El gran teatro del mundo by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (review)

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Reviewed by:

• El gran teatro del mundo by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
• Rasmus Vangshardt

Pedro Calderón de la Barca. El gran teatro del mundo. Edición de Ignacio Arellano. Estudio preliminar de Enrique Rull y Ana Suárez. EDITION REICHENBERGER, 2021. 296 PP.

"CORTA FUE LA COMEDIA" (v. 1255), Mundo exclaims in apparent despair when the play-within-a-play ends and the "globe of the world" closes. In their momentous simplicity, Mundo's words spring to mind when opening Reichenberger's final volume—number one hundred—of Calderón. Autos sacramentales completos, which was begun in 1992 and concludes—how could it not?—with the most famous of them all, El gran teatro del mundo, likely written between 1633 and 1636. One senses the merited pride in the two forewords by the publisher Eva Reichenberger and the general editor Ignacio Arellano. The editorial project might not always have felt short: in fact, it spanned almost thirty years. But how wonderful that Calderón's autos, which have seen significant changes in esteem and popularity across the ages, are now finally available in their entirety in reliable editions. One could only ask that the publisher make their purchase more convenient instead of requiring an email order and payment via bank transfer.

An edition of this auto sacramental was surely much needed. The play's foundational metaphor has after all become emblematic of a whole epoch. Yet until now scholars wanting to try their hand at a new interpretation of the iconic play had to make due with very few editions: the Cátedra edition from 2005 (ed. Eugenio Frutos Cortés), most appropriate for high school students, or the Crítica edition, already almost twenty-five years old (eds. John J. Allen and Domingo Ynduráin, 1997). The only other option was Gerhard Poppenberg's skillful Spanish–German edition published in 1988 and 2012 with Reclam, whose production quality and design are no match for the play's masterful content. At last we now have that longed-for edition, concluding a momentous project, with 130 pages of introductory study by Enrique Rull and Ana Suárez.

Arellano's primary challenge as editor in establishing the text was to choose between the 1655 edition published during Calderón's lifetime [End Page 399] and Pedro de Pando y Mier's edition from 1717. In convincing fashion, he notes that, notwithstanding the seeming abundance of thirty-three modern editions published between 1926 and 1974, the only relevant ones remain the two just mentioned along with six available manuscripts. Arellano explains that the 1655 edition has very few deficiencies. The most significant one, already noted by Poppenberg, is that "su obscura" should be emended to "tu obscura" (v. 34) because Autor is addressing Mundo. This is of utmost importance because it deals with the very cosmogenesis of the play's world in the sense that it relates to Autor's giving form to the world. Other than that, the 1655 edition presents minor problems consisting of a few typographical errors and a couple of missing verses that can be easily fixed (e.g., p. 153 in the new edition). Arellano notes, in turn, that the 1717 version and the manuscripts all seem based on the 1655 edition, which makes the ecdotic challenges manageable.

The only regrettable feature of this edition is the decision to leave out the play's philologically contested loa. In 1717, Pando y Mier included a loa to Calderón's play and in Calderón's name, but five years later, the publisher of playwright Francisco Bances Candamo (1662–1704) claimed that Bances had written this loa for a play called El gran químico del mundo (Rasmus Vangshardt, "'El circular coliseo': The Loa to El gran teatro del mundo Reconsidered," Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 72, no. 2, 2020, 117–42). Even if it has long been standard to assume that Bances wrote the loa, the fact remains that it has been a part of the reception history of Calderón's auto, for instance in Alexander A. Parker's work. From a comparative perspective, it would have been useful to include the loa for...