Alan D. Deyermond

Pleberio's Lost Investment: The Worldly Perspective of Celestina, Act 21

Pleberios lament for Melibea, which occupies virtually all of Celestinas last act, invites the scrutiny of readers who, in the absence of third-person authorial guidance within the text of this engimatic novel-in-dialogue, hope to find a trustworthy spokesman for the author. Their hopes are not fulfilled. Although Marcel Bataillons reasons for rejecting Pleberio as the authors mouthpiece have not inspired general agreement, the critical consensus now accepts his conclusion:

The Metamorphosis of Avellaneda's Sonnet to Washington

(1979). The Metamorphosis of Avellanedas Sonnet to Washington. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 153-170.

'Edit'/editar, 'Editor'/editor, 'Edition'/edición: Semantic and Ethical Problems

Open Forum offers space for debate and controversy on topics ranging from the interpretation of a line or history of a word, or the assessment of a major scholars work, through the future of hispanism, to wider theoretical issues. Contributions may vary in length from a paragraph to several thousand words. Readers are encouraged to respond, and our aim is to publish a response in the next issue after we receive it, so as to keep up the momentum of the debate.

Parker the Medievalist

The fact that Alec Parker’s first article, published in his twenties, was on medieval drama is not in itself remarkable. A number of scholars made a good beginning as medievalists, but the seed proved to have been sown on the rock, and they did not long endure. A well-known Latin Americanist, for instance, began with an MA thesis on medieval English history. That seemed for a long time to be the pattern of Parker’s research, but it was not so. The greater part of his time and energy went, as we all know, into study of the Golden Age; this was, indeed, foreseeable from the outset: the full title of his article is ‘Notes on the Religious Drama in Mediaeval Spain and the Origins of the Auto sacramental’, the initial step on the road that led to his famous first book, The Allegorical Drama of Calderón (1943). Yet he retained an interest in medieval literature throughout his life, and Chapter 1 of his last book, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature (1985), is devoted to latemedieval works (cancionero poetry, Amadı́s de Gaula, Celestina, and so on). In between came a pamphlet, a journal article, and two chapters in books. I do not want to overstate the case. Parker’s interest in medieval literature was not comparable with that of another Catholic scholar, Robert Pring-Mill, who wrote copiously and brilliantly on Ramon Llull, and was recognized as a world authority on that author, while working intensively on Calderón and other Golden-Age authors and then adding a major research project on LatinAmerican political poetry. Not comparable, then, with Pring-Mill, but nevertheless a Golden-Age scholar with a sustained interest in medieval literature. In this paper I propose to describe Alec Parker’s medieval work and try to assess its value to medievalists today. ‘Notes on the Religious Drama’ has a modest aim: ‘I have endeavoured in this article to summarise most of the existing and little-known evidence as to the mediaeval church drama in Spain’ (170). Parker starts from the position that ‘The history of the drama in mediaeval Spain has never been adequately studied’ (170), but things have changed greatly in the seventy years since those words were written, the middle decades of that period being ones of

The Books of SEMYR: Reflections on Scholarly Publishing in the New Millennium

Since much of this review article brings good news, it is sensible to follow Dante’s example and deal first with the bad. The bad news concerns the state of scholarly publishing today in the United Kingdom and the United States, at least in medieval and Renaissance studies (I have no reason to suppose that things are much better in other fields). The examples that I give could, of course, be dismissed as isolated and/or anecdotal, but I doubt whether anyone with more than a few years’ experience would

Readers in, Readers of, Celestina

I shall not attempt here to cover once more the ground first covered by the anonymous sixteenth-century commentator, covered again and widened by Florentino Castro Guisasola in 1924, and explored in parts by a number of investigators (myself among them) in the last half-century.1 My purpose is twofold: first, to look at the differing extent to which characters in the work are shown to have read books and to be aware of the process of reading. Second, I shall consider some of the ways in which the work has been read, starting with the reactions described by Fernando de Rojas in the prefatory letter ‘El autor a un su amigo’, first printed in the 1500 edition of the

Publications by John Varey

This list is a revised and much amplified version of the one included in Golden Age Spanish Literature: Studies in Honour of John Varey by his Colleagues and Pupils, ed. Charles Davis and Alan Deyermond (London: Dept of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1991), 31–38. It is still far from being a definitive bibliography of Varey’s publications: partly because it does not include reviews, or a few short notes published in Het Poppenspell, The Puppet Master, Radio Times, and Royal Shakespeare Company News, but most importantly because Varey left a substantial body of work in press and in preparation. Such information as is available about these items has been included, though usually in a provisional form. We hope to publish, in due course, a definitive bibliography. Items written by Varey alone are listed without an author’s name. Much of his work was done in collaboration, first with N. D. Shergold and later with Charles Davis. Since the order in which the authors’ names appear in each of these collaborative works generally reflects—as in the compilation of the present bibliography—the extent to which each author contributed to the work, we have listed the authors for each collaborative item. There is thus an apparent inconsistency in the ways in which items (e.g. A3 and A4) are listed, but we believe this to be necessary in order to give an accurate account. The following abbreviations are used:

William J. Entwistle's Research on Ballads and Epic

Abstract William J. Entwistle died on 13 June 1952. It is appropriate, half a century later, to look again at his work on ballad and epic. In a five-year period Entwistle challenged the increasingly powerful neotraditionalist view of Spanish epic in his studies of Bernardo del Carpio and the Cantar de Sancho II (both 1928) and in an important theoretical statement arising out of those detailed studies (1933). He then, however, seems to have lost interest in the epic, returning to it briefly in a slighter and provisional article on epic chronology (1947–48). His interest in ballads, in contrast, persisted throughout his scholarly life. His first article on the subject was published in 1923, when he was in his late twenties, and he left two articles in press at his death. In all, he published twenty-two ballad articles, and a standard book on the subject, European Balladry (1939, 2nd ed. 1951). In this article, I survey Entwistles work in these two areas, and try to assess its relevance to our research in these areas today.

Es posible escribir la historia de la literatura medieval española

?Es posible escribir la historia literaria? ?Es legitimo que un historiador utilice los recursos del novelista? ?Es posible conciliar la critica con la historia? A pesar de estas y otras dificultades, hay bastantes historias de la literatura medieval espanol, que incluyen la mia, la cual mezcla la estructura cronologica con la generica. Si la reescribo, optare por la cronologica.