doubtful plays. In checking the words at the ends of lines only in the first few comedias of Cotarelo ii, all of them surely of Tirso's composition, eleven instances of real as monosyllabic were discovered to only two instances of its use in bisyllabism.
23 Cotarelo has abajo for aý vajo (252a, 4).
24 Oýd is bisyllabic by virtue of the bisyllabism of the -ía of alegría and the hiatus before ésta.
25 Auía might be considered as representing syneresis here except that the eight—rather than seven—syllables of its verse are indicated by the octosyllabic character of the passage of which it is a part. The syllabic length of other verse-ending words in the section (compañía, filomosías, hypocresía, mías, míos) is likewise determined in each case by the line-length of the verses surrounding them.
26 Cf. note 24.
27 Only the hendecasyllabic verses are considered in this study as having obligatory internal stress. The controversial question of such stress in lines of less than eleven yl-s lables has been ignored.
28 By aspirate h is meant that initial h of a word which early replaced Latin or Arabic f-in certain parts of the Iberian peninsula, and which in articulation was probably a velar fricative (See R. Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del Español [Madrid, 1929], section 41, for a history of the phoneme). Although the aspiration of the h was an unusual phenomenon in the seventeenth century, poets at times seem to have taken advantage of the archaism in order to make hiatus logical. Our compilation indicates the number of times Tirso refused to employ such hiatus, or, on the contrary, preferred its use. The entire matter of the aspirate h has never been thoroughly studied, as Mr. Morley says (op. cit., p. 538). Señor Montesinos (Teatro antiguo español, viii [Madrid, 1935], p. 254) denies that Lope probably aspirated the h (“No parece verosímil que Lope aspirara la h”), but thereafter goes on to say that the hiatus in two verses of Barlaán y Josafat seems difficult to explain in any other way. Robles Dégano (paragraph 238) takes the opposite opinion from Montesinos, as he asserts that the aspiration of the h “es frecuente en los poetas.”
29 The verse is read with híatus before hilos.
30 Contrast 263b, 17.
31 In the MS the verse reads Mi hija Juana es, señor. It is possible that the hiatus may precede es rather than hija.
32 The matter of the tonic or atonic quality of a syllable in poetry still needs clarification in spite of the labors of Benot, Robles Dégano, Navarro Tomás and others in this regard. Navarro Tomás has investigated the phenomenon more thoroughly than anyone else. The present study has used his findings as expressed in his Manual de pronunciación española (Madrid, 1932), paragraphs 165–170. It is highly probable that students of orthoëpy will take exception to certain of our classifications of syllables in sections ii, 2 a, b, c, d.
33 This hiatus is preferable to one before es, as honrra bears a greater stress than es.
34 Contrast the synalepha of de hir at 308a, 47; 313b, 9.
35 The verse is at 305b, 43. Cotarelo in error wrote ser for the holograph's ir.
36 Contrast the synalepha of Juana. ¡Ay and oveja. ¡Ay in the verses just before and after this one.
37 Contrast Déjenme hir in synalepha at 313b, 7.
38 Cotarelo in error made two verses of one. Read ¿Qué hay de nuevo? FRANC. A pie y corriendo.
39 Cotarelo's sanata should read sanará; contiguous verses, likewise distorted from the holograph's reading, necessitate the correction.
40 Hiatus here rather than before es, as ora bears strong stress.
41 Cf. qué hêcho (for qué he hecho) at 308b, 4.
42 This verse is the holograph's reading for Cotarelo's 260a, 51. Hiatus seems preferable as indicated rather than before A, since essos is a tonic word and A is not.
43 The MS has no e or u.
44 In addition to the Spanish orthoëpy there is also involved that of the Latin which Tirso used in the two plays (Recall mea; see footnote 16). At 269b, 1 we read Nolo exire in synalepha. Just below, for Cotarelo's line 7, we find that in the holograph's habes ut me expelas? Acipe higan (sic), Tirso employs synalepha with me expelas and hiatus before higan. The holograph's “sayagués” huera (for fuera), as at 265b, 57 and 268b, 3, does not involve hiatus; as Benot reminds us (Prosodia castellana. . ., Madrid, n.d., ii, 499–500), the combination hue- does not form a triphthong with a preceding vowel. This of course also applies to huego (for fuego) at 325b, 3: ¡O malos truenos de huego (Cotarelo's del cielo is wrong), and to huere (for fuere) at 328a, 32.
45 These assertions are supported with evidence in the article referred to in footnote 6.
46 The eleven examples of hiatus which in the holograph replaced synalepha in the Cotarelo text are not the only examples of similar nature. But the very small number excluded from our count were omitted because the verses in which they appear afford no accurate indication of Tirso's process of composition; they are completely new in the MS rather than being different only in part. A few more than the two cases of hiatus which in the Quinta Parte text became synalepha in the MS were excluded from our calculations of the last several paragraphs for the same reason. All the cases excluded do not affect the results greatly, as they are so few in number.