Juan Pérez de Montalbán was a prolific Golden Age poet, novelist, and playwright, who in his short life (1601–38) achieved considerable success, placing him among the most renowned Spanish authors of the time, like Lope de Vega and Calderón. The book here reviewed is the sixth volume published in the series stemming from the Montalbano Project, the purpose of which is to recuperate his reputation for contemporary audiences by publishing critical editions of all of his comedies. This ambitious project is carried out under the general editorship of one of the foremost specialists in Montalbán's theatrical production, Claudia Demattè. This second installment of the Segundo tomo de comedias (Second volume of comedies), which includes three of the nine plays posthumously published by the author's father (following the series policy to publish plays as editors complete them, instead of by associated theme or chronology), has been supervised by Davinia Rodríguez Ortega. She does not, however, edit the comedies: a different editor is in charge of each of the three plays: Paula Casariego Castiñeira edits Como amante y como honrada (Like a lover and like an honorable woman); Giulia Tomasi, Don Florisel de Niquea (Sir Florisel of Nicaea); and Claudia Demattè, Teágenes y Clariquea (Theagenes and Chariclea).
The three plays are good proof of Montalbán's broad range of dramatic genres. Como amante y como honrada is a cloak-and-dagger comedy, featuring a good number of stock elements typical of Golden Age comedies: two couples about to marry whose love is disturbed by mutual suspicions of disloyalty, largely resulting from misunderstandings caused by the servants (graciosos) or funny simpletons. The rest of the plays are transpositions of other literary genres: Don Florisel de Niquea brings to the stage a chivalric novel written a century earlier by Feliciano de Silva, and Teágenes y Clariquea adapts the byzantine novel Theagenes and Chariclea or Aethiopica by the classical author Heliodorus.
The volume exhibits structural homogeneity in the elements analyzed in the introductions of all three works. Once each editor discusses aspects of authorship, date of composition, themes, and sources, and after a detailed summary of the play, each then provides a thorough bibliographical study of the extant editions, both in compiled volumes and in sueltas (individually printed plays), with special attention to seventeenth-century testimony. Versions of later date are not taken into consideration for the textual apparatus. The two final sections of each introduction examine the metrical aspects, with a list of the various types of metrical composition in the plays and their distribution in each act, and the reception of the play—that is, an overview of documented performances and those known only by indirect mentions, as well as later rewritings. Each play is followed by a list of textual variants in the seventeenth-century exemplars used for the edition, which evinces the weight given to textual criticism.
Beyond these similarities, however, each of the texts has been edited with slightly different approaches. While Casariego Castiñeira focuses largely on the textual tradition of Como amante y como honrada rather than on the themes, hypotexts or hypertexts, or even generic cliches in the work, these latter aspects feature prominently both in Tomasi's introduction to Don Florisel de Niquea and in Demattè's study of Teágenes y Clariquea. Thus, Tomasi pays special attention to how the traditional characteristics of the chivalric novel are transformed in Montalbán's hands, turning the story into chivalric theater. Demattè's preliminary study develops a more elaborate analysis of the literary and theatrical aspects, surveying the reception of Heliodorus's Aethiopica in early modern Spain only to analyze Montalbán's adaptation of the classical text for the stage from the perspective of contemporary theatrical practice and paradigms of the “new comedy” established by Lope de Vega. Undeniably, the disparities in the approach of each introduction respond to the peculiarities of the plays, but nonetheless some equivalence in the depth of analysis would have been welcome, rendering the volume somewhat more consistent. Notably as well, the description of the features of the edition in the statement of criteria seems addressed to a non-academic readership—a surprising choice and rather out of step with the high level of expertise one has come to expect from Reichenberger editions.
But none of this subtracts from the broader value of this new volume of Montalbán's comedies. The recovery of his figure, his works, and his literary legacy is, as the editors of this series recognize, of paramount importance if a complete view of the Spanish Golden Age of theater is to be achieved.
