A Companion to Celestina 9004349294, 9789004349292

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A Companion to Celestina

The Renaissance Society of America Texts and Studies Series

Editor-in-Chief Ingrid De Smet (University of Warwick) Editorial Board Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Paul Grendler, Emeritus (University of Toronto) James Hankins (Harvard University) Craig Kallendorf (Texas a&m University) Gerhild Scholz-Williams (Washington University in St. Louis) Lía Schwartz Lerner (cuny Graduate Center)

VOLUME 9

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rsa

A Companion to Celestina By

Enrique Fernandez

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: ‘La Celestina’. Oil on canvas. Original painting by Rafael Ramírez Máro (2011, 120 cm × 200 cm). Location: RMI Institut Hauset, Belgium. Website: rafael.ramirezmaro.org. Photography by Jens Schultze. ©Rafael Ramirez Máro. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017021294

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2212-3091 isbn 978-90-04-34929-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34932-2 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface ix List of Illustrations xi Notes on Contributors xiii

Introduction 1 The Significance of Celestina 3 Joseph T. Snow

Text, Origins and Sources 2 The Early Editions and the Authorship of Celestina 21 José Luis Canet 3 The Poetics of Voice, the Performance, and the Meaning of Celestina 41 Gustavo Illades Aguiar 4 Quotation, Plagiarism, Allusion, and Reminiscence: Intertextuality in Celestina 58 Amaranta Saguar García 5 Theater Without a Stage: Celestina and the Humanistic Comedy 74 Devid Paolini 6 Celestina in the Context of Fifteenth-Century Castilian Vernacular Humanism 94 José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León 7 Minerva’s Dog and Other Problematic Points in Celestina’s Text 108 Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe 8 Calisto and Leriano in Love 124 Ivy A. Corfis

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The Story of Hero and Leander: A Possible Unknown Source of Celestina 141 Bienvenido Morros Mestres

Themes and Readings 10

“Aquellos antigos libros”: Approaches to Parody in Celestina 161 Ryan D. Giles

11

Risky Business: The Politics of Prostitution in Celestina 173 Enriqueta Zafra

12

A Guidebook for Two Cities: The Physical and the Political Urban Space in Celestina 188 Raúl Álvarez-Moreno

13

Magic in Celestina 205 Patrizia Botta

14

Lovesickness and the Problematical Text of Celestina, Act 1 225 Ricardo Castells

15

Jesus and Mary, Christian Prayer, and the Saints in Celestina 242 Manuel da Costa Fontes

16

Eating, Drinking, and Consuming in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea 262 Connie L. Scarborough

Influence and Posterity 17

Modernity and Celestina: The Future of Our Past and of Our Present 275 Antonio Pérez-Romero

18

Celestina as a Precursor to the Picaresque 292 Ted L. L. Bergman

Contents

19

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Early Responses to Celestina: Translations and Commentary 305 Kathleen V. Kish

20 Celestina’s Continuations, Adaptations, and Influences 321 Consolación Baranda 21

Celestina and Agustín Arrieta’s China Poblana: Mexico’s Female Icon Revisited 339 Beatriz de Alba-Koch

22

The Images of Celestina and Its Visual Culture 362 Enrique Fernandez

23 Celestina in Film and Television 383 Yolanda Iglesias Electronic Resources, Editions, and Select Bibliography 403 Index 416

Preface In spite of the enormous success of Celestina in Spain soon after its publication, of its immediate translations into the main European languages, and of its influence in their literatures—it is said to have inspired Romeo and Juliet— this masterpiece has not made it into the world literature canon, in which Don Quixote continues to be the only representative of Spanish letters. Celestina’s exclusion is totally undeserved since its many merits include the pioneering of the same parodic treatment of other genres that Cervantes so successfully exploited. And this is only one of the creative paths opened by Celestina that left a strong imprint on world literature: the treatment of the marginalized members of society that the Spanish picaresque made into its anti-heroes is also clearly indebted to Celestina. Compared to the two mythical characters that Spanish literature has contributed to the world, Don Quixote and Don Juan, the bawd Celestina is barely known outside the Hispanic countries. It is difficult to ascertain why Celestina did not maintain the momentum of the first two centuries after its publication and today is relatively unknown in the international literary arena. Several factors seem to have conspired in this undeserved neglect. Celestina has a strong medieval component, which makes it a text difficult to follow for readers of later periods, who do not have the required patience for the erudition and rhetoric in its text. However, its otherwise entertaining dialogues and general plot are sufficiently “modern” as to be enthralling, even titillating, especially in the passages of open sexual content. On the other hand, Celestina has triggered a vast scholarship that continues to find new, surprising meanings and other features in its text. Although part of this scholarship was written in English, and some in French and German, the vast majority is in Spanish, and highly fragmented. Besides a few brief summaries of the main studies—as Peter N. Dunn’s 1975 Fernando de Rojas in Twayne’s World Authors Series, valuable but by now outdated—or collections of a few articles on specific subjects, there is not, even in Spanish, a book as comprehensive and thorough on Celestina as the one we present here. This Companion to Celestina brings together twenty-three hitherto unpublished texts on the main aspects of Celestina, written by some of the leading experts in specific areas of its scholarship. The contributors were asked to summarize and evaluate the previous studies and then expand on them with their own research and opinions in mind. The results are chapters that offer to the non-specialists a brief overview of Celestina studies, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the main topics and methods that have punctuated the vast scholarship of this masterpiece. Those who already know the field will

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find in this Companion state of the art Celestina contributions, with new insights that elaborate on or depart from the many established currents of criticism. Indeed the main themes of Celestina scholarship are explored in these twenty-three contributions, which can be read piecemeal according to the reader’s interest at the moment, or consecutively in order by those who want a comprehensive view of the field. With the latter readers in mind, the articles are arranged in logical progression. The first contribution, by Joseph Snow, the doyen of Celestina studies, serves as an introduction into the significance and meaning of this masterpiece, as well as to this Companion and its contents. The following contributions are organized in three groups according to their content. The first group, “Texts, Origins, and Sources”, gathers contributions dealing with the many difficult questions still surrounding the authorship of Celestina and its complex textual history, as well as with the equally complex relation of the book with the genres of the period and with specific models and sources. The second section, “Themes and Readings,” encompasses the issues traditionally most discussed about the text of Celestina, such as its intention, its connection with the intellectual, political, and religious climate of the period, or specific key subjects, such as the role of magic in the plot or the portrayal of the contemporary society of the period, especially of the underworld of crime and prostitution. Finally, the section “Influence and Posterity” deals with the many aspects in which Celestina has influenced not only later literary but also artistic productions—painting, cinema, etc.—as well as its translations and continuations. Our hope is that this Companion will serve as the starting point for those, specialists or not, who want to know the state of the art of Celestina scholarship and familiarize themselves with new, cutting edge ideas. We also hope that, by providing this trove of organized information in English, scholars of other related fields will start to see connections between Celestina and their areas of expertise, allowing them to build bridges between their research and Celestina. If these bridges are built, the world literary canon could be expanded to include this significant masterpiece from which much of the originality that characterizes Spanish letters springs. Enrique Fernandez Editor

List of Illustrations 21.1 21.2 21.3

21.4 21.5 21.6 21.7 21.8 21.9 21.10 21.11 21.12 21.13 21.14 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4

22.5

Carl Nebel, Poblanas, engraving in Nebel’s Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la partie la plus intéressante du Mexique (Paris, 1836) 341 Edouard Pingret, Cocina poblana (Poblana Kitchen), s-d 343 Hesiquio Iriarte and Andrés Campillo, illustration to the article “Chinas” by José María Rivera in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos: Tipos y costumbres nacionales (México: Murguia, 1855), p. 90 349 Agustín Arrieta, Vendedoras de horchata (Horchata sellers), s-d 351 Agustín Arrieta, Aguajolera (Water Seller), s-d 351 Agustín Arrieta, Escena de mercado con dama (Market Scene with Lady), s-d 352 Agustín Arrieta, Escena popular de mercado con soldado (Popular Market Scene with Soldier), s-d 353 Agustín Arrieta, China con guajolote (China with Turkey), s-d 354 Agustín Arrieta, La sirvienta (The Servant), s-d 355 Agustín Arrieta, El almuerzo (The Breakfast), s-d 356 Agustín Arrieta, El requiebro (The Amorous Compliment), s-d 357 Agustín Arrieta, Intervención, s-d 357 Agustín Arrieta, Vendedora de frutas y vieja (Fruit Seller and Old Woman), s-d 358 Agustín Arrieta, Cocina poblana (Poblana Kitchen), 1865 359 Sosia narrates to Tristán the execution of Pármeno and Sempronio while Calisto daydreams in his bedroom. Woodcut illustrating Act 13 of the Burgos 1499 edition of Celestina 367 Melibea, helped by Lucrecia, quietly leaves her bedroom to meet Calisto. Illustration of Act 12 in La Celestina, ó Calixto y Melivea (Barcelona: Tomás Gorchs, 1842) 369 Calisto and Melibea in the garden, and Lucrecia behind. Illustration of Act 19 in La Celestina, ó Calixto y Melivea (Barcelona: Tomás Gorchs, 1842) 369 Calisto scaling the wall to access Melibea’s garden at night. Illustration of Act 19 in La Celestina: Tragi-comedia de Calisto y Melibea … obra famosisima escrita por Rodrigo de Cota. Biblioteca amena é instructiva (Barcelona: Nueva de S. Francisco, 1883) 370 De koppelaarster (The Procuress), by Dirck van Baburen (1622). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 372

xii 22.6 22.7 22.8 22.9 22.10 22.11 23.1

23.2 23.3

List of Illustrations

De koppelaarster (The Procuress), by Jan Vermeer (1656). Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden 373 Maja y Celestina al balcón (Maja and Celestina on a Balcony), by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1808). Private collection 374 A modern Celestina, by Lameyer and Alenza, in Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (Madrid: Ignacio Boix, 1843–44) 376 A modern Celestina handing in a letter, by Lameyer and Alenza, in Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (Madrid: Ignacio Boix, 1843–44) 377 Trata de blancas (White Slave Trade) by Joaquín Sorolla Madrid (1894/95). Museo Sorolla, Madrid 379 Celestina, by Ignacio Zuloaga (1909). Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid 380 Movie poster of Celestina P … R.., directed by Carlo Lizzani (Italy, 1965), with Daniela (Daliah Lavi), Luisella (Beba Loncar), two images of Loredana (Mirella Sannoner), Celestina (Assia Noris), and Anna (Mirella Maravidi) 386 Movie poster of La Celestina, directed by César Ardavín Fernández (Spain, 1969), with Calisto and Melibea (Julián Mateos and Elisa Ramírez), and Celestina (Amelia de la Torre) 387 Movie poster of La Celestina (los placeres del sexo), directed by Miguel Sabido (Mexico, 1976), with Calisto (Luigi Montefiori) and Melibea (Isela Vega) 391

Notes on Contributors Beatriz de Alba-Koch is Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. She has published on Enlightenment thought and early indigenous accounts of the conquest of México, on Enlightenment appropriations of Golden Age genres such as the picaresque, female quixotism, and satirical allegories in the works of Fernández de Lizardi and his contemporaries, as well as on the construction of a national literature in the works of Altamirano. She is currently working on the Baroque from the perspective of the formation of cultural patterns and their diffusion and re-imagination over the American and Asian colonies of the Iberian monarchies. Raúl Álvarez Moreno is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he teaches Medieval and Early Modern literature and culture. His scholarship focuses on relations between language and ideology in 15th century Spain, Celestina, connections between literature and economy, and travel literature at the time. In addition to his recent monograph, Celestina según su lenguaje (and the trilingual edition and study of Legatio Babilónica by Pedro Mártir de Anglería, he is the author of several publications in journals such as Celestinesca, Anales Cervantinos, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Hispanic Review, Dicenda and La Corónica. Consolación Baranda is Professor of Spanish at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is the author of studies on different genres of the Renaissance, such as dialogues, apologues, epistles, scientific literature, cyclical literature, and on Celestina (La Celestina y el mundo como conflicto). She has published scholarly editions of the work of Feliciano de Silva, Pérez de Moya, Cervantes de Salazar, sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Francisco López de Villalobos, and Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño. Together with Prof. Ana Vian Herrero, she directs the Grupo de Estudios de Prosa Hispánica Bajomedieval y Renacentista . Ted L. L. Bergman is Lecturer in Spanish at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he teaches Early Modern Spanish literature and culture. His current research interests include Golden Age theatre, early-modern criminality, the history of medicine, and the cultural exchange between Spain and Scandinavia in the seventeenth century.

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Notes on Contributors

Patrizia Botta is Professor of Spanish Literature at the Università di Roma La Sapienza. She has published over forty essays on Celestina dealing with textual problems, the genesis of the text, early editions, etc. She is the author of a critical edition of La Celestina. She has also published profusely on the Spanish Cancioneros, Delicado´s La Lozana Andaluza, and Inés de Castro. She is the coordinator of the portal Glossari di Ispanistica. José Luis Canet is Professor of Spanish literature at the Universitat de València. He is the author of tge critical editions of, among others, Celestina, Thebayda, Serafina, Lope de Rueda, and Actas de la Academia de los Nocturnos. His main areas of research are the Spanish theater in the Renaissance and the printing press in Valencia during the 16th century. He is the director of the journals Lemir and Celestinesca, as well as the creator of the on line portal Panaseo . Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe teaches Linguistics and Literary Theory at the UNED (Spain), is a member of the editorial board of Teatro del Siglo de Oro for the collection Estudios de Literatura y Ediciones Críticas of the German publisher Reichenberger. He is the author and coauthor of books on semiotics, contemporary and 17th century (Calderón, Cervantes, Claramonte) theater, Seniloquium, and Celestina. Ricardo Castells received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1991 and is currently Professor of Spanish at Florida International University. He has written two books on Celestina and also specializes in Golden Age drama and Cervantes. Ivy A. Corfis is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on sentimental and chivalric narrative and Celestina. She is the General Editor the web-based Corpus of Hispanic Chivalric Romances and co-editor of the collection of Early Celestina Editions. She has published critical editions of Diego de San Pedro’s Arnalte y Lucenda and Cárcel de amor, as well as edited La historia de los nobles caballeros Oliveros de Castilla y Artus.

Notes On Contributors

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Manuel da Costa Fontes Emeritus Professor of Spanish Portuguese from Kent State University. His areas are the medieval and Renaissance literatures of Spain and Portugal, with a special interest on the ballad and the relationship between folklore and literature. He has published several books. Besides numerous articles on balladry, his bibliography includes studies on Alfonso X el Sabio, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Diego de San Pedro, Fernando de Rojas, Francisco Delicado, Cervantes, and Crypto-Jewish prayers and ballads in Northeastern Portugal. Enrique Fernandez is Professor of Spanish at the University of Manitoba and President of the Canadian Association of Hispanists. He was one of the editors of Celestina comentada, and also edited the scholarly edition of the Neo-Latin translation of Celestina, the Pornoboscodidascalus Latinus. He recently edited a monographic issue of Celestinesca on the visual culture of Celestina and is the director of the on line database Celestina Visual http://celestinavisual.org. José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. He works on the Early Modern period both in Spain and Latin America. He is the author of Caballero noble desbaratado: Autobiografía e Invención en el siglo XVI and of a number of articles in journals like Lexis, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Hispanic Journal, Hispanófila and Celestinesca, among others. His interests include first person narratives, miscellanies, autobiographies, chronicles of the Indies, Cervantes, and primitive forms of the novel, like the sentimental romance, Celestina, and the picaresque. Ryan D. Giles is associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he specializes in medieval and Renaissance literature. He has published numerous articles and essays in scholarly journals and collected volumes. He is the author of The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain, and co-edited, with Matthew Bailey, Charlemagne and his Legend in Early Spanish Literature and Historiography. His newest book is Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature.

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Yolanda Iglesias received her PhD from Boston University. She is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and at the Centre for Medieval Spanish of the University of Toronto. Her primary areas of research cover La Celestina, especially the Celestinesque genre and sentimental romance, as well as literary theory and the history of fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain, and Las Siete Partidas of Alfonso X. Her secondary areas of research are Cervantes and Galdós. Gustavo Illades Aguiar is Professor of Medieval and Golden Age Spanish Literature at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, Mexico. He is working on the poetics of voice in 15th–17th century Spanish prose. He is the author of articles and chapters on, among other, Celestina and Don Quixote, as well as on the epistles of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. He is the author of the book La Celestina en el taller salmantino. Kathleen V. Kish is Professor Emerita of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and of San Diego State University. An Honorary Fellow of the Hispanic Society of America, her primary research interests are the reception of Celestina, the Spanish ballad tradition, and 18th-century Spanish literature. Her published books are An Edition of the First Italian Translation of the Celestina and two coedited works: Die Celestina-Übersetzungen von Christof Wirsung and Celestina: An Annotated Edition of the First Dutch Translation (Antwerp, 1550). She has served as Editor of La Corónica and as a Corresponsal for Celestinesca. Bienvenido Morros Mestres is Professor of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona is the author of many articles several books on early modern Spanish literatura, such as Estudios sobre el Libro de buen amor and El tema de Acteón en algunas literaturas europeas: de la Antigüedad Clásica a nuestros días. Devid Paolini is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Italian at The City College of New York, CUNY. His research focuses on Medieval Spanish and Italian Literature, Celestina, Theatre and Performance in the Renaissance, Humanism and Renaissance in Spain and Italy, and History of the Book. He has published articles and reviews in major journals on Berceo, Libro de buen amor, Celestina, bibliography, etc  … His most recent published monograph is a new critical edition of the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo.

Notes On Contributors

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Antonio Pérez-Romero is Professor Emeritus at John Carroll University. He is the author of Subversion and Liberation in the Writings of St. Teresa of Avila, and The Subversive Tradition in Spanish Renaissance Writing, and of articles on mysticism, dissident literature, and the works of women playwrights in Spain’s Golden Age, appeared in journals such as Hispanic Review and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. At present he is working on a book on Spanish modernity. Amaranta Saguar García has a PhD in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and she is a holds an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Münster. She is the author of the book Intertextualidades bíblicas en Celestina: Devotio moderna y humanismo cristiano and of several articles on Celestina and Cárcel de amor. Connie L. Scarborough is professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University. She edited the books Inscribing the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Medieval Spanish Literature, A Holy Alliance: Alfonso X’s Political Use of Marian Poetry and is the coeditor of Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. She has published several articles on medieval Spanish literature, some of them dealing with Celestina. Joseph T. Snow is Emeritus Professor of Spanish from Michigan State University. He has authored more than 100 studies on, principally, The Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X and on Celestina. In 1977 he founded the international journal, Celestinesca, and edited it through 2002 when it was transferred to the Univ. of Valencia. He is an Honorary President of the International Courtly Literature Society and now resides in Madrid. Enriqueta Zafra is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ryerson University. Her areas of expertise include Spanish Peninsular Literature, with a focus on early modern discourse on prostitution and gender, Cervantes, and the female picaresque novel. Her latest research centers on women traveling in the early modern Spanish territories. She is currently teaching the course “Sex in the Early Modern City” and has created and interactive website on travelling women in the early modern period.

Introduction

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CHAPTER 1

The Significance of Celestina Joseph T. Snow The great classic works in all national literatures share an essential common trait on which this essay will dwell. Celestina, the first best seller of Spanish literature, is much like the concept of an infinite house with multiple entrances, doors, and windows, maybe even chimneys and attached garages, through which one can enter endlessly. The result is a work that has produced a wide range of perspectives, opinions, and attitudes which attest to the resiliency and long life of all classic works able to “speak” in multiple and interesting ways to succeeding generations. The many offerings in this collection will bear this out for Celestina. The work first circulated in the late 1490s in manuscript copies, almost certainly in the university community of Salamanca.1 When it did reach print, with the title Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, it contained sixteen acts of pure dialogue—ostensibly derived from earlier theatrical traditions in Italy, with works performed in Latin.2 There were thirteen speaking roles divided between four members of the moneyed class—the titular protagonists, Calisto and Melibea, and the parents of the latter, their only daughter—and nine members of the lower classes, principally the go-between, Celestina. When the well-bred Melibea rejects the poorly-disguised amorous advances of Calisto in the first scene of the work, recognizing in them the subtext of an illicit love, she sets in motion a series of actions that produce tragic consequences for most of the text’s characters. First, a desperate Calisto, to regain contact with Melibea, resorts to the services of a persuasive go-between, Celestina, a bawd who has fallen on hard times and seeks clients with money. Calisto’s manservant, Sempronio, knows Celestina and her reputation because 1  Charles Faulhaber rediscovered the initial folios of an early manuscript of the Comedia and published it with his study and commentary in “Celestina de Palacio, Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS 1520,” Celestinesca 14, no. 2 (November 1990): 3–39. It includes Faulhaber’s transcriptions and folio-by-folio reproductions of the surviving manuscript. 2  One of the scholars most familiar with the humanistic and elegiac comedy traditions of Italy is Devid Paolini, and he here, in the chapter “Theater without a Stage: Celestina and the Humanistic Comedy,” gives a full accounting of the possible contacts of Celestina with previous dramatic practices in Italy.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004349322_002

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his paramour, Elicia, a prostitute, lives with Celestina in a ramshackle house near the river. His embassy to Celestina brings the grateful go-between into the action and, from that moment, Celestina begins facilitating the fulfillment of Calisto’s desires, becoming the central axis of the work. Calisto pays Celestina well (a hundred gold coins, a gold chain, and promises of more) and the go-between manages, not easily, to persuade Melibea— already smitten with the handsome and virile Calisto—to rebel against the patriarchal norms of society and agree to meet him secretly. This takes time and much persuasion on the part of the bawd, and also silent complicity from Melibea’s maid, Lucrecia. The first and only sexual encounter of the lovers in the Comedia takes place in Act 14 (of 16). It is the beginning and end of their love affair, as Calisto falls from the ladder used to scale her high garden wall and dies instantly, while Melibea commits suicide, unwilling to resume her life as the virginal daughter her parents had raised. Her parents, Pleberio and Alisa, the mainstay of the patriarchal system, whose norms the lovers violate, are devastated. And Celestina, having first formed a confederation with Calisto’s servants, Sempronio and Pármeno, with the promise to share all the booty received from their master, is murdered by them when her insatiable greed will not allow them their promised shares. The Comedia in sixteen acts was printed three times—in Burgos, Toledo, and Seville—between 1499 and 1501, and gained instant popularity. However, since the ill-starred lovers die after only the one sexual coupling, there arose among readers a popular clamor for an extended love affair. The response was an expanded work, retitled Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, with five new acts inserted into Act 14 of the Comedia.3 Internal references indicate that the lovers are able to meet nocturnally for one month before the Tragicomedia concludes—as does the Comedia—with their deaths in tragic falls. Melibea, having betrayed the patriarchal social norms, her family, and her own honor for this chance to experience a passionate but forbidden love, is consequently unable to imagine a life without Calisto, seeing her fall as one last act of loving devotion. 3  Possibly, there were printings of the Tragicomedia in 1502, 1503, and 1504, but, if so, no copies remain. The irony is that the first version we possess today of this twenty-one-act version of the Tragicomedia is an Italian translation finished in 1505 and published in early 1506 (see chapter “Early Responses to Celestina: Translations and Commentary” by Kathleen Kish). In Spain, an edition of Zaragoza 1507 is the earliest printing still extant. In a printing of 1526 in Toledo a surprising Act 22 was incorporated as an added segment of the actions of the five interpolated acts that make up the Tragicomedia. Only five later editions incorporated this act, generally rejected by other printers as spurious.

The Significance of Celestina

5

Both the Comedia and the Tragicomedia conclude with the same final act, a monologue by a despairing Pleberio spoken over the broken body of Melibea, bewailing the ways in which three entities—World, Fortune, and Love—have created, for him, a disconsolate present and an empty future, with his only prospect being the burden of disorder and loss of meaning. In another very real sense, however, his lament also heralds a rupture in the hierarchical structure of the patriarchal society his character represents. His preoccupation with his many business affairs—he plants orchards, builds ships, erects towers, and acquires honors—had blinded him to the new social movements afoot. That is his tragedy. The title page of the 1519 Italian translation of the work presents the first usurpation of the work’s title: the emergence of Celestina as the new titular protagonist of the work. The title is emblazoned on the Madrid 1569 edition and has remained so through the centuries. This evolution of the title, in many ways, is entirely understandable: Celestina is not only a go-between, but also a midwife, maker of cosmetics, weaver, restorer of hymens, and—as one of Calisto’s servants claims—a bit of a spell-caster,4 but she also becomes central to every phase of the action. Her confederation with Calisto’s servants, Sempronio and Pármeno, undermines all loyalty to their master. Her persuasiveness is critical in allowing Melibea’s secret desire for Calisto to rise to the surface. She crows with pride about the treason Melibea, as the sole daughter and inheritor of Pleberio and Alisa, carries out against her family, smugly parading her triumph before Calisto: that Melibea is more yours than Pleberio’s (“más está a tu mandado y querer que de su padre Pleberio”) (p. 460). Plainly, Celestina’s greed, selfishness, and overweening pride lead her two confederates to assassinate her, an act which in turn leads to their immediate execution at dawn in the town plaza, witnessed by Sosia, another of Calisto’s servants. And her death, in the longer twenty-one-act Tragicomedia, leads to the plan to revenge these deaths by the two dead servant’s doxies—Areúsa, the beautiful prostitute Celestina uses as bait in convincing Pármeno to join 4  In the Spanish original, Pármeno says: “Un poquito hechicera” (p. 257). He later claims that “all was falsehood and trickery” (todo era burla y mentira) (36; 263). On Celestina’s witchcraft, see Patrizia Botta’s chapter, “Magic in Celestina.” Here and subsequently, all citations of the Spanish original are from Peter Russell’s edition of La Celestina (Madrid: Castalia, 2007). Citations in English are from the translation by Mack H. Singleton, Celestina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). Many other English versions of the work have appeared but I believe this one best reflects the style and flavor of the original Spanish. The page numbers to each version are after the quote in the text, between parentheses, separated by a semicolon.

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her schemes to fleece Calisto, and Elicia, the lone sex worker left in Celestina’s once-prosperous bordello and Sempronio’s lover. Though the assassination of the go-between occurs in Act 12 of both the short and long versions, Celestina’s shadow hovers over the actions that follow and is unmistakably and deeply felt by the reader. Such was the impact of the go-between as the new titular protagonist of the work that her name became part of the language: as the noun “celestina” in the eighteenth century, and as a verb, “celestinear,” after that. In Spanish today, “celestineo” and “celestinaje” are nouns perfectly understood as appertaining to Celestina’s main profession. What author or authors are responsible for the crafting of this Spanish masterpiece? The name of Fernando de Rojas (1476–1541) appears for the first time in a series of acrostic verses at the conclusion of the Toledo printing of the Comedia in 1500. Later, in a judicial hearing in 1525, his father-in-law identifies him as “he who composed ‘Melibea’ ” (que compuso a Melibea).5 Many years later, he is mentioned as the author in a case involving his descendants’ claim of being of pure blood.6 Interestingly, however, no printer of the many editions of Celestina up to 1541, the year of the death of Fernando de Rojas, includes his name on the title page, and no contemporary author mentions him in references to the work.7 The writer of the opening preface of the work, “The Author to a Friend” (El autor a un su amigo), claims that he found a brilliant but incomplete first Act and, deeply affected by its subtleties, practical wisdom, and 5  The Spanish verb “componer” not only means “to compose,” but in the early stage of printing, it was also clearly associated with the act of preparing the frames of type face for the printed page. It did not automatically refer to authorship. 6  The Inquisition was established in Spain in 1481 and established procedures for locating, trying, and punishing the enemies of Christianity: Jews who maintained their own rites, men and women in league with the devil, and other heretical groups. Purity of Blood guidelines were set up to define “old” Spanish Christians in opposition to “new” Christians or converts, whose sincerity in the act of conversion was ever suspect, making their lives often rather difficult. However, some conversos did embrace Christianity whole-heartedly and even attained high ranks in the church hierarchy. 7  In fact, Fernando de Rojas, if the author of Celestina in whole or part, never wrote anything else. Instead, after 1507 he lived, practiced law, and died in Talavera de la Reina, in the province of Toledo, where he was named its interim mayor in 1538. Details may be found in Inés Valverde Azuela, “Documentos referentes a Fernando de Rojas,” Celestinesca 16, no. 2 (1992): 81–102. Among the books listed in Rojas’s testament was a single copy of the work, called, simply, “Calisto” (probably a Seville printing of 1518–20). That one copy was given to Rojas’s oldest son by his widow, but he did not want it and passed it on to a younger brother. Two continuations of Celestina, one by Feliciano de Silva (the Segunda Celestina in 1534), the other by Gaspar Gómez de Toledo (the Tercera Celestina in 1539), both circulating in Rojas’s lifetime, never mention Rojas.

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wit, has spent a fortnight writing the continuation of the Comedia. The entire matter of single or multiple authors is, however, complex and more information on this topic will be found in the chapters by José Luis Canet (“The Early Editions and the Authorship of Celestina”) and Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe (“Minerva’s Dog and Other Problematic Points in Celestina’s Text”). Celestina proved to be nothing if not controversial. When finally censored by the Inquisition in 1640, the Tragicomedia had gone through approximately one hundred and ten printings: its readership was vast and it was commented upon in various literary circles. The assassinated go-between was to be resuscitated—as, later, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes would be—in three original works, and Celestina inspired the creation of similar figures in many other works. A more complete range of these continuations can be found in the chapter “Celestina’s Continuations, Adaptations, and Influences” by Consolación Baranda. The character of Celestina would continue to serve as a model in many theatrical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Celestina herself became a figure of fun in many poetic pieces that dot the literary landscape of Spain in the same two centuries.8 One admirer of the work, Juan Sedeño, even published a complete versification of the original prose text in 1540, neglecting to name, or not knowing the name of, its original author. A small sampling of contemporary reactions to the work would include violent condemnations alongside small islands of admiration. The following is a smattering of the adverse reactions to readings of the work. These and many others form a part of the history of reader response to the work, helping make Celestina the classic it was to become.9 We can appreciate that its account of prohibited extramarital love, so richly presented in the text of Celestina, was found to be so offensive to the intelligentsia of the sixteenth century and, in large part, would lead to its eventual inclusion in the Inquisition’s list of prohibited books. The following free English translations are my own.

8  See J. T. Snow, “La metamorfosis de Celestina en el imaginario poético del siglo XVI: El caso de los testamentos,” in Literatura y ficción: ‘Estorias,’ aventuras y poesía en la Edad Media, ed. Marta Haro Cortés (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 2015), II:759–73. One of the more jocular and inspired of these poetic pieces involved Celestina’s last will and testament and codicils to it, reprinted with variants from one collection to another. 9  I have abstracted these commentaries from my ongoing critical history of the reception of Celestina, in Celestinesca 21 (1997), 115–72; 25 (2001), 199–282; 26 (2002), 53–121, and 37 (2013), 119–38.

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(A) “The authorities ought to be preoccupied with such pestiferous books, as these books in Spain: Amadís de Gaula […], la alcahueta Celestina, mother of all foolishness, and Carcel de amor.”10 (B) “It inspires compassion to see how in these days and nights they [young readers] consume vain books, to wit, an Amadís, a Primaleón, a Lucrecia, a Calixto [Celestina]: with the doctrine of learned men, I will venture that they are not spending time, rather they are wasting their time. Because in these books they do not learn to distance themselves from vice, but instead learn what ‘marvels’ are there to make them even more sinful.”11 (C) “The law of love is foreign to sinful men as they do not wish to follow it and, worse, they wish not to hear of the love of God but of that [love] found in Celestina, or in the Cárcel de amor; or of similar kinds of love that are abhorrent […]. In Hell, these would serve as instruments of torture.”12 (D) “We see that men no longer do anything but read such books that it is an affront to name them: books such as Amadís de Gaula, Tristán de Leonís, Primaleón, Cárcel de amor and Celestina; all of these and many others ought in justice not be printed nor sold, because their teachings only incite their sensuality to sin and restrict any willingness to live well.”13 Despite the fact of the enthusiastic readership that developed over the years between 1499 and 1634, certain facets of the Celestina text did manage to convince the Inquisition to ban it completely, once and for all.14 Most of these objections stemmed from certain blasphemous declarations of Calisto in praise 10  The citation is from Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae (The Formation of the Christian Woman) (Antwerp, 1524), book 1, chapter 5. 11  This is from Libro de Marco Aurelio con relox de príncipes (Valladolid, 1529), pp. 38–39, authored by the well-known Fray Antonio de Guevara, a churchman who served in the court of the Emperor Charles V. 12  These harsh opinions are those of Fray Francisco de Osuna, Ley de amor y quarta parte del abecedario spiritual (The Law of Love and Fourth Part of the Spiritual Alphabet) (Burgos: 1536), p. 139 (recto and verso). 13  The original text is found in Fray Antonio de Guevara’s Aviso de privados y doctrina de cortesanos (Valladolid: 1539). I cite it here from the 1546 edition of Martín Nucio, (Antwerp, 1546), fol. xv (verso). 14   Celestina remained banned from publication in Spain and, in 1793, the ban was extended even to members of the clergy responsible for the oversight of the ban. Even so, not long after the end of the Inquisition in Spain in 1805, Celestina again found a publisher: León Amarita published it in Madrid in 1822; he also reissued it in a revised version in 1835. This marked the beginning of a new life, editorially speaking, for Celestina, for it has never since been out of print.

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of Melibea. One example, from Calistos’s dialogue with Sempronio in Act 1, after his rejection by Melibea, reads: Calisto: So, I take it, you are reproving me? Sempronio: I am, because you are subjecting the dignity of man to the imperfection of woman. Calisto: You call her woman? Oh, vile tongue! She is God, rather. God! Sempronio: Are you in earnest? You’re jesting and you know it. Calisto: I am not jesting at all. I hold her to be God, I so confess her to be, and I believe there is no other sovereign in heaven—even though she dwells on earth. (Calisto: ¿Qué me repruebas? Sempronio: Que sometes la dignidad del hombre a la imperfección de la flaca mujer. Calisto: ¿Muger? ¡O grossero! ¡Dios, Dios! Sempronio: ¿Y assí lo crees, o burlas? Calisto: ¿Qué burlo? Por Dios la creo, por Dios la confiesso, y no creo que aya otro soberano en el celo, aunque entre nosotros mora). (22; 237) In addition to the continuing production of new celestinesque fictions and the mixed critical responses in her home country, Celestina was destined to become an international go-between, translated first into Italian (1506, 1515, 1519, 1525), then into French (1527, 1578, 1698, 1634–44 [in four printings]), German (1520, 1534), English (1530, 1598, 1631, 1707), and Dutch (1550, 1574, 1580, 1616). There was also a most interesting translation into Latin, the Pornoboscodidascalus (1624), completed by the German humanist, Gaspar von Barth.15 The 1519 Italian translation was used for the first translations into French and German, although a Spanish edition may have been consulted also. There is evidence as well of a lost Hebrew translation made in the sixteenth century.16 More on the translations of Celestina can be appreciated in 15  It was edited, translated into English, and extensively annotated by Enrique Fernández Rivera as Pornoboscodidascalus latinus: Kaspar Barth’s Neo-Latin Translation of Celestina, North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 16  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there have been fresh translations into French, Italian, German, Dutch, and English, but there are also first-time translations of Celestina into Catalan, Portuguese, Swedish, Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Serbian, Chinese, Hungarian, Greek, and Italian. In the special case of adapted theatrical texts, there have been abridged versions in many of these same languages, but additionally also in Polish, Arabic, and Flemish.

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the chapter “Early Responses to Celestina: Translations and Commentary,” by Kathleen Kish. Celestina appeared just after the discoveries of Christopher Columbus. Spain would establish Viceroyalties in various parts of the New World and many Spaniards were sent to represent and to oversee the nation’s interests. The evangelizing efforts of Spanish priests, the establishment of schools, and intermarriages with the native population grew stronger over time. By the midsixteenth century there was a new audience for Spanish books. Surviving records of bills of lading for ships taking merchandise to the New World show that in terms of books, Celestina, in one or another edition, was frequently shipped to the principal Viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru. The presence of Celestina in Latin America, then and after, is of great interest and more on this can be found in the chapter “Celestina and Agustín Arrieta’s China Poblana: Mexico’s Female Icon Revisited,” by Beatriz de Alba Koch. Interest in many specific elements of the text has created stand-alone bibliographies. One of these topics is magic. As we have seen, Pármeno calls Celestina a spell-caster and, in Act 3, we see Celestina conjuring up a supernatural being, the devil—here called Pluto—to help her gain entrance to the home of Pleberio. She bids him enter into a skein of yarn she has anointed with serpent’s oil that she plans to offer for sale to Melibea’s mother, Alisa. Though initially feeling doubts while approaching Pleberio’s house, she decides to soldier on, for as she says to herself: “I should rather offend against Melibea’s father, Pleberio than bitterly disappoint Calisto” (Más quiero offender a Pleberio que enojar a Calisto) (69; 313). Her strong desire to seduce his only daughter away from the rich and successful Pleberio evidences a vengeful side of the impoverished go-between and suggests a plot element rarely discussed in Celestina.17 But Celestina is then relieved to learn that, in fact, Alisa is in need of her yarn, but is also about to leave home in haste with a page, accompanying her to the house of an ailing sister whose illness has suddenly worsened. Celestina believes that her spell is responsible and says to herself: “The devil is back of all this, preparing my opportunity by aggravating her sister’s illness” (Por aquí anda el diablo aparejando oportunidad, arreziando el mal a la otra) (73; 319). Is it her spell that is working? Or is it—as others think—her own imagination at work? The reader decides, but Celestina’s wish to be left alone with Melibea 17  This plot element was amply explored in J. T. Snow, “Quinientos años de animadversión entre Celestina y Pleberio: posturas y perspectivas,” in Versiones y crónicas medievales: Actas del Coloquio Internacional VII Jornadas Medievales, México (Sept. 1998) (México: UNAM, 2002), 13–29.

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is fortuitously granted. Lucrecia will be there, too, aware of what is transpiring, but unwilling to speak out against Celestina’s manipulations of her mistress. Melibea is charged with paying Celestina for the yarn, but the bawd and former neighbor manages to prolong her stay and is able to insinuate in the ensuing conversation the nature of the embassy entrusted to her by Calisto. The well-bred Melibea is at first enraged by the mention of Calisto, but the quick-witted Celestina, improvising on the spot, invents a toothache that is causing Calisto great suffering. She claims he needs Melibea’s girdle, which has been in contact with holy relics in Jerusalem, and also a prayer she knows of Saint Appolonia, the patron saint of dental aches and pains. A common language of illness is established in which Melibea can freely participate as a good Christian woman. Melibea’s good breeding is about to be sacrificed on the altar of her inner desires. She removes her girdle and hands it to Celestina, asking her to return secretly on the morrow for the prayer, as she now wishes her mother not to know of further contact with this yarn-seller. Her maid, Lucrecia, speaks what the reader now knows: “Is she proposing to Celestina to come secretly? She may want to give her something more than she has said” (¿Secretamente quiere que venga Celestina? ¡Más le querrá dar que lo dicho!) (86; 337). The dilemma for many scholars and readers has to do with different reactions to the text. Is Melibea in Act 4, when this first meeting with Celestina takes place, already smitten with the Calisto she has rejected and, like him, hoping for a way to reestablish contact? Can she risk trusting Celestina? The successful ruse of the toothache, in fact, opens up that possibility. Or, on the other hand, is the reader to see—as Celestina herself does—the workings of the devil, Pluto, in this initial submission of Melibea, symbolized in her relinquishing the girdle? The dilemma comes down to either the efficacy of Celestina’s spell or the exercise of Melibea’s free will. Critics have thoughtfully defended both positions in the long history of critical analysis of Celestina, and much more on this central matter is taken up by Patrizia Botta in the chapter “Magic in Celestina.” A second set of contrasting opinions centers on the possible presence of Jewish thought in the work. Why is this matter taken up at all? One of its proposed authors, Fernando de Rojas, was a third-generation converso, the grandson of a man who was forced to abandon his Jewish faith and accept Christianity, as were many Jews in the fifteenth century, who did so in order to survive. Celestina was written and published less than a decade after the January 1, 1492 edict of expulsion—invoked by the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella—of all Jews refusing to accept Christianity. Many converts, or conversos, outwardly did so—as cristianos nuevos (New Christians)—but secretly

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kept up the practices of their old faith. However, the pure-blooded Spaniards, the cristianos viejos (Old or Original Christians), kept a dutiful watch on them, especially after the Inquisition was established in 1481. A second reason, for many, is that neither Calisto nor Melibea contemplate marriage. As a possible reason for this, some have suggested that one of the couple may have Jewish (or converso) blood.18 Thus, the timing of the Celestina text, plus the notion of an impossible legal union between the two lovers, has led some scholars to examine Celestina closely for possible threads of Jewish thought. Despite the lack of any overt and specifically Jewish indicators in the text, the societal mix at the time of the text’s printing, and its eager reception, require more study—see Manuel da Costa Fontes’s reflections on Judaism in the chapter “Jesus and Mary, Christian Prayer, and the Saints in Celestina.” A different focus is the result of the foregrounding in the Celestina text of the ten characters from the lower social classes (one new character was added in the twenty-one-act version). Besides the central go-between, there are conniving and disloyal servants (Sempronio, Pármeno), prostitutes (Elicia, Areúsa), an easily duped stable lad (Sosia), a not-so-easily fooled servant (Tristán), a boastful pimp (Centurio), a humble serving class lass (Lucrecia), and one bordello client (Crito). This is the first work of Spanish literature in which lower caste people are major players. They have also been seen as early literary evidence of such contemporary social phenomena as prostitution (Enriqueta Zafra expands on this in the chapter “Risky Business: The Politics of Prostitution in Celestina”) and a forerunning depiction of the budding Spanish picaresque tradition, treated by Ted Bergman in the chapter “Celestina as a Precursor to the Picaresque.” These vivid specimens of urban life are aspects of the genuine societal unrest characteristic of the early sixteenth century, brilliantly espoused and analyzed in a study by José Antonio Maravall19 and, in this volume, by Raúl Álvarez Moreno in the chapter “A Guidebook for Two Cities: The Physical and the Political Urban Space in Celestina.” Clearly, Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was deeply involved in humanism, as is well delineated in the broad study of Ottavio Di 18  If one listens to Melibea in the added Act 16 of the Tragicomedia, neither was remotely interested in marriage: “Love with love only is repaid. […] I want no husband. I will not sully the bonds of matrimony or violate the marriage vows as many have done, I find, in those ancient books which I have read” (El amor no admite sino sólo amor por paga […]. No quiero marido, no quiero ensuziar los ñudos del matrimonio, no las maritales pisadas de ageno hombre repisar, como muchas hallo en los antiguos libros que leý) (217; 547–48). 19  The classic work of 1964, often revised and updated, is José Antonio Maravall, El mundo social de La Celestina (Madrid: Gredos, 1981).

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Camillo.20 Clearly, from the conversations, themes, and topics addressed in Celestina by many of its characters, humanistic learning in the post-Gutenberg era was available to many in the form of printed books, as it is to the well-to-do father and daughter, Pleberio and Melibea.21 Other characters, too, refer specifically or tangentially to classical authors, whether or not they could have plausibly read them. This is not as surprising as it might seem, as so much lore and learning was still being transmitted in oral form at the time. More on the literary appropriation of orality is to be found in the chapter “The Poetics of Voice, the Performance, and the Meaning of Celestina” of this volume, by Gustavo Illades. There is, additionally, a companion piece on learning, book culture, and humanistic attitudes in the sixteenth century, all explored in the chapter “Celestina in the Context of Fifteenth-Century Castilian Vernacular Humanism” by José Luis Gastañaga. A text as fertile as Celestina is further enriched by its frequent recourse to irony, which may be seen as winks on the part of its authors to the readers. A few examples demonstrate the operation of irony in our text. (A) When Celestina first learns of Calisto’s lust for Melibea, she declares: “Well, I am delighted with this news, as doctors are when people crack their skulls” (Digo que me alegro desta nuevas, como los cirujanos de los descalabrados) (32; 253–54). As a matter of fact, Calisto indeed will die of a broken skull. (B) Pármeno, warning Calisto of what he fears may happen, says to his master: “Your losing the falcon the other day was the cause of your entering Melibea’s garden to recover it. Your entrance there was the cause of your seeing her and speaking to her. That conversation was the cause of your falling in love with her. And love gave birth to sorrow. Sorrow will now cause you to lose body, soul and estate” (Señor, porque perderse el otro día el neblí fue causa de tu entrada en la huerta de Melibea a le buscar; la entrada, causa de la ver y hablar; la habla engendró amor; el amor parió la pena; la pena causará perder tu cuerpo, alma y hazienda) (56; 289–90). Even though Pármeno is a mere youth servant, his prescience here offers the reader a miniature plot summary, even as an 20  Ottavio Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano en el siglo XV (Valencia: F. Torres, 1976). 21  Read these words of Melibea as she speaks to her stunned father below, from atop the tower of her house: “[…] could I before my longed-for death proffer you some consoling words from those ancient works you gave me [to read], in order to illuminate my wit […].” (Algunas consolatorias palabras te diría antes de mi agradable fin, coligidas y sacadas de aquellos antiguos libros que tú, por más aclarar mi ingenio, me mandavas leer (245; 601–2, emphasis added, and see note 15). On Melibea’s readings, see also note 18. The voluminous references to classical authorities and names in Acts 20 and 21 (originally Acts 15 and 16 in the Comedia) reflect the currents of humanistic learning in Spain.

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unbelieving Calisto cannot imagine this encounter with Melibea will end in the loss of his body, soul, and estate. (C) Act 9’s banquet scene takes place at Celestina’s house, is supplied by Sempronio and Pármeno’s theft of good food and wine from Calisto’s larder,22 and is attended by those servants’ mistresses, Elicia and Areúsa. Here, Celestina waxes nostalgic about her prosperous past: “My prosperity reached its pinnacle, such as I was. It had necessarily to wane and descend; I approach my end. I see in this the brief remainder of my days” (Mi honrra llegó a la cumbre, según quien yo era; de necessidad es que desmengüe y abaxe. Cerca ando de mi fin. En esto veo que me queda poca vida) (150; 432). Never in her active imagination, speaking as she is to an attentive audience, does she think that her life’s end, ironically, is so very close at hand. (D) When first Calisto scales Melibea’s high garden wall, she exclaims in fear: “Oh, my lord! Leap not down from so high a place! Oh, I shall die to see it!” (¡O, mi señor, no saltes de tan alto, que me moriré en verlo!) (198; 513–14). Melibea cannot then anticipate that she will, in fact, choose to die when she sees him leap/fall from so high a place. (E) At their last meeting, Calisto arrives late and listens to Melibea singing in the garden bower below. He admits this and Melibea responds: “Why let you me with hoarse swan’s voice cast my silly words upon the air?” (¿Por qué me dexavas echar palabras sin seso al ayre, con mi ronca voz de cisne) (235; 581–82). As the reader knows, the swan sings only when it is to die. In complete ironic innocence, Melibea compares her voice to the swan’s voice and then she, herself, dies. Such instances of irony abound in the text. Not every reader can profit from all of them in a first reading, but they will continue to enrich the reading experience as they manifest themselves to readers in new readings. The skilled use of irony in Celestina is one additional assurance of the admirable literary skills of its author or authors. Celestina is a work in which love (parental or romantic), lust, and desire all play a basic role. Much of the innuendo, discussion, and treatment of these aspects are couched in medical terms, in consonance with ideas about them expressed in the popular medical manuals then circulating. Ricardo Castells discusses them in the chapter “Lovesickness and the Problematical Text of La Celestina, Act 1.” Also relevant in past studies of Celestina have been the notions of parody (is Calisto, for example, a parody of the courtly lover?), of 22  The daily nourishment mentioned by the characters in Celestina (foods and wines) are surveyed in the chapter “Eating, Drinking, and Consuming in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea” by Connie Scarborough.

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comedy, incongruities, and carnivalesque features that seem to surface in a text with so many tragedies. These lighter elements are capably explored by Ryan Giles in the chapter “ ‘Aquellos antigos libros’: Approaches to Parody in Celestina.” Not surprisingly, Celestina, being an exceedingly complex literary work, is also one on which scholars present opposing views not obvious to casual readers of the text. Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, in the chapter “Minerva’s Dog and Other Problematic Points in Celestina’s Text,” brings us face to face with many of these conflicts. There is a noticeably strong element of anticlericalism in the text, surely seen by the Inquisition and Celestina’s many ecclesiastical critics. Calisto goes to the Church of the Magdalene to pray for Celestina’s success in her erotic embassy. God is often mentioned, but only in conventional phrases, never in serious prayer. When Celestina first appears at Calisto’s house, he treats her with great reverence. We earlier saw one sample of Calisto’s blasphemies, but there are others also. God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints are treated offhandedly and incongruously in Celestina, a matter Manuel da Costa Fontes gives full attention to in the chapter “Jesus and Mary, Christian Prayer, and the Saints in Celestina.” A work thus poised between these two centuries would naturally have, among its literary ancestors, an entire library of works to draw upon: what today we define as sources. The outlines of its love story—including recourse to go-betweens—draws upon many classical works, among them Ovid’s Art of Love and the Metamorphoses and the familiar story of Hero and Leander, as discussed here by Bienvenido Morros Mestres in the chapter “The Story of Hero and Leander: A Possible Unknown Source of Celestina.” Petrarch was also a source for the borrowing of much of Celestina’s sententious base, as thoroughly demonstrated by Alan Deyermond.23 Closer to the actual time of Celestina, we find scenes adapted from Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor, here rehearsed by Ivy A. Corfis in the chapter “Calisto and Leriano in Love.” As we can see in these few examples, the study of literary intertextuality can enrich our understanding of many aspects of the Celestina text, especially as so many classical and near-contemporary authorities are invoked in one way or another. The many veins of intertextuality are mined by Amaranta Saguar García in the chapter “Quotation, Plagiarism, Allusion, and Reminiscence: Intertextuality in Celestina.” One other important work dealing with sources was compiled in

23  A. D. Deyermond, The Petrarchan Sources of La Celestina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

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the 1570s. It scrutinized the Tragicomedia line by line, with its legal and judicial sources traced by a truly voracious reader-scholar.24 One of the most significant matters concerning Celestina is that now, almost 520 years later, it is still being read (in Spanish and in diverse translations), discussed, studied, interpreted, and seen. The first theatrical adaptation of a Celestina text too long for a full staging occurred in the twentieth century (Madrid, 1909), and since then there have been many and varied stage adaptations.25 A musical version by Brad Bond was performed in New York City in 1999, and a rousing musical, titled “Salsa Celestina,” in London in 1993.26 As the plot and characters of Celestina would surely appeal to opera fans, operas have been composed, some performed, others not.27 Not to be outdone by these other stagings, Celestina has inspired three dance interpretations as well, all in Madrid (1968, 1990, 1998).28 Two collections of poetry have also been written, inspired by the love affair of Calisto and Melibea.29

24  This study of Celestina’s sources, titled Celestina comentada, remained in a difficult-toread manuscript form until very recently. It was edited by Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernández Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne, and published in the Textos Recuperados series (Salamanca: University of Salamanca Press, 2002). Owing to the edition parsed, Toledo 1538, which contains the later and spurious Act 22, this comprises a complete compendium of the diverse legal and juridical sources of the work. 25  The only study of adaptations of Celestina in Spanish is the topic of a recently defended PhD dissertation at Madrid’s Complutense University: María Bastianes’s La Celestina en escena (1909–2012), January 2016. There have, of course, been several adaptations in other languages and a history of them is needed. Celestina speaks, as we know from the work’s many translations, a variety of languages. She has now been heard speaking, with varying accents, on the world’s stages. 26  A review by Jane Whetnall of “Salsa Celestina” can be consulted in Celestinesca 17, no. 1 (1993): 135–38. 27  The first opera in Spanish was composed by Felipe Pedrell (1902) and the most recent one, by Joaquín Nin Culmell, premiered in Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela in September 2008. Jerome Rosen composed an English language opera, Calisto & Melibea, with libretto by Edwin Honig: it premiered in Davis, California in May of 1979. Notes on these and other Celestina operas form an appendix to the article by J. T. Snow and A. Gimber, “Richard Strauss, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Gregor, and the Story of the Celestina Opera that Almost Was,” Celestinesca 31 (2007): 160–63. 28  See the appendix mentioned in note 27 (pp. 162–63) for summaries of these three balletic performances. 29  These two slim volumes are Jorge Guillen’s El huerto de Melibea (1954) and Manuel Manteros’s Ya quiere amanecer (1975). Other single poems also have been penned in homage to Celestina.

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From the Burgos 1499 printing of the Comedia, which contains sixteen different woodcut illustrations of important plot actions, all the characters of the work have earned a place in the art world, none more so than Celestina herself. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countless editions and translations have given us sequential illustrations of the actions of the twentyone-act Tragicomedia. Later artists, of the caliber of Murillo, Goya, and Picasso (and many others), portrayed Celestina plying her trade.30 In the last one hundred years, new editions of Celestina have been illustrated by contemporary artists and her image has appeared in advertising, on stamps, lottery tickets, cigar boxes, and much more. Sculpted statues of Spain’s classic go-between have appeared in Salamanca and La Puebla de Montalbán. A complete history of Celestina in all forms of art would be a massive undertaking. Fortunately, such a project is underway, shepherded by Enrique Fernández Rivera, whose chapter in this volume, “The Images of Celestina and its Visual Culture,” together with Yolanda Iglesias’s “Celestina in Film and Television,” will add to our appreciation of the multi-pronged reach of Celestina over its five centuries.31 The website he sponsors grows constantly as new illustrative materials are found and added. Capping the presence of the Tragicomedy in our own time, Antonio Pérez-Romero, in the chapter “Modernity and Celestina: The Future of Our Past and of Our Present,” shows how modern existentialism equates with similar trends present in the text of Celestina and, additionally, takes up other modern readings and interpretations taking place as the work earns a firm foothold in our time and place.

30  On Picasso, a recent monograph in English is: Carol Salus, Picasso and Celestina: The Artist’s Vision of the Procuress (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2015). 31   Celestina Visual, online database of the five hundred years of the visual culture of Celestina, http://celestinavisual.org.

Text, Origins and Sources

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CHAPTER 2

The Early Editions and the Authorship of Celestina José Luis Canet Celestina presents one of the most complex cases of transmission of a literary work in manuscript and printed formats. The finding of the Manuscrito de Palacio, also known as the Celestina de Palacio, in the last decade of the twentieth century, prompted the rethinking of the transmission and authorship of Celestina because it contains information about an early manuscript phase in the work’s transmission previous to the publication of the sixteen-act and twenty-one-act printed versions.1 Many critics have tried to establish the origin of this manuscript version (Salamanca-Segovia?), and whether it actually belonged to Rojas, who would have then introduced the corrections and additions to the manuscript—a widely discarded possibility. Critics have also postulated that the manuscript was written by two different people, who copied the text from an original source that was part of a tradition other than the one from which the printed versions descend. The existence of this preprinted version tradition would confirm the circulation of an early version of the Comedia in Salamanca, which later, Rojas (or the proofreader of a printing press) would have corrected before taking to a printer. In any case, the discovery of the Manuscrito de Palacio was crucial because the manuscript bears witness to an embryonic stage in the textual life of Celestina—first circulated in manuscript form and later superseded by the printed textual tradition.2 1  On the Manuscrito de Palacio, see Charles B. Faulhaber, “Celestina de Palacio: Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, Ms 1520,” Celestinesca 14, no. 2 (1990): 3–39; Patrizia Botta, “El texto en movimiento (de La Celestina de Palacio a La Celestina posterior),” in Cinco Siglos de Celestina: Aportaciones interpretativas, ed. R. Beltrán and J. L. Canet (Valencia: Universitat de València, 1997), 135–59; Patrizia Botta, “La Celestina,” in Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española. Textos y transmisión, ed. Carlos Alvar and Manuel Lucía Megías (Madrid: Castalia, 2002), 252–67; Juan Carlos Conde, “El manuscrito II-1520 de la Biblioteca de Palacio y La Celestina: Balance y estado de la cuestión,” in Cinco Siglos de Celestina: Aportaciones interpretativas, 161–85; Remedios Prieto de la Iglesia, “Reflexiones sobre el Íncipit de las ediciones de la Comedia de Calisto y Melibea y el Manuscrito de Palacio,” Celestinesca 24 (2000): 57–68. 2  In addition to the studies mentioned in the previous note, the following are important for the scholarship of the Manuscrito de Palacio: Donald McGrady, “Two Studies on the Text of the Celestina. 1. Palacio MS 1520; A Late Copy of the Ancient Author’s Comedia de Calisto y Melibea,” Romance Philology 48, no. 1 (1994): 1–9; Michel Garcia, “Consideraciones sobre Celestina de

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We know the textual history of Celestina is one of continuous expansion. The first version is lost, but can be reconstructed, according to the model of the humanistic comedies, as the love story between a young suitor (Calisto) and a girl (Melibea). In order to succeed in his conquest, Calisto resorts to the help of his servants. His servant, Sempronio, who in Act 1 behaves as the typically stern and admonishing servant common to the Roman comedies, tries to dissuade his master Calisto, adducing negative exempla that he had taken mostly from the Ovidian tradition. However, since Sempronio cannot persuade Calisto to desist from his pursuit, he becomes the servus fallax (deceiving servant), resorting to the procuress Celestina to help his master reach Melibea. We may hypostatize the comedy concluded with the sexual possession of the loved woman since similar plots can be found in many Latin comedies circulated among Spanish professors and students at the end of the fifteenth century. If we accept that Celestina circulated first in manuscript form—a fact confirmed by the “Autor a un su amigo” (The Author to a Friend) introduction added to the printed versions—the first version might have been a complete story with a happy ending, it belonging to the comedic tradition, as indicated by the title.3 Patrizia Botta writes that, in this early phase, Celestina was missing the plot summaries that later preceded each act, and the preliminary texts (Letter to a Friend, and the acrostic verses). Likewise, no author name or other identifying

Palacio,” Celestinesca 18, no. 1 (1994), 3–16; Michel Garcia, “Apostillas a ‘Consideraciones sobre Celestina de Palacio’,” Celestinesca 18, no. 2 (1994): 145–49; Francisco J. Lobera, “El Manuscrito 1520 de Palacio y la tradición impresa de Celestina,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 48, no. 1 (1993): 51–66; Francisco J. Lobera, “La transmisión textual” in the prologue to Fernando de Rojas (and “Antiguo Auctor”),” in La Celestina. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000), CCVIII–CCXXXX; Francisco J. Lobera, “Sobre historia, texto y ecdótica, alrede­ dor del Manuscrito de Palacio,” in La Celestina. V Centenario (1499–1999). Actas del Congreso Internacional (Salamanca, Talavera de la Reina, Toledo, La Puebla de Montalbán, 17 de septiembre a 1 de octubre de 1999), ed. Felipe B. Pedraza, Rafael González, and Gema Gómez (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2001), 79–96; Remedios Prieto, “La portada de las ediciones de la Comedia y el Manuscrito 1520 de Palacio: Evolución textual de La Celestina,” in La Celestina. V Centenario (1499–1999), 283–91; Antonio Sánchez, “Otro punto de vista sobre el Manuscrito de Palacio Ms 1520,” in La Celestina. V Centenario (1499–1999), 273–81; Dorothy S. Severin, “Celestina’s Audience, from Manuscript to Print,” in La Celestina 1499–1999. Selected Papers from the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina (New York, November 17–19, 1999), ed. O. Di Camillo and J. O’Neill (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2005), 197–205. 3  Antonio Sánchez and Remedios Prieto defend this opinion in “Sobre la ‘composición’ de La Celestina y su anónimo ‘auctor’,” Celestinesca 33 (2009): 143–71.

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references were included in the text.4 The preliminary materials would be added only when the book was printed as Comedia de Calisto y Melibea and given a tragic ending, in spite of the presence of the term “comedy” in the title. In other words, the first refashioning of the text took place when the manuscript became a printed text. Later, new acts were added to this simple story, as well as (most likely) a sad ending. These changes modified the meaning of the text so as to conform to the moral philosophy the author or authors identified in the preliminary materials that accompanied the book as the correction of young lovers’ excesses.5 An editor, a printer, and probably several proofreaders left their mark on the language and the structure of the printed version.6 Starting with the 1500 Toledo edition, the acrostic verses, entitled Autor, escusándose de su yerro (The Author Apologizes for His Errors), are always included as part of the printed text. The initials of each verse identify the author: “Fernando de Rojas, with a degree in law, completed the comedy of Calisto and Melibea, and he was born in Puebla de Montalbán” (El bachjller Fernando de Royas acabó la comedja de Caysto y Melybea, y fve nascjdo en la Puevla de Montalván). This addition is part of what Peter Russell calls the constant process of amplification of Celestina, a process that matches better the transmission of medieval manuscripts than a printed book. Russell also writes that some hints indicate that Rojas himself introduced many significant changes to the manuscript he handed in to the printer.7 Indeed, as Fernando Cantalapiedra has noted, the different additions in the printed editions amount to forty percent of the whole book. And this estimate does not take into account the early additions to the lost proto-version, which cannot be accurately quantified without resorting to subjective interpretations. The result is that the additions, in the form of interpolations by whoever introduced them, change the meaning

4  Patrizia Botta, Edizione critica de La Celestina di Fernando de Rojas (dall’Atto VIIIº alla fine), in Cervantes Virtual, 2001, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/la-autoria-de-la-celestina/. 5  Alan D. Deyermond thinks Rojas became even more of a Christian moralist when he expanded the Comedia into the Tragicomedia. “Fernando de Rojas from 1499 to 1502: Born-Again Christian?,” Celestinesca 25 (2001): 3–20. 6  José Luis Canet, “Los correctores de imprenta (y/o componedores) como configuradores de las normas de escritura de la lengua castellana (un caso entre Valencia-Sevilla en la primera mitad del XVI),” in Filologia dei testi a stampa (Area Iberica), ed. Patrizia Botta (Modena: Mucchi Editore, 2005), 369–80. 7  Peter Russell, introduction to Fernando de Rojas, Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Madrid: Castalia, 1999), 11–185, p. 16.

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and intention of the book. The additions also confirm that Celestina was not the product of a single writing process but of successive interventions.8 The most substantial change in the textual evolution of Celestina was the transformation from Comedia to Tragicomedia, which took place in an edition, probably printed in Salamanca around 1502, which is now lost.9 We can infer its existence because the Italian translation of Celestina, by Alonso Ordóñez, published by Eucharius Silber in 1506, already contains the added passages of the Tragicomedia.10 In the prologue to the Tragicomedia version, Rojas (if he is the person responsible for extending the book and changing the title to Tragicomedia) explains the reason for the expansion and changes: I thought about what the majority was saying and realized they wanted the period of the lovers’ happiness to be extended, and this was very vexing for me, but I decided against my best will to set my pen to work a second time in this strange toil I was never trained for, and took time from my main studies, and used hours set aside for recreation, although there are now bound to be fresh detractors of my latest additions. (p. 214)11 The readers, who pressured the author because they “wanted the period of the lovers’ happiness to be extended,” represent the interaction between the author(s) and the early readers in the university city of Salamanca, a place which favored such close contact. In the prologue, the author also attributes the decision to change the title from Comedia to Tragicomedia to the pressure exerted by readers:

8  Fernando Cantalapiedra, “Sentencias petrarquistas y adiciones a la TragiComedia de Calisto y Melibea—Aspectos textuales y temáticos,” in Tras los pasos de La Celestina, ed. P. Botta, F. Cantalapiedra, K. Reichenberger, and J. T. Snow (Kassel: Ed. Reichenberger, 2001), 55–154, p. 56. 9  On the changes from Comedia to Tragicomedia, see Patrizia Botta’s excellent article “El paso de la Comedia a la Tragicomedia,” in Actas del Simposio Internacional 1502–2002: Five Hundred Years of Fernando de Rojas’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (18–19 de octubre de 2002), ed. Juan Carlos Conde (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2007), 92–113; and Carmen Parrilla, “Incremento y ratiocinio en la Tragicomedia,” in the same book, 227–39. 10  Ottavio Di Camillo, “Hacia el origen de la Tragicomedia: Huellas de la princeps en la traducción al italiano de Alfonso Ordóñez,” in Actas del Simposio Internacional 1502–2002, 115–45. 11  The English quotes of Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009).

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Others have argued over the name, claiming it shouldn’t be called a comedy, since it ends sadly and so it should be called a tragedy. The first author named it in line with how the work began, that is, amusingly, and called it a comedy. Seeing there was such discord, I decided to cut down the middle and call it a tragicomedy. (p. 214) As the result of this complex genesis, Celestina probably has one of the most complex textual traditions we know. Because of this complexity, critics have proposed different stemmata, or genealogical charts, that trace the origins of the text back to a lost editio princeps (first edition). This lost edition is the cornerstone for the three surviving editions of the Comedia version and also for the near one hundred editions of the Tragicomedia version published between 1499 (or 1500–1502) and 1633. These descendants also contain their own variants, attributable to the author(s), the copyists, and the typesetters in the form of additions and suppressions. Many critics today question the primacy of the Comedia version, printed by Fadrique de Basilea in Burgos, 1499, which was considered the editio princeps until recently. They propose, instead, that the first printed version was the one printed in Toledo, 1500, by Hagenbach, followed by Seville, 1501, and, only later, by Fadrique de Basilea’s edition in Burgos, printed only in 1501 or 1502, in spite of the colophon reading 1499.12 I agree with the later date but I do not think we will be able to establish an exact date unless we find a complete copy of this edition (only an incomplete copy survives), the printing contract, or other documents.13 However, many critics still believe that the Burgos edition was printed in 1499 and, consequently, that it is the editio princeps. Other early editions, of which no copies survive, can be indirectly postulated, with some certainty, such as the one printed in Salamanca by Hans Gysser, 1500?, and one 12  Julián Martín Abad, Post-incunables ibéricos (Madrid: Ollero & Ramos, Editores, 2001) 456–57; Víctor Infantes, “El laberinto cronológico y editorial de las primitivas impresiones de Celestina (1497–1514). Con una Marginalia bibliographica al cabo,” in Actas del Simposio Internacional 1502–2002, 6–9; Mercedes Fernández Valladares, La imprenta en Burgos (1501–1600), 2 vols. (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2005), 1:352–368; Antonio Sánchez SánchezSerrano and María Remedios Prieto de la Iglesia, “Fernando de Rojas acabó la Comedia de Calisto y Melibea,” Revista de Literatura 51 (1989): 21–54; Ottavio di Camilo, “Pesquisas indiciarias sobre el incunable acéfalo de la Comedia de Burgos,” in Filologia dei testi a stampa, 75–96; Ottavio di Camilo, “The Burgos comedia in the printed tradition of La Celestina: A Reassessment,” in La Celestina 1499–1999. Selected Papers from the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina, 235–323. 13  José Luis Canet, “Criterios de edición” in the introduction to his edition of Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2011).

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by Cromberger in Seville, 1502. Also, many critics think the first edition of the twenty-one-act Tragicomedia was published in 1502, probably in Salamanca. The existence of the Cromberger brothers’ edition (Seville, 1502) is inferred because it presumably contained a 1502-dated colophon (page included at the end of a book with data regarding the book’s production, such as the date) that was used in counterfeited editions printed later in Seville (Jacobo Cromberger, c. 1511 and c. 1513–15) and in Italy (Marcellus Silber, Rome, c. 1515; Antonio Blado, Rome, c. 1520). All these editions reproduce, on their title pages, the long title of the equally counterfeited Toledo edition of 1502 (in reality Toledo, c. 1510, by the successor of Hagenbach). That title reads: Tragic-Comedy of Calisto and Melibea, which, besides sweet and pleasant style, there are many philosophical sentences and advice very needed by young men, in which the deceptions that are plotted secretly against them by servants and procuresses, to which the treatise of Century has been added (Tragicomedia de Calisto y melibea Enla qual se contienen de mas de su agradable y dulce estilo muchas sentencias filosofales y auisos muy necesarios para mancebos. mostra[n]do les los e[n]gaños que estan encerrados en seruie[n]tes y alcahuetas y nueua mente añadido el tractado de Centurio).14 Given the uncertain printing dates of counterfeited copies, the first clearly datable edition of Celestina is the one printed by Jorge Coci in Zaragoza, 1507.15 For many critics, this Zaragoza edition is the closest we can get to the editio princeps of the first Tragicomedia. Although it does not include the summaries of the actions for each act later included in all the Tragicomedia editions, its title page clearly states that the book was not printed following the shorter version of the Comedia, but the longer, newer version of the Tragicomedia: “Newly added to all that until now was missing in the story of their love” (nueuame[n]te añadida lo que hasta aquí faltaua de poner enel 14  The only exception regarding the title among these pseudo-1502 editions was Marcellus Silber’s Rome edition: Libro de Calixto y Melibea y de la puta vieja Celestina. This edition is, curiously, the only one Rojas owned when he died, and as such it was included in the inventory of his library accompanying his will. It is surprising that he only owned a counterfeit edition among the many possible legal editions. 15  Patrizia Botta and Víctor Infantes, “Nuevas bibliografías de la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Zaragoza, Jorge Coci, 1507),” Revista de Literatura Medieval 11 (1999): 179–208. See the facsimile edition of Julián Martín Abad, with a study by Joseph Snow, Un volumen facticio de raros post-incunables españoles (Toledo: Antonio Pareja Editor, 1999).

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processo de sus amores). Besides the counterfeited editions of Toledo and Seville (c. 1510–1511–1513) already mentioned, the next known edition was printed in Valencia by Jofré, c. 1510–13 (reprinted in 1518). Most of the modern editions of Celestina depart from this Valencia edition because it included all the preliminary materials (Letter of the Author to a Friend, acrostic verses with the name of Rojas, and the prologue), as well as the paratexts added at the end (the stanzas by Rojas and Proaza, and the colophon). As the colophon and the title proudly announce, the Valencia book was “carefully edited and corrected,” and it included the act summaries as a bonus (probably compiled by Proaza, the likely editor and corrector for the edition). Proaza also added a new stanza, entitled “Toca como se deuia la obra llamar Tragicomedia y no comedia” (He Refers as to Why it Should be Called Tragicomedy and not Comedy), which implies an editorial reflection on the evolution of the text. In another stanza, Proaza points out that the Comedia version was produced in Salamanca, in 1500 (p. 210). During the sixteenth century and until the Pamplona edition, 1633, more than one hundred editions were printed. Some include new additions, such as the so-called Auto de Traso, first added in the Toledo 1526 edition. Authorship The debate surrounding the authorship of Celestina—which includes whether there is, in fact, only one author, Fernando de Rojas,16 or multiple authors— has a long scholarly tradition that has been reinvigorated by new proposals.17 16  Those in favor of Rojas’s authorhsip adduce the testimony of Cosme Gómez de Tejada, Historia de Talavera (Ms 8396, Biblioteca Nacional, ff. 256 v–257 r). Regarding the Jewish origins of Rojas’s family, see Manuel Serrano y Sanz, “Notas biográficas de Fernando de Rojas,” Revista de la Biblioteca, Archivo y Museo del Ayuntamiento de Madrid 6 (1902): 145– 260. See also Fernando del Valle Lersundi, “Testamento de Fernando de Rojas, autor de La Celestina,” Revista de Filología Española 16 (1925): 385–96, and (1929): 366–88; and Valle Lersundi, “Documentos referentes a Fernando de Rojas,” Revista de Filología Española 17 (1930): 183; Otis H. Green, “Fernando de Rojas, converso and hidalgo,” Hispanic Review 15 (1947): 384–87. Many later articles and books study this issue. 17  See, for instance, Emilio de Miguel Martínez’s extended chapter, “Algunas objeciones a la autoría de Rojas e igualdades vistas por otros,” in La Celestina de Rojas (Madrid: Gredos, 1996), 248–300, which reviews the vast bibliogaphy on the issue. See also Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. V Centenario: 1499–1999. Edición crítica, con un estudio sobre la Autoría y la “Floresta celestinesca” (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000). Another comprehensive summmary is Nicasio Salvador Miguel, “La autoría de La Celestina y la fama de Rojas,” Epos, no. 7 (1991): 275–90, and “La Celestina

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Today many critics do not think that Fernando de Rojas was the author.18 In the mid-twentieth century, Clara Louisa Penney questioned the fact that a simple student, like Rojas, could have been able to write such a complex text as Celestina. She found it suspicious that the personal library of Rojas, of which we know thanks to his inventory of books listed in his will, did not include any of the books used to write Celestina.19 Furthermore, in his analysis of Rojas’s inventoried books, Víctor Infantes has difficulty explaining why the supposed author of Celestina had only one copy of the book when, by then, it had become a best seller with many editions, translations, and continuous printings.20 Rojas owned a counterfeit copy, but none of the Salamanca editions he must have used when he expanded the Comedia into the Tragicomedia. In consequence, we do not know whether Rojas even took part in this expansion, a fact which is further unlikely if we believe the above-mentioned verses Proaza added. In the verses, Proaza “Explains a secret the author hid in the lines he put at the beginning of the work” (p. 208). If Rojas had taken part in the edition, he would not likely have allowed the printer and editor to reveal such a secret—he would have wanted to remain anonymous, as the use of the acronyms suggests. If he had wanted his reader to know he was the author, he would have added his name to the title page and not given up the prestige and profits from the book sales. Because of these incongruences, we must conclude that the “autor” (Rojas?) did not take part in the transformation of the book from the manuscript Comedia into the printed version. Furthermore, I believe the person who wrote the stanzas of the prologue and the colophon is the same person trying to obfuscate the process of authorship. In this case, Alonso de Proaza, the corrector of the Valencia edition, shows the same will to obfuscate which the characters of the book continuously resort to in dialogue. en su V centenario (1499–1500/1999–2000),” in El mundo como contienda. Estudios sobre La Celestina, ed. Pilar Carrasco, Anejo 31 of Analecta Malacitana (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2000), 15–28. I think that Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo was right when, over a century ago, he wrote that determining authorship of the first act is impossible and pointed out that, during the sixteenth century, nearly everybody believed that Celestina was the product of two authors (Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela, 3 [Madrid: Casa Editorial Bailly-Baillière, 1910], pp. XIX and XXIII). 18  See Joseph T. Snow, “La problemática autoría de Celestina, “Incipit nos. 25–26 (2005–2006): 537–61. 19  Clara Louisa Penney, The Book Called Celestina in the Library of the Hispanic Society of America (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1954), pp. 8–9. 20  Víctor Infantes, “Los libros ‘traydos y viejos y algunos rotos’ que tuvo el bachiller Fernando de Rojas, nombrado autor de la obra llamada Celestina,” Bulletin Hispanique 100 (1998): 1–51, p. 34.

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We must conclude the following: either the original author did not intervene in the printing process at all, or we are dealing with a case of smoke and mirrors to hide the true identity of those who extended the sixteen-act Comedia version into the twenty-one-act Tragicomedia version. In his thorough examination of what Celestina’s first readers thought of its possible authorship, Joseph T. Snow points out that the first editions do not mention Rojas as the author, except much later, when his name is connected to the acrostic verses only as the person who “acabó” (concluded) the work. Rojas could have completed some aspect of the work, but there is no clear evidence that he wrote the fifteen acts following the anonymous first Act in the sixteen-act Comedia, in spite of the claims in the “Letter of the Author to a Friend.” Regarding the twenty-one-act Tragicomedia, the role of Rojas is even more doubtful. He might have been one of those who rewrote it, which would explain why he is listed as the person who “concluded” the work (who gave it the final touches), as Snow thinks.21 These unknown facts make the gestation and printing of Celestina even more complex. One cannot but wonder about the identity of the person or persons who gathered the substantial financial support needed to publish the book in several Spanish cities within so little time. Likewise, who are the person or persons who did not want their names to appear on the book, therefore leaving all possible profits in the hands of other people? Ottavio di Camilo has investigated who brought the manuscript to a printer for the first time.22 The question is impossible to answer because we do not have reliable data to establish who signed the first publishing contract. Years ago, I asked the reputed Celestina and early printed books experts— Julián Martín Abad, Víctor Infantes, and Jaime Moll—whether they knew of any early contract for the printing of the book, and they did not. Although quite a few contracts signed by booksellers, editors, authors, and printers have survived in the notarial registries of Spain, there are no vestiges with respect to Celestina. In the period of the incunabula (books printed before 1501) and postincunabula books (books printed in the sixteenth century which maintain some of the primitive characteristics of the incunabula period), due to high paper prices and inefficient production techniques, the edition of a book 21  Joseph T. Snow, “La problemática autoría de Celestina.” 22  Ottavio di Camilo, “Pesquisas indiciarias sobre el incunable acéfalo de la Comedia de Burgos,” in Filologia dei testi a stampa, 75–96, and “The Burgos comedia in the printed tradition of La Celestina: A Reassessment,” in La Celestina 1499–1999. Selected Papers from the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina, 235–323.

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was an expensive enterprise. Printers did not begin to work until the paper was paid for and deposited in their shops, and they were paid as they printed each ream of paper. I think that the important role of the editors in the early printing press in Spain has not been properly studied, and, due to this lack of information, we tend to give too much importance to the role played by the authors: they probably were not very influential in the production of books up to the second or third decade of the sixteenth century.23 To publish Celestina, the editor or editors had to have solved many issues in advance, including the gathering of considerable funds and having a system for distributing the book, as well as the procuring of a clientele of potential readers. The Ordinarium of Majorca, printed in Valencia by Jofré in 1516, demonstrates the magnitude of this task. For the five hundred copies of this book in quarto (approximately twelve inches tall), with 146 pages containing twenty-two printed lines each, the bookseller Gabriel Fábregues had to pay between seventy-two and ninetynine Valencian pounds, depending on the going price of the paper he used24 (as an indication of a pound’s value then, think that the salary of a professor at the University of Valencia was between fifteen and thirty-five pounds a year).25 Assuming the edition of the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (printed in Toledo, 1500, by Hagenbach, with 80 pages of thirty-two lines each and a run of five hundred copies) cost around sixty Valencian pounds, including the extra cost for having more lines than in the previous edition of the Ordinarium, printing it would take at least ten days of work in the printing shop of Pedro Hagenbach, according to Víctor Infantes’s calculations.26 A simple law student, as Rojas was, could not afford such expenses. The printing of Celestina in several Spanish cities nearly simultaneously can only be explained if one of these three prerequisites were fulfilled: a) the text was already known to a group of readers who wanted to acquire a printed copy; b) Rojas had wealthy protectors, as did many authors who dedicated their books to important noblemen or princes of the Church in return for having their edition paid for; c) a group of professors agreed to use the text in their 23  A brief analysis of the role of the editor is Jaime Moll, “El impresor, el editor y el librero,” in Historia de la edición y de la lectura en España, 1472–1914, ed. Víctor Infantes, François Lopez, and Jean-François Botrel (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 2003), 77–84. 24  Philippe Berger, Libro y lectura en la Valencia del Renacimiento (Valencia: Edicios Alfons el Magnànim, 1987) t. 1, p. 103. 25  José Teixidor y Trilles O.P., Estudios de Valencia [Historia de la Universidad hasta 1616], ed. Laureano Robles (Valencia: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia, 1976). 26   Vid. Víctor Infantes, “De la cartilla al libro,” Bulletin hispanique 97, no. 1 (1995): 33–66.

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classes, therefore assuring a potential group of buyers and reassuring the printers they would recoup their investment. Other possible explanations, such as the need to publish new titles by famous authors to obtain fast profits, are only applicable to the workings of the printing press in later decades. Besides, Rojas was not a famous author who could promote sales. I think that what made the printing of Comedia de Calisto y Melibea possible was that it had begun to circulate a few years before in manuscript form—a fact which the Manuscrito de Palacio evidences. We do not know whether, in this manuscript stage, the text was an unfinished story, as the preliminary material in the printed editions states. After years of studying the genre known as the humanistic comedy, I am convinced that a finished comedy of this type could be achieved by adding a few pages to this proto-Celestina that circulated in Salamanca, and which corresponds to what we call today the work of the “antiguo autor” (i.e. most of the first and the beginning of the second act).27 To show how easily that incomplete comedy could be given an ending, we can compare it with the humanistic comedy, Poliscena (attributed to Leonardo Bruni, but written by Leonardo Serrata in 1433).28 Two parallelisms between Poliscena and the proto-Celestina deserve to be analyzed: 1) Poliscena ends quickly and happily after the defloration of the heroine, the eponymous Poliscena, with the promise of a future wedding and ending that can be easily adapted to the proto-Celestina. 2) The author of Poliscena does not bother having “the period of the lovers’ happiness to be extended”—as the Comedia’s later extension into the Tragicomedia justified— because, once the supreme (sexual) pleasure is achieved, the story is considered to reach its natural ending, which is also the happy ending of humanistic comedies. We can hypostasize that a primitive Comedia de Calisto y Melibea circulated in university circles. It consisted of between thirty and thirty-five hand-written 27  See José Luis Canet, De la comedia humanística al teatro representable (Valencia: UNED, Universidad de Sevilla smf Universitat de València, 1993); La Comedia Thebayda, ed. José Luis Canet (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2003); “La comedia humanística española y la filosofía moral,” in Los albores del teatro español. Actas de las XVII Jornadas de teatro clásico, Almagro, julio de 1994, ed. Felipe B. Pedraza and Rafael González (Almagro, 1995), 175–87. Especially, see “Humanismo cristiano, trasfondo de las primitivas comedias,” in Relación entre los teatros español e italiano: siglos XV–XX, ed. Irene Romera and Josep Lluís Sirera (Valencia: Servei de Publicacions Universitat de València, 2007), 15–28. 28  Enzo Cecchini, introduction to Chrysis, by E. S. Piccolomini (Firenze, 1968), note 13, pp. XVI–XVII; Giorgio Nonni, “Contributi allo studio della commedia umanistica: la Poliscena,” Atti e Memorie. Arcadia 6 (1975–76): 393–451.

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pages, as Poliscena did. Also, as in the case of Poliscena, it was limited to describing the process of falling in love and how the beloved woman was reached by the young man, thanks to the intervention of servants and/or a procuress. Not surprisingly, today’s first Act of Celestina has all the conventions of the humanistic comedy: love at first sight; the young man rationalizing his insurmountable desire to have the woman he is smitten with; his request for help from his servants, who try to dissuade him by explaining the dangers of his pursuit; and the servants, unable to deter their determined master, resorting to a procuress to facilitate the task. As a complete humanistic comedy, the first chapter lacks only a few more pages. In them, the procuress would maneuver to convince Melibea, the successful date between the lovers would take place, and a rushed happy ending would follow.29 I am not stating that this protoCelestina had a life of its own in the university circle as a complete play matching exactly the form of a Latin humanistic comedy. It was, however, similar to the humanistic comedies in that it resorted to the same compositional techniques, and that its story aimed at corrigendo mores, i.e., at advising youth. Likewise, as with the humanistic comedies, the first Act of Celestina presents a case of sexualized love but, in my opinion, subverts many of the compositional and rhetorical characteristics of the genre. As we will see, the subversion can be explained by the crisis the medieval teaching system was undergoing at the time, which produced a new perception of the humanistic comedy’s role in the university milieu. Also, Celestina’s mockery of the indiscriminate insertion of quotes from authoritative books, of the scholastic dialectic and its logic, of the rigidity of the grammar, and of the poetics of the time are to be understood as part of an attempt to renew university teaching.30 If this brief humanistic comedy, circulating with some success in university circles, was the printed text of Celestina, a publisher would gladly have taken the risk of advancing the money for it, since he was aware of the existence of a group of readers eager to buy copies. However, this train of thought cannot explain the publication of the sixteen-act Comedia, much more the extended, 29  Several critics agree that this happy-ending version may have circulated: Antonio Sánchez Sánchez-Serrano and María Prieto de la Iglesia, “Fernando de Rojas acabó la Comedia de Calisto y Melibea”; Fernando de Rojas y La Celestina (Barcelona: Teide, 1991); “Sobre la ‘composición’ de La Celestina y su anónimo ‘auctor’,” Celestinesca 33 (2009): 143–71. 30  On the mockery of these medieval ideas, see Ottavio di Camilo, “Ética humanística y libertinaje,” in Humanismo y literatura en tiempos de Juan del Encina, ed. Javier Guijarro Ceballos (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1999), 69–82; later published as “Ética humanística y libertinaje en La Celestina,” in Estudios sobre “Celestina,” ed. Santiago López-Ríos (Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 2010), 579–98.

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unknown, and longer twenty-one-act Tragicomedia. The previous fame of the proto-Celestina does not explain either why the sixteen-act version was published roughly within a year in four different places—Salamanca (now lost) and Toledo, immediately followed by Seville and Burgos. Something else must have happened between 1500 and 1502 that made possible those four publications. Taking into account what we know of the printing industry in that period, I cannot easily defend the idea that an unknown law student, like Rojas, could convince four printers or book handlers in distant cities to concurrently publish his text. Furthermore, a Salamanca student could not afford to travel to Burgos or Seville to sign the contracts for the editions, an unnecessary expense assuming that he already had an assured contract in the same city, Salamanca, where he was studying. Evidently he was not important enough to be present and control the book fair of Medina del Campo, which, at the time, was the only market able to distribute, and even to reprint, books from Salamanca, Alcalá, Valladolid, Seville, and Toledo.31 Thanks to the studies several Celestina specialists published during the 500th anniversary commemoration of Celestina in 1999, we can advance new hypotheses about its publication. For instance, Ottavio de Camilo noticed the erudition of whoever wrote the “Letter of the Author to a Friend.” The brief text, barely a page and a half, includes at least fifteen neologisms (newly minted words) and learned expressions, some of which had never before been used in Spanish.32 In my opinion, such erudition excludes the possibility that a young law student could be the author. Pedro Cátedra, who has studied the conceptions of love in the erudite treatises of the period, points out that the Comedia and the Tragicomedia rely on dissimilar conceptions of love. He also notices that there are formal differences between the two versions, suggesting they each had different target audiences. The Comedia was designed as a “limited release” within university circles, especially student circles, which produced their own literature to entertain colleagues.33 In previous publications, Pedro Cátedra related Celestina to the tratados de amores (love treatises), 31  See Manuel Peña Díez, “El comercio, la circulación y la geografía del libro,” in Historia de la edición y de la lectura en España, 1472–1914, ed. F. López, V. Infantes, and J. F. Brotel (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 2003), 85–91. 32  Ottavio di Camilo “La péñola, la imprenta y la doladera. Tres formas de cultura humanística en la Carta ‘El autor a un su amigo’ de La Celestina,” in Silva. Estudia philologica in honorem Isaías Lerner, ed. Isabel Lozano-Renieblas and Juan Carlos Mercado (Madrid: Castalia, 2001), 101–26. 33  Pedro Cátedra, “Lectura, polifonía y género en la Celestina y su entorno,” in Celestina. La comedia de Calixto y Melibea, locos enamorados (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio, 2001), 33–58, pp. 37–38.

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a genre of long tradition among university circles. These treatises were part of the pedagogical tradition of love, traceable to Ovid’s Ars amandi and similar books. This tradition is present in Historia de dos amantes, Euríalo y Lucrecia by Eneas Silvio Piccolomini (published a few years before the Comedia), and the stories used as examples in Tratado de cómo al hombre es necesario amar.34 I agree with Pedro Cátedra’s ideas, but what interests me most is that, when commenting on the “Letter of the Author to a Friend,” Cátedra notices that the author’s interpretation of the manuscript he found is that of an erudite reader well versed in the reading of the classics and in literature. Indeed, the author of the letter writes: “I contemplated the work’s beauty, its subtle artifice, its pliant but strong metal, the way it had been wrought, an elegant style” (p. 201). As Cátedra explains, even if this person is not the author of the sixteen-act version, he frames the text of Celestina with the limits and references of the academic disciplines of the time.35 Most critics accept that Celestina was born and developed in academic milieux. There are no documents to prove that the text was ever used by professors in their teaching at the University of Salamanca, or at any other university, as far as I know.36 However, we have indications that this was the case, such as the fact that some of the (rare) early surviving copies of Celestina show evidence of having being used by students. As Nieves Baranda sustains, the ruinous condition of one of the surviving copies of the 1507 Zaragoza Celestina evidences use by different readers, who left marginal annotations bearing witness to proactive readings suggestive of a deep engagement with the text. The Latin annotations comment on the many sententiae37 in Celestina, specifying the source and, in some cases, expanding on their meaning. The Spanish 34  Pedro Cátedra, Amor y pedagogía en la Edad Media (Estudios de doctrina amorosa y práctica literaria) (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); Tratados de amor en torno a la Celestina, preliminary study by Pedro M. Cátedra, ed. by Pedro M. Cátedra, Miguel M. García-Bermejo, Consuelo Gonzalo García, Inés Ravasini, and Juan Valero Moreno (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal Nuevo Milenio, 2000). 35  Pedro Cátedra, “Lectura, polifonía y género en la Celestina y su entorno,” pp. 41 and 44. 36  Dorothy S. Severin thinks that the didactic content of the book attracted the first readers of Celestina (“Del manuscrito a la imprenta en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” in Literatura y conocimiento medieval. Actas de las VIII Jornadas Medievales, ed. L. Von der Walde et al. (Mexico: Publicaciones de Medievalia 29, UNAM/UAM/Colegio de México, 2003), 33–48. Germán Orduña expresses a similar idea in “El didactismo implícito y explícito de La Celestina,” in La Celestina. V Centenario (1499–1999), Actas del Congreso Internacional (Salamanca, Talavera de la Reina, Toledo, 217–27. 37  “Sententia” is an authoritative passage, generally in Latin and from a prestigious source or author, such as Aristotle or the Bible, which is often quoted to prove a point.

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marginal annotations add moral commentaries to the action or point out information for later use. They also express the personal reaction of readers to passages of the text. Thus, the readers drew a pointing index or hand, and a vertical line, sometimes accompanied by the Latin word “non,” to call attention to a passage. The reader-annotators of this copy of Celestina were applying the technique of introducing marginal and interlinear annotations learned as students and mastered in advanced courses. Not only students, but also teachers, in preparation for classes, resorted to this form of annotated reading. As Baranda indicates, the practice of actively reading with the inclusion of marginal annotations, at least between the beginning of the printing press and the end of the sixteenth century, is nearly exclusively reserved for studying—even if we can find sporadic cases of books not used for studying that were annotated, they are not books from the beginning of the century. The readers of the 1507 edition of Celestina profusely resorted to this annotation system, proving, at least, that they were cultivated people who had studied at a university. This profile is confirmed by their calligraphy, their mastery of Latin, and the content of the marginalia, typical of a well-read, mature person of independent ideas and vast knowledge.38 Another testimony from within the same century of this form of annotated reading of Celestina is the extended manuscript known as Celestina comentada (c. 1570). It consists of many pages with commentaries on the text of Celestina—many of them written from the point of view of an expert in law.39 The two surviving copies of the 1507 edition of Celestina offer us another valuable indication of how early readers used the book: how dirty the first and last pages of the volumes are. This indicates that the book was used as a single, unbound volume. Only later was it bound into a larger volume comprised of Estoria del noble caballero el conde Fernán González con la muerte de los sietes infantes de Lara (Toledo, 1511), Égloga trovada de Juan del Encina (Sevilla, 1510–16), and Lecciones de Job en caso de amores (Burgos, 1516).40 Using a single, unbound volume with no covers was typical of students, who, to save some 38  Nieves Baranda, “Leyendo ‘fontezicas de filosophía’. Marginalia a un ejemplar de la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Zaragoza, 1507),” in Actas del Simposio Internacional “1502–2002: Five Hundred Years of Fernando de Rojas’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea” (18–19 de octubre de 2002, Departamento de Español y Portugués, Indiana University, Bloomington), ed. Juan Carlos Conde (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2007), 269–309, p. 297. 39   Celestina comentada, ed. Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernández Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2002). 40  Nieves Baranda, “Leyendo ‘fontezicas de filosophía’.”

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money, bought the book in its cheapest available format (i.e. unbound), since often the cost of having it bound was higher than that of the book itself. The continual use of the book in this unprotected format explains why the Burgos 1499 edition, as well as one of the surviving Zaragoza 1507 editions, are missing their cover pages, the preliminary materials (one or more pages), and the colophon. These pages, worn and torn by years of heavy use, would have been removed and discarded at some point. My own experience as a student confirms this practice, since it was common for the last page of a textbook to be detached from the volume and eventually go missing. The possible use of Celestina as a textbook also explains why so few copies of its early editions have survived. Books heavily annotated and missing pages are, and were, difficult to resell, and were eventually destroyed since there were no buyers. A similar fate affected, for instance, the so-called cartillas escolares, books for learning reading and writing, of which we know many copies circulated but very few survived due to their heavy use. In the case of the early editions of Celestina, only those copies that were bound later survived. The same pattern of survival can be observed in the case of other books cheaply printed and profusely read, such as the above-mentioned cartillas escolares, as well as the loose-sheet and other minor publications made up of less than three sheets. In the case of Celestina, the scarcity of bound copies is aggravated by the fact that even if the text of Celestina was considered didactic, the book never made it into collections of convents or the large libraries of the nobility, from where most of our surviving old books come. A possible explanation for the absence of volumes of Celestina in the convents is that the religious orders, at least in the early decades of the sixteenth century, did not agree with its supposed didactic values. Similarly, nobility had a definite taste, inherited from the previous century, for the acquisition of expensive books, which were characterized by their careful production, abundant engravings, and expensive binding: conditions that the rushed, cheap editions of Celestina did not meet. We can conclude that Celestina was born within a university and the first editor or editors were counting on university audiences as possible buyers, though its readership would, a few years later, expand exponentially as the book became part of the Spanish literary canon. We cannot precisely know who the editor or editors were, but I am positive it was not the humble student of law who participated in the edition of the Comedia and Tragicomedia versions, as the paratextual materials explain. I think that several people were involved in the creation and edition of the texts, probably several of them professors and, maybe, political and/or religious authorities. As Ottavio di Camilo writes, many clues could be found if we could know more about Alfonso

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Ordóñez, the translator of Celestina into Italian.41 Ordóñez and the corrector Alonso de Proaza are the only two people who seem to have had a direct relationship with the original creation of the text. In my previous work on Proaza, I point out that we know he was, according to his own words, “bonis litteris iniciatus” (initiated in belles lettres). This knowledge enabled him to work as proofreader and editor, and eventually obtain the Professorship of Rhetoric in the Estudi General de Valencia between 1504 and 1507. We also know that he was the secretary of the Bishop of Tarazona and Chancellor of Valencia, Guillén Ramón de Moncada, who introduced the ideas of Ramón Llull into the universities through the instauration of professorships dedicated to the teaching of his texts. We know he was in contact with other admirers of Llull, such as the renowned Cardinal Cisneros, to whom he dedicated his edition of Llull’s Ars inventiva veritatis (1515), as well as with the Llull scholar Nicolás Pax.42 Unfortunately the known data about Proaza’s life does not include his previous years in Salamanca when he wrote the prologue for Celestina in 1500. We can, however, follow his professional career in the years after, in his work as proofreader for several printers. He always worked in cities that were university centers, such as Salamanca, Valencia, and, probably, Seville and Zaragoza, and had a well-established printing industry. He proofread Cromberger’s edition of Rodrigues de Montalvo’s Sergas de Esplandián (Seville, 1510), to which, as in the case of Celestina, he added six stanzas in octava real (eleven-syllable verses). However, Proaza’s most important work took place during his years in Valencia, when he participated in the edition of Ramón Llull’s work and the reedition of Celestina by the printer Jofré in 1514 and 1518. His addition of octava real stanzas at the end of both Sergas de Esplandián and Celestina seems to go beyond the tasks of the typical proofreader of the time; they resemble the praising dedicatory of a friend or an “interpreter” of the author’s intentions. Typically, the proofreaders limited their words to pleas for forgiveness from readers for not completely freeing the text of its many mistakes— shortcomings the proofreaders blamed on their own or the printer’s inabilities. These commonplaces of the proofreaders’ introductions are not present in

41  Ottavio di Camilo, “Hacia el origen de la Tragicomedia: huellas de la princeps en la traducción al italiano de Alfonso Ordóñez,” in Actas del Simposio Internacional 1502–2002: Five Hundred Years of Fernando de Rojas’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, p. 125. 42  José Luis Canet, “Alonso de Proaza,” in Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Valencia, Juan Jofré, 1514). Estudios y edición paleográfica y facsimilar (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1999), 31–38.

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Proaza’s stanzas, which makes us think Proaza’s role was the more important one of editor, a possibility which MacPheeters pointed out years ago.43 Other aspects of Proaza’s professional career seem to confirm our hypothesis that the early editions of Celestina were intended for a pre-existing university readership. During his years in Valencia, as we saw, he edited the philosophical works of Ramón Llull, which were used for teaching by the Professors of Logic at the university. These books were printed at the request of those interested in the work of Llull, who were backed by two important religious authorities, Cardinal Cisneros and the Bishop of Tarazona. During his years in Valencia, Proaza edited the Oratio luculenta de laudibus Valentie (Leonardo Hutz, 1505), Ramón Llull’s Disputationem quam dicunt Remondi christiani & Homerij sarraceni (Jofré, 1510), De nova logica (Costilla, 1512), and Ars inventiva veritatis (Diego de Gumiel, 1515, dedicated to Cardinal Cisneros). The Professor of Poetics at the University of Valencia, Alonso Ordoñes (he might have been the same person who translated Celestina into Italian), published Nebrija’s Gramática and some works by Pedro Mártir de Anglería. Once again, we find connections between those who participated in the publishing of Celestina and their role as editors in university circles. Furthermore, Alonso de Proaza was a prestigious intellectual. He was a disciple of Jaime Janer, who Ferdinand the Catholic appointed to teach Ramón Llull’s ideas at the University of Valencia. Janer had also taken part in the edition of Ars metaphysicalis (Leonardo Hutz, 1506, reedited in 1512) and Tractatus de ordine naturae, published the same year. He also exchanged letters with the above-mentioned Nicolás Pax, one of the most renowned experts on Llull. In Valencia, after the reform of the Estudi General in 1513–14, there was an important group of Llull scholars, some of them related to the nominalist doctrines emanating from the University of Paris. This group was also in contact with those who favored reformation of the Catholic Church and the religious orders, including the abovementioned Bishop of Tarazona and Cardinal Cisneros, the latter a de facto reformer of university studies who founded the University of Alcalá in 1509–10. Before ending this chapter, I would like to explore whether Proaza could be the editor of the sixteen-act Comedia and, later, of the twenty-one-act Tragicomedia.44 I can advance the working hypothesis that a short piece, entitled Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, circulated in the last decades of the fifteenth 43  D. W. MacPheeters, El humanista español Alonso de Proaza (Madrid: Castalia, 1961). 44  Ottavio de Camillo also thinks that Proaza acted as editor, in “The Burgos Comedia in the Printed Tradition of La Celestina: A Reassessment,” in La Celestina 1499–1999. Selected Papers from the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina (New York, November 17–19, 1999), pp. 276–77.

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century. Although it reached some popularity, it was eventually reformulated before being printed—the text was enlarged and its overall intention and meaning was also changed according to newer trends in literature and philosophy. In its new form, it exceeded previous educational conventions and was adopted by some progressive professors, but rejected by those still anchored in scholastic ideas and methods. In this sense, we must notice that the enlargement of Celestina coincided with the first attempt to reform the University of Salamanca. The support of the authorities, and the existence of a sympathetic faculty that would adopt the book for their classes, was enough to convince the presses to print texts in quantities large enough so as to supply the university markets on short notice. That seems to be the case with Celestina since, in only one or two years, between two and four thousand copies were printed (assuming runs of between five hundred and one thousand copies). I believe Celestina was an intellectual enterprise, with several professors and intellectuals involved, and some authority figures providing prestige and necessary funds. This support explains how the book was printed nearly simultaneously in different Spanish cities. If we assume this hypothesis, the issue of the authorship becomes less important. The peculiar circumstances surrounding the genesis of Celestina may partially explain why we cannot find documents or information about the printing contracts of the book. Based on my current studies of the Spanish universities and the intellectual trends of the time,45 I am inclined to think that Cardinal Cisneros, who we know launched the first attempt at a comprehensive teaching reform in Spain, was behind the publication of Celestina. His importance would explain why the first versions of the book were edited by Proaza (a friend of Cisneros’s), Jaime Janer, and Nicolás Pax (the personal secretary of Guillén Ramón de Moncada, and who also was in contact with many intellectuals following nominalism and other humanist trends of the period). My theory also explains why Celestina was not published until 1514 in Valencia, even if Proaza was there as early as 1505. The delay is due to the fact that 1514 was the year of victory for nominalists in the Faculty of Arts at Valencia. As a consequence, new teaching positions in Theology were funded, and, most importantly, the number of positions in the Humanities increased: the position in Oratory, originally taught by 45  José Luis Canet, “La universidad en la época de Melchor Cano,” in Melchor Cano y Luisa Sigea, dos figuras del Renacimiento español, ed. Miguel Ángel Pérez Priego (Cuenca: Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Tarancón, 2008), 23–40; and “Libros escolares-universitarios salidos de las prensas valencianas entre 1473–1525,” in ‘Litterae Humaniores’ del Renacimiento a la Ilustración. Homenaje al profesor José María Estellés, Anejo 69 of Quaderns de Filologia (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2009), 169–94.

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Juan Partenio, became two positions, Oratory and Poetry. These, in 1516, were respectively in the hands of Miguel García and the above-mentioned Alonso Ordoñes, who, as we saw, published Nebrija’s Gramática in 1518 (with the same press as Celestina) and the Poemata of Pedro Mártir de Anglería in 1520. Finally, I want to clarify that I am not defending that Alonso de Proaza is the author of Celestina, but that he was deeply involved in the evolution of a text intended as a tool for new educational methods that questioned scholasticism, the moral philosophy of stoicism, and the use and abuse of auctoritates.46 Celestina was an innovative, daring proposal, which explains the repeated defenses and justifications of the text in the preliminary materials and colophons of its early and later editions. These words, aimed at convincing the targeted intellectual readership, succeeded given the many copies printed by the Spanish presses in the initial years of the sixteenth century. I do not believe a law student (such as Rojas) wrote or expanded Celestina to its sixteen- and twenty-one-act versions. There were several writers involved in the process. The sources used in Act 1 (Auctoritates Aristotelis), as well as the ways in which the characters organize their argumentation, are different from the other fifteen acts of the Comedia (which resort to the Index of Petrarch’s Opera Latina) and the six other acts of the twenty-one-act Tragicomedia (in which there are no references to Petrarch).47 I do not find traces of Jewish influence in the book, as is sustained by a group of critics who believe it was written by the converso Fernando de Rojas. The underlying philosophical assumptions are part of Christian reformism and of the new spirituality that was taking hold of some circles of the Church. This hypothesis is confirmed by how the book had no problems with the Inquisition or with the religious censors, at least during the sixteenth century. Some humanists who did not approve of fictional books at all, and some professors of Aristotelian leanings, who disagreed with the new ways of understanding Christian morality, might have disagreed with the book. Except for them, Celestina was widely accepted by the intellectual and university circles all over the country.

46  On the role that Proaza played in the evolution of the text, see Keith Whinnom, The Textual History and Authorship of Celestina (London: Queen Mary-University of London, 2007), pp. 2–21. 47  See Iñigo Ruiz Arzalluz, “El mundo intelectual del ‘antiguo auctor’: Las Auctoritates Aristotelis en la Celestina primitiva,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 76 (1996): 265– 84; Alan Deyermond, The Petrarchan Sources of La Celestina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

CHAPTER 3

The Poetics of Voice, the Performance, and the Meaning of Celestina Gustavo Illades Aguiar While many literary masterpieces were groundbreaking when first published, we cannot now fully perceive how innovative they were then. To experience again their originality is to reconstruct how initial readers experienced in them what they had never read before. With such surprise, readers experienced the first edition of Celestina (Burgos, 1499). They were unsure how to read and, more significantly, since common practice at the time was to read this kind of text aloud in front of an audience, how to perform the text. The printed text they confronted was a complex “score” with a new type of dialogue inspired by a Latin model unknown to audiences outside university circles. Yet in spite of its erudite origins at the University of Salamanca, Celestina included the words and actions of characters of a wide range of social groups, from wealthy masters to servants and prostitutes. Most conspicuously, it gave voice to a protagonist of the lowest rank, the procuress Celestina, an expert in the manipulation of language. Celestina innovated also in its numerous references to the acts of speaking and listening (verba dicendi and verba audiendi), referencing mouth, tongue, ears, word, voice, and the acoustic qualities of people—even of animals and objects, such as bells and clocks. Many of these allusions, not surprisingly, implied a reference to the actio or delivery of the text by the reader-performer, whose voice had to bring to life thirteen characters together with their feelings, hidden intentions, intonations, and accents.1 Given how innovative the text was, many readers probably failed to follow the subtle 1  In the Prologue to the extended version of the Comedia, known as the Tragicomedia, Fernando de Rojas mentions the vocalized reading and the number of listeners he had in mind: “So when ten people get together to listen to this comedy being read” (Assí que, quando diez personas se juntaren a oyr esta comedia) (214; 201). The English quotes from Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009), followed by the original Spanish text taken from Fernando de Rojas, Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Peter E. Russell (Madrid: Castalia, 1991), and followed by their respective page numbers between parentheses. Occasionally, I provide my own translation when a literal rendering of the original is required.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004349322_004

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instructions embedded in the dialogue for how to read some passages, such as the asides, which were to be uttered so softly other characters couldn’t hear. The innate difficulty in reading the text properly may explain why the second edition (Toledo, 1500) included paratexts with specific instructions on how to read the book aloud.2 The editor, Alonso de Proaza, included a stanza entitled “Description of the Way to Read this Comedy” (Dize el modo que se ha de tener leyendo esta comedia). Significantly, the first recommendation affects the asides, where Proaza’s advice is intended for the potential readers-reciters but not the audience: “[E]nsure you can do it in whispers” (cumple que sepas hablar entre dientes) (208; 626). In other words, read it so the audience, but not the interlocutor, can hear. Celestina’s innovations help produce its complexity and affect three interconnected aspects of the masterpiece debated even today: authorship, genre, and meaning. The studies I will explore touch upon these issues to help evaluate the presence and the function of the voice in Celestina. I will begin with the critics who consider the work a dramatic text meant for a performance on stage. Probably, the first hint in this regard appeared in Pedro Ximénez de Urrea’s Égloga de la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1514), a versified version of part of Act 1 of Celestina. Speaking of Celestina’s genre, Urrea wrote in his introduction: “This way of writing about love matters is very common in letters and in dramatic form, as in Terence, and what is written here is in the style of Terence” (Esta arte de amores está ya muy usada en esta manera por cartas y por çenas que dize el Terencio, y naturalmente es estylo del Terencio lo que hablan en ayuntamiento).3 More than a century later, Kaspar Barth, who translated Celestina into Latin with the tile Pornoboscodidascalus Latinus (1623), called the book a ludus, i.e., a theatrical or dramatic piece, therefore distinguishing it from essays written in dialogue, pastoral novels, and short stories or novellas. Lope de Vega indicated similarly when, in Las fortunas de Diana (1621), he called Celestina “The famous tragedy of Celestina” (la tragedia famosa de Celestina).4 Three centuries later, the renowned scholar Marcelino 2  The reason why this edition included instructions on how to read is alluded to in the stanzas in octavas. Fernando de Rojas added: “My quill is attacked and they [my critics] are destroying me / with criticism, complaints and corrections” (Ella [mi pluma] es comida y a mí están cortando / reproches, revistas [‘escrutinios’] y tachas) (my translation; 189). See Françoise Maurizi, “ ‘Dize el modo que se ha de tener leyendo esta (tragi) comedia’: Breve aproximación al paratexto de La Celestina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 74, no. 2 (1997): 151–57. 3  Pedro Manuel Ximénez de Urrea, Penitencia de amor (Burgos, 1514), ed. Raymond FoulchéDelbosc (Barcelona-Madrid: Bibliotheca Hispánica, 1902), p. 3, my translation. 4  For Kaspar Barth’s conception of Celestina, see María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística de La Celestina (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1970), p. 55. Lope de Vega’s quotation is from

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Menéndez y Pelayo wrote that Celestina is characterized by the peculiar logic a dramatic form imposes on actions and characters.5 María Rosa Lida de Malkiel was, however, the most influential voice in affirming the dramatic nature of Celestina, as we will see later.6 Charles Fraker went ever further, considering the first Act a modern adaptation of a Latin model. He sustained that Rojas and the anonymous author of Act 1 intended to write a Terence-style piece, a classic Roman comedia, and not merely a humanistic comedy in the fashion that was common in university circles at the time.7 Also following Lida de Malkiel’s lead, Peter E. Russell called attention to the absence of stage directions in the text, which implied an active participation of the audience in following the story; to the abundance of asides; and to the dramatic nature of the many rhetorical figures deployed in the text.8 More recently, other critics continued to argue in favor of the dramatic nature of Celestina. Alfredo Hermenegildo, who wrote a successful adaptation of Celestina for today’s stage, carefully reviewed the didascaliae—the stage directions—of the original version. Didascaliae are embedded in the dialogues or in separate paragraphs, and are never meant to describe the characters or explain the actions to the readers, but are intended as specific instructions that inform the actors how to move and act (walk around the stage, gestures, etc.). They also serve to describe the props, dressing, location, and other practical aspects of a performance. A kind of didascalia, for instance, instructs the actor to leave the stage. This instruction can be an explicit command, or be implicitly included in the interlocutor’s words and/or in those of the actor exiting the stage. For instance, at the end of the first scene of Celestina, Melibea tells Calisto: “Be gone, you selfish fool” (Vete, vete de ay, torpe!). Calisto confirms that he is leaving the stage with his words: “I leave devastated” (Yre como aquel […]) (1; 228). As Hermenegildo noticed, the dialogues of Celestina contain an impressive number of implicit stage directions, proving the theatricality of a text that transforms the literariness of written words into true dramatic performance. Because of this peculiarity, he added, any discussion about a

Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, Novelas a Marcia Leonarda, Obras Escogidas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1961), p. 1346. 5  Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela III (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1961), p. 222. 6  Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad, passim. 7  Charles Fraker, Celestina: Genre and Rhetoric (London: Tamesis, 1990), pp. 20 and 24. 8  Peter E. Russell, introduction to Rojas, 11–158, pp. 53–55.

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specific genre under which we can classify Celestina is a moot issue, of interest only for scholars and specialists.9 Michel Moner studied how dramatic and symbolic space interact in Celestina. In Act 5, the dialogue between Celestina and Sempronio at the door of Calisto’s house takes place at the same time as the dialogue between Calisto and Pármeno inside the house. Moner called this a form of theater within the theater, a game of duplications that takes place at the threshold, the place where the public and private selves of the person communicate. He called it the theatricalization or dramatic materialization of the characters’ motivations and hidden thoughts.10 Similarly seeing Celestina as a dramatic piece, Ivy Corfis analyzed a mid-sixteenth-century manuscript that includes marginal annotations by a different hand showing how reader and listener followed the story.11 Emilio de Miguel Martínez, as part of his argument that Rojas is the author of the whole text of Celestina, examined the use of dramatic techniques (asides, comments, simultaneous scenes, dialogues, monologues, space, and time), concluding that the text belongs to the dramatic tradition.12 The humanistic comedy is one of the strongest dramatic influences in Celestina. In his thorough study of the issue, Jose Luis Canet Vallés pointed out that Celestina inherited the following features from this genre: dialogues and monologues not introduced by a narrator, implicit comments to indicate movement, the use of space and action not represented on stage, the importance of the characters’ gesticulation, the abundant asides, and the configuration of space in the same way as the Latin comedy. However, unlike the Latin comedy, the conventional unity of time and space is not respected in Celestina, resulting in a more verisimilar action. In spite of pointing out the presence of dramatic features in Celestina, Canet Vallés emphasized that Celestina was 9  Alfredo Hermenegildo, “El arte celestinesco y las marcas de teatralidad,” Incipit 11 (1991): 127–51, pp. 132, 137, 143–44, and 151. Other studies of the dramatic sources of Celestina are Keith Whinnom, “The Form of Celestina: Dramatic Antecedents,” Celestinesca 17, no. 2 (1993): 129–45; and Helios Jaime Jamirez, “Le cômos dans la dramaturgie de La Célestine,” in La Célestine, Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Actes du Colloque International du 29–30 Janvier 1993, ed. Françoise Maurizi (Caen: Université-Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines, 1995), 111–18. 10  Michel Moner, “Espacio dramático y espacio simbólico en La Celestina de Fernando de Rojas,” in Studia aurea: Actas del III Congreso de la AISO, vol. 2, ed. Ignacio Arellano Ayuso, Carmen Pinillos Salvador, Marc Viste, and Frédéric Serralta (Toulouse: AISO, 1993), 279–90, p. 286. 11  Ivy A. Corfis, “Celestina as Drama: Commentary by a 16th-Century Reader,” Romance Philology 47 (1993–94): 33–47. 12  Emilio de Miguel Martínez, La Celestina de Rojas (Madrid: Gredos, 1996).

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not written to be performed on stage, proved by its lack of instruction for actors’ entrances, exits, or movements and gestures. Another proof that the text was not meant to be performed, not even on the simple stage of Terence-style theater or of the pastoral eclogues, is the lack of space-temporal unity within the same act, Canet added. He also wrote that the monologues are too many and too long for a conventional representation. Furthermore, the frequent debates over moral issues, such as free will and how free will is negatively affected by passions, fortune, etc., slow down the action to a degree unconceivable in Terence’s comedies or in the eclogues written for the stage.13 So far I have summarized the many testimonies confirming Celestina as a dramatic piece, even if it was not meant to be acted on a conventional stage. There have been, however, critics that highlighted its narrative tone and considered it a dramatized novel or novel written in dialogue.14 Some have called it a collage of the genres known at the time.15 Furthermore, Stephen Gilman considered that the radical originality of Celestina places it outside any specific genre boundaries. The impossibility of confining it to a genre, he concluded, is caused by its exclusive reliance on dialogue, which, at the same time, is the perfect form to express a “dialogic” vision of life within a text.”16 The previous summary shows that it is possible to classify Celestina within a vast array of genres, especially dramatic ones. In their analysis, the critics implicitly or explicitly accept the originality of Celestina. The author of the first Act and Rojas created a new type of work related simultaneously to genres from the past (the Roman theater) and the present (sentimental novel, eclogue, etc.), while it became a seminal inspiration for new genres that would be created a few year later, such as the Spanish comedia or the picaresque novel, to mention the most famous ones. Because of this undeniable originality and 13  José Luis Canet Vallés, De la comedia humanística al teatro representable: Égloga de la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, Penitencia de amor, Comedia Thebayda, Comedia Hipolita, Comedia Serafina (Valencia: UNED, Universidad de Sevilla, Universitat de València, 1993); and “Género y dramaturgia en la Celestina,” in Theatralia. La dramaturgia de La Celestina, ed. José María Ruano de la Haza and Jesús G. Maestro (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2008), 27–42. 14  See Marcel Bataillon, La Célestine selon Fernando de Rojas (Paris: Didier, 1961); June Hall Martin, Love’s Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the Courtly Lover (London: Tamesis, 1972); Alan Deyermond, La Edad Media. Historia de la Literatura Española I (Barcelona: Ariel, 1973); and Dorothy S. Severin, “Is La Celestina the First Modern Novel?,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 9 (1982): 205–9. 15  María Eugenia Lacarra, “La parodia de la ficción sentimental en La Celestina,” Celestinesca 13, no. 1 (1989): 11–29. 16  Stephen Gilman, La Celestina: Arte y estructura (Madrid: Taurus, 1982), pp. 303–4.

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the difficulty in classifying the text by the usual genres, it is useful to analyze Celestina’s innovations by examining the problems the authors faced when they wrote it. They had to come up with a text made up of uninterrupted dialogue, without stage instructions, and with only the diegetic indications needed to make a romantic story understandable in space and time. Furthermore, their text was meant to be “performed,” not on a stage by actors, but by the voice of one or several readers. Because of the difficulty of this experiment in composition, the writers needed to resort to features taken simultaneously from the drama, the narrative prose, and the dialogue. The critics interested in the important role rhetoric plays in Celestina examined the structure and development of the dialogues, their different styles, and suitability to be read aloud.17 Colbert Nepaulsingh analyzed the rhetorical structure of the prologue,18 and Shipley the lack of correspondence between the characters’ speeches and their actions, since the latter depend “on rhetoric to give satisfying form to ideas rarely (and then only briefly) realized in their objective experience.”19 Erica Morgan saw Melibea’s capitulation as the result of Celestina’s masterly deployment of deliberative rhetoric in Act 4: “Her [Celestina’s] speeches reveal Rojas’ thorough grounding in the art of persuasion and also serve to question the adherence of classical rhetoricians to Cato’s definition of rhetoric—vir bonus dicendi peritus—and the conviction that goodness is a prerequisite of the true orator, as Quintilian maintains in his Insitutio oratoria: ‘Neque enim esse oratorem nisi bonum virum indico; et fiere etiamsi protest nolo’.”20 Charles Fraker considered Celestina a rhetorical text influenced by the themes and variations introduced by writers of the late classical Latin period, especially by the declamations of Seneca the Elder, “in many ways patently dramatic, […] addressed to someone, a fictitious judge, Agamemnon, Cicero […]. What is more, they are at least potentially part of a dialogue.”21 On his analysis of the dialogue between Celestina and Pármeno 17  A classic study of the issue is Carmelo Samonà, Aspetti del retoricismo nella Celestina (Roma: Università di Roma, 1953). 18  Colbert Nepaulsingh, “The Rhetorical Structure of the Prologues to the Libro de buen amor and the Celestina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51, no. 4 (1974): 325–34. For the preliminary paratexts, see also Lillian von der Walde, “El exordio de Celestina: ‘El autor a un su amigo’,” Celestinesca 24 (2000): 3–14. 19  George Shipley, “ ‘¿Qual dolor puede ser tal…?’: A Rhetorical Strategy for Containing Pain in La Celestina,” Modern Language Notes 90, no. 2 (1975): 143–53, p. 143. 20  Erica Morgan, “Rhetorical Technique in the Persuasion of Melibea,” Celestinesca 3, no. 2 (1979): 7–18, p. 7. 21  Charles F. Fraker, “Declamation and the Celestina,” Celestinesca 9, no. 2 (1985): 47–64, p. 60.

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at the end of Act 1, Antonio Cortijo compared them to the disputationes and declamationes, argumentative school exercises inspired by the professional practices of lawyers and meant to train the students in mental reasoning. He considered the dialogic characteristic of rhetoric vital to understanding medieval literature, and also the debate, a genre that permeated the birth and development of national literatures in vernacular, including Celestina. Cortijo concluded that the dialogue between Calisto and Pármeno is structured as a controversia—divided into three quaestiones (natural love, economic profit, and the contrast honesty/pleasure), plus a conclusion that parodies the viability of stoicism as a philosophical system.22 Similarly, Patrizia Di Patre, in her analysis of the importance of rhetoric in the dialogues of Celestina, considered that each sentence is constructed in the form of a dilemma, and that the author’s objective is to evidence the ultimate failure of logic. She sees Celestina as a completely innovative yet diabolical literary proposal that presents a possible system of reasoning and, simultaneously, its practical failure.23 Albert Lloret resorted to Perelman’s New Rhetoric, a conception of rhetoric that includes all the conditions and means used to persuade beyond the classical precepts of the discipline—hence the importance of “performative arguments,” characterized by materializing the actions they enunciate in language. According to Lloret, Celestina dies at the hands of Calisto’s servants because she does not fulfill the promise of sharing the profits she formulated as a “performative argument.”24 Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros established a dynamic relationship between the use of Ciceronian rhetoric—which relies on the expressive and emotional capacities of the declamatio—and the performative nature of Celestina. The visual structure of the story relies on the external expression of internal movements, which results in implicit explanations or descriptions of bodily gestures revealing passions, such as blushing or lowering the head. For Evangelina Rodríguez, the intended dramatic structure of the work turns the reading into a virtual space of performance shared by the orator and the listener. The instructions in Proaza’s stanzas invite the humanist reader to act as an orator seducing the audience with his lectio, an invitation also present in some humanist comedies. The authors of Celestina are not “writing” drama but doing an exercise of dramaturgy, 22  Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, “La disputatio entre Celestina y Pármeno al final del primer auto de La Celestina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 74, no. 4 (1997): 413–23, pp. 413 and 421. 23  Patrizia Di Patre, “P Y NO-P. El lenguaje retórico de La Celestina,” Celestinesca 29 (2005): 115–69, p. 166. 24  Albert Lloret, “El error retórico de la alcahueta. Performatividad y nueva retórica en la Celestina,” Celestinesca 31 (2007): 119–32.

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creating a text with all the resources and conditions for representability. The intended reader listens to what is read and its delivery in a university classroom, absorbing action, scenario, and the implicit stage directions, in other words the visual aspect, delivered together with the instructions on how to stage it. The intentional dramatic structure of Celestina, Evangelina Rodríguez concluded, makes of its reading a virtual space of representation shared by the orator and the listener, who somehow becomes a viewer or spectator.25 The previous studies of rhetoric in Celestina emphasize the text’s dialogic, declamatory, and performative nature, as well as the importance of the readers’ gestures and vocalization. However, these studies do not analyze the actual act of reading the text aloud in front of a small audience, which the author(s) of Celestina had in mind. In the prologue to his Las tres comedias (1559), Juan de Timoneda referred to “the comic style meant to read in prose” (estilo cómico para leer puesto en prosa) of Celestina. He added that he intended to keep this style in mind in order to write short and representable comedies.26 Evidently, Timoneda clearly distinguished between reading and stage performance. In our day, Roger Chartier reconstructed the history of reading aloud in Western Europe: “Yet reading in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not always, nor everywhere, a gesture of reclusive intimacy. Reading can itself create a social bond, unite people around a book, and foster convivial social relations, on the condition that it be neither solitary nor silent. At a time when the ability to read silently (at least for the upper classes) had become sufficiently common that understanding a text no longer depended on its being ‘vocalized,’ reading aloud was no longer a necessity for the reader, but rather an exercise in sociability practiced on any number of occasions and to diverse ends.” Referring to Celestina, Chartier wrote: “Ten listeners assembled voluntarily about a reader: here the book is placed at the center of a literate social gathering, one that is friendly, worldly, and cultivated, and in which the unicity of the relation to the text—heard by the audience—in no way precludes the plurality of its potential interpretations.” He also pointed out that at the time, other forms of vocalized reading existed that were neither part of the private realm nor meant to entertain a group, but were part of religious ceremonies, proclamations by

25  Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros, “Retórica y dramaturgia del gesto y la expresión en Celestina,” in Theatralia, la dramaturgia de La Celestina, ed. José María Ruano de la Haza and Jesús G. Maestro (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2008), 43–57, pp. 46–7, 49–50, and 53. 26  Lida de Malkiel, Originalidad, p. 55.

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the civil authorities, and lectures at universities.27 In another study, Chartier wrote that the printing press replaced the separate and specialized readership of the manuscript days with a varied one made of readers of all ages and genders. Between 1480 and 1680, he added, the new figure of the reader was constructed. A new reading public appeared, which included a lower stratum, to which the loose sheets were aimed, and a higher one. Paradoxically, the cultivated and learned readers enthusiastically embraced the new printed format and the associated intellectual techniques created by it while continuing to use manuscripts and oral practices. The popular readers, in spite of being immersed in an oral, visual, and gestural tradition, became the target audience of the printed word.28 Isidro Rivera studied the performance of Celestina from an iconographic perspective. He noticed how the first printed editions resorted to engravings to make the books more accessible to the readers: “Each woodcut offered a mimetic space which invited contemplation of setting, dress, and activities […] the images transformed reader and prelectors [the agents who read a written text aloud to one or more listeners] into spectators.” The presence of images contributed to the “theatricalization” of the text along the lines recommended in Proaza’s stanzas. The images acted as visual instructions that “simultaneously served the socio-literary demands of readers and the performance needs of prelectors.”29 The above-mentioned studies by Maurizi and Ivy Corfis also explore performativity. More recently, Ivy Corfis argued that the readers of the time could recognize Celestina as a comedy better after the additions that expanded the Comedia text into the Tragicomedia. This apparent paradox makes sense if we consider the academic definition of comedy as “ordinary characters in an ordinary world providing a moral reading,” and that the Tragicomedia is more didactic in nature.30 Enrique Fernandez Rivera also dealt with the delivery of Celestina’s text in his comparison of the genre of the text and the so-called “closet drama”: “The (Tragi)comedia […] belongs to a variety of dramatic literature written to be 27  Roger Chartier, “Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe,” in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 103–20, p. 104. 28  Roger Chartier, “El concepto de lector moderno,” in Historia de la edición y de la lectura en España, 1472–1914, ed. Víctor Infantes et al. (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 2003), 142–49, pp. 148–49. 29  Isidro J. Rivera, “Performance and Prelection in the Early Printed Editions of Celestina,” Celestinesca 22, no. 2 (1998): 3–20, pp. 8 and 16–17. 30  Ivy A. Corfis, “Readers and Comedy in Celestina,” Celestinesca 37 (2013): 33–47, p. 41.

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read aloud, viva voce, by one or several persons in front of a small audience, rather than to be performed by actors on stage. This variety of dramatic literature, which never reached the same success as onstage theater in early modern Spain, is referred to as ‘closet drama’ in English. This expression tries to convey the intimacy of the reading by a group of friends in closed quarters. The vocalized reading of the dramatic text in front of a reduced audience is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the specific genre to which Celestina belongs: the humanistic comedy, a genre that dates back to the Middle Ages and has strong roots in antiquity. But Celestina introduced new conventions to the genre.” He also commented on how the exclusive use of dialogue in Celestina points to its dramatic origins. The lack of scenic instructions was not a problem for the understanding of the story since the irruption of new characters on stage and their words are enough to evidence the change of scene. Even if the division into so many acts, as well as the many interruptions and changes of scene, made a conventional theatrical performance on stage impossible, this was not a problem for the type of dramatized reading for which the text was intended.31 The above-mentioned studies of Celestina focused on the specific conditions of vocalized reading, the task of the readers, the presence and possible participation of the audience, and the features in the text that enable dramatized reading. Esperanza Gurza maintained that the authors of Celestina intentionally included features from the oral tradition, such as poems taken from the cancioneros, popular proverbs and sayings, and many formulaic expressions of colloquial speech. She also emphasized the abundance of talking and sounds, barking dogs, singing birds, bells ringing, crying, and laughter.32 Similarly, Eloisa Palafox commented on how Celestina’s orality is noticeable in the inclusion of short narratives, songs, and proverbs, all of them products of an oral knowledge that was the counterpoint to the reading and writing technique on which the lettered class relied.33 Finally, I will review the studies that center on language as well as on the presence and effects of the voice not covered by traditional rhetoric. This is the case with D. J. Gifford’s study of the magic or subconscious function in Celestina’s spells, which aim at numbing consciousness so the listener cannot 31  Enrique Fernández Rivera, “Celestina as Closet Drama,” in A Companion to Early Modern Hispanic Theater, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 7–17, p. 7. 32  Esperanza Gurza, “La oralidad y La Celestina,” in Renaissance and Golden Age. Essays in Honor of D. W. McPheeters (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1986), 94–105, p. 102. 33  Eloísa Palafox, Oralidad, Autoridad y Retórica en la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1993).

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resist its effect, as with hypnosis or the repetition of mantras. The subjugation of the will is achieved though the spell’s repetitive structure: the iteration of words, or of a series of nonsensical words, often in the form of hidden alliterations, rhymes, and anaphors. According to Gifford, this is precisely what Celestina does with Melibea when, in their meeting in Act 4, the old bawd complains about the aches and pains of old age. Spells also work through the use of proper names, which, when used in this context, acquire magic powers. In Act 10, Celestina cunningly delays pronouncing the name of Calisto in front of a Melibea overwhelmed by anxiety.34 Similarly, Juan Martínez Ruiz supported that the author of Celestina knew the words used by healers and witchdoctors, as proven by the similarities between the text and the alliterations and rhythms in the medieval spells contained in the old manuscript in Arabic called The Spells of Solomon, found in Ocaña, Toledo, and in other documents of the time.35 Malcolm K. Read analyzed the crisis of language that Rojas conjures by identifying a phatic communion with a ritual code of Celestinesque behavior. On one hand, the respect to the code causes social interaction to be rigid and formalistic, but on the other, this formalism or false ritual serves as an instrument for deception that empties language of any significance.36 Similarly, MarieClaire Zimmerman identified new functions in the discourse of the characters, who experience power, pleasure, and solitude through their speech. She also noticed the number of expressions in Celestina that emphasize the pattern sender-message-receptor, as well as the prominence of the phatic and conative functions of language in the speeches of the characters. The systematic exhibition of speech becomes an end, and listening becomes the withdrawn reception and poetic reflection. Her conclusion was that Celestina represents the crisis of language in a civilization, an allegory of failed oral communication and of characters who have an incredible power that is, however, under the threat of an irreversible silence.37 34  D. J. Gifford, “Magical Patter: The Place of Verbal Fascination in La Celestina,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honor of P. E. Russell (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Language and Literature, 1981), 30–37. 35  Juan Martínez Ruiz, “La magia de la aliteración en La Celestina y en la tradición mudéjar de Ocaña (Toledo),” in Homenaje al Profesor Antonio Gallego Morell II (Granada: Universidad, 1989), 359–73, p. 372. 36  Malcolm K. Read, “Fernando de Rojas’ Vision of the Birth and Death of Language,” Modern Language Notes 93, no. 1–3 (1978): 163–75. 37  Marie-Claire Zimmerman, “Le dire dans La Célestine: Pouvoir, plaisir et solitude,” in La Célestine. Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Actes du Colloque International

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Stephen Gilman was the first critic to emphasize that, if we really want to understand the meaning of Celestina, as the original listeners-readers did, the reading aloud instructed by Proaza is capital. Gilman sustained that Rojas “incorporated” the voices of the papers he found circulating in Salamanca, thus amplifying their expressive possibilities. Instead of scenes, the text became oral situations, always new and surprising. This transformation demanded that intonation change from being a mere expression of inner realities to being a motivation, as if the voices of Act 1 become the subject of the work since, only through their intonations, being so malleable and changeable, can human beings be truly known. As an example, Gilman adduced the passage in which a scared Sempronio warns Celestina: “Don’t go for silk and bring back a brush” (no vayas por lana y vengas sin pluma). She replies: “A brush, my son?” (¿Sin pluma, hijo?), to which Sempronio retorts: “Worse still, mother, don’t come back brushed and tarred” (O emplumada, madre, que es peor). Celestina, enraged, replies: “My God, a fine friend you are. You want to teach Celestina the tricks of her trade” (Alahé, en malhora a ti he yo menester para compañero! ¡Aun si quisieses avisar a Celestina en su oficio!) (304; 41). Gilman considered that, in this reply, we are in front of a new Celestina, a person who underwent an inner metamorphosis and found her authentic self. A subtle change in intonation in the voice of a secondary character, as with Sempronio here, not fate, anticipates future disasters.38 Even if the studies we have summarized may contradict each other in some aspects, they permit us to extract valuable conclusions about the reading and reception of Celestina that Rojas and Proaza had in mind. They envisioned an audience made up of a reduced group of humanists from university circles, experts in dealing with manuscripts and the oral transmission of knowledge. These humanists knew each other and felt free to interrupt and make comments while one of them was reading the text aloud. However, once printed, the text became a book that reached a new, wider audience, a popular readership deeply embedded in the oral, visual, and gestural culture of the period. Celestina contains features of the Latin comedy (instructions, asides, simultaneous scenes, dialogues, and monologues) and of the humanistic comedy (dialogues and monologues without the intervention of a narrator, implicit du 29–30 Janvier 1993, ed. Françoise Maurizi (Caen: Université-Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines, 1995), 145–66. 38  Stephen Gilman, “Entonación y motivación en La Celestina,” in Estudios de literatura española y literatura francesa, siglos XVI y XVII. Homenaje a Horst Baader, ed. F. Gewecke (Frankfurt-Barcelona: Verlag Klaus Dieter Vervuert-Hogar del Libro, 1984), 29–35, pp. 33–35.

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instructions that imply actions not shown on stage, the use of space, the movements and gestures of the characters, and the abundant presence of asides). In spite of the many implicit instructions that set the scene, the text could not be enacted on a stage: it was divided into too many acts, with many interruptions; it contained no explicit instructions for representing the action; it did not respect the unity of space and time within each act; monologues and debates were too frequent and extended. Other secondary problems, though equally difficult to solve, make representation on a stage problematic. First, the text contains too much rhetoric, especially in the monologues and long debates that imply the necessary deployment of technical gestures in their delivery to make the characters’ actions and reactions understandable. Second, language abounds in expressions from the oral tradition, including proverbs, idioms, and rhythmic alliterations, requiring a careful intonation in their delivery to justify the strong reactions of the other characters. The first illustrated editions palliated these problems, since the illustrations gave readers cues to aspects that the text, by itself, could not express. While these peculiarities made a conventional performance by actors on a stage difficult, they fitted a dramatized reading. The reader, as an orator, had to absorb and process the setting, implicit instructions, and action, then convey them through voice and gesture in front of an audience. Simply put, Celestina belongs to a literary form meant to be read and acted. Most studies connect Celestina with university ambience because of the influences of Latin and humanistic comedy, Ciceronian rhetoric, and the disputatio and declamatio exercises of medieval universities. This connection is reinforced by both the audience to which it was aimed, a reduced group of erudite humanists, and the required dramatized reading. However, Celestina also has a “popular” vocation because, as we saw, it includes a vast array of sociolinguistic registers, especially those of low-class and marginal characters, who often voice proverbs, idioms, and curses. Its circulation as a printed book contributed to this popular vocation, since in this format it could reach a varied audience beyond the university walls. With such an extended audience, one can conceive the implicit readers or listeners as counterparts of the implicit orator. While he is expected to enact the mimesis of the desires, fears, and verbal ruses of the procuress, the prostitutes, and the servants, his listeners are expected to be attentive to the dialogues and to the changes in space and time through which the plot of a fatal love story develops. I think that this is the exact type of mimesis codified in the dialogues and spelled out in Proaza’s stanzas. This kind of mimetic performance requires as much or more of the old art of the jongleurs and street readers than it does of the actio of the classical orator. Paul Zumthor noticed how during the Middle Ages the jongleur,

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troubadour, or public reciter had a tendency to “universalize” his voice, assimilating the sermon of the priest, the lesson of the teacher, and the commands of the master. In the public square, the portico of the church, or the royal court, the words of these performers resonated thanks to voice, expressions of face, and hand gestures. These interpreters were, in the terminology of today’s pragmatic linguistics, well-tuned or concrete senders, and their system of expression was a rhetoric of the voice based on acting. Zumthor also pointed out that, beginning in the twelth and thirteenth centuries, writing was identified with power, while voice was identified with the live transmission of culture. These two forces coexisted between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Singers, reciters, and pubic readers incarnated, depending on whether they were sedentary or itinerant, two conceptions of culture that gradually grew apart. Such dichotomy prepared the arrival of the so-called “man of letters,” whose first representatives lived in sixteenth-century Italy, in Burgundy, and in France at the end of the fifteenth century.39 Celestina must be understood as the product of this combination of reading/reciting methods. On one hand, the form of public reading can be traced back to the jongleurs’ ludic readings. On the other, the humanists’ reading, as described by Chartier, is germane to the lectio at the universities and relied on memorization, oratory, and the dramatization of Latin texts. Everything indicates that Rojas and the original author of the first Act were well acquainted with the techniques of reading aloud, which, according to Walter Ong and Margit Frenk, had monopolized the literary transmission in vernacular between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.40 I want to illustrate these ideas with my previously published analysis of two passages from Celestina that exemplify a delivery, a form of reading that responds neither to the precepts of classical rhetoric nor the ones that would characterize the performance of the actors of the corrales de comedias toward the end of the sixteenth century.41 The first passage is the meeting between Celestina and Melibea in Act 4. Celestina opens her exordium with the moving 39  Paul Zumthor, La letra y la voz. De la ‘literatura’ medieval (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), pp. 85–88, 264, 186, and 78. 40  Walter J. Ong, Oralidad y escritura. Tecnologías de la palabra (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987); and Margit Frenk, Entre la voz y el silencio. La lectura en tiempos de Cervantes (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005). 41  Gustavo Illades Aguiar, “La ‘ecuación oralidad-escritura’ en las letras hispánicas de los siglos XV–XVII (propuestas en torno a un diálogo en ciernes),” Criticón, nos. 120–21 (2014): 155–70; and “Observaciones sobre la actio del lector (de La Celestina a la sátira anónima novohispana),” Escritos, no. 26 (2002): 13–35.

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topic of the ailments of old age: “As I know only too well, old age is only a den of sickness, a tavern of gloom, a bed of nails, a heath of desolation, incurable sores, past skeletons, present sorrow, future woe, doorstep to death, a hovel open to the rain, and a staff of willow that bends under the smallest burden” (Que a la mi fe, la vejez no es sino mesón de enfermedades, posada de pensamientos, amiga de renzillas, congoxa continua, llaga incurable, manzilla de lo pasado, pena de lo presente, cuidado triste de lo porvenir, vezina de la muerte, choça sin rama, que se llueve por cada parte, cayado de mimbre, que con poca carga se doblega) (48; 306). If the person reading these lines aloud follows the instruction in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, 11.3.4–5, the most complete description of the orator’s face and gestures, Celestina must pronounce her exordium with a soft voice, moderate tone, and modesty, while moving from side to side slowly, and moving her eyes the same way. Before starting to speak, her body must be erect, the feet parallel to each other, slightly apart, the knees straight but not tense, the shoulders relaxed, the countenance grave but without reflecting sadness, fear, or discouragement. The left hand must accompany the movement of the right one, which must be partially open and in front of the body. Also, Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.11.19–15.27) offers detailed recommendations on the use of the orator’s voice. For a moving exordium intended to provoke commiseration through the exaggeration of the afflictions, as is the case in this passage, it recommends a controlled voice, deep tone, frequent interruptions, long pauses, and marked modulation. The gestures should include hitting one’s thighs and head with the palm of the hands, the face sometimes serene, sometimes sad and hopeless. Given such specific instructions, what voice should a reader assume to perform the mimesis of a drunk, toothless, astute, and talkative bawd? What gestures to convey that the reader is supposed to be a poorly dressed vieja barbuda (bearded crone), with the scar of a knife cut on her face? Furthermore, the delivery of this exordium must convey to listeners Celestina’s actual intentions, in spite of her façade of humbleness and honesty. The concatenation of commonplaces about old age may be delivered in an in-crescendo tone, without a pause, since Celestina’s objective is to confuse Melibea, taking her by surprise. Possibly, Celestina’s sorrowful grievance imposes the rhythmical intonation of beggars in their demands for help.42 In any case, Celestina’s grotesquely pathetic exordium clashes with the restraint and elegance recommend by the Latin rhetorical precepts so much that, when read to a humanist audience, 42  The blind beggar in Lazarillo de Tormes assumed such a tone when he prayed. See Francisco Márquez Villanueva, “Sebastián de Horozco y el Lazarillo de Tormes,” Revista de Filología Española 41 (1957): 253–339.

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Celestina appeared as the parody of an orator. And inversely, when read to a popular audience, Celestina was perceived as a well-read, educated procuress. The second episode that will help me prove the importance of the voice in Celestina is from the first scene of Act 1, where a furious Melibea rejects Calisto, who, without any delay or break, appears in his house in the next scene. I reproduce the text with the typographic setting of the Valencia 1514 edition to reflect better the difficulties that sixteenth-century readers faced when confronted with this passage. Calisto suddenly appears in his house, furious: CAL: I leave devastated by this cruel twist in my fortunes. Sempronio, Sempronio, Sempronio, where the hell are you. SEM: I’m here, Master Calisto, I’ve been seeing to the horses. SEM: In that case, why do you come from the dining-room? SEM: The falcon fell off its perch and someone had to put it back. CAL: The devil take you. I hope you die a violent death. (pp. 1–2, modified) ([Ca.[ yre como aquel contra quien so= lamente la aduersa fortuna pone su estudio con odio cruel. Sempronio sempronio: sempronio. donde esta este maldito? [Sem.] aqui soy señor curando destos cauallos. [Ca.] pues como sales dela sala? [Sem.] abatio se el Girifalte τ vine le a endereçar enel alcandara. [Ca.] assi los diablos te ganen: assi por infortunio arrebatado perezcas […]).43 Notice how, without any interruption in the actual text, Calisto passes from his laments in front of Melibea to yelling to his servant. The word “Yré” (I [will] leave) indicates that Calisto leaves Melibea at the end of the first scene, while the next line, “Sempronio, Sempronio, Sempronio, where the hell are you?” (Sempronio sempronio: sempronio. donde esta este maldito?), implies that Calisto left Melibea’s garden, walked on the streets, and entered his house. The reader in charge of delivering these lines must perceive all these factors and fill in the lack of textual indications with only his voice and gestures. Furthermore, in the new scene, the triple call (Sempronio sempronio: sempronio), should not be pronounced as an anaphoric exclamatio but with a well-marked pause between each term, and in an increasing volume to indicate Calisto’s mental state as he moves through his house—first the door, then the yard, and finally a 43  Fernando de Rojas, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea [Valencia: Juan Joffre, 1514], ed. paleográfica de Nicasio Salvador Miguel y Santiago López-Ríos (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim / Ministerio de Educación y Cultura / Biblioteca Nacional, 1999), fol. A5 r-v.

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room—looking for a servant he cannot find. The intonation must also be carefully codified in Sempronio’s first excuse—“I’m here, Master Calisto, I’ve been seeing to the horses” (aqui soy curando destos cauallos)—which must be pronounced in a tone revealing insincerity and laziness. When Calisto questions him—“In that case, why do you come from the dining-room?” (¿pues como sales dela sala?)—his next excuse—“The falcon fell off its perch” (abatio se el Girifalte)—must be read in such a way that implies a compulsive liar who excels at improvisation. Besides a comic effect, these sentences must be enough to convey a moral and psychological portrait of Sempronio. Celestina’s text contains many similar passages in which the voice of the reader compensates for the absence of a stage with its side entrances and exits, and for the lack of textual explanations or didascaliae.44 There are also hints in the dialogues, all of them implicit, and always directed to the reader, never in the form of instructions for an actor. This textuality is the codification of a singular form of actio or delivery, one that can enact simultaneously popular humor and erudite parody, and all in a frame of dialogical exchanges and improvised gestures. This a goliardic form of actio that was retooled for university ambiences but at the same time aimed at a heterogeneous audience. This combination may explain the long lasting success of Celestina. We can conclude that the formal experiment of Rojas and the first Act’s anonymous author creates a small universe of characters that dialogue in a true “theater of the voice,” with a poetics that assimilates and amalgamates aspects of the jongleurs’ performances, the declamationes oratoriae, the theatrical speeches, the debating exercises of the university classrooms, spells and incantations, the slang of the underworld of prostitution, etc. The result is so complex that critics continue to discuss it. Should today’s readers read Celestina’s text aloud, as it was meant to be, or silently? Perhaps the solution is to combine the two forms of reading, accepting their limitations because the verbal score we have to perform seems to exceed the capacity of a single voice. Also, the multiplication of meanings resulting from the dialogism of the speeches and the intonations of the readers go beyond the interpretations that a silent reading permits. This complexity is an essential aspect of the originality of Celestina.

44  On the other hand, a theatrical performance with the actors on a conventional stage cancels the autonomy of the voice because it subordinates the voice to the visual aspects of the mise en scène. Also, a theatrical performance cancels the creativity of the audiences because they do not need to represent in their imagination the descriptions contained in the text, which are conveniently represented for them by actors and sets.

CHAPTER 4

Quotation, Plagiarism, Allusion, and Reminiscence: Intertextuality in Celestina1 Amaranta Saguar García Intertextuality has been a favorite topic of literary theory since Julia Kristeva first coined the term in reference to the Bakhtinian notion that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”2 Because the term “quotation” may refer to fragments or passages of varying lengths and the imprecise nature of the term “text” itself, scholars have approached intertextuality from different angles. Some, like Roland Barthes, extend the definition of “citation” and “source” beyond the realm of the written word, defining text as “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”3 Others, like Gérard Genette, limit intertextuality to the “actual presence of one text within another.”4 I will adopt a rather restrictive approach to intertextuality in this chapter. Here, I will rely on Genette’s definition of intertextuality as a “relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts,”5 and on the three possible degrees of copresence he defines: quotation, plagiarism, and allusion. In its most explicit and literal form, intertextuality is the traditional practice of quoting within quotation marks, with or without specific references to the source. In another less explicit and canonical form, it is the practice of plagiarism, which is also a literal borrowing, but without acknowledgment of the source. Similar, however less explicit, is the practice of allusion: an enunciation whose full meaning presupposes the perception of a relationship with another text to which it 1  I wrote this piece during my research stay at the University of Münster as an Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. 2  Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 34–62, p. 37. Originally published as “Bakhtin, le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique, no. 239 (1967): 438–65. 3  Roland G. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, no. 5–6 (1967): art. 3, §5. 4  Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newmann and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 2. Originally published as Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982). 5  Genette, Palimpsests, p. 1.

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necessarily refers by some inflection.6 Because of the particular circumstances of the late medieval and early modern periods that we will examine below, I will necessarily include a fourth degree of copresence: the relationships spontaneously established by the reader with texts not present, but which the reader is reminded of by virtue of a subjective perception of common features, topics, or ideas, and a well-established habit of associative reading. I will refer to this as “reminiscence.” Unlike the subjective relationships among texts implied in either Michael Riffaterre’s definition of intertextuality as “the reader’s perception of the relationships between one text and others that have either preceded or followed it,”7 or in Genette’s concept of transtextuality as “all that set the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts,”8 the abovementioned subjective relationships are the result of the purely mechanical procedure improperly dubbed as “humanistic reading.”9 Humanistic reading refers to a didactic practice taught at universities in the last decades of the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and which, therefore, is not pertinent for the abstract idea of literariness discussed by Genette and Riffaterre, which only applies to late periods. However, the notion of humanistic reading is essential to understanding the reception of Celestina by its intended audience: people formed in the humanistic method of reading. That the contemporary readers of Celestina followed the methods of humanistic reading is evidenced in the earliest testimony on how the Comedia—the first version of Celestina—was received by its contemporaries. By this testimony, I mean the prose prologue to the Tragicomedia or the extended version of the text: Some tut-tut, that there is no wit, that the story is too much of a muchness, that the detail is wasted, that lots more stories could have been spun. Others wax fulsome about the jokes and common adages, praising 6  Genette, Palimpsests, p. 2. 7  “La perception par le lecteur de rapports entre une œuvre et d’autres, qui l’ont précédée ou suivie.” Michael Riffaterre, “La trace de l’intertexte,” La Pensée, no. 215 (1980): 4–18, p. 4 (my translation). 8  See Genette, Palimpsests, pp. 1 and 2–3 for a discussion of Riffaterre’s article. 9  The bibliography on the topic is immense. However, of particular interest for Celestina are Enrique Fernández Rivera, “Una forma no lineal de leer Celestina: El compendio de sententiae como mapa textual,” Celestinesca 21, no. 1 (1997): 31–47; and Peter E. Russell, “Discordia universal: La Celestina como ‘floresta de philosophos,’ ” Ínsula, no. 497 (1988): 1 and 3. A less specific but still useful summary approach to humanistic reading can be found in Anthony T. Grafton, “El lector humanista,” in Historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Robert Bonfil (Madrid: Taurus, 1997), 281–328.

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them effusively, but ignore what makes them relevant and useful. But those for whose pleasure the whole has been done, these discount the heart of the story and tell it their way, select what they think is important, laugh at what is funny, and memorise the sayings and dicta of philosophers in order to repeat them at an opportune moment.10 The emphasized sentence encapsulates the general procedure of humanistic reading: selecting the most relevant passages of a book to copy into commonplace notebooks serving as consulting tools for one’s own future argumentative or rhetorical writings. Furthermore, students would memorize the wording, style, and content of the quotations. This procedure allowed them to redeploy quotations without having to reach for their notebook and in scenarios other than writing at their desks. The whole concept of humanistic reading depends on the existence and acknowledgment of such a group of sanctioned (i.e. authoritative) texts. For those trained in humanistic reading, the intertextual presence of these sources was a chief criterion in determining whether a passage deserved their attention. Allusions, citations, and plagiarisms of authoritative texts had to be identified from memory or by consulting other texts, and then had to be conveniently marked—either in the margins or between the lines. Later, the passages were incorporated into one’s personal commonplace book, or, in the case of more experienced readers, directly committed to memory. However, this habit of looking for intertextual relationships and quotable material led to what I have named “reminiscence,” a process integral to both the reception and composition of Celestina. In this light, Ivy Corfis defines Celestina’s composition as part of the “humanistic concept of intertextual relationship” in which “there need not be close correspondence between two texts in order to claim influence. […] The individual auctor was not as important as the sententiae thought itself, which fit into a system of commonplaces.”11 Readers noted relationships among presumably unrelated texts because of similarities in language and content, and because the texts belonged to a long line of authoritative texts. Evidencing this practice are the marginal and 10  Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, trans. Peter R. Bush (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), pp. 213–14 (adapted and emphasized). All subsequent quotations from this edition, with page numbers, unless otherwise stated. 11  “Sententia” is an authoritative passage, generally in Latin and from a prestigious source or author, such as Aristotle or the Bible, which is often quoted to prove a point. See Ivy A. Corfis, “Fernando de Rojas and Albrecht von Eyb’s Margarita Poetica,” Neophilologus 68, no. 2 (1984): 206–13, p. 211.

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interlinear notations by readers on some sixteenth-century extant copies of Celestina.12 However, the best testimony of this associative form of reading is Celestina comentada, a mid-sixteenth-century manuscript that comprehensively comments on the many auctoritates13 to which the Tragicomedia can be related. The anonymous composer of this erudite commentary painstakingly tried to identify all possible connections of Celestina with authoritative texts. The intertexts identified by the commentator were often sources, but he also pointed to texts written after the composition of Celestina that reproduced the same original ideas.14 Next to its value for identifying the sources of Celestina, this commentary also exemplifies what we define as the fourth degree of copresence of one text in another. It enables us to examine how readers of the period perceived the many intertextual reminiscences in Celestina. While not all readers could knit such an exhaustive web of intertextual relations as the author of Celestina comentada (who dedicated many years to the task), many readers of Celestina would have noted and appreciated its relationships with other texts—relationships we would dismiss today as vague, coincidental, or impertinent (if the reminisced text was written after Celestina). While texts mentioned by Celestina comentada, or by its sixteenth-century readers, are not necessarily intertexts of Celestina, some textual relationships modern readers discard as too far-fetched were detected at the time. These intertexts influenced the reception of the work, even if they were never directly alluded to in it. The intertexts presented Celestina as a more authoritative piece of writing than it is for us now—one deeply involved and in dialogue with a whole tradition of texts to be quoted, and not only those to which it makes explicit reference. Interestingly, literary reminiscence simultaneously evokes many different texts, as the author of Celestina comentada perfectly illustrates in his lengthy notes, because, in humanistic reading, the existence of a direct relationship 12  Nieves Baranda, “Marginalia a un ejemplar de la Tragicomedia (Zaragoza, 1507),” in Actas del Simposio Internacional 1502–2002: Five Hundred Years of Fernando de Rojas’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (18–19 de octubre de 2002, Departamento de Español y Portugués, Indiana University, Bloomington), ed. Juan Carlos Conde (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2007), 268–309. 13  The term “auctoritates” is nearly a synonym of sententia, although auctoritates is a vaguer word since it refers to prestigious passages as well as to the books from which they were taken, and even to the authors themselves. 14  Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernández Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne, eds., Celestina comentada (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2002). On the process of its composition, see Enrique Fernández Rivera, “La autoría y el género de Celestina comentada,” Revista de Filología Española 86, no. 2 (2006): 259–76.

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between two texts does not discard the possibility of indirect links to others, even if it backgrounds them. A passage can evoke two or more indirectly related texts at the same time, as well as those elicited by the other three degrees of intertextuality—quotation, plagiarism, and allusion. This simultaneity is concomitant with the concept of humanistic writing, which viewed “all literature as a system of interchangeable fragments and […] the process of composition as centered on intertextuality.”15 Also, the capacity to simultaneously indicate several intertexts was made possible by the extended use of one of the most characteristic methods of scholastic composition in the late Middle Ages, compilatio, the rearrangement of previous authoritative materials in creation of new content.16 The habit of humanistic reading and the practice of compilatio resulted in texts replete with explicit references to other texts lending themselves as sources for other indirect quotations. As a result, a textual reference could be traced back to secondary and even tertiary texts simultaneously, even by way of reminiscences. In addition, humanistic reading and writing favored the emergence of writing aids or tools, including the above-mentioned personal commonplace-books, the medieval compendiums of auctoritates, the indexes, and the florilegia, all of which assisted in finding relevant passages to quote in one’s own writings.17 That Celestina abounds with quotations, plagiarisms, and allusions to authoritative texts taken from compendiums and similar writing aids suggests that manuals of this kind were perused in its composition. With regard to some passages, the author or authors of Celestina would seem to have had these books literally open in front of them as they wrote, as indicated by the inclusion of quotations, even in the same order, as they appear in the Index to Petrarch’s Opera,18 the Auctoritates Aristotelis,19 Albrecht von Eyb’s Margarita poetica,20 and Pero Díaz de Toledo’s Proverbios de Séneca.21 Because many 15  Mary T. Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 92. 16  Neil Hathaway, “Compilatio: From Plagiarism to Compiling,” Viator 20 (1989): 19–44. 17  Jacqueline Hamesse, “El método escolástico de lectura,” in Historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Robert Bonfil (Madrid: Taurus, 1997), 179–210. 18  Alan D. Deyermond, The Petrarchan Sources of La Celestina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 36–49. 19  Iñigo Ruiz Arzálluz, “El mundo intelectual del ‘antiguo autor’: las Auctoritates Aristotelis en la Celestina primitiva,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 76, no. 269 (1996): 265–84. 20  Corfis, “Fernando de Rojas and Albrecht von Eyb’s Margarita poetica.” 21  Barbara Riss and John K. Walsh, “Pero Díaz de Toledo’s Proverbios de Séneca and the Composition of Celestina, Act IV,” Celestinesca 11 (1987): 3–12.

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readers, since their time as students, would have resorted to the same practice, they would easily have detected the use of compendiums and indexes in the composition of Celestina. However, this detection would not have detracted from their appreciation of Celestina and the myriad passages from Petrarch, Aristotle, Seneca, and other auctoritates. In fact, readers likely took both intertexts simultaneously into account: that is, both the secondary manual, from which the reference had been taken to be included in Celestina, and the original source from which it had been collected. In other words, the readers valued the intertextual reference for what it immediately came from, as well as for what it pointed to. This double recognition was important because part of Celestina’s meaning relied on the readers’ ability to distinguish whether a reference was taken from a primary or from a secondary source and also to establish if the precise location from where it was enlisted implied a change in meaning.22 Furthermore, the possible double origin also mattered because the text of Celestina often seems to interact with both the primary and the secondary intertext, as we will see.23 Having reviewed how notions of intertextual reminiscence and intertextual simultaneity affected Celestina’s reception among practitioners of humanistic reading, I will now comment on the practice of quotation, plagiarism, and allusion in Celestina. I must advance that one may not rely on punctuation marks to identify citations in texts from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Although quotation marks existed, they were not used for introducing citations. Other graphic conventions to introduce verbatim quotations were sometimes employed, but punctuation was too inconsistent.24 Because of this problem, in the case of Celestina, we will identify a passage as a citation when it is introduced by a verbum dicendi—expressions such as “it is said,” “as said by,” etc.—and/or the source is indicated in the text. Seven passages in Celestina follow this format:25 22  Louise Fothergill-Payne, Seneca and Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 23  Amaranta Saguar, “Diego de San Pedro en Celestina: más allá de Cárcel de amor,” Dicenda. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 30 (2013): 127–40. 24  Fidel S. Mediavilla, La puntuación en los siglos XVI y XVII (Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2002), p. 35. 25  I am leaving the quotations in the prose prologue aside, which is a special manifestation of plagiarism on its own (see below). I only count quotations that appear directly after the reference to the author or to the written source, or after the verbum dicendi, even if there are several of them strung together or they are combined with popular proverbs and sayings. For the purpose of this piece of work, I have used Fernando de Rojas and “antiguo autor,” Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Francisco Lobera et al.

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Listen to Solomon when he says “women and wine make men renege” (p. 6) (“Vinum et mulieres apostatare faciunt homines etiam sapientes,” Sirach 19:2). Didn’t you ever read the philosopher where he says, “As matter yearns after form, so woman yearns after man”? (p. 10) (“Materia apetit formam sicut femina masculum et turpe pulchrum,” Auctoritates Aristotelis, 2.32). […] because as Seneca put it so beautifully, “Vagabonds enjoy many taverns and few friends” (p. 23) (“Peregrini multa ospicia habent, nulla amicitias,” Auctoritates Aristotelis, 21.4). I can only repeat what Solomon said: “He who ignores good advice will trip up badly and never recover” (p. 27) (“Viro qui corripientem dura cervice contemnit, repentinus superveniet interitus et eum sanitas non sequitur,” Proverbs 29:1). […] and you know what God said against the tempter from hell, that “we can’t live on bread alone” (p. 51) (“Non in solo pane vivit homo,” Matthew 4:4). But rather imitate divine justice, that decreed “The soul who sins shall die” (p. 55)26 (“Anima quae peccaverit ipsa morietur,” Ezechiel 18:4 and 18:20). […] and said that the Holy Scriptures say: “Blessed are those persecuted by the law for they shall possess the kingdom of heaven” (p. 82) (“Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter iustitiam, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum,” Matthew 5:10). It further includes forty-six occurrences of a verbum dicendi—forty-seven if we dismiss the omission of one of them in the Tragicomedia27—of which twentyfour are followed by popular proverbs, and twenty-two by classical, medieval,

(Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011), which dismisses quotations, plagiarisms, and allusions without an identifiable source or which are too vague, instead of Fernando Cantalapiedra’s more specific Floresta celestinesca (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000), which also gathers potential quotations, plagiarisms, and allusions together, in order to keep to a reasonable number of intertextual examples. References to the original sources in parentheses are taken from the notes to that edition, unless otherwise stated. 26  Translation is partially mine, due to Peter Bush overlooking the biblical reference. I take the verse from the New King James Version of the Bible. 27  “And they also say that ʽhe who can cure the sick, and doesn’t, ushers in death’ ” (“Qui succurrere perituro potest, cum non succurrit, occidet,” Proverbia Senecae, 66). Translation is based on that by Peter Bush (p. 52), adapted to the text of the Comedia.

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or early-modern auctoritates. Furthermore, two quotations are introduced by what could be called a verbum audiendi:28 Celestina, I have heard from my elders that “a single act of lust or greed does a lot of harm” (p. 26) (“Unum exemplum luxuriae sive avariatiae multum mali facit,” Auctoritates Aristotelis, 21.18). I have heard that “a man should believe his elders” (p. 27) (“Maioribus credite,” Erasmus, Adagia, 2866). Some instances of the verb “to know” seem to systematically introduce quotations as well: Didn’t you know that “the first step on the ladder to madness is to think you’re a genius”? (pp. 33–34) (“Sapientem se credere primus ad stultitiam gradus est,” Petrarch, Index). You should already know that “only who considers himself defeated is defeated”29 (“Victus non est nisi qui se victum credit,” Petrarch, Index). But, as you know, “the joy of revenge is short-lived and the joy of forgiveness is eternal” (p. 55) (“Ultionis momentanea delectatio est: misericordia sempiterna,” Petrarch, Index). […] as you know, “Crooks hate the light” (p. 70) (“Omnia enim qui male agit odit lucem,” John 3:20). And you need to know that “you must love if you want to be loved”30 (“Si vis amari, ama,” Petrarch, Index). You know that when only the dregs are left, drunks soon abandon the inn. Well, it’s no different in times of adversity, times of need and false friends (p. 4) (“Adversitas simulatorem abigit, faex potorem,” Petrarch, Index). And, you well know, “the bigger the sin, the bigger the sinner” (p. 134) (“Et est omne peccatum eo maius quo et maior qui peccat et minor causa peccandi,” Petrarch, De remediis, 1.42).

28  There could be a third one, but we have counted it among the verba dicendi group: “As I have heard say, lancing ripe boils is a recipe for disaster” (translation is mine, based on that by Peter Bush, p. 3). It quotes a general principle of Hippocratic medicine with no identifiable source. 29  Translation is mine. It corresponds to p. 54 in Bush’s edition. 30  Translation is mine. It corresponds to p. 78 in Bush’s edition.

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More interesting than the number of quotations is the form in which the inclusion of the author or the source is reserved for the most authoritative cases, e.g. quotations from the Bible and by classical authors. The inclusion of the source and/or the author seems to highlight the authority of quoted text in contexts where more credibility is needed to convince the interlocutor. Surprisingly, however, a quotation from such authoritative sources may be the basis of a play on words, as when Celestina quotes the Beatitudes—“Blessed are those persecuted by the law for they shall possess the kingdom of heaven”—in reference to the punishment for witchcraft of her friend Claudina; or when an authoritative sentence is applied to lower matters, as in the conversation between Celestina and Melibea when Celestina quotes, “Non in solo pane vivit homo,” while speaking about mundane matters; or it may be simply ironic, as when Celestina claims her innocence by means of a passage of the Old Testament that clearly condemns her—“The soul who sins shall die.” Although biblical authority succumbs to rhetorical abuse, the three quotations remain authoritative enough to distress the readers or, at least, draw their attention. In contrast, the other four quotations with author or source in our sample do not see their status as auctoritates altered; only their meaning is altered, as in the case of the last two examples,31 or they are contradicted later in the text, as in the previous ones.32 In any case, these authoritative sentences are clearly not used in earnest. The introduction (verbum dicendi, inclusion of author and source) of quotations in Celestina is consistent with other features that differentiate Act 1 from the rest of Celestina.33 For example, the introduction of a quotation by a 31  Several pieces of scholarship analyze the biased argumentation Celestina uses to convince Pármeno to join her and Sempronio in Act I, but we will only refer to William D. Truesdell, “Pármeno’s Triple Temptation: Celestina, Act I,” Hispania 58, no. 2 (May 1, 1975): 267–76. 32  George A. Shipley, “Authority and Experience in La Celestina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 62, no. 1 (1985): 95–97. 33  We will not be commenting here on the topic of different authorships for Act 1 and Acts 2 to 21 of Celestina, which frequently is discussed in relation to the differences between the intertexts of Act 1 and those of the remaining acts. Slightly outdated revisions of the problem, nonetheless comprehensive with regard to differences between Act 1 and the rest, can be found in Amancio Labandeira, “Sobre el autor o autores de La Celestina,” Cuadernos para Investigación de la Literatura Hispánica, no. 8 (1987): 7–27; and Nicasio Salvador Miguel, “La autoría de La Celestina y la fama de Rojas,” Epos, no. 7 (1991): 275–90. Moreover, unless otherwise stated, we will, by default, refer to the definitive version of Celestina, that is, the twenty-one-act Tragicomedia, not differentiating it from the sixteenact Comedia except where necessary for our argumentation.

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verbum dicendi is by far the favorite method of Acts 2 to 21, there being seventeen or eighteen instances in the Tragicomedia, whereas there are only three cases of introduction by author or source. In Act 1, however, the use of both methods is equal: four cases respectively, with one ambiguous instance suggesting either method.34 Moreover, Act 1 of Celestina does not use verba dicendi to introduce popular proverbs.35 This preference could suggest deference to auctoritates and, thus, stress their authoritative character. Acts 2 to 21 resort to verba dicendi more or less in the same proportion as they introduce auctoritates by name: twenty-four to twenty-two (twenty-three in the Tragicomedia). As a result, scholarly and popular wisdom (sententiae and proverbs) are more leveled than in Act 1, and indicate a slightly different appreciation for the origins of authority. This use fits well with the so-called early modern dignification of non-classical proverbs and sayings. Finally, the fact that verba audiendi are exclusively present in Act 1, and that the verb “to know” is only used to introduce auctoritates in Acts 2 to 21, supports this differentiation. The two forms of dealing with quotation imply a distinction between knowledge, as information externally sourced, and wisdom, as experience inherently personal. These two different, even opposite, perceptions of textual authority correspond to the medieval and the early modern conception of cognition, respectively. In my opinion, this difference in method for introducing quoted material between Act 1 and Acts 2–21 of Celestina is due to the fact that the two sections of the book were written under two different epistemological paradigms. Quotation, its formal introduction, and the idea of authority are characteristic of the scholastic composition method, the context in which Celestina Act 1 should be read. This is also the reason why Celestina’s intertexts and its rhetorical strategies fit better with a scholastic cultural horizon.36 By contrast, plagiarism is the traditional form of humanistic writing and, as such, it is the characteristic method behind Acts 2 to 21 of Celestina. While there is 34  We have assigned it to the verbum dicendi group: “Don’t you remember that bit in the prayers for the Festival of St. John where it says, ʽThis is woman, the ancient curse of man that cast Adam from the delights of paradise, that sent the human race to hell, woman scorned by Elias the prophet’, et cetera, et cetera?” (p. 7). It quotes a sermon by Peter Chrysologus: “Haec est mulieris antiqua malitia, quae Adam eiecit de paradisi deliciis […] haec humanum genus misit in infernum […] hoc malum fugit Elias propheta.” 35  The only exception is “[…] as they say, ʽWalls have ears’ ” (p. 13). 36  María del Carmen Parrilla, “ ‘Fablar según la arte’ en La Celestina,” in “La Celestina, V centenario (1499–1999).” Actas del Congreso Internacional (Salamanca, Talavera de la Reina, Toledo, La Puebla de Montalbán, 27 de septiembre–1 de octubre de 1999), ed. Felipe B. Pedraza, Gemma Gómez Rubio, and Rafael González Cañal (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2001), 229–46.

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plagiarism in Act 1, it is a scholastic kind of plagiarism: undeclared borrowings functioning as statements, either by themselves—“ ‘You’re so small-minded. It’s a sick man who refuses to look riches in the face’ ” (p. 26) (“Infirmi animi est non posse pati divitias,” Auctoritatis Aristotelis, 21.13)—or incorporated into the discourse—“And don’t thank me, for ʽpraise and gratitude should go to the bearer of the good news and not the recipient’ ” (p. 28) (“Laus et gratiarum actio debetur danti et non recipienti,” Auctoritates Aristotelis, 12.61).37 In turn, plagiarism in Acts 2 through 21 tends to ignore the authoritative idea behind its undeclared borrowings, often valuing those borrowings for their rhetorical potential instead. In other words, plagiarism is not limited to supporting, refuting, or contributing ideas, which it frequently does, but is also aimed at creatively building the discourse, sometimes for the sole pleasure of embellishing it. Other times it may serve as a basis for a rhetorical device, in the best tradition of humanistic copia.38 The best evidence of this attitude is no doubt the prose prologue to the Tragicomedia, which recombines and repurposes several selected passages of the preface to the second book of De remediis utriusque fortunae in order to express the author’s reflections of the Comedia’s reception.39 Furthermore, the apparently indiscriminate and unmotivated addition of Petrarchan plagiarisms to the Tragicomedia40 seems to corroborate the dependence of Celestina on humanistic writing, especially amplification. The Comedia itself is full of rhetorical instances of plagiarism. For instance, to purely stylistic and dramatic effect, Celestina plagiarizes the first book of De remediis in her description of love when meeting Melibea: It’s a hidden fire, a delicious poison, a sweet bitterness, a delectable pain, a happy torment, a sweet, deep wound and a gentle death (p. 118) (“Est enim amor latens ignis, gratum vulnus, sapidum venenum, dulcis amaritudo, delectabilis morbus, iucundum supplicium, blanda mors,” Petrarch, De remediis, 1.69). 37  Actually, we have been able to identify a single case of plagiarism used not as a statement but with an ironic purpose in Act I, although the phrase could already have been perceived merely as an idiom by then: “As if love fired its darts at him alone […] ‘Oh, almighty God, how impenetrable your mysteries’!” (p. 5) (“O altitudo divitiarum sapientiae et scientiae Dei, quam inconprehensibilia sunt iudicia eius et investigabiles viae eius,” Epistle to the Romans 11:33). 38  An excursus on this topic would lead us too far; therefore, please refer to what is generally considered the foundational text: Desiderius Erasmus, De Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, trans. Betty Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). 39  Deyermond, The Petrarchan Sources of La Celestina, pp. 50–57. 40  Deyermond, The Petrarchan Sources of La Celestina, pp. 44–45, 67–71, and 74–77.

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Moreover, Celestina amplifies her portrait of the lovesick man with several borrowings from the Index to Petrarch’s works, strung together: Their bodies are with their lady friends, together with their hearts and senses. “Love is really almighty.” “Traverses land and sea; so powerful is it.” “Possesses all manner of men.” “Overcomes all obstacles.” “Is anxious, fearful and wary. Looks all around.” If you’ve ever really been in love, you’ll know I’m telling the truth.41 (“Amoris mira et magna potentia,” “Volucer est amor: non terras sed caelum transit et maria,” “Quod par imperium habet in omne hominum genus,” “Amor omnes difficultates frangit,” “Amor anxia res est, credula, timida, sollicita, omnia circumspiciens et vana etiam ac secura formidans,” Petrarch, Index). Finally, to make the sentence fit her depiction of lovesick women, Celestina ignores its original meaning and context, substituting the persons to which the following borrowing from De remediis originally applied: They’re [lovesick women] enemies of any golden mean. They’re always going out on a limb (p. 40) (“[Populus] semper enim alterum extremorum tenet, medium vero nunquam, ut qui habitantem ibi hostem metuat,” Petrarch, De remediis, 1.94). Far from exclusively being representative of their respective scholastic and humanistic writing traditions, the uses of quotation and plagiarism in both Act 1 and Acts 2 through 21 of Celestina do not exactly respond to reliance on either method; they rather exaggerate their characteristic intertextual procedures. Almost every idea in Celestina is either accompanied by a quotation or a plagiarism, or elaborates upon one—even when unnecessary or the circumstances are inappropriate for such a lofty intertext, as in conversation among low-life characters. Despite the abuse of auctoritates, discourses in Celestina do not fulfill the purposes of scholastic and humanistic writing, that is, rational knowledge and persuasion with truth. All characters deceive themselves and try to deceive the others with regard to their motivations and intentions. For instance, Sempronio is a victim of love himself, his misogynist argumentation in Act 1 notwithstanding; Celestina convinces Pármeno to join her party, not by her disquisitions on friendship, but only after she promises to help him have Areúsa. Furthermore, the interlocutors are aware that these discourses follow pre-established, trite patterns, so far that Celestina predicts the next 41  Translation is based on that by Peter Bush (p. 106).

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auctoritas to which Pármeno will resort—“Oh, you fool! And now you’ll say that ʽwhere more wisdom, the less fortune, and the more prudence, the less luck’ ”42 (“Ubi plenus intellectus et ratio ibi minima fortuna, ubi vero plurima fortuna minimus intellectus,” Auctoritates Aristotelis, 13.2–3). Furthermore, all characters are fond of criticizing each other for their abuse of either scholastic methods of argumentation—“Well, you can mock, or you can pretend a lie is true, and believe afterward what you want”43—or their humanistic rhetorical embellishment—“Master, forget the blather and this poetry. What’s the point speaking that strange language so few share or understand? Say ʽwhen the sun sets’ and everyone will know what you’re on about” (p. 99). Consequently, the biased and superfluous use of quotation and plagiarism in Celestina should be interpreted as a denunciation—through exaggeration and de-contextualization—of those who limit themselves to the surface instead of the spirit of scholastic or humanistic composition. In Celestina, allusion, despite some isolated potential instances of plagiarism, is the only degree of direct intertextuality open to what could be called “non-authoritative” sources, that is, literary intertexts. Not in vain, the inflections by which allusion can be recognized go beyond content to include stylistic and, thus, literary features: tone, vocabulary, wording, motifs, rhetorical devices, etc. These features do not automatically exclude allusions to auctoritates. Typically, however, the intertexts introduced are often mediated through a literary text which is an intertext of the first intertext (simultaneous reference). Allusion can also work as the imitation of a stylistic feature of the literary intertext whose authoritative content is somehow ignored. For example, the allusion to the centurion’s servant’s healing (Matthew 8:5–8 and Luke 7:2–7) in Act 4—“I left a sick man at death’s door, but a single word from your noble lips, carried to him on my lips, will surely heal him, as he so adores your pretty ways” (p. 52)—retains some of the authoritativeness of the Bible to fit to the image of a harmless pious woman that Celestina is trying to project. The allusion to the Gospels also presents the lovesickness of Calisto to Melibea as if it were a matter of Christian compassion for her to help him. However, in the foreground, Celestina is alluding to the literary motif of the religio amoris and the rhetorical device of the sacred hyperbole, both characteristic of the so-called poesía amorosa de cancionero and the novela sentimental. In fact, allusion contributes to one of the most important structural motifs in Celestina: the demystification

42  Translation is mine. It corresponds to pp. 25–26 in Bush’s edition. 43  Translation is mine. It corresponds to pp. 21–22 in Bush’s edition.

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of courtly love,44 and, more concretely, the moral disapproval of the literary trends of the poesía amorosa de cancionero45 and the novela sentimental46— particularly of its best seller, Cárcel de amor.47 Dialogue with the latter is a constant of Celestina’s text: from the general plot—a love story between two noble youths in which a third person intercedes—to the image that both lovers try to project of themselves. Thus, Calisto uses Leriano—the protagonist of Cárcel de amor—as his model for displaying his lovesickness; Melibea does the same with Leriano’s beloved, Laureola, and shows herself, at least at first, disdainful and dignified. Even the ending of Celestina matches Cárcel de amor by finishing with a suicide. The codas to the two stories, Pleberio’s lament and the lament of Leriano’s mother, are both contrafacta—a reworking of an existing text to fit a new purpose—of the compassio Mariae in the Passion of Christ.48 Even the wording of this ending sometimes pushes the limits of allusion and approaches plagiarism.49 As in the case of the argumentative and rhetorical use of auctoritates seen above, these features are exaggerated: Calisto and Melibea go beyond Leriano and Laureola respectively in his lovesickness and her disdain. The plot is also decontextualized: Celestina does not take place in the mythical Macedonia of Cárcel de amor, and neither is Melibea a princess, nor Celestina a trustworthy friend of the noble male protagonist. The original frame of reference does not correspond to the reality of what is being portrayed in Celestina—an affair between two noble youths in a Castilian city at the end of the fifteenth century. As a result, both conventionality (literary and rhetorical) and insincerity are highlighted, and the incompatibility of the models with reality is denounced. The same procedure and the same consequences apply to uses of allusions to the poesía amorosa de cancionero. Celestina denounces its formulaic nature 44  Dorothy S. Severin, “La parodia del amor cortés en La Celestina,” Edad de Oro 3 (1984): 275–80. 45  Theodore L. Kassier, “ ‘Cancionero’ Poetry and the Celestina: From Metaphor to Reality,” Hispanófila, no. 56 (1976): 1–28. 46  Yolanda Iglesias, Una nueva mirada a la parodia de la novela sentimental en La Celestina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009). 47  Eukene Lacarra, “La parodia de la ficción sentimental en la Celestina,” Celestinesca 13, no. 1 (1989): 11–30. 48  Dorothy S. Severin, “From the Lamentations of Diego de San Pedro to Pleberio’s Lament,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 66, no. 1 (1989): 178–84; Amaranta Saguar, Intertextualidades bíblicas en Celestina: Devotio moderna y humanismo cristiano (Vigo: Academia del Hispanismo, 2015), 80–103. 49  Luis M. Vicente, “El lamento de Pleberio: contraste y parecido con dos lamentos en Cárcel de amor,” Celestinesca 12, no. 1 (1988): 5–44.

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and essential emptiness, not to mention its incongruence with reality, by placing in a non-courtly context the pathetic tone and the most characteristic rhetorical devices of this kind of poetry, particularly sacred hyperbole and literary motifs—especially the lovesickness of the enamored man, who follows the rules of the religio amoris. Allusions to the literary models of Celestina, the poesía amorosa de cancionero, and the novela sentimental are less systematic. They serve stylistic purposes, be it that of conscious imitation, as when the summoning of Laberinto de Fortuna serves as inspiration for Celestina’s spell at the end of Act 3, or of punctual appropriation, as when Calisto resorts to Boccaccio’s Fiametta to tell Sempronio that “the difference between the fire in your song and the one burning me is as great as the gap between appearance and reality, life and painting, a shadow and its source.”50 In spite of their occasional nature, these allusions reflect the intellectual background of the work, situating it in a particular cultural context—more concretely, in the university milieu of the end of the fifteenth century. Actually, some allusions point to readings exclusive to this milieu, such as Tratado de cómo al hombre es necesario amar.51 Consequently, “those for whose pleasure the whole [Celestina] has been done” must be readers with university training. Only they had the knowledge necessary to identify these allusions, quotations, plagiarisms, and allusions, and only they had the required tools for the humanistic reading habits which predisposed them to look up these references. In this brief analysis we have shown that intertextuality is integral to the interpretation of Celestina, and the determination of the text’s original target audience. Moreover, we have also revealed the importance of humanistic reading for the intellectual appreciation of the book. This reading method relies on a broad notion of intertextuality that links Celestina to a tradition of authoritative texts to be quoted. As a result, Celestina itself gained in authority by entering into a dialogue with this prestigious tradition of texts. Also, humanistic reading provided its practitioners with the added pleasure of identifying Celestina’s intertexts, of putting its lines in relation with further potential intertexts, and of perceiving its multiple, simultaneous references. The use and abuse of these intertexts in Celestina are also essential for understanding the 50  My translation based on Peter Bush’s translation (p. 4). Cf. “[…] non essere altra comparazione del mio narrare verissimo a quello che io sento, che sia dal fuoco dipinto a quello che veramente arde” in Fiammeta, quoted in Rojas and “antiguo autor,” La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, p. 34n85. 51  Pedro M. Cátedra, Tratados de amor en el entorno de Celestina, siglos XV–XVI (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio, 2001).

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authorial intentions: criticizing the misappropriation of auctoritates, and the insincerity of the poesía amorosa de cancionero and the novela sentimental. Equally, part of the authorial intention was to show that the scholastic and the humanistic composition methods had the implicit risk of being reduced to their more external feature, that is, intertextuality, and of losing sight of its original, more transcendental function. Because of all this, intertextuality in Celestina is not a mere manifestation of the writing and composition methods of its time, but rather a reflection on and an exploration of their dangers and possibilities.

CHAPTER 5

Theater Without a Stage: Celestina and the Humanistic Comedy Devid Paolini One of the great influences on Celestina is the humanistic comedy, a genre of mostly Latin works, in prose or verse, written in Italy during the fifteenth century and meant not to be performed but to be either recited or read aloud. Celestina, however, exceeds the limited scope of the humanistic comedy as a genre. As Alan D. Deyermond has pointed out, the relation between the book and the drama tradition can be directly drawn from the title of the Spanish masterpiece. In fact, before being known as Celestina (named for its most salient character), the book was originally called Comedia de Calisto y Melibea and later Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.1 Celestina is written exclusively in dialogue but its plot structure clearly shows techniques that typically belong to dramatic texts, demonstrating its connection to the humanistic comedy in its effort to recreate ancient Latin plays as part of the general trend in its rebirth of classical culture. Yet, the dramatic origins of Celestina were mostly overlooked as modern critics came to consider the work as the beginning of the modern novel. To fully understand this widespread interpretation and before analyzing the evident relationship between Celestina and the comedy tradition and Celestina as a humanistic comedy, we must first examine the state of theater, spectacle, and dramatic representation at the time that the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, as it was initially called, first appeared in the Castilian literary life. Equally important is to take into account the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence and the elegiac

1  Alan D. Deyermond, “La Celestina,” in Historia y crítica de la literatura española, coord. F. Rico, vol. 1, Edad Media, ed. A. D. Deyermond (Barcelona: Crítica, 1980), p. 485. For a detailed overview of the different stages through which the work came down to us, see: Fernando de Rojas (and “Antiguo autor”), La Celestina. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. F. J. Lobera et al. (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011), pp. 361–68. For all the problems related to the title of the work, see: Keith Whinnom, “La Celestina, The Celestina, and L2 Interference in L1,” Celestinesca 4, no. 2 (1980): 19–21; and Erna Berndt-Kelley “Peripecias de un título: en torno al nombre de la obra de Fernando de Rojas,” Celestinesca 9, no. 2 (1985): 3–46.

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comedy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for their role in the rebirth of dramatic literature throughout the fifteenth century.

Theater and Spectacle in the Middle Ages

In the last decades, scholars such as Luigi Allegri and Johann Drumbl, among others, have radically modified our conception of medieval theater.2 Their studies argue that it is anachronistic to seek the same features of early Renaissance theater in previous medieval centuries and that there is no line of evolution between the two periods. The flourishing theatrical culture at the height of the Roman empire, including the architectural structures in which comedies were performed, had slowly fallen in disuse and totally disappeared by the fifth century. Of the past glory, all that remained were new forms of humble performances by street entertainers and mimes that seem to have survived through the following centuries of the Middle Ages. What was left of the buildings where plays had been performed was now turned into spaces for shows in which semi-naked women were displayed. Due to such lewd content that originated among pagans and continued to be practiced among Christians, the Fathers of the Church, beginning with Tertulian, Lactantius, and many others, condemned not only any form of spectacle but also the actors and spectators.3 Consequently, the Middle Ages lost all notion of what constituted classical theater and, more importantly, the awareness that dramatic texts were intended to be performed on conventional stages by actors. It was only toward the end of the fifteenth century, after recovering a sizable corpus of Latin comedies, that a few humanists who had mastered classical Greek and Roman philology rediscovered that these complex dialogical writings were meant to be memorized and enacted on stage by actors. These early scholars who studied the language and the cultural context of Plautus’s and Terence’s surviving works struggled to decipher their form, substance, and function. When they finally understood that the objective of the texts under examination was a reenactment of their plot through stage performances, they were misled as to how they were represented. A misinterpretation 2  Luigi Allegri, Teatro e spettacolo nel Medioevo (Bari: Laterza, 1988); Allegri, “El espectáculo en la Edad Media,” in Teatro y espectáculo en la Edad Media, Actas del Festival d’Elx (1990), ed. L. Quirante (Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil Albert, Diputación de Alicante, Ajuntament d’Elx, 1992), 21–30; Johann Drumbl, Il teatro medievale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989). 3  Allegri, Teatro, pp. 15–33.

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of a passage by Titus Livius (Ab Urbe condita, 7.2) and some marginal glosses on an ancient manuscript of comedies by the two Roman playwrights, led them to believe that in Roman times a recitator read the text aloud while the actors would mimic the characters’ actions.4 Compounding their misunderstanding was their total unawareness of the need for stagecraft as well as the specific constructed space assigned to ancient public representation.5 One can see from these brief remarks that during the Middle Ages, the concept of theater and dramatic representation was virtually nonexistent. That is why to view medieval theater or speak about it in terms of dramatic categories characteristic of Renaissance stage representation is not only inaccurate but also a counterproductive distortion. What was known throughout the Middle Ages was a notion of spectacle associated with the activity of minstrels, jugglers, acrobats, and other histrionic street performances. One should always keep in mind the distinction, very often confused if not forgotten, between theater and spectacle. The term “theater” was reserved for the physical place in which some form of mimetic performance took place, where actors and public met in a communal ambience—a town square or a religious space designated as suitable to enact collective religious ceremonies or join in traditional festivities. “Spectacle,” on the other hand, was characterized by a clear separation between those who acted in the performance and those who watched it. Audiences’ response was in general that of passive spectators who had little or no sense of taking part as a community in a meaningful event, even when some didactic values were at the center of the happening.6 This can be exemplified with the well-known case of religious drama, in the form of what is known as miracle plays and mysteries. Believers who gathered in church to attend the Easter mass were witnesses to a liturgical dramatic dialogue such as the Quem quaeritis?, also known as Visitatio sepulchri. This simple dialogical exchange was a verbal reenactment of what occurred between the angel and the three women who found Christ’s sepulcher empty. The speakers did not perform; they limited their role to a mere repetition of the Gospels’ words. The audience, on their part, was well aware that they were not witnessing the true announcement of resurrection, but purely a human representation of a 4  See Antonio Stäuble, La commedia umanistica del Quattrocento (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1968), pp. 187–202; Allegri, Teatro, pp. 268–74; and Cesare Molinari, “La memoria del teatro nel medioevo e il caso di Terenzio,” in The Renaissance Theatre. Texts, Performance, Design, ed. C. Cairns (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 2:1–10. 5  Only in the middle of the fifteenth century did Leon Battista Alberti throw some light on this issue in his De re aedificatoria, which, however, was not published until 1485, a year before Vitruvius’s De architectura was easily available. 6  Allegri, “El espectáculo,” p. 21.

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divine event. The suspension of disbelief, implicit in a dramatic development, was therefore missing, making this performance a liturgical act rather than a theatrical action.7 It is only in the last quarter of the fifteenth century that we can talk about “theater.” The “rebirth” of comedy that took place in a few humanist centers of the Italian peninsula was carried out mainly by Pomponio Leto (1428–98) and his followers, who tried to resurrect classical theater in Rome; by Florentine humanists who reenacted classical tragedies and comedies; and by courtly patrons like the Este family in Ferrara whose enthusiasm for this new form of high culture entertainment led to the invention of a specific theatrical space, of appropriate stagecraft for different representations, and of performing rules to improve actors on stage. A significant corollary to this resurgence was the vast production of “paratheatrical” texts, namely the corpus of humanistic comedy. Although these works were not enacted on a stage, they deserve, nonetheless, to be included in the dramatic genre’s rediscovery. If these texts were not conceived or written to be performed, this was because they were composed before such a notion had been fully developed or had been put into practice. They are not “dramatic” in the modern sense of the term—a term correctly applicable to works of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, when the rebirth of classical theater was taking place. They are, however, early dramatic examples of the Quattrocento and represent an important step in the long recovery of the lost idea of theater. These are the premises that need to be taken into account when analyzing Celestina as “drama.”

The Genre of Celestina8

Although more than half a century has passed since its first publication, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel’s La originalidad artística de La Celestina is undoubtedly

7  Maria Grazia Profeti, “La profesionalidad del actor: Fiestas palaciegas y fiestas públicas,” in Los albores del teatro español. Actas de las XVII Jornadas de teatro clásico (Almagro, julio de 1994), ed. F. B. Pedraza Jiménez and R. González Cañal (Almagro, Ciudad Real: Universidad de Castilla—La Mancha, 1995), 69–88. 8  I have already dealt with this topic in my article “Acerca del género de Celestina: algunas observaciones,” in Aproximaciones y revisiones medievales. Historia, lengua y literatura, ed. L. von der Walde Moheno, C. Company, and A. González (México: El Colegio de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2013), 491–502. I am developing here some of those ideas.

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still the most authoritative monograph written on the Spanish masterpiece.9 The first chapter is entirely dedicated to the difficult issue of establishing Celestina’s genre and she has no doubt in framing it within the dramatic literary traditions of the Roman comedy, the elegiac comedy,10 and the humanistic comedy. The uncontestable conclusion is that Celestina shares with the Roman comedy its general structure; with the medieval elegiac comedy, it has in common the simplicity of the story, the use of contemporary life scenario, the active role of the beloved woman and of the procuress, and the abundance of tortuous feelings. From the humanistic comedy, Celestina takes many formal and thematic aspects, ranging from the use of prose and stage direction to the conception of place and time, etc.11 As Lida de Malkiel has pointed out, the ascription of Celestina to the dramatic tradition began to be questioned only in the eighteenth century, when Aristotle’s Poetics, with its rigid concept of unities in what constituted comedy and tragedy, was widely accepted. It was at this time that Leandro Fernández de Moratín, the leading Aristotelian in literary matters, coined the expression “dramatic novel” to describe Celestina, followed soon after by Aribau, who considered the work a novel in dialogue.12

9  María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística de “La Celestina” (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1962). 10  Written in elegiac distich in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the so-called elegiac comedies do not have much in common with the comedies of antiquity, except for the presence of low-class characters, a mediocre style, and a happy ending (see Ferruccio Bertini, “La commedia elegiaca,” in Lo spazio letterario del Medioevo. 1. Il Medioevo latino, ed. G. Cavallo, C. Leonardi, and E. Menestò [Roma: Salerno editrice, 1993], vol. 1, La produzione del testo, tome 2, 217–30). Although they contain dialogue, they also contain narration, sometimes so much that they are closer to the tradition of the short story than to theater. Good examples of elegiac comedies with long narrative parts are: Baucis et Traso (c. 1150–1175), Alda and Lidia (both written before 1170), and De uxore cerdonis (second half of the thirteenth century). The texts are reproduced in: Ferruccio Bertini, coord., Commedie latine del XII e XIII secolo (Genova: Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto di filologia classica dell’Università di Genova, 1976–98). 11  In addition to Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad, see also her review “Johannes de Vallata, Poliodorus. Comedia humanística desconocida, ed. J. M. Casas Homs (Madrid: CSIC, 1953),” published in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 10 (1956), 415–39; and her “La técnica dramática de La Celestina,” in Homenaje a Ana María Barranechea, ed. L. Schwartz and I. Lerner (Madrid: Castalia, 1984), 281–92. 12  Leandro Fernández de Moratín, Orígenes del teatro español (París: Librería Europea de Baudry, 1838); Buenaventura Carlos Aribau, Novelistas anteriores a Cervantes (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1846), tome 3.

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The most famous proponent of placing Celestina in the literary genre of the novel was Menéndez y Pelayo, who ambiguously included the Comedia as a foundational text in the development of the Spanish novel. While recognizing its inherent dramatic dimension, he still went on to assign to Celestina a somewhat overstated role in the evolution of sixteenth-century Spanish narrative.13 Later critics have contributed to this debate. Stephen Gilman, for example, argues that the book could not be included in any canonical genre, whereas Deyermond, Severin, and Mancing, in the wake of Menéndez y Pelayo, deem it to be the first modern novel.14 Not surprisingly, the debate about the proper classification of Celestina began with its publication in the early sixteenth century. In fact, in the prologue to the extended version of twenty-one acts, the author, or whoever added the additional acts, explains his reasons for changing the title from Comedia to Tragicomedia. Some readers had complained that the original title was inappropriate, because the “comedia” ended in the tragic death of the main protagonists. To remedy this incongruence and satisfy in part his critics, he renamed it Tragicomedia. Regarding the terms “comedy” and “tragedy,” they had acquired, during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, different uses and meanings.15 A good illustration of their uses can be seen in the title that, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Dante gave to his magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, or, even closer to the time of Celestina, we find the Comedieta de Ponça (c. 1435), a serious poem about a sea battle written by the Marqués de Santillana. The 13  Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela (Madrid: Bailly-Ballière e hijos, 1905–15). 14  Stephen Gilman, “El tiempo y el género literario en la Celestina,” Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1945): 145–59; Gilman, The Art of La Celestina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 303–21; Alan D. Deyermond, A Literary History of Spain. The Middle Ages (Londres: Ernest Benn, 1971), pp. 311–2; Deyermond, “La Celestina,” 485–87; Deyermond, “Las relaciones genéricas de la ficción sentimental española,” in Symposium in honorem prof. M. de Riquer (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona y Quaderns Crema, 1986), p. 86; Dorothy S. Severin, “Is La Celestina the First Modern Novel?,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 9 (1982): 205–9; Howard Mancing, “La Celestina: A Novel,” Celestinesca 38 (2014): 63–84. 15  On the use of the two terms in the Middle Ages, see: Henry Ansgar Kelly, Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo-Dante (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Kelly, Ideas and forms of tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Miguel Ángel Pérez Priego, “De Dante a Juan de Mena: Sobre el género literario de comedia,” 1616, Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada 1 (1978): 151–58.

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latter, in a famous letter to Violante de Prades, has left us a learned notion when applied to literary genres; if on the one hand Seneca and Boccaccio are authors of tragedies, on the other, Terence and Dante are writers of comedies. At the origin of these misconceptions there is first the loss of classical theater and second Isidore of Seville (560–636 AD), who, in his Etymologiae (8.7.7), erroneously classified the two Roman satire writers Persius and Juvenal as comedy writers.16 Therefore, at the end of the fifteenth century the terms “comedy” and “tragedy,” and also “tragicomedy,” did not indicate a dramatic text written to be performed, but just a distinction that was characterized by three elements: the development of the plot with a happy or sad ending; the style, low or high; and the characters, humble people or princes and kings. However, in spite of the diversity of genres which this theatrical terminology came to designate up to the time of Celestina’s appearance, the text of this particular comedia undeniably shows that its author or authors had a remarkable command, unusual for the time, of dramatic techniques and conventions, as evidenced by the pace of the dialogue according to particular scenes, the division into acts, the play’s argument typical of Plautus’s and Terence’s comedies, together with many other techniques as pointed out by Lida de Malkiel— asides, use of time and space, etc.17 It is obvious that one of the main sources of Celestina was the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence, known to Celestina’s authors through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ rudimentary elegiac adaptations, the fifteenth-century reworking of some humanistic comedies, or through a direct and meditated reading of the two Roman playwrights. Since the Middle Ages had lost the idea 16  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 8.7.7: “Duo sunt autem genera comicorum, id est veteres et novi. Veteres, qui et ioco ridiculares extiterunt, ut Plautus, Accius, Terentius. Novi, qui et Satirici, a quibus generaliter vitia carpuntur, ut Flaccus, Persius Iuvenalis vel alii.” See also Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti and Maria Pia Mussini Sacchi, Teatro del Quattrocento. Le corti padane (Torino: UTET, 1983), pp. 22 et seq. 17  Recently, Di Camillo has indicated that in the only surviving manuscript of the Spanish masterpiece, known as Celestina de Palacio, symptomatically, Calisto’s first line is introduced by the words “comiença Calisto” (Calisto enters or starts), as if giving cue to the person about to recite the lines of Calisto (Ottavio Di Camillo, “Consideraciones sobre La Celestina y las instituciones dramatúrgicas del humanismo en lengua vulgar,” in La Celestina 1499–1999. Selected Papers from the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina (New York, November 17–19, 1999), ed. O. Di Camillo and J. O’Neill (New York: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2005), p. 56n5. On Celestina de Palacio, see, among others, Charles B. Faulhaber, “Celestina de Palacio: Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS 1520,” Celestinesca 14 (1990): 3–39.

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of dramatic “performance,” Celestina was initially composed following a theatrical model but exceeded its limits and developed into a dramatic text with no intention to be staged. Independently from the discussion arisen about its genre, we do not have any doubt that Celestina was composed as a dramatic piece and can only be fully understood by framing it with the Roman theater revival—of which the humanistic comedy was an early but a decisive stage.

The Humanistic Comedy

In university cities, Latin was the lingua franca spoken by an international array of students and professors. The erudite and festive culture that characterized these centers provided the natural breeding ground for composing and performing para-theatrical texts, based on Roman comedy, in order to expose and ridicule vices considered rampant at the time. The corruption in every rank of the Church, the dissolute sexual mores, and the disordered life of university students were the preferred targets of goliardic texts and humanistic comedies. For example, during the so-called Vesperiae, that is to say the public debates between the student and the professors that were required for graduation, goliardic farces were recited to lighten the solemnity of the occasion with a jocular, festive ending.18 The humanistic comedies that evolved in fifteenth-century Italy from metrical imitations of Terence’s comedies to written compositions for the training of students in public speaking, declamation and rhetorical delivery, or for other didactic or literary purposes, entered in the last quarter of the century the private space of aristocratic courts and ecclesiastical magnates where they became an essential component of the convivial culture that led to the first dramatic representation of early modern theater. Although much of these ephemeral texts are often of questionable literary interest and quality, their importance lies in the fact that they are the first instance of modern secular theater after the Middle Ages—where classical Roman theater and modern Renaissance theater coalesce. One of the main factors that significantly spurred the humanists’ interest in the theater of Ancient Rome was, without a doubt, the rediscovery in 1429 of twelve comedies of Plautus, lost during the Middle Ages, and of Donatus’s commentary on Terence in 1433. Despite an extremely limited circulation of 18  Luciano Bottoni, “Il teatro: Testi e spettacolo,” in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, ed. N. Borsellino and W. Padullà (Milano: Motta Editore, 1999), vol. 3 (Rinascimento e Umanesimo—Dal Quattrocento all’Ariosto), p. 292.

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these texts in the years following the announcement of their discoveries, their impact was increasingly felt in the second half of the century when many humanists began to emulate these ancient dramatists by writing their own comedies. At the same time the additional recovery of Latin and Greek sources enabled humanists to undertake an in-depth philological study of Roman theatrical culture which in turn resulted in the invention and early development of scenography, needed, in their view, for the proper staging of plays of Plautus and Terence, both in Latin and Italian translation. Such a renewed interest in dramatic representation among the learned of the time, together with the recovery and dissemination of Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture, the publication of the historical and archeological works of Flavio Biondo on ancient Rome, the patronage of nobility, the cardinals’ and city states’ rulers for the new theater, and the participation of humanists whose contributions to literary, political, and historical thought were widely recognized in the composition of plays and the use of the Italian language instead of Latin, created the conditions that promoted the birth of the erudite comedy at the end of the fifteenth century and the ensuing development of modern theater throughout the following century.19 Giving a precise assessment of the many features that ultimately define the humanistic comedy is not an easy task. Besides, any discussion of how many features make up this literary genre or which work can fully satisfy all the necessary requirements only tends to limit or reduce its many-faceted manifestations. In our case, to establish specific criteria can eventually affect the overlapping stages of its formation as well as the eclectic nature of its representative works. While some could be considered goliardic farces, others are clearly Latin dramatizations of historical events; some others are experimental representations of lived experiences and still others are dramatic adaptations of short stories.

19  A good introduction to the new theater of the period is: Giorgio Padoan, La commedia rina­ scimentale veneta (1433–1565) (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982); Padoan, L’avventura della commedia rinascimentale (Padova: Piccin, 1996); Fabrizio Cruciani, Teatro nel Rinascimento. Roma 1450–1550 (Roma: Bulzoni, 1983); Fabrizio Cruciani and Diego Seragnoli, eds., Il teatro italiano nel Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987); Raimondo Guarino, ed., Teatro e culture della rappresentazione. Lo spettacolo in Italia nel Quattrocento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988); Guarino, Teatro e mutamenti. Rinascimento e spettacolo a Venezia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995); Marzia Pieri, La nascita del teatro moderno in Italia tra XV e XVI secolo (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989); Paola Ventrone, Gli araldi della commedia. Teatro a Firenze nel Rinascimento (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1993); and Marco Villoresi, Da Guarino a Boiardo. La cultura teatrale a Ferrara nel Quattrocento (Roma: Bulzoni, 1994).

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Keeping in mind the above-mentioned precautions, a pragmatic, working definition, however approximate, of the humanistic comedy should be offered. Judging from the extant corpus, it is a Latin text, in prose or verse, written exclusively in dialogue form, of variable extension and loosely inspired by Plautus’s and Terence’s comedies, mostly composed by Italian humanists during the period that goes from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century.20 As we learn from one of his letters, Petrarch was the first author to compose a comedy, entitled Philologia. It was a youthful work which he hesitated to send to his friends, a most likely reason why it is now lost, leaving no trace of its contents. Discounting this and other allusions to lost texts, the corpus of humanistic comedies that has survived is made up of approximately fifty works that in recent years have been classified into four main groups according to content and style:21 1.

Works written by young university students or scholars trying to imitate the plays of Plautus and Terence. Most of them are to be considered literary experiments not meant to be staged. This group includes: Paulus (1390) by Pietro Paolo Vergerio, Cauteriaria (c. 1420–1425) by Antonio Barzizza, Philodoxeos fabula (1426) by Leon Battista Alberti, the anonymous Dolos (1432?), Philogenia (c. 1432–37) by Ugolino Pisani, Poliscena

20  Important studies about the humanistic comedy are: Alessandro Perosa, Teatro umanistico (Milano: Nuova Accademia, 1965); Antonio Stäuble, La commedia; Stäuble, “Risonanze europee della commedia umanistica del Quattrocento,” in The Late Middle Ages and the Dawn of Humanism Outside Italy, ed. Mag. G. Verbeke and J. Ijsewijn (Leuven, The Hague: University Press, Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 182–94; Stäuble, “La commedia umanistica: bilancio e prospettive,” Maia 28 (1976): 255–65; Stäuble, “Umanistica, commedia,” in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, coord. V. Branca (Torino: UTET, 1986), 4:344–49; Giorgio Padoan, La commedia rinascimentale; Padoan, L’avventura; Paolo Viti, Immagini e immaginazioni della realtà. Ricerche sulla commedia umanistica (Firenze: Le lettere, 1999); Stefano Pittaluga, La scena interdetta. Teatro e letteratura fra Medioevo e Umanesimo (Napoli: Liguori, 2001); Luca Ruggio, Repertorio bibliografico del teatro umanistico (Firenze: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011); and Jean-Frédéric Chevalier, “Neo-Latin Theatre in Italy,” in Neo-Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. Bloemendal and H. B. Norland (Leiden—Boston: Brill, 2013), 25–102. 21  Stäuble proposes this division in “La commedia umanistica” and “Umanistica, commedia.” See also José Luis Canet Vallés, De la comedia humanística al teatro representable (Valencia: UNED, Universidad de Sevilla, Universitat de València, 1993), 12–17; and Canet Vallés, “Género y dramaturgia en la Celestina,” in Theatralia. La dramaturgia de La Celestina, vol. 10, ed. J. M. Ruano de la Haza and J. G. Maestro (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2008), 27–42.

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(1433) by Leonardo de la Serrata, Chrysis (1444) by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Poliodorus (c. 1444) by Johannes de Vallata, etc. Texts intended to be performed during specific events, such as celebrations organized by patrons or school festivals prepared by teachers and students. There is not a lot of information regarding their performances but the few that have survived indicate that they originated in three main centers of the Italian peninsula: Venice, where Titus Livy of Frulovisi staged five of his comedies (Corallaria, Claudi Duo, Emporia, Symmachus, and Oratoria) between 1432 and 1435; Ferrara, where Francesco Ariosto’s Isis (1444) and Pietro Domizi del Comandatore’s Licinia (1476) and Augustinus (1494) were performed; and Rome, where in 1492 and 1493 were staged two works by Carlo Verardi: Historia Baetica and Fernandus servatus, this latter in collaboration with his nephew Marcellino.22 Goliardic writings and carnivalesque farces written in the first half of the fifteenth century in university circles of Padua and Pavia. Examples of this group include Catinia (1419) by Sicco Polenton, the anonymous Janus sacerdos (1427), Repetitio egregii Zanini coqui (1435), also known by the title of De coquinaria confabulatione, by Ugolino Pisani, etc. Works that cannot be classified under any of the three previous headings. They barely follow the model of Plautus’s and Terence’s plays and are more inspired by the comedies of Aristophanes. They are best defined as experimental, pioneering theatrical attempts.23 Typical examples are Fabula Penia (c. 1415–16) by Rinuccio Aretino, Michaelida (1439) by Gigliolo Giglioli, as well as the anonymous Aetheria (c. 1500) and Paedia (c. 1500).

The strong influence that the Roman theater had on the humanistic comedy can be readily evidenced in their plot development, in the vocabulary they use, in the typology of characters and their borrowing of names, as well as by the attempt, never really achieved, to reintroduce the meter of the iambic senarius—as had been used in Plautus’s Aulularia. As in Roman comedies, the authors of Paulus, Poliscena, Fraudiphila, Stephanium, and Aetheria resort to the intrigues of an astute servant, who helps his young master in his amorous pursuits in exchange for money or other benefits. This character, who is at the center of the action, is directly 22  Other pieces were produced in other Italian cities in the period. As Stäuble, La commedia umanistica, pp. 187–88 and Canet Vallés, De la comedia humanística, pp. 30–32 think, these were probably private readings in front of a select group of friends. 23  Stäuble, “La commedia umanistica: bilancio,” p. 259.

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borrowed from the Roman comedy, as are those of the stingy father, the wasteful and frivolous son (Poliscena, Stephanium, Dolotechne), and the go-between (Poliscena, Poliodorus, Chrysis, Epirota, Dolotechne). The presence of these classical models was, however, barely sketched in works written during the first half of the fifteenth century. Such a tenuous influence in fact reveals the limited or vague knowledge they had of ancient comedy. It was only with Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who must have had access, however limited, to the newly discovered Plautus’s comedies, that the Chrysis, which he wrote in 1444, shows a preponderant influence of Plautus. As already mentioned, together with classical theater there were other sources of inspiration that contributed to the development of the humanistic comedy. New literary genres from the medieval tradition, namely elegiac comedy, such as Pamphilus and Geta, and the short story collections, such as the Decameron, were mined for situations and characters that had a dramatic potential. To the medieval world belong also the figures of the lecherous priest (Cauteriaria, Philogenia, Janus sacerdos), the cuckolded husband (Cauteriaria, Fraudiphila), the simpleton county hick (Philogenia, Poliodorus), the unhappily married woman (Cauteriaria, Fraudiphila, De Cavichiolo), and the daughter contravening social norms, especially the conventional practices of courtship (Philogenia, Poliscena, Emporia, Symmachus, and Poliodorus).24 The combined use of ancient and medieval elements does not end, however, with the typology of these characters. There are also in the humanistic comedies references to both Christian and pagan deities, and a greater freedom from the Aristotelian unities of time and place that often results in dividing the comedy into more acts than in the classical models.25 A significant innovation that appears from the very inception of this new genre is the contextualization of contemporary reality in its temporal and spatial dimensions. For instance, in his Paulus, Vergerio mentions the Ravegnana gate of Bologna, thus making this modern city the action’s background. Similarly, Barzizza, the author of Cauteraria, claims in the prologue that his work was inspired by a true event that had just happened. Not to be overlooked is the author’s personal experience in relating the story. Piccolimini, for example, who spent several years north of the Alps, is probably voicing his drinking preferences when, in his Chrysis, he has the procuress Canthara admit that she prefers wine over cider and beer, two drinks that she disdainfully leaves

24  Stäuble, La commedia, pp. 176–86. 25  Ibid., p. 148.

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to the barbarian tastes of Turks and Bohemians.26 In comedies dealing with students, contemporary university life is often described. Paulus, the central character in the homonymous humanistic comedy, is depicted as a dissolute student with problems related to his lack of interest in pursuing his studies; Pisani’s Repetitio egregii Zanini coqui parodies the ostentatious pomposity of contemporary ceremonies surrounding university graduation, etc.27

The Humanistic Comedy and Celestina28

Menéndez y Pelayo was among the first critics to connect the humanistic comedy with Celestina. In his edition of the Spanish masterpiece published at the end of the nineteenth century, he indicates the affinity between the character Celestina and the old procuress and sorceress in the humanistic comedy Poliscena.29 This generic reference is then developed in his Orígenes de la novela, where he wrote the first systematic study of the humanistic comedy’s influence on Celestina. In this study he extends his analysis to five humanistic comedies (Chrysis, Paulus, Philodoxus, Philogenia, and Poliscena), concluding that, even with Poliscena, with which Celestina seems to have more common traits, the similarities are still vague.30 A few years later, Castro Guisasola, in his influential Observaciones sobre las fuentes literarias de La Celestina, dedicates only a single paragraph of his investigation to the possibility of Celestina having been influenced by the humanistic comedy; following Menéndez y Pelayo’s opinion, he accepts only Poliscena as a likely source.31 A few decades later, when Casas Homs discovers the humanistic comedy Poliodorus in the introduction to his edition, he remarks on the closeness between this text and 26  “O wine, dear wine! Why don’t you talk to me, wine! I’m not afraid to tell the truth: I’m a wine-bibber. I drink it neat. I don’t drink wine mixed with water, I don’t drink it mixed with honey, I don’t drink cider or beer. I leave those tipples to the Turks and Bohemians,” in Gary G. Grund, Humanist Comedies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 301. 27  Stäuble, La commedia, pp. 161–70. 28  I am developing here some ideas from my “La comedia humanística, La Celestina y España,” in Rumbos del hispanismo en el umbral del Cincuentenario de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, coord. P. Botta (Roma: Bagatto Libri, 2012), 2:281–87. 29  Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Vigo: Eugenio Krapt, 1899–1900, 2 vols.). 30  Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela, pp. 110–19. 31  Florentino Castro Guisasola, Observaciones sobre las fuentes literarias de La Celestina (Madrid, 1924), p. 145.

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Celestina. While he refrains from stating that the authors of the Spanish work had read Poliodorus, he doesn’t completely exclude the possibility.32 In spite of these early comments associating Celestina with the humanistic comedy, the first scholar to place the Spanish work within the new genre of the humanistic comedy was María Rosa Lida de Malkiel. In her review of Casas Homs’s edition of Poliodorus, she points out commonalities between the two works, such as dramatic techniques (stage directions in the text and the ways in which space and time were represented), specific episodes, and even vocabulary. Later, in her La originalidad artística de La Celestina, the scholar dedicates a lengthy and detailed study to reaffirming the affiliation between the humanistic comedy and the Spanish masterpiece and pointing out the undeniable innovations that Celestina brings to the genre.33 In her first chapter, she focuses on the generic classification of the work, describing the similarities between Celestina and the fifteenth-century comedies: the use of prose, the division into more acts than in the Roman theater, the implicit use of stage direction and asides, the main plot (the obtainment of the loved one through the intervention of a servant and a procuress), and the active role of the young lady. These features, although they are somehow present in the elegiac comedy, are absent in Plautus and Terence. According to her rigorous analysis, not only is Celestina a humanistic comedy, but it is also the culmination of that forgotten genre for it reached a level of literary quality that no other humanistic comedy ever attained.34 With the publication in 1968 of La commedia umanistica del Quattrocento, Stäuble initiated a new phase in the study of this long forgotten genre. It offers the first systematic assessment of the extant texts and an exhaustive examination of the entire corpus. It is not surprising that he would end his study with pertinent observations on Celestina. Not only did he reconfirm its connatural traits with the humanistic comedies, but he was also struck by certain distinguishing features that place this puzzling work on a higher level.35 In recent decades several scholars have revisited the relationship between Celestina and the humanistic comedy, coming up with diverse conclusions that do not stray from those of their predecessors. Gómez Moreno recognizes the similarity of techniques and themes used in the Italian humanistic comedies and Celestina, but he doubts that these texts were known in Spain in the 32  Johannes de Vallata, Poliodorus, comedia humanística desconocida, ed. J. M. Casas Homs (Madrid: CSIC, 1953), pp. 164–65. 33  Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística, p. 14. 34  Ibid., p. 50. 35  Stäuble, La commedia, p. 264.

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years in which Celestina was written. Therefore, he concludes by denying any form of influence.36 Ruiz Arzálluz shares a similar vision: at first he seems to reject the influence of humanistic comedy on Celestina, but then affirms that there could have been some sort of dependence.37 Other critics, however, posit that such direct influence existed and that the humanistic comedies were known in Spain. Russell, for example, argues that even if there is no proof of these Italian works in Spain, Celestina itself is enough evidence that humanistic comedies circulated in university circles.38 For Whinnom, though there are the substantial differences between the Roman comedy and its humanistic counterpart, it is evident that there are similarities between the latter and the Spanish masterpiece. In his view, “There is no doubt that the shape of Celestina owes everything to humanistic comedy.”39 Finally, Canet Vallés addresses this issue in several works,40 where he shows the close relationship between the Italian humanistic comedy and the Spanish work.41 In my opinion, the origins of Celestina can only be understood within the context of the humanistic comedy genre, a position supported by solid arguments and documentary evidence. The contrary views of critics writing in the first half of the twentieth century, from Menéndez y Pelayo to Casas Homs, was due to the fact that they did not have access to many representative works of this genre; moreover, the information they had at their disposal was often incomplete and incorrect. Undoubtedly this limitation curtailed their understanding of the genre. Later, better knowledge of these comedies has allowed 36  Ángel Gómez Moreno, El teatro medieval castellano en su marco románico (Madrid: Taurus, 1991), pp. 114–26. 37  Fernando de Rojas (and “Antiguo autor”), La Celestina, pp. 416–7. 38  Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina. Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Peter E. Russell (Madrid: Castalia, 1991), pp. 47–55. 39  Keith Whinnom, “The Form of Celestina: Dramatic Antecedents,” Celestinesca 17, no. 2 (1993): 129–46, p. 135. 40  José Luis Canet Vallés, De la comedia humanística; Canet Vallés, “La comedia humanística española y la filosofía moral,” in Los albores del teatro español. Actas de las XVII Jornadas de teatro clásico (Almagro, julio de 1994), ed. F. B. Pedraza and R. González (Almagro, 1995), 175–87; Canet Vallés, “Humanismo cristiano, trasfondo de las primitivas comedias,” in Relación entre los teatros español e italiano: siglos XV–XX, ed. I. Romera and J. Lluís Sirera (Valencia: Servei de Publicacions Universitat de València, 2007), 15–28; Canet Vallés, “Celestina: ‘sic et non’. ¿Libro escolar-universitario?,” Celestinesca 31 (2007): 23–58; Anonymous, Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. J. L. Canet Vallés (València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2011), 31–46. 41  In this short list of scholars who have addressed the possible relationship between the humanistic comedy and Celestina, it has not been our aim to be exhaustive, but just to cite some major works devoted to the subject.

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critics such as Lida de Malkiel, Whinnom, and Canet Vallés to make more detailed analyses, which have confirmed the close relationship between the fifteenth-century Latin comedy and Celestina. Scholars who did not want to take sides in favor of such an affinity have justified their position by noting the almost total absence of the humanistic comedy in fifteenth-century Spain. However, the very fact that there is no evidence that these works circulated in Castile should not be considered an argument to deny Celestina’s genesis in the humanistic comedy tradition. Yet nothing is known about the origins of Celestina and its anonymous author, nor do we know the true role played by Fernando de Rojas. One explanation to overcome the problem of the lack of humanistic comedy in Spain would be to postulate that a first version of the work was composed in the Italian peninsula. Even though the differences between the humanistic comedy and Celestina are many and much more considerable than the similarities, and the latter is significantly more artistically accomplished than all the attempts of Italian humanists in recreating the Roman comedy and adapting it to their own times, we cannot overlook all the commonalities that these works share. In conclusion, what Whinnom wrote years ago synthesizes the problematic issue of how we conceive the relationship between Celestina and the humanistic comedy: One could argue that humanistic comedy represents an attempt at emulating the classical writers of comedy by Italians conditioned by medieval literary theory and practice—that is, to put it crudely, a cross between Roman comedy and medieval drama. One might, therefore, go on to enquire whether the author of the first Act of Celestina might not have arrived at a similar form by a similar route, and whether, given Act 1 as a model, Rojas need have been familiar with the humanistic comedy of Italy. But the general resemblance of form and treatment—which are such that the only proper label for Celestina is “humanistic comedy”— are also accompanied by a number of other coincident features, such as the use of a prefatory letter. It is true that some coincidences may be due to chance, to common sources, or to European traditions, but it is impossible that all the features common to Celestina and Italian humanistic comedy could have arisen independently.42

42  Whinnom, “The Form of Celestina,” pp. 139–40.

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Humanistic Comedy in Spain at the Time of Celestina43

The humanistic comedy never achieved a wide reception or readership, nor was it a popular genre. As a matter of fact, our knowledge of its diffusion and circulation in many parts of Europe, with the exception of Germany, is virtually non-existent.44 Even in Italy, where the genre originated and evolved, it did not receive the same attention as that of other humanist writings of the fifteenth century. The humanists’ attempt to restore classical Latin comedy was circumscribed to narrow audiences made up of like-minded men of letters. The almost total absence of these works from consideration in Cinquecento poetic treatises indicates that they were experimental in nature and had an ephemeral impact. For instance, Giulio Cesare Scaligero’s Poetica did not even mention the existence of this genre and Cinthio Giraldi’s De poetis nostrorum temporum only makes a brief reference to two late humanistic comedies, Stephanium (c. 1501) and Dolotechne (1504). The humanistic comedy was, however, relatively popular in German-speaking countries, where Poliscena, for example, was used as a manual for teaching Latin. Because of its pedagogical use it was published seventeen times between 1478 and 1517 in Leipzig, Krakow, Vienna, and Schussenried. Equally popular in these regions, but to a lesser degree, were other humanistic dramas: Epirota, Dolotechne, Stephanium, Historia Baetica, and Fernandus servatus. The diffusion and favorable reception of humanistic comedy in Germany and neighboring regions were due mainly to the teaching activity of German humanists who, during the fifteenth century, had studied in Italian universities. They brought back for their own use comedies they had acquired during their stay in Italy, thus contributing to the dissemination of these works north of the Alps. Another reason for the relative popularity of these plays in central Europe was the fragmentation of German dialects and their lack of literary prestige, a cultural condition that encouraged the tendency to maintain Latin and neo-Latin as the language of the universities and for literary expression. Since many of these humanistic comedies were written in Latin, the cultivated German readers seemed to have treasured them more than in Southern Europe, where the vernacular, in competition with Latin, had already become the standard language for literary expression. Concerning Spain, Stäuble’s evaluation of Celestina led him to presuppose that the humanistic comedy must have been known in the fifteenth century due to the fact that some texts are held in Spanish libraries and, equally telling, 43  I am developing here some ideas from my “La comedia humanística, La Celestina y España.” 44  See Stäuble, La commedia, pp. 51 and 246.

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a small number of printed editions of humanistic comedies issued by Spanish printers. A manuscript (ms. 5–5–28) at the Colombina Library in Seville contains both Philogenia and Poliodorus while another one (ms. 7–1–36) includes the text of Poliscena. The same institution also owns an edition of Philogenia (Tolosa, 1476–77?), one of Epirota (Venice, 1483), and one of Dolotechne (Strasbourg, 1511). In the Biblioteca Universitaria of Salamanca, it has been reported only very recently that it houses another humanistic comedy: Syrus by Domenico Crispo Rannusio de Pistoia.45 Carlo Verardi’s Historia Baetica and Fernandus servatus, the latter versified by his nephew, were printed together twice toward the end of the fifteenth century. Although they do not bear the printer’s name, place, or date of publication, they are deemed by many critics to have been printed in Salamanca and Valladolid, in 1494 and 1497, respectively.46 Another argument in favor of a tradition of humanistic comedies in Spain finds support in the one publication of Leon Battista Alberti’s Philodoxeos fabula in Salamanca in 1501.47 Francisco de Quirós, Professor of Latin Poetry at the University of Salamanca at the time, was responsible for the edition and printing of this text, which, curiously, was never printed in Italy. As he states in the prologue, the reason for its publication was to satisfy the wishes of his students who responded enthusiastically when it was first read in class. A closer look at this documentary evidence does not support, however, the claim of a widespread interest in humanistic comedy among the learned in the Spain of the time, nor is it proof of an autochthonous production and circulation. Regarding the manuscript containing the Philogenia and Poliodorus texts, they entered Spain long after the fifteenth century. In the handwritten colophon by Ferdinand Columbus, the second son of Christopher Columbus who assembled his personal library, he carefully records how the codex was acquired in London in 1522. Similarly, the manuscript containing Poliscena

45  Ruggio, Repertorio, xxv–xxvi. As Ruggio informs us, Syrus is written in prose and follows closely the Roman comedy model, especially Plautus’s Menaecmi. It was dedicated to Íñigo López de Mendoza y Quiñones (1442–1515), second Count of Tendilla, who was an ambassador of Ferdinand of Aragón in Rome in 1486–87. 46  Konrad Haebler, Bibliografía ibérica del siglo XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1903–17), numbers 667 and 667/5; and Francisco Vindel, El arte tipográfico en España durante el siglo XV (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales, 1945–54), 2:42 and 6:17. 47  See Frederick J. Norton, A Descriptive Catalogue of Printing in Spain and Portugal 1501–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), number 528; and Julián Martín Abad, Post-incunables ibéricos (Madrid: Ollero & Ramos, 2001), number 18.

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reports in a note that it was bought in Padua in 1531.48 As for the three editions of humanistic comedies held in the Colombina Library and the manuscript recently catalogued in the Biblioteca Universitaria of Salamanca, we have no clues as to how and when they came to form part of the two institutions’ funds. Historia baetica and Fernandus servatus cannot be considered true comedies, but rather theatrical texts based on historical events composed in Rome in order to commemorate the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Kings and the attempted assassination of Ferdinand of Aragon. Closer to the tradition of humanistic tragedy,49 they were printed in Castile not for representation, as was the case in Rome, but rather for their historical and literary content.50 Regarding Francisco de Quirós’s printed editions of the Philodoxeos fabula, as he explained in the prologue, the reason for printing it was to keep it from remaining omnibus incognitum (unknown to everybody). In other words, in 1501 there was little knowledge of these comedies in Spain, or at least of Philodoxeos fabula. As for the possibility that Alberti’s comedy was used as a textbook for teaching Latin,51 there is no evidence from any source of the time.52 The fact that it was printed only once argues against the conjecture of its having been used as a university textbook.53 A few years ago I began to research catalogues and libraries for correspondence and other documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in hope of finding references to the circulation of humanistic comedies in Spain at that time. My thorough searches in several sources and archives and libraries did not bear any fruits. Though I have not exhausted all archives, I doubt that such references can be found. A question remains: even if we speculate 48  José Francisco Sáez Guillén, Catálogo de manuscritos de la Biblioteca Colombina de Sevilla (Sevilla: Excmo. Cabildo de la Santa, Metropolitana y Patriarcal Iglesia Catedral de Sevilla, 2002), numbers 244 and 354. 49  Canet Vallés, De la comedia, p. 14. 50   Historia baetica was composed to celebrate the conquest of Granada in January 1492, while Fernandus Servatus dramatized the attack against the Catholic King, Ferdinand of Aragon, in December of that same year. 51  Canet Vallés, De la comedia, p. 33n46. 52  In a brief consultation of the archives of the University of Salamanca in the summer of 2009, we found nothing that could support this. The only thing that I was able to determine is that Quirós was ill in July 1503 (Salamanca, Archivo Histórico, AUSA 4, fol. 20v) and he was given a month’s leave to recuperate. His name appears again in late August of that year and he was granted another period for resting (fol. 27v). In the minutes of October 19 his position was declared vacant (fol. 34v). 53  See the considerations and hypothesis of Celestina as textbook presented by Canet Vallés, “Celestina: ‘sic et non’.”

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that the humanistic comedy was known in Spain in the second half of the fifteenth century but left no trace in catalogues, letters, documents, etc., there is still the need to explain why it only influenced Celestina and no other literary work of the period.54 Any conclusion based on the premise that Celestina’s authors had a significant knowledge of the dramatic techniques found in the humanistic comedy will always be contradictory because of its inexplicable aspects. The many specific points of contact between Celestina and this Italian genre, which critics have shown to exist, demonstrate that Celestina could not have been created outside of the literary tradition of the humanistic comedy. The question we continue to ask is how this contact took place if no trace of the humanistic comedy is to be found in the Iberian Peninsula. A possible answer to this question is enmeshed in the problematic and debated issue of Celestina’s authorship, genesis, and early diffusion.

54  The only case, although a very late one, is pointed out by Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad, p. 37n6: Eufrósina by the Portuguese playwright Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos (1515–1585), which followed Alberti’s Philodoxus.

CHAPTER 6

Celestina in the Context of Fifteenth-Century Castilian Vernacular Humanism José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León Three central aspects of fifteenth-century Castilian vernacular humanism affected Rojas and the anonymous author of Celestina’s first Act, and are consequently present in the text. We depart from the premise that literary creation, and recreation, implies the elaboration of a message marked by the circumstances of its creation and reception. Since cultural artifacts are not isolated from the rest of society, we see as necessary the investigation of how they reflect politics, religion, artistic sensitivity, and ideas on education of the time. Three lines of investigation will structure our exposition: first, the extent to which Celestina’s authors were humanists, or, at least, conversant with the contemporary Castilian humanism; second, why Celestina presents a fully autonomous world without need of external support; and third, how the authors of Celestina express their worry for the society in which the characters live, the same society to which Celestina’s readers belonged, and how such concern was characteristic of fifteenth-century humanism. In his review of the studies of fifteenth-century Castilian humanism, Di Camillo identifies two main lines of research: one studies the historical, sociological, and intellectual impact of humanism; the other centers on the pedagogical, rhetorical, and literary practices associated with humanism.1 Both lines are relevant to the study of Celestina’s production and reception because a complete understanding of the Renaissance as a historical period, and of humanism as an intellectual movement in it, are integral to the understanding of this masterpiece within its context. Undeniably, Rojas and the first Act’s unknown author were part of Castile’s, and particularly Salamanca’s, intense changing cultural ambience at the time. Therefore, the more we know about fifteenth-century Castilian humanism, especially vernacular humanism, i.e., using Spanish instead of Latin, the more we understand the circumstances of Celestina’s production. The vernacular humanism we propose as the context for Celestina’s production was characterized by a defense of the usefulness and 1   Ottavio di Camillo, “Fifteenth-Century Spanish Humanism: Thirty-Five Years Later,” La Corónica 39, no. 1 (2010): 19–66, p. 40.

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practicality of knowledge that implied an interest not only for antiquity but also for the present. Those who shared the humanistic ideals, and believed in the importance of the studia humanitatis, valued the arts of language and communication between equals. Thus, humanist Alonso de Cartagena (1384–1456) conceived of language as the human capacity enabling communication between social groups and preserving the political and social fabric of city and state.2 Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522), author of the first Spanish grammar, expressed similar ideas in his prologue to his Introducciones latinas (1481). Humanists understood literature as a civic enterprise extending to the moral and ethical function of denouncing corruption and social tensions.3 Words must be capable of moving people to action. Literature was expected to influence the reader; the deaths in Celestina were lessons intended to influence youth, as stated by the book’s paratexts.

Castilian Humanism

Nationalism was another important facet of vernacular Castilian humanism. Beginning in the early fifteenth century, many humanists saw the classical tradition’s recovery as an opportunity for extolling the writers born in the Roman province of Hispania, including Lucan, Seneca, and Quintilian. They presented these authors as precursors to a proto-Spanish literary tradition, and references to them became common in the discussion of the creation of a new Spanish literature. Diego de Burgos, secretary of the Marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), deemed contemporary Spain a literary wasteland, except for the work of his master, whom Burgos praised for restoring the country to the splendor of the days of Lucan, Seneca, and Quintilian.4 The longing for a grandiose national past included an admiration for not only the Roman Empire, but also for when the Visigoths ruled the Iberian Peninsula, a period defined by natural unity under strong kings. The idea that Visigothic Spain could be a model and inspiration for the present was shared, for instance, by Alonso de Cartagena, in spite of him being a converso, a fact which automatically placed him beyond this lineage that extended only to cristianos viejos.5 Similar investigations into 2  Ottavio di Camillo, El humanismo castellano del siglo XV (Valencia: Imprenta Doménech, 1976), pp. 55–56. 3  Guido M. Capelli, El humanismo romance de Juan de Lucena. Estudios sobre el De vita felici (Bellaterra: Seminario de Literatura Medieval y Humanística, 2002), p. 23. 4  Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano, p. 124. 5  Ibid., p. 132.

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Spain’s national culture and history in order to look for answers to the present’s problems characterized the writing of many fifteenth-century Castilian intellectuals, including Nebrija and Rojas, as evidenced by the letter which served as Celestina’s prologue. The Spanish humanism taking shape in the early fifteenth century was not merely a transplantation of the Italian model. It had its own peculiarities that responded to internal factors, including the interest of the nobility and the middle classes in acquiring the expertise needed to be part of the bureaucracy that the Catholic Monarchs were creating. These peculiarities of Spanish humanism do not mean there was no contact with Italy. The relation with Italy existed, but the reasons compelling some Spaniards to travel to Italy for education were specific to the political and cultural circumstances of Spain. Their motives were not limited to literary interests, but extended to other, more practical, fields. Furthermore, some such Spaniards had an apprehension toward literature. Luis Vives (1493–1540), for instance, considered some forms of fiction to be insubstantial and even detrimental to readers. Because Spanish humanists wrote in so many areas, we must examine not only their strictly literary production, but also their correspondence, chronicles, treatises, dialogues, and, of course, their work as translators and commenters of classical texts. Their prologues, often neglected, are also useful in understanding their thought and praxis. A defining aspect of Spanish humanism is the strategic decision to use Spanish instead of Latin. The reason for this choice was that the humanist movement in Spain, unlike in Italy, was not promoted by the Church, but by members of the nobility: learned men or men wanting to learn. Besides, Spanish humanism had a clear political objective that imprinted a civic, laic, and bourgeois vocation on the endeavor. A new social class, one of learned men and humanists, was charged with the duty of spreading new values to the rest of society. They did so by promoting their ideas from the protected positions their powerful patrons offered them. These humanists read classics and the work of important foreign authors, often translating them into Spanish. Thanks to their positions as diplomats, and the travels required by their professional duties, they established contacts with colleagues in other parts of Europe, as exemplified, once again, by Alonso de Cartagena. As the representative of Castile, he attended the Council of Basel, and later travelled to Rome and Lisbon as part of official missions allowing him to meet important intellectual figures. In Castile, he was instrumental in the diffusion of classical texts and their commentaries. Juan de Mena (1411–56) is also another example of this new type of active intellectual. His commitment to bringing dignity to the Spanish language and its literature led him to adopt an innovative writing

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style, while politico-moral engagement with the problems of his time marked his life.6 These intellectuals favored texts of “moral philosophy,” i.e., the rational examination of ethical controversies as a means to steer one’s personal behavior. In this, they were following the Italian initiative, where Petrarch had decisively made moral philosophy a central interest. Petrarch’s ideas arrived in Spain most likely through contact between Castilian and Italian learned men via the papal court of Avignon (1309–77). Another important figure was Coluccio Salutati, a disciple of Petrarch. Castilian writers of the fifteenth century popularized Salutati’s ideas, including the secularization of life, the social and financial responsibility of the individual, and the reconciliation of the teaching of the classics with Christian beliefs.7 These new ideas implied an exaltation of civic virtues and recommended a socially-involved life, emphasizing the positive changes well-thought action might have on the different spheres of personal life: at home, in the community, and in positions of political influence.8 As we will see, Celestina can be read as an example a contrario of such an ideal life-model, with each character exemplifying the failure to be a constructive member of the community and subsequently paying with their life. Not surprisingly, Celestina, who touts her vices as virtues, suffers the most violent death, stabbed by those she calls her “sons”: Pármeno and Sempronio. As is well known, the beginning of humanism was coetaneous with the translation of classical works into vernacular, especially the manuals of rhetoric and particularly those by Cicero, to whom Rhetorica ad Herennium, translated into Spanish by Enrique de Villena (1384–1434), was incorrectly attributed. In Cartagena’s translation of Cicero’s De inventione, the introductory prologue reveals, according to Di Camillo, a “fully humanistic” conception of rhetoric where this discipline is presented as the basis for a pedagogy oriented toward social harmony.9 The emphasis on translation and adaptation is characteristic of Spanish humanism: translation was mostly from Latin or Tuscan, sometimes from French, rarely from Greek, while adaptation implied a reworking of some aspects of the text to make it suitable for the Spanish environment. Jeremy Lawrance characterized Castilian humanism by its interest in translating Latin and Italian texts into Spanish for a local nobility unable to read the

6  Cappelli, El humanismo romance, p. 20. 7  Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano, p. 36. 8  Ibid., pp. 38–39. 9  Ibid., pp. 52–53.

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books in the original language yet still eager to enjoy their content.10 Spanish humanism, however, lacked the interest in textual philological study so important in Italy.11 Even if the translations into Spanish were far from perfect, they were read with the reverence accorded to philosophy, as proved by titles included in some miscellaneous codices, i.e., volumes made up of different books bound together by their owners in which Spanish translations are positioned next to authoritative texts. Thus, we find Juan de Lucena’s Diálogo sobre la vida feliz (Dialogue on a Happy Life, 1463) bound with Albert the Great’s medieval writings on philosophy. Similarly, printers published in a single volume Lucena’s above-mentioned dialogue and Enrique de Villena’s Los doce trabajos de Hércules (The Twelve Works of Hercules, 1417), which morally interprets this classical myth through allegory.12 For readers of the period, learning philosophy while reading fiction, such as Terence’s comedies, was a refreshing endeavour. Not surprisingly, the Marqués de Santillana had no problem considering Terence the equal of Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, and Ovid.13 Literature of antiquity, even fiction, was read for its moral value. Remember, the “old books” Melibea refers to before jumping to her death from the tower are classical books understood as sources of moral philosophy, even if they are fiction. The mid-sixteenth-century extended commentary of Celestina, known as Celestina comentada, also proves, by its many notes’ content, that Celestina could be read as a compendium of moral philosophy, or at least as a repertoire of moralizing sentences.14 Equally, the “rivulets of philosophy” (fontezicas de filosophía) (219; 70)15 of the anonymous manuscript, praised in the “Letter of the Author to a Friend,” are implicitly presented as instructions for moral 10  Jeremy N. H. Lawrance, “On Fifteenth-Century Spanish Vernacular Humanism,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honour of Robert Brian Tate, ed. Ian Michael & Richard Cardwell (Oxford: Dolphin Books, 1986), 63–79, p. 66. 11  Cappelli, El humanismo romance, p. 13. 12  See Jerónimo Miguel’s introduction to Juan de Lucena, Diálogo sobre la vida feliz. Epístola dedicatoria a las letras (Madrid: RAE, Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2014), pp. 200, 205. 13  Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano, p. 185. 14   Celestina comentada, ed. Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernández Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2002). See also Enrique Fernández Rivera, “Una forma no lineal de leer La Celestina: El compendio de sententiae como mapa de lectura en Celestina comentada,” Celestinesca 21 (1997): 33–47. 15  The Spanish quotes from Celestina are by page number from La Celestina, ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997). The English quotes of Celestina are by page number from Peter Bush’s translation (New York: Penguin, 2009).

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behavior. In the period, ethics covered education, politics, and economics:16 three areas Celestina clearly touches on. It shows the waste of an education by those fortunate enough to have it, like Calisto and Melibea. Equally, the text emphasizes economics when Calisto squanders his fortune and Melibea endangers her family’s patrimonial continuity. Finally, the existence of confronted factions, whose quarrels in the city streets can be heard at night, infers politics. Because the reading of classics was considered formative, Pleberio gives his daughter, Melibea, “ancient books” (antiguos libros) (191; 324) to read. Books offered the readers not only sententiae,17 but also a repertoire of characters from antiquity exemplifying correct and incorrect behaviors. Furthermore, these characters’ actions in concrete situations could serve as behavioral models for when confronted with the variant circumstances of life. This utility explains why humanist authors were so prone to show their erudition by including exempla—short didactic stories or anecdotes—which their writing took from antiquity or the Bible. However, if the many exempla helped the authors display their erudition, they also endangered the clarity of the message which the text was supposed to convey, even confusing the reader, since these stories interrupted reasoning and deviated from main argumentation. The Terentianstyle comedy that Rojas discovered was a moderate exercise in finding models of behavior from the classics, however, because with each successive addition during the text’s complex editorial history, erudite references were added to many passages. Excessive erudition is noticeable, for instance, in two key passages from the Tragicomedia: the lamentations of Melibea and Pleberio. In both cases, excessive erudition burdens the dramatism of the speech. Ironically, Melibea seemingly succumbs to the same mistake of excessive erudition which made the books her father gave her ineffectual. Paradoxically, Melibea could have acted better if she had read a book that simply described contemporary cases like hers, i.e., a book like Celestina. Spanish humanists of the fifteenth century found acquiring moral virtues through the memorization of select sentences from authoritative books to be inadequate. According to Cartagena, moral virtues were acquired through mindful participation in the life of the family, the city, and the state.18 Humanists and learned men insisted on the importance of an active, engaged 16  Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano, p. 166. 17  Sententia is an authoritative passage, generally in Latin, from a prestigious source or author such as Aristotle or the Bible, and is often quoted to prove a point. 18  “[Las virtudes morales] se adquieren a través de la participación activa en la vida de la familia, de la ciudad y del estado,” quoted by Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano, p. 170.

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life because active participation in communal life offered opportunity to apply and hone moral values. Learned men, like Rojas, were proud of the important positions they attained in Castile by the end of the Middle Ages. They were convinced they had reached these positions because of their civic virtues, not because they were born to noble wealthy families, as the traditional concept of merit dictated.19 Celestina shows the importance of civic virtues not only by making the characters pay highly for their lack thereof. By finishing the incomplete manuscript circulated in Salamanca and making it widely available, surely a service to society, Rojas accomplished a double civic service: the advancement of Spanish literature and the offering to readers of “weapons to defend yourself against [love’s] fires” (defensivas armas para resistir sus fuegos) (201; 69). At the same time, he filled his leisure hours with the kind of intellectual engagement Aristotle and Seneca so highly praised. The humanist campaign of civic virtues accorded great importance to rhetoric as a tool of productive writing that could move the reader to action, and the didactic character of much of the period’s literature aimed at influencing readers’ behavior. The objective was not the sanctimonious moralizing and preaching of medieval sermons, but a more convincing, entertaining, and practical form of didacticism. Nebrija’s prologues, Lucena’s writing, and Celestina’s prologue allude to this ideal form of entertaining, specific moral teaching.20 Celestina gives advice specific to those with the same vital circumstances: young Spanish readers sharing an interest in good literature.21 In Epístola exhortatoria a las letras (1482), Lucena explains that the cultivation of belles lettres is integral to the education of the individual and to the well-being of the community. This is very similar to what Nebrija wrote in his Introducciones latinas. These ideas are explicitly present in the prologue of Celestina and implicitly in the rest of the book: the characters’ lack of civic virtues triggers the tragedy. These characters cannot speak openly or communicatively to each other. They use obsolete speech conventions—courtly love between Calisto and Melibea, and between Pármeno and Areúsa—or offensive language. They speak sincerely to themselves in asides and monologues,

19  Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano, p. 176. 20  Nebrija’s prologues to Gramática (1492) and Introducciones latinas (1481 and 1485); Lucena’s Diálogo sobre la vida feliz (1463) and Epístola exhortatoria a las letras (1482). 21  Also, Nebrija’s prologue to his Gramática and Celestina’s prologue coincide in their insistence on the need to create a literature in Spanish matching the prestige the Spanish state earned in the international arena.

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but do not seem interested in communicating efficiently, honestly, and directly with neighbors and acquaintances. Humanists applied rhetoric’s teachings—the art of effective interpersonal communication both in speech and writing—to the composition of letters, biographies, and the prefatory dedications of books and translations. These genres are somehow present in Celestina: several dedications are included as prefatory material, while the details of characters’ lives mentioned in the dialogues imply biography. The importance of biography can be deduced by the names given to the two longest sections added to Celestina to extend the Comedia into the Tragicomedia and beyond: the “Treatise of Centurio” and the “Auto of Traso.” The inclusion of the names of two characters—Centurio and Traso—in the titles chosen for these additions reveals that the readers were eager to find some sort of (anti)exemplary lives in the new sections. Curiously, the epistolary genre is conspicuously absent in Celestina: Calisto and Melibea do not exchange letters, in spite of the fact that the sentimental romance, one of the genres that most influenced Celestina, often resorted to embedded missives. Critics have pointed out that intellectuals of the fifteenth century, when addressing noblemen or persons socially above them, assumed a persona different than when they addressed their peers. When addressing somebody of a higher position, they assumed a didactic or exemplary voice, while, when they wrote for their peers, their fellow humanists, they placed themselves on an equal plane.22 Books claiming a didactic purpose, such as Celestina, implicitly aimed at a noble reader with a position higher than the author. In the “Letter of the Author to a Friend,” the addressed friend is evidently a person of means, someone capable of generosity in his favors or mercies, as the letter suggests: “I have also felt the need to repay the immense help I have received from your generous spirit” (para pagar las muchas mercedes de vuestra libre liberalidad recebidas) (201; 69). The noble friend is presented as young and in need of helpful advice: “[Y]our own self and your own youth that, if I remember rightly, was stricken and cruelly torn by love, because you lacked weapons to defend yourself against its fires” (en particular vuestra misma persona, cuya juventud de amor ser presa se me representa haber visto y dél cruelmente lastimada, a causa de le faltar defensivas armas para resistir sus fuegos) (ibid.). The letter of a humanist to a young noble friend was a commonplace of the period, often inspired by models of antiquity, such as Seneca’s letters to Lucilius. Print reproduction turned Celestina into reading material not only for the noble friend but 22  Guillermo Serés, “Juan de Mena y el ‘Prerrenacimiento’,” in Juan de Mena, Laberinto de Fortuna y otros poemas, ed. Carla de Nigris (Barcelona: Crítica, 1994), IX–XXXII, p. XX.

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also for a much larger audience. However, since we know that part of the text initially circulated in manuscript form, the possibility that it was first designed with didactic purposes and dedicated to a noble friend cannot be discarded. The “Letter of the Author to a Friend” presents Rojas as a humanist, living in a university milieu and writing in vernacular. Also in the humanist fashion, he includes many sententiae in his characters’ lives. These characters quote Aristotle, Seneca, and many other authoritative sources, proving Rojas resorted to popular compendiums: manuals which were collections of sayings and anecdotes from antiquity, offering easy access to ready-made quotations. As Deyermond has demonstrated, Rojas resorted repeatedly to the thematic index of sententiae included in the 1496 Basel edition of Petrarch’s works.23 However, because the use of compendiums as a shortcut in finding quotes was an extended practice among humanists and learned writers, Rojas’s use of such manuals does not indicate that he had only a shallow knowledge of the classics.24 When, in the prologue, Rojas speaks of the “rivulets of philosophy” (fontezicas de filosophía) (219; 70) he detected in the manuscript containing the first Act of Celestina, he merely offers testimony to the contemporary habit of, when reading, identifying and memorizing sentences for reuse later in one’s own writing or conversation. Such use of previously memorized sentences is at work in the dialogue of Act 1, in which Sempronio tries convincing Calisto to give up his pursuit of Melibea. By including sententiae in Celestina, Rojas behaved like a typical humanist of the period, helping to circulate morally valuable excerpts of classical texts.25 He acted as a mediator and popularizer, and even as a controller, of the circulation of ancient but difficult-to-access 23  Alan Deyermond, The Petrarchan Sources of La Celestina (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975). For other compendiums used in Celestina, see Louise Fothergill-Payne, Seneca and Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Ivy Corfis, “Fernando de Rojas and Albrecht Von Eyb’s Margarita Poetica,” Neophilologus 68 (1984): 206–13. 24  Jacqueline Hamesse, “Los florilegios filosóficos, instrumentos de trabajo de los intelectua­ les a fines de la Edad Media y en el Renacimiento,” Estudios clásicos, no. 140 (2011): 7–32, pp. 27–28. 25  As a humanist, Rojas’s work was a continuation of that by several generations of Spanish humanists. The first generation included Enrique de Villena (1384–1434) and Alonso de Cartagena (1384–1456); the second, Juan de Mena (1411–56) and Alfonso de Madrigal El Tostado (1410–55); and the third, Alfonso de Palencia (1423–92), Fernando del Pulgar (1430–93), and Juan de Lucena (1430–1506). Toward the end of the century, figures like Antonio de Nebrija were part of what Serés calls “humanismo isabelino” (Elizabethan humanism), named in reference to Queen Isabella I of Castile. Serés considers the author of the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea to be a disciple of Nebrija, and therefore part of his generation (Serés, “Juan de Mena,” pp. XXIV and XXV respectively).

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knowledge. As a humanist, he had the expertise in Latin needed to access and translate the classical sources, thus making them available to an elite of readers, who, in spite of their interest in refining their culture, and therefore themselves, did not know enough Latin to access the ancient texts directly.26

The Autonomy of Fiction

Celestina demonstrates the author’s will to present a verisimilar story. Such intention is evident, for instance, in the text’s emphasis on maintaining decorum—characters’ behavior in accordance with social status—and in the construction of a self-contained virtual world, two characteristics of Celestina that the Spanish humanist Valdés praised in his Diálogo de la lengua (c. 1535). Rojas indirectly alludes to the character of his creation as a self-standing, complete story in the “Prologue” to the Tragicomedia. There he points out that the new editors included summaries of the plot in some editions, additions he considered unnecessary since the story was clear enough by itself and without need of such scaffolding. Rojas’s conception of self-sufficient narrative is an important step toward a verisimilar representation of reality, toward literary realism. However, this is not realism as understood today by the arts, but as the representation or recreation of the contemporary world in a manner that the readers could recognize. This recognition allowed the text to serve as an efficient vehicle for exemplary didacticism. Celestina’s realism inaugurated a new form of exemplary literature that did not present exemplary stories from an unquestionable authority, such as the Bible, or from a remote past unquestionably valid because of that past’s ancient and sanctioned pedigree. Celestina’s new exemplarity relied on narrating events that might well happen to its own readers or to somebody those readers knew. Although the text condemned vices and sensual pleasure, a medieval attitude, it did not do so by merely repeating sayings from older books or manuals; it did so through the narration of its characters’ mishaps, presenting them in a credible fashion. The degree of contemporary realism belonging to each character often appears, however, diluted by erudition and literary borrowings. Calisto’s passion seems extracted from old manuals on courtly love. This is not the case with Melibea’s believable psychological changes. Other characters’ feelings are even more realistic, and clearly not the product of bookish 26  For instance, the character of the Marqués de Santillana in Lucena’s Diálogo sobre la vida feliz (Dialogue on a Happy Life) laments his lack of this knowledge (ed. Jerónimo Miguel, p. 11).

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borrowing: Sempronio’s desire for Melibea, Pármeno’s and Areúsa’s passionate affair, Lucrecia’s lust, or Sosia’s hope to reach Areúsa. The text impresses real feelings, deeply marked by unique and believable features—authentic and individualized expressions which Renaissance representational forms favored. The autonomy of fiction in Celestina relies not only on verisimilar realism; the story is also dramatic, in all senses of the term. As the “Prologue” states, the story was written as a dramatic piece meant to be read aloud by a group. The paratexts actually include recommendations for the different voices used for this “performance.” Following such advice was crucial to reciter-performers’ conveyance of the text, because the audience’s aesthetic experience depended not only on the story, but also on the quality of the collective performance— in other words, in the recreation of each of the characters’ voices. In order to move the audience, reciters were expected to perform their dramatic readings in a similar fashion to those who delivered sermons or speeches, or who sang or recited poetry. Ideas on poetry, having reached Castile from Italy, emphasized poetry’s civilizing capacity, as Boccaccio sustained in Genealogia deorum gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles, c. 1350). Also, in his defense of rhetoric, Cicero attributed a similar power to properly composed speeches. Celestina is then to be understood as a civilizing endeavor, as an attempt to regenerate the social body through poetry and rhetoric, i.e., through art. Although Celestina is not a biographical book, the biographies of some of its characters, such as Pármeno, are embedded in the story, while those of others are merely suggested, such as Areúsa’s, or taken for granted and left for the reader to reconstruct, such as Calisto’s. This presence of biographies in Celestina also contributes to its status as autonomous, self-standing fiction. The characters’ lives are supports upon which fictive worlds are built. As a matter of fact, the biographical development of the characters is one of the enduring contributions of Celestina to the Spanish literature of subsequent centuries. In the picaresque genre, which owes much to Celestina, the narration of the rogue’s life is central; in Don Quixote, the peculiar biography of the homonymous character is all-important. The didacticism of the fifteenth century did not consist, like its medieval counterpart, of righteous punishment. It preferred to present the reader with familiar examples of behavior deserving of condemnation (the so called exemplos vitandos or examples to be avoided) or praise.27 The inclusion of fully 27  We think that this new form of exemplarity originated from the reading and studying of Terence’s comedies. We know these comedies were read at the Castilian universities of the fifteenth century, not only for their highly-esteemed, unaffected style, but also to extract moral philosophy from the stories.

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developed, concrete characters in Celestina did not appear in a vacuum. By the end of the fifteenth century, the genre of the exemplum had evolved to include and emphasize realistic characters, rather than the schematic heroes and gods of antiquity favored in previous centuries. In the new model, what mattered were the actions and attitudes of historically-specific characters, performing concrete roles in society.28 The authors wanted to present believable, verisimilar characters resembling the text’s readers, their acquaintances, and their neighbors. In the case of Celestina, when Calisto compares Melibea to an angel in Act 11, a reader would have recognized Calisto’s febrile mind speaking. The reader was aware of Melibea as a mere mortal sharing the same weaknesses and living in the same situations as all the other characters. She is realistic, with passions and feelings, able to do good and evil. Calisto is not the only one to misjudge Melibea’s character; her parents also consider her an innocent girl, incapable of sexual desire. The reality is that Melibea and Calisto have to save themselves.

Social Reality

Celestina describes a society in the process of turbulent transformation. What was valid for Pleberio’s generation is not for Melibea’s. The recent conquest of Granada is not of interest for Celestina, who once lived next to Pleberio but is later relegated to the city’s periphery, either. The new world the story presents is that of a Castilian city, predominantly distrustful, even if its inhabitants seem to know each other. Everyone seems a potential enemy and, consequently, defensiveness is the default attitude: men carry weapons, movement through the streets mandates escort, and the routes followed or avoided are carefully planned. Calisto is cautious when approaching Pleberio’s house because he knows armed men will readily defend the house if they perceive danger. When Calisto learns of the execution of his servants, Pármeno and Sempronio, he immediately thinks of the animosity of the judge toward his father, despite the fact that his father had previously helped the judge. This hostile panorama historically matches the Castile of the same period, when the violent confrontation between urban factions at the service of powerful families was a common and ugly reality. From the early fifteenth century, important intellectuals questioned the pitiful situation of contemporary society. Cartagena wrote against the civil wars ravaging the kingdom, which he saw as originating from disagreements within the royal court. Since internecine wars were detrimental to the common welfare, Cartagena emphasized 28  Cappelli, El humanismo romance, p. 23.

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the importance of determining a common external enemy as a lesser evil, and as a means of curtailing civil war and fostering social harmony.29 Cartagena’s solution for noblemen involved in endless internecine wars was clear: let them fight in Africa and continue the Reconquista in the land occupied by infidels.30 The Catholic Monarchs brought pacification and the hope of change and prosperity. The prologues of Nebrija’s Grammar, as well as Lucena’s Epístola, welcome the new era. They present Isabella as a model defender of society and cultivator of the arts. The humanists’ politically-engaged position has been called “the ethic of responsibility,” a vision of the world in which human actions are more consequential than God’s providence.31 Celestina, for instance, emphasizes earth rather than the heavens: while the paratexts mention religious faith and Christian doctrine, the actual text does not refer to them or to the characters’ religious beliefs. What matters is their behavior and how their actions impact not only their soul’s salvation, but also their earthly life, as Pleberio’s bitter final monologue epitomizes. Spanish humanists did not focus on religion, but on political and ideological solutions to the perceived erosion of state structure.32 They were pro-monarchy, favoring a strong king capable of mediating between a nobility struggling to maintain power and influence and the emerging social groups searching for a stable position in a peaceful societal order: the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and conversos. The humanist program aimed also at improving the individual precisely because the ideal community was composed of virtuous individuals. The humanists believed the value of a person depended on his or her performance within the community, and on how much they contributed to social harmony. The counter-example of Celestina presents individuals acting exclusively for their own benefit, satisfying their desire for sex and wealth. Except for Melibea’s parents, Pleberio and Alisa, there are no passive characters in the story; all restlessly move through the city, day and night, to improve their lot. Calisto’s and Melibea’s shortcomings are evident if we compare their tragic ending with society’s expectation of them: to keep or, preferably, aggrandize the patrimony and prestige of their families through honorable behavior and advantageous marriage. Diego de Valera’s Tratado de providencia contra fortuna (Treatise About Foresight Against Bad Fortune, c. 1462) established a correlation between personal virtue and wealth when it stated that virtuous people cannot show their merits if they lack wealth. Calisto, who has enough means to show 29  Ibid., p. 143. 30  Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano, pp. 131–32. 31  Capelli, El humanismo romance, p. 161. 32  Ibid., p. 17.

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his noble origins, fails miserably in the task, and in his fall he pulls Melibea’s family down with him, as if exemplifying the implicit corollary of Valera’s idea that a person steeped in vice will squander the family fortune and reputation. In this sense, Celestina is the tragic story of the loss of the patrimonies of two families. It is a tragedy in the classical sense because its two main actors cannot envisage the unavoidable disaster that their servants easily predict from the beginning. We want to emphasize before closing that the didactic, (anti)exemplary character of Celestina is not achieved at the expense of its literary quality and dramatic intensity. Celestina was written during a period when some intellectuals, with the support of political power, were enlisted in a national campaign for peace and harmony for which citizen education was central. They understood that high-quality literature, written in vernacular, could contribute by offering the reader, in an appealing form, the valuable contents they had rediscovered in the classics. Celestina is the happy result of this attempt.

CHAPTER 7

Minerva’s Dog and Other Problematic Points in Celestina’s Text Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe Celestina has a very problematic textual history because several authors took part in its composition at different periods. Additionally, several passages, in part due to the convoluted process of creation, seem to be corrupt and/or are difficult to understand. Here I will examine both Celestina’s composition and some of the most controversial passages in the text. Regarding the complex and problematic textual history of Celestina, I wrote years ago that Fernando de Rojas did not find the first Act of Celestina—which most critics, following what the paratexts of the book indicate, believed—but a Terentian-style comedy that contained the first twelve acts of today’s Celestina.1 Departing from these acts, he completed the rest of the book as a comedia humanística: he included Acts 13–16 of the Comedia version and added the first scene of the play—the meeting of Calisto and Melibea in the garden—as well as the first onstage appearance of Pleberio and the characters of Sosia and Tristán. He also modified the other characters, created new spaces (garden and tower), and modified passages of the original twelve acts to adapt them to the tragic outcome he gave the story. He was also responsible for the twenty-one-act version. This second version includes so many changes that it is a new play in which the dramatic balance is superseded by a predominantly narrative structure. In the original plot, the play was an open Terence-type comedy in which it was not clear whether Celestina died at the end and the murderous servants Pármeno and Sempronio managed to escape. In this sense, we have to keep in mind that, for instance, the continuation of Celestina by Feliciano de Silva (1534) assumed that the old procuress had survived the wounds that the two men had infringed upon her. 1  Fernando Cantalapiedra, Pour une analyse sémiotique de La Célestine de F. de Rojas (thèse de III cycle, Université de Paris III, Sorbonne, 1978). See also this idea in my “La escena de la huerta-huerto,” in Literatura Hispánica. Reyes Católicos y descubrimiento, ed. Criado de Val (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1989), 317–27; and in Anonymous Author and Fernando de Rojas, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe (Reichenberger: Kassel, 2000), 2:661.

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Martín de Riquer points out that Rojas had completely changed the location of the first scene, moving it from a church to a garden. Riquer deduces that such changes prove that the true beginning of the story was missing or incomplete, although he does not believe that Rojas had altered what he found written in the manuscript with the proto-version.2 Additionally and along the same lines, Marciales notices that the opening scene does not match the remaining part of the first Act in style, because of which he considers that it was probably composed later by another person. Marciales assumes that the second scene in Calisto’s house has to be interpreted as taking place many days after the initial encounter between the young lovers.3 However, he considers that Rojas did not alter the original manuscript that he found. This manuscript, attributed to Cota, reached up to the second scene of the second Act; Rojas’s first editorial intervention would only take place in Act 3.4 Many years before, Castro Guisasola had advanced that the creation of the anonymous first author reached beyond the first Act since the same kind of Aristotelian and scholastic auctoritates are quoted in this part of the play.5 Ruiz Arzálluz has proved that these auctoritates come from a single florilegium of maxims, the Auctoritates Aristotelis, to which the author resorted nearly as frequently as the Index to Petrarch’s works.6 Antonio Sánchez Sánchez-Serrano believes that what the second author (not Rojas, but the “friend” mentioned in the paratexts) found was a happy-ending comedy, not divided into acts but written as continuous text, very different from today’s Celestina. This friend modified the text

2  Martín de Riquer, “Fernando de Rojas y el primer acto de La Celestina,” Revista de Filología Española 41 (1957): 371–95, pp. 389, 388, and 392. 3  Fernando de Rojas, Celestina. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Miguel Marciales (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 1:275 and 2:19. Also, Miguel Garci-Gómez, “El sueño de Calisto,” Celestinesca 9, no. 1 (1985): 11–22, and, later, Ricardo Castells, “El sueño de Celestina y la tradición celestinesca,” Celestinesca 14, no. 1 (1990): 17–39, defend that the initial scene is a dream of Calisto’s and that the events never really happened. 4  Marciales, ed., Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, 2:57. 5  Fernando Castro Guisasola, Observaciones sobre las fuentes literarias de La Celestina, Revista de Filología Española, Anejo V, 1924, p. 188. See also Riquer, “Fernando de Rojas y el primer acto de La Celestina,” p. 376. 6  Íñigo Ruiz Arzálluz, “El mundo intelectual del ‘antiguo autor’: Las auctoritates Aristotelis en la Celestina primitiva,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 76, no. 269 (1996): 265–84. For the interpolation of the Petrarchan sources, see Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, “Sentencias petrarquistas y adiciones a la Tragi-Comedia de Calisto y Melibea,” in Tras los pasos de La Celestina, ed. P. Botta, F. Cantalapiedra, K. Reichenberger, and J. T. Snow (Kessel: Reichenberger, 2001), 55–154.

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substantially, making a tragedy of it.7 Although following a different route, this critic agreed with my ideas mentioned above because the tragic turn takes place in Act 13. Years later, García Valdecasas published a related view of the process: he wrote that the original manuscript included fourteen acts,8 a thesis that is also defended by Antonio Bernaldo de Quirós.9 The next step in the critical evaluation of the complex process of Celestina’s creation was to question Rojas’s authorship. For instance, Jose Luis Canet considers that Rojas was merely one of the several people who took part in the composition of the play.10 An important moment in the recent history of Celestina criticism because of the interest it created was Charles B. Faulhaber’s publication in 1990 of the unpublished manuscript of the first Act of Celestina, which has come to be known as the manuscrito or Celestina de Palacio, because it was kept in the Biblioteca de Palacio in Madrid.11 It only contains eight folios, pages 93 to 100, and two are missing (the ones between f. 95 and 96 and between 97 and 98). It is composed by two different hands. The manuscript can be divided into two sections following these two different hands: folios 94–97, and folios 93, 98, 99, 7  Antonio Sánchez Sánchez-Serrano, Mensaje de La Celestina. Análisis de un proceso de comunicación diferida (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1988), pp. 545– 47. See also Antonio Sánchez Sánchez-Serrano and María Remedios Prieto de la Iglesia, Fernando de Rojas y La Celestina (Barcelona: Teide, 1991), p. 41, and recently, by the same authors, “Sobre la composición de La Celestina y su anónimo ‘auctor’,” Celestinesca 33 (2009): 143–71. In the same direction points José Antonio Bernaldo de Quirós, “La Celestina desde el punto de vista escénico. Consecuencias para la atribución de la autoría,” Lemir, no. 13 (2009): 97–108. 8  José Guillermo García Valdecasas, La adulteración de La Celestina (Madrid: Castalia, 2000). 9  José Antonio Bernaldo de Quirós, “Comentarios a la hipótesis de García Valdecasas sobre la gestación de La Celestina,” Espéculo, no. 30 (2005): 1–22 and “Sobre el papel de Rojas en la elaboración de La Celestina,” Lemir, no. 12 (2008): 325–39. 10  José Luis Canet Vallés, Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (Valencia: Prensa de la Universidad de Valencia, 2011), p. 19. See also Joseph T. Snow, “La problemática autoría de Celestina,” Incipit 25–26 (2005–2006): 537–61. Also, Víctor Infantes, “Los libros ‘traydos y viejos y algunos rotos’ que tuvo el bachiller Fernando de Rojas, nombrado autor de la obra llamada Celestina,” Bulletin Hispanique 100 (1998): 1–51. 11  Charles B. Faulhaber, “Celestina de Palacio: Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS 1520,” Celestinesca 14 (1990): 3–39. Many other works have been published about this manuscript. Among them, also by Faulhaber, is “Celestina de Palacio: Rojas’ Holograph Manuscript,” Celestinesca 15, no. 1 (1991): 3–52. Also Juan Carlos Conde, “El manuscrito II1520 de la Biblioteca de Palacio y La Celestina: Balance y estado de la cuestión,” in Cinco siglos de Celestina: Aportaciones interpretativas, ed. R. Beltrán and J. L. Canet (Universidad de Valencia, 1997), 161–85.

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and 100. Additionally, the second hand corrects many points of the text written by the first one. The interest of this manuscript is that it contains many readings that diverge from the corresponding passages of the printed early versions of Celestina.12 The publication of the manuscript has opened more questions than it has resolved. In general, the critics’ views range between seeing in it the papers that Rojas claimed to have found, even Rojas’s holograph with revision, to seeing it as one of the first imitations of Celestina. Personally, I do not think that the manuscript is Rojas’s holograph, the primitive papers found, or an imitation. My opinion rests upon my belief that the model from which its text was copied went much further than the end of the first Act. It can be seen, for instance, in the passage “if she passes by the dogs, they bark, when she walks, the crickets follow her” (si pasa por los’ perros. Aquello suena sus ladrjdos […] quando camjna los’ grillos’ la sigen) (f. 99r).13 The reference to the crickets is not in the printed editions of Celestina for this passage, but it shows up in a later passage in Act 6: “You bet, so no one rapes the young damsel! You can go with her, Sempronio. She’s afraid of the crickets that sing in the dark” (p. 70) (porque no fuercen a la niña […] Tú irás con ella, Sempronio, que ha temor de los grillos que canta con lo escuro).14 This inclusion would not have been possible if the copyist had not had access to the complete text of the book.15 Let’s now use the testimony of Celestina de Palacio in one of the most controversial passages of the first Act, the one in which the unknown doctors Eras and Crato are mentioned. In the printed versions, this difficult passage reads: “If those doctors of old, Galen and Crato, came back now, they’d soon diagnose my illness! I beg the heavens to take pity on me and encourage her father, Pleberio, not to send my spirit, now wandering and terminally sick, to join the 12  For a detailed account of the many readings that differ from the printed edtion, see Patrizia Botta, “El texto en movimiento (de la Celestina de Palacio a la Celestina posterior),” in Cinco siglos de Celestina: Aportaciones interpretativas, pp. 143–45, 148–57. 13  My translation. “No tiene más corazón que un grillo,” says an old proverb, the anonymous Adagios, proverbios o sentencias varias (en romance y en latín), manuscript, c. 1501 and 1600, signature Mss. 4502, Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, f. 18. 14  The Spanish quotes of the text are from the Celestina de Palacio by folio number. I quote other passages of Celestina by act number in Roman numerals and passage numbers following my edition, Anónimo and Fernando de Rojas, TragiComedia de Calisto y Melibea (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000), which follows the same system established in Miguel Marciales’ edition, Celestina. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. The English quotes of Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009). 15  There are other cases of similar inclusions; see Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, “Fue tanto breve quanto muy sutil: Los paratextos de La Celestina,” eHumanista 18 (2011): 20–78.

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wretched souls of Piramis and hapless Thisbe!” (p. 2) (¡O! ¡si viniessedes agora Eras y Crato, médicos, sentiríades mi mal ¡O piedad de silencio, inspira en el plebérico coraçón, porque sin esperança de salud no embíe el espíritu perdido con el desastrado Píramo y de la desdichada Tisbe!).16 This passage is curiously missing in Celestina de Palacio, which reads: “My disappointment doesn’t deserve to see the light. Death that gives relief to sorrow is so welcome. Sem. What are you talking about, master?” (p. 2) (mis tristes pensamjentos’ non son dignos’ de luz. o bien aventurada muerte aquella que desead(j)a . alos Aflitos viene . S. que cosa es). The only exceptions are a correction by the hand of the second copyist that adds “sentirias mi mal / o piedad de seleuco.” Where the sign is, the reference to the two doctors is missing. Were these names missing in the model that the first copyist followed or were they illegible, as the many problems that printed editions had with the same paragraph indicate? Later printed editions reconstructed the corrupted passage to read: “If that doctor of old Erasistarto came back now, he would soon diagnose my illness! O the piety of Seleucus” (O si viniéssedes agora Erasístrato, médico sentirías mi mal / o piedad de Seleuco). The reference to the doctors is part of a well-known anecdote narrated in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives,17 in which emperor Seleucus’s son is lovesick for his stepmother Stratonice. The sickness is diagnosed and cured by the famous doctor Erasistratus, which is later corrupted in the printed copies into the nonsensical “Eras y Crato.” In any case, including this anecdote relies on a series of false parallelisms in the text of Celestina: Melibea is not Calisto’s stepmother or Pleberio his father. Furthermore, the expression “plebérico corazón” of the printed editions does not make much sense, especially because the character of Pleberio has not yet been introduced in the story. McGrady wrote that Rojas altered the reference to Erasistratus, erased all references to a cure, and entered the reference to Pyramus and Thisbe to anticipate the ominous ending of the play.18 In Celestina comentada, a sixteenth-century anonymous commentary on the play, it is written that “plebérico corazón” refers to “in the heart of Pleberio, father of Melibea, and [Calisto] may be 16  This translation follows some printed editions that replace the name of Eras with Galen, and ignores the word “silencio.” 17  Plutarco, Vidas paralelas, trans. de Alfonso de Palencia, chap. 38, Vida de Demetrio (Sevilla, 1491), f. 242v. On the tradition and evolution of this story, see Bienvenido Morros, “La difusión de un diagnóstico de amor desde la antigüedad a la época moderna,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 79 (1999): 93–150. 18  Donald McGrady, “The Studies on the Text of the Celestina,” Romance Philology 48 (1994): 1–21.

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wishing that he gives him his daughter [in marriage]” (en el coraçón de Pleberio padre de Melibea e puédelo dessear para que le diesse a su hija Melibea).19 Cejador y Frauca proposed that the expression means Melibea’s heart, since she is Pleberio’s daughter after all. Garci-Gómez considers the expression to be a misreading for “plebeian heart” (plebeyo corazón) and Fernández Rivera proposes “plethoric heart” (pletórico corazón).20 But, in my opinion, we can find the solution within the text of the play itself. In VI.34, Calisto uses the suffix “-ico” when talking about the story of Dido and Aeneas, and uses “Ascanica forma” to refer to how Venus disguised Cupid in the shape of Ascanius to make Dido fall in love with Aeneas. The passage presents many symmetries with the problematic passage: the two deal with lovesickness and death, and the two include references to the tragic stories of antiquity, those of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the Tuscan soothsayer Adelecta, mentioned by Petrarch. In the new passage, Celestina plays the healing role of Erasistratus. Because of these similarities, I believe that this tirade of loci communes in the first Act, absent in the first redaction of Celestina de Palacio, was added later, inspired by the above-mentioned passage in Act 6. Its later addition would explain the many textual problems it raises. Another crux or problematic passage in the text of Celestina in which the testimony of Celestina de Palacio can help, although it does not solve the problem, is in the dialogue of Pármeno and Sempronio in Act 1: C. Please repeat what you just muttered before going on. S. I said you’re more hot-blooded than Nimrod or Alexander. You’re so desperate to get a woman, many of whose kind have frolicked with lusty muleteers and coarse beasts. Or did you never read about Pasiphaë romping with her bull or Minerva dallying with a dog? C. Don’t believe such cheap gossip. P. And was what your grandma did with a monkey all gossip too? And what your grandpa did to it with his knife? C. Blast this foolish nonsense you’re coming out with! (p. 6) (CALISTO. ¡Maldito sea este necio, y qué porradas dize! SEMPRONIO. [41] Dixe que tú, que 19   Celestina comentada, ed. Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernández Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2002), p. 11, gloss 10 (my translation). 20   La Celestina, ed. Julio Cejador y Frauca (Madrid: Ediciones de La Lectura, 1913), 1:36; Miguel Garci-Gómez, “Sobre el plebérico coraçón de Calisto y la razón de Pleberio,” Hispania 66 (1983): 201–7; Enrique Fernández Rivera, “El plebérico corazón, Erasístrato y la plétora,” Celestinesca 39 (2009): 71–85.

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tienes más coraçón que Nembrot ni Alexandre, desesperas de alcançar una muger; muchas de las quales, en grandes estados constituýdas, se sometieron a los pechos y ressollos de viles azemileros, y otras a brutos animales. [42] ¿No has leýdo de Pasife con el toro, de Minerva con el can? CALISTO. No lo creo, hablillas son. SEMPRONIO. Lo de tu abuela con el ximio, ¿fablilla fue? Testigo es el cuchillo de tu abuelo). Unfortunately, Celestina de Palacio is missing the folio in which part of the passage would be included and only contains the following fragment: se sometieron Alos pech(~)os y Resoll[*os] de viles’ y (^tan pres’tes’) [^canpestres] azemjleros’ y algunas alas’ brutas’ Anjmaljas’ . no as leydo de pas’ypa conel to[*ro] y mjreua conel can . (^S). C. no lo creo habljllas’ s’o[*n] . S . lo de tu aguela conel xjmjo fue habljlla tes[*tigo] es el cuch(~)illo de tu Aguelo caljsto . c . maldito [*sea] este nec’io que porradas’ dize The hand of the corrector in Celestina de Palacio changes the nonsensical “tan prestes’ ” into “canpestres” (rural), but the change does not help much in understanding the passage. The anecdote of Queen Pasiphae falling in love and copulating with the bull is well known since antiquity and has been reflected in many sources. However, the references to Minerva doing something similar with a dog, and Calisto’s grandmother with a monkey, and Calisto’s grandfather and his knife are very obscure and difficult to interpret. Several explanations exist for the phrase “lo de tu abuela con el ximio”: connections to cases of bestiality in literature, interracial sexual relations (Jewish, converso, or black), popular sentences, typo for “eximio” (nobleman), a simple nonsensical joke or insult, etc.21 For the “Minerva con el can,” several solutions have been advanced. I am summarizing them in the following table:

21  Otis H. Green, “ ‘Lo de tu abuela con el ximio’ (Celestina, auto I),” Hispanic Review 24, no. 1 (1956): 1–12; Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H. Silverman, “Algo más sobre ‘Lo de tu abuela con el ximio’ (La Celestina, I): Antonio de Torquemada y Lope de Vega,” Papeles de Son Armadans, no. 205 (1973): 11–18; Samuel G. Armistead, James T. Monroe, and Joseph H. Silverman, “Was Calixto’s Grandmother a Nymphomaniac Mamlūk Princess?: A Footnote on ‘Lo de tu abuela con el ximio’,” eHumanista 14 (2010): 1–23.

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Minerva con el can

1) Minerva with Vulcan(o) 2) Intended mistake of an illiterate servant 3) Minerva’s servant Glauca with a dog 4) Mistake for “mi nuera” (daughter-in-law) with a dog 5) Minos with the dog [synecdoche for Scylla] 6) Semiramis with the horse

Otis H. Greena B. Bussell Thompsonb Miguel Marcialesc Isabel Lozano-Renieblasd Alberto Blecuae

a Otis H. Green, “Minerva con el can,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1953): 470–74. b B. Bussell Thompson, “Misogyny and Misprint in La Celestina, Acto I,” Celestinesca 1, no. 2 (1977): 21–28. c Marciales in his edition of Celestina, I:112–15 and II:25. d Isabel Lozano-Renieblas, “Minerva con el can,” Celestinesca 15 no. 1 (1991): 75–78. e Alberto Blecua, “Minerva con el can o los falsos problemas filológicos,” Revista de Literatura Medieval 14 (2002):37–46.

The correction to “Vulcan” does not match the tone of the passage since there is no reference to bestiality in his legends. The second one is possible, but not likely. The third proposal makes the passage even more complex. The fourth includes a family connection that is never used in the play. The fifth changes the gender of the sinner and implies many other changes because Scylla’s dogs were several. Proposal six changes everything in the text in a radical manner that is difficult to justify. The solution, if it is ever to be found, has to be simpler. An analysis of the scene and its context may help. Sempronio is applying a therapy against his lovesickness through music, misogyny, and laughter. A parallel construction results: 1st part of Sempronio’s intervention

other women coarse beast

many women lusty muleeter 2nd part of Sempronio’s intervention

gossip Pasiphae, Minerva bull, dog

no gossip: nonsense grandmother monkey

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Minerva, an example of virginal virtue, is, among other things, a healing deity and the protector of the quintessentially female tasks of spinning and dealing with wool and dye, which matches some of the offices of Celestina. Furthermore, we are told that her house is located in the district where the dyers live. This humanization of Minerva because of her association with humble tasks pushes her outside of the mythological realm and moves her toward the human realm, toward the grandmother mentioned in Sempronio’s next phrase. This displacement leads us toward the famous debate between Demades and Demosthenes narrated by Plutarch: When Demades said, ‘Demosthenes teach me! So might the sow teach Minerva!’ He replied: Was it the same Minerva who was recently found playing the harlot in Collytus? (Algunas vezes usava de burlas. Como le acaesció quando dixo Démades: ‘De Demósthenes, la puerca se iura por Minerva.’ Dixo Demósthenes: ‘Esta Minerva agora fue tomada en adulterio [en Colito]’).22 The Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum includes sayings that compare Athena or Minerva to a cat, and a pig foolishly competing with her, expressed by the sentence “A pig is teaching Minerva” (Minervam sus docet), as well as references to Minerva having a (monstrous) child, i.e., a dog, a pig, or cat that pretends to be wise.23 Sempronio would be following Demosthenes’s comic pattern, referring to her as an adulterous woman. This oxymoron of referring to the virgin goddess as an adulteress who practices bestiality results in a joke that facilitates the transition between Pasiphae and Calisto’s grandmother. Here we have to keep in mind that Demosthenes was the illegitimate son of a knife maker also called Demosthenes.24 This connection takes us to the knife of Calisto’s grandfather. Furthermore, the term “monkey” was used by Demosthenes and his opponents as an insult that implied being unfaithful, tricky, a thief, which explains the reference to the grandmother and the monkey. The famous conflict between Demosthenes and Alexander the Great connects with the beginning of the passage “Yet another Nimrod, another Alexander the 22   Plutarch’s Lives, ed. A. H. Clough (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1882), p. 12. 23  V. J. Herrero Llorente, Diccionario de frases y expresiones latinas (Madrid: Gredos, 1992), p. 262. See also Enrique Benítez Rodríguez, “Atenea en el Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum,” Paremia, no. 7 (1998): 121–28. 24  Cf. Virginia Muñoz Llamosas, “Insultos e invectiva entre Demóstenes y Esquines,” Minerva 21 (2008): 33–49.

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Great” (p. 6) (tú, que tienes más coraçón que Nembrot ni Alexandre). Nimrod is the grandson of Cam, which was pronounced and spelled “Can” (dog) at the time. Sometimes, references were made exploiting this phonetic similarity, as Lobera et al. have noticed in El caballero Cifar: The old stories say that the brave Nembrot, great grand Child of Noah, was the first king in the world, and Christians called him Nino. […] And this lineage of Can [sic], Noah’s son, […] who had intercourse with his wife in the ark, where he had a son who was called Cus, whose son was King Nembrot; and Noah damned Can for the possessions of this world. And the Jews write in another place that the dog [can] was damned because he had intercourse with the bitch in the ark. […] And because of this King Nembrot, his descendant, sinned against God, and tried to simulate the roots of this grandfather, from which he descended (E fallase por las estorias antiguas que Nimbros el valiente, visnieto de Noe, fue el primero rey del mundo, e llamanuanle los cristianos Nino. […] E este linaje de Can, fijo de Noe, […] que yogo con su muger en el arca, onde ouo vn fijo a que dixeron Cus, cuyo fijo fue este rey Nimbrot; e maldixo estonçe [Noé] Can en los bienes temporales. E otrosy dizen los judios que fue maldicho el can porque yogo con la cadiella en el arca. […] E porende este rey Nimbrot que fue su nieto, fue malo contra Dios, e quiso semejar a la rays de su auuelo Can, onde veniera).25 The transition from the dog to the monkey, i.e., from the lack of shame to lechery, implies a semantic movement from the damned Can or Cam to the “vile muleteer” (vil acemilero). A similar transition from vile to peasant can be traced in El Libro de Buen Amor, which states that the female wolves (lupae in Latin) always choose the ugliest wolf.26 In other words, the lupa or prostitute is impregnated by the lowly man, for which the term acemilero is a synonym. Similar connections between monkey and man of no value are welldocumented in proverbs of the period:

25  Fernando de Rojas and “Antiguo Autor,” La Celestina, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Guillermo Serés, Francisco J. Lobera, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Carlos Mota, Iñigo Ruiz Arzálluz, and Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000), p. 383. The quotation is taken from Libro del Caballero Zifar, ed. Cristina González (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), pp. 95–96, my translation. 26  Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, ed. Alberto Blecua (Madrid: Cátedra, 1992), p. 107.

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– Cosmetics do not change the head of the donkey or the face of the female monkey (No presta la lexía en la kabeza del asno i kara de la ximia). (Correas, p. 258) – To serve as a Moor, to climb as a monkey (Servir komo moro, medrar komo mono). (Correas, p. 275) – He who wants to be safe in this world needs to have the eyes of a falcon, the ears of a donkey, the face of a monkey, the mouth of pig, the back of camel, and the legs of a deer. The mouth of a pig to eat anything, and the stomach to swallow and digest words and facts with the resistance of a camel, the other images are clear enough (Kien por el mundo kiere andar salvo [h]a menester oxos de halkón i orejas de asno, kara de ximio, boka de puerko, espaldas de kamello i piernas de ziervo. / La boka de puerko para comer de todo, i estómago para engullir i soportar dichos i hechos kon espaldas de kamello: lo demás es klaro). (Correas, p. 408)27 The confirmation that the “ximio” is the “acemilero” can be found in the much later passage of Celestina in which Sosia is treated as such: ELICIA. You clever lass! Good riddance on cue, the donkey deserves it for letting his secret out of the bag! AREÚSA. Off you go, muleteer! You so fancy yourself! You’ve got it coming, you rascal) (p. 173) (ELICIA. [Aparte, escondida.] ¡Tiénente, don handrajoso! ¡No es más menester! ¡Maldito sea el que en manos de tal azemilero se confía! ¡Qué desgoznarse haze el badajo! (XVIIT.31) AREÚSA. ¡Allá yrás, azemilero! ¡Muy ufano vas, por tu vida! [34] Pues, toma para tu ojo, vellaco). (XVIIT.33–34) And Sosia confirms his lowliness later: I swear by this dangerous path we now tread, brother, that it was pure bliss. Two or three times I was within an inch of throwing myself on her, but I was too embarrassed when I saw she was so beautiful and smart and I was in my usual threadbare old cape. She was giving off the sweetest, strongest smell of musk, and I stank of the dung still sticking to my shoes (p. 179) (Pero yo te juro por el peligroso camino en que vamos, hermano, y assí goze de mí, que estuve dos o tres vezes por me arremeter a ella, sino que me empachava la vergüença de verla tan hermosa y arreada y 27  Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), ed. Louis Combet (Madrid: Castalia, 2000).

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a mí con una capa vieja ratonada. Echava de sí en bulliendo un olor de almizque; yo hedía al estiércol que llevava dentro de los çapatos). (XIXT.3) Sosia is a dimwitted, dirty, poorly dressed, stinking muleteer who is thinking of doing with Areúsa what the monkey did with Calisto’s grandmother. The sentence “el cuchillo de tu abuelo Calisto” has been interpreted in different ways: “cuchillo” as a misreading for “cuclillo”;28 as a reference to cuckoldry (the handle of a knife was usually made from horn, the traditional symbol of cuckoldry);29 as an erotic symbol (knife as penis and the implied sheath as vagina);30 as a reference to an oriental tale about the exchange of favors according to the age of a woman, who, when she is young, receives favors but when is old, has to give them;31 and as a parody of the vengeance of honor.32 I think that the knife has to be understood as a witness of the adultery committed by Calisto’s grandmother, and the grandfather as a cuckold. In medieval literature the phrase “cuchillo de …” is commonly used in the sense of rage, revenge, pain, spirit, argumentation, and justice in sentences such as “el rey es el cuchillo de los traidores” (the king is the knife or avenger of traitors).33 Therefore, here the knife acts as the witness, the avenger, the judge, and the executer or executioner of revenge. It is not a coincidence that this grandfather, maker of knives, as in the joke about Minerva, was also named Calisto in Celestina de Palacio. Concurrently, the character of Centurio in the play follows the same habit of having the same name as his grandfather: That’s why they called my grandfather Centurio, my father Centurio, and I’m a Centurio as well (p. 177) (Por ella [la espada] le dieron Centurio por nombre a mi abuelo, y Centurio se llamó mi padre, y Centurio me llamo yo). (XVIIIT.15)

28  Marciales, ed., Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, 2:25. 29  Lobera et al. eds., La Celestina, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, by Fernando de Rojas y Antiguo Autor, p. 383. 30  Garci-Gómez, “Sobre el plebérico coraçón de Calisto y la razón de Pleberio,” Hispania 66 (1983): 201–7. 31  Henry N. Bershas, “Testigo es el cuchillo de tu abuelo (Celestina I),” Celestinesca 2, no. 1 (1978): 7–11. 32  Françoise Vigier, “Quelques réflexions sur le lignage, la parenté et la famille dans la ‘celestinesque’ ” in Autour des parentés en Espagne aux xviè et xviiè siècles. Histoire, mythe et littérature, ed. A. Redondo (Paris: La Sorbonne, 1987), 157–74. 33  See a similar use in Marqués de Santillana, Comedieta de Ponza, sonetos, serranillas y otras obras, ed. R. Rohland de Langbehn and V. Beltrán (Barcelona: Crítica, 1997), p. 3.

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And the same naming habits applied in the case of Sosia: If it’s pedigree, I reckon she knows your name’s Sosia, that your father was a Sosia, and that he was born and brought up in a village breaking clods of earth with a hoe, which is more in your line than being a lover (p. 180) (Si por hombre de linaje, ya sabrá que te llaman Sosia, y a tu padre llamaron Sosia, nascido y criado en una aldea, quebrando terrones con un arado, para lo qual eres tú más dispuesto que para enamorado). (XIXT.6) These cases confirm the readings of Celestina de Palacio, since the vile muleteer resounds of Sosia’s grandfather breaking up clods of earth. Similarly, Centurio’s face is scarred by the wound of a knife (“acuchillado” in Spanish), as is Celestina’s, and Calisto’s grandmother most likely had a similar wound, because, according to Sempronio, she was a woman not that different from Elicia’s grandmother, who had taught Celestina her trade, as well as Claudina, Pármeno’s mother, who was as much a bawd, “tan puta vieja” (I.137), as Celestina. According to Calisto (the grandson), Sempronio is talking nonsense. However, in the printed versions of Celestina, the text has been sanitized: the name of the grandfather (also Calisto) has been removed, as well as Sempronio’s rebuttal of the accusation of talking nonsense (“no se s’y so neçio n[…]”). The censorship is even more noticeable in what seems to be an addition of the early printed editions. Celestina de Palacio only contains the following: Take advice from Seneca and read what a low opinion he has of them. Listen to Aristotle; think Bernardo. Gentiles, Jews, Christians and Moors all agree on this at least […]. But who could ever find time to recount the misdeeds of the other sort, their lies, flightiness, simpering ways, tempers and temerity? They dare to do whatever enters their heads without pausing for a moment’s thought (p. 7) (consejate con seneca & veras enque las tiene y escuch(~)a all aristotil mjra / al bernaldo gentiles’ judios xpistianos moros’ todos enesta [*con]- cordia estan 34 qujen te contaria sus mentiras s’u[*s cam]bios sus trafagos’ s’us hurtos su ljviandad s[*us] lagrimjllas s’us’ altercaçiones’ sus’ os’adias que […] lo que piens’an osan s’y pueden. . . . . . . . . .  [*pero lo dicho y lo que dellas dixere no te] […]). (f. 96r) 34  The crosses refer to a marginal annotation in Celestina de Palacio.

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However, the printed editions expand the passage considerably: Take advice from Seneca and read what a low opinion he has of them. Listen to Aristotle; think Bernardo. Gentiles, Jews, Christians and Moors all agree on this at least. However, don’t make the mistake of assuming what they said applies to all women because there were and still are many saintly, virtuous and remarkable exemplars of the species. Their shining characters fly in the face of such general vituperation. But who could ever find time to recount the misdeeds of the other sort, their lies, flightiness, simpering ways, tempers and temerity? They dare to do whatever enters their heads without pausing for a moment’s thought (p. 7) (Conséjate con Séneca y verás en que las tiene. Escucha al Aristóteles, mira a Bernardo. Gentiles, judíos, cristianos y moros, todos en esta concordia están. [Pero lo dicho y lo que dellas dixere, no te; contezca error de tomarlo en común (45) que muchas ovo y ay santas, virtuosas, y notables, cuya resplandeciente corona quita el general vituperio . Pero destas otras,] ¿quién te contaría sus mentiras, sus tráfagos, sus cambios, su liviandad, sus lagrimillas, sus alteraciones, sus osadías? Que todo lo que piensan, osan sin deliberar). (46) The amount of text missing in Celestina de Palacio is so much that its omission cannot be a mere mistake on the part of the copyist. Also, the new lines added in the printed versions go against the grain of the misogynistic tone of Sempronio’s speech and the therapeutic thrust to heal lovesick Calisto. Furthermore, Celestina de Palacio presents women’s vices arranged in a completely different order. The negative characterization of husbands as cuckolds is behind another controversial passage in Celestina for which Celestina de Palacio can be surmised. In Act 1, Celestina’s husband is characterized in supposedly derogatory terms: Pármeno. Her husband was such an eater of boiled eggs! What else would you expect than for one rolling stone to hit another to the tune of filthy old whore! Calisto. So how come you know her? (my translation) (P[ármeno]: que encomendador su marido de huevos’ asados’. que quieres’ mas’, si no que si una piedra topa con otra, luego suena puta vieja C[alisto]: y tu commo la conoçes). (f. 99v)

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While the printed tradition reads: Pármeno. Her husband was such an eater of boiled eggs! What else would you expect than for one rolling stone to hit another to the tune of filthy old whore! Calisto. So how come you know her and all there is to know about her, Pármeno? (my translation) (PÁRMENO. O, ‘¡qué comedor de huevos assados era su marido’! ¿Qué quieres más, sino que si una piedra topa con otra, luego suena: “¡puta vieja!”? CALISTO. Y tú, ¿cómo lo sabes y la conosces?) (I.92) Although most critics agree that the reference to boiled eggs is a convoluted reference to cuckoldry, they do not agree on the details. It is not clear if the correct text should be “comedor” (eater), “comendador,” or “encomendador” (commander).35 Some critics interpret it as a racial insult since eating boiled eggs is connected with a Jewish custom during the bereavement of the deceased.36 Others see in it a sexual remedy37 or an aphrodisiac,38 and some give it a genital interpretation.39 In my opinion, it is clear that Celestina’s husband is here referred to as a cuckold. When a sentence becomes a saying or idiom, it often loses the original semantic basis of its literal meaning and develops a strong metaphorical one that is two or three degrees removed from the original meaning. The scar on Celestina’s face reveals that her husband, like Calisto’s grandfather, was prone to wrath. In the humoral medicine of the 35  Joseph E. Gillet, “Comedor de huevos (?), Celestina, auto I,” Hispanic Review 24 (1956): 144–47; Enrique J. Fernández Rivera, “ ‘Huevos asados’: Nota marginal,” Celestinesca 17, no. 1 (1993): 57–60; Juan M. Escudero, “La expresión ‘comedor / encomendador de huevos asados’ en La Celestina,” Rivista di Filología e Letterature Ispaniche, no. 1 (1998): 197–201. 36  Peter B. Goldman, “A new interpretation of ‘comedor de huevos asados’ (La Celestina, aucto I),” Romanische Forschunge 77 (1965): 363–67. 37  Gillet, “Comedor de huevos,” p. 145. 38   Miguel Garci-Gómez, “ ‘Huevos asados’: Afrodisíaco para el marido de Celestina,” Celestinesca 5 (1981): 23–34; Kathleen Kish and Ursula Ritzenhoff, “On Translating ‘huevos asados’: Clues from Christof Wirsung,” Celestinesca 2 (1981): 19–31; Louise O. Vasvari Fainberg, “ ‘¡O, qué comedor de huevos assados era su marido!’: Further Glosses on the Vocabulary of Celestina, IV,” in ‘La pluma es la lengua del alma’. Ensayos en honor de E. Michael Gerli, ed. José Manuel Hidalgo (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2011), 367–86. 39  Marciales, ed., Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, 2:35. For a recent summary of the issue, see José Antonio Torregrosa Díaz, “Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Anotaciones críticas y textuales y versión modernizada” (PhD diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2015), pp. 130–32.

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period, the person prone to rage was supposed to be of a dry constitution, and the element associated with this condition was fire, which made his blood boil easily. Several other passages in which the text of Celestina is not clear and/or open to interpretation exist in which its complex textual history may be a factor. Together with the one I have examined, I have to consider all these passages to be part of Celestina’s nature as a text that was born between two worlds, the old and the modern, the manuscript tradition and the printing press, anonymity and the singular author. In any case, these difficulties in reading the text do not detract from the book’s character of masterpiece. Furthermore, they help to remind us of its nature as a pivotal text in the history of literature.

CHAPTER 8

Calisto and Leriano in Love Ivy A. Corfis Critics have acknowledged that Celestina and the sentimental romances, especially Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor, share common traits.1 Similarities are evident: e.g., young lovers, courtly love, and failed or tragic endings to the affair. Many differences are also apparent: rhetorical style and allegory, to name a few. It is not the purpose of this essay to discuss whether the sentimental texts form a unified genre, or whether the terms “romance,” “novel,” or even “sentimental” describe such works. Nor will this study assume that Cárcel de amor is representative of the sentimental texts or that any parallel between Celestina and Cárcel de amor applies to other romances. Those are considerations beyond the scope of this essay. It is sufficient to acknowledge that comparison of the two books is appropriate given that San Pedro’s work 1  Points of contact between the romances and Celestina may be formal or thematic. See, for example, Peter G. Earle, “Love Concepts in La cárcel de amor and La Celestina,” Hispania 39, no. 1 (1956): 92–96; Edwin J. Webber, “The Celestina as an arte de amores,” Modern Philology 55, no. 3 (1958): 145–53; Keith Whinnom’s introduction to his edition and translation, Prison of Love (1492) together with the Continuation by Nicolás Núñez (1496) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979), esp. p. xxvii; Dorothy Sherman Severin, Tragicomedy and Novelistic Discourse in Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Religious Parody and the Spanish Sentimental Romance (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2005); and Yolanda Iglesias, Una nueva mirada a la parodia de la novela sentimental en La Celestina (Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2009), to mention only a few. On parody, see note 6 below. In this study I will refer to the “author” or “Rojas” without entering into who was/were or how many or at what stage of composition any given author(s) participated in the writing of the text, and accept that Rojas contributed in some way to the work. English translations of Cárcel de amor refer to Whinnom’s Prison of Love. Spanish quotations and references refer to Diego de San Pedro, Cárcel de amor, ed. Keith Whinnom, in Obras completas, vol. 2 (Madrid: Castalia, 1971). Quotations and references to Celestina in Spanish refer to Fernando de Rojas, Comedia o tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Peter E. Russell (Madrid: Castalia, 1991); and in English, to Mack Hendricks Singleton’s translation of Celestina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). General references to the works refer to the original texts, with page numbers from the Spanish editions. When English translations are quoted, not accompanied by the Spanish original, the page number of the Spanish original is given first, followed by a semicolon and the page number of the English translation. I want to thank Professor Pablo Ancos for reading a draft of this article; responsibility for content is mine alone.

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was well known to the late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century reading public and that, while there are similarities between Celestina and the romances in general, there is indication that the Celestina author knew Cárcel de amor.2 Examples of reminiscences or borrowings are found in Pármeno’s words in Act 2 (274–75); in Melibea and Celestina’s conversation in Act 4 (315, 319, 320); in Celestina’s speech in Act 10 (438); in Melibea’s remark to Calisto in Act 14 after their first night of love (502–03); in Melibea’s monologue in Act 20 (586); and finally in Pleberio’s lament in Act 21 (595).3 In addition, we know from Rojas’s library inventory, made after his death in 1541, that he owned a copy of Cárcel de amor.4 Thus, beyond similarities of form and style, which reflect a broader literary canvas, there is evidence that Cárcel de amor was specifically on the mind and in the memory of Celestina’s author.

2  On popularity of the work, see, for example, Whinnom’s Prison of Love, pp. vii–ix, and his “The Problem of the ‘Best-seller’ in Spanish Golden-Age Literature,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 57 (1980): 189–98. In her monumental study, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel compared Cárcel de amor and Celestina, citing the work of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (Orígenes de la novela, vol. 3, 2nd ed. [Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1962], esp. pp. 351–52). She observed that Cárcel de amor and Celestina are most similar in their representation of the male protagonist, who lacks personal action to fulfill his love yet dedicates his life to it, contemplating himself in love (“mirarse amar,” La originalidad artística de La Celestina [Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1962], p. 393). 3  F. Castro Guisasola, Observaciones sobre las fuentes literarias de La Celestina (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1973), pp. 183–85, documents reminiscences of Cárcel de amor in Celestina. I here cite only one in full, to which I will refer later in this article. In Act 4, Melibea says to Celestina: “Truly, if I were not mindful of my honor, and if I did not hesitate to publish his rashness and arrogance, I would see to it that your life and your words ceased at the very same instant” (Por cierto, si no mirasse a mi honestidad, y por no publicar su osadía desse atrevido, yo te fiziera, malvada, que tu razón y vida acabaran en un tiempo) (80; 315), echoing what Laureola says to the Auctor: “Had you been of Macedonia and not of Spain, your discourse and your life would have ended together” (Si como eres d’España fueras de Macedonia, tu razonamiento y tu vida acabaran a un tienpo) (14–15; 96). Severin cites further examples with full citations in Tragicomedy, pp. 29–30, and dedicates a chapter to a comparison of Pleberio’s and Leriano’s mother’s laments (ibid., pp. 105–15); see also her “From the Lamentations of Diego de San Pedro to Pleberio’s Lament,” in The Age of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1516. Literary Studies in Memory of Keith Whinnom, ed. Alan Deyermond and Ian Macpherson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 178–84. See also Luis Miguel Vicente, “El lamento de Pleberio: Contraste y parecido con dos lamentos en Cárcel de amor,” Celestinesca 12, no. 1 (1988): 35–43. 4  Fernando del Valle Lersundi, “Testamento de Fernando de Rojas,” Revista de Filología Española 16 (1929): 366–88, esp. p. 382.

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Courtly love, as J. M. Aguirre shows in his 1962 essay, is present and important in Celestina, as it is in the sentimental romances.5 However, while Aguirre argues that Calisto is a courtly lover, albeit a tragic one, with the work of Alan D. Deyermond and June Hall Martin, among others, the idea of Calisto as courtly has been rethought, with a focus instead on the foolish and parodic elements of his tragic-comic character.6 Those aspects, however, do not negate the importance of other traits: his lineage, lovesickness, humoral temperament, ineptitude, egotism, lack of self-confidence and reliance on others to court Melibea, sexual desire, generosity, and paradoxical, if not anti-heroic, representation.7 5  J. M. Aguirre, Calisto y Melibea, amantes cortesanos (Zaragoza: Almenara, 1962). 6  On parody of the courtly lover, see Alan D. Deyermond, “The Text-Book Mishandled: Andreas Capellanus and the Opening Scene of La Celestina,” Neophilologus 45 (1961): 218–21; June Hall Martin, Love’s Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the Courtly Lover (London: Tamesis, 1972), pp. 71–134; John Devlin, The Celestina: A Parody of Courtly Love. Toward a Realistic Interpretation of the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Madrid: Anaya-Las Américas, 1971); Gay Abatte, “The Celestina as a Parody of Courtly Love,” Ariel 3 (1974): 29–32; Ivy A. Corfis, “Celestina and the Conflict of Ovidian and Courtly Love,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 73, no. 4 (1996): 395–417. Of particular note, Severin discusses Calisto as parody but does not view Melibea in quite the same light (“La parodia del amor cortés en La Celestina,” Edad de Oro 3 [1984]: 275–79, and her Tragicomedy and Religious Parody). Eukene Lacarra Lanz understands parody in Celestina more broadly, extending it to sentimental fiction in general and including Melibea in her discussion (“La parodia de la ficción sentimental,” Celestinesca 13, no. 1 [1989]: 11–29). Regula Rohland de Langbehn sees the connection with the sentimental genre but notes that Calisto is more than parody; he is anti-courtly in many ways (“La parodia en la novela castellana del siglo XV y en la Celestina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86 [2009]: 86–94). Iglesias concludes that there is no clear evidence of parody of courtly love prior to Celestina, which parodies the sentimental genre overall, creating something new and complex, criticizing sentimental texts as well as entertaining its readers (Una nueva mirada, see esp. pp. 69–76). Ricardo Castells refutes the idea of parody if the first scene is a dream, in which case Calisto’s passion is inside his mind, infected by lovesickness, and the lover generally follows De Amore’s advice (“Calisto and the Imputed Parody of Courtly Love in Celestina,” Journal of Hispanic Philology 15, no. 3 [1991]: 209–20, esp. pp. 218–19, with a revised version in Calisto’s Dream and the Celestinesque Tradition: A Rereading of Celestina, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures [Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1995], pp. 79–97). In viewing the initial meeting as a dream, Castells follows Garci-Gómez (Ricardo Castells, “El sueño de Calisto y la tradición celestinesca,” Celestinesca 14, no. 1 [1990]: 17–39, and Calisto’s Dream, pp. 15–34; Miguel Garci-Gómez, “El sueño de Calisto,” Celestinesca 9, no. 1 [1985]: 11–22, and Calisto, soñador y altanero [Kassel: Reichenberger, 1994]). 7  Calisto’s characteristics listed here are not all-inclusive or given in any specific order of importance. On lineage, see, for example, Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, “El linaje de Calisto,”

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Connie L. Scarborough provides an overview of scholarly interpretations of Calisto. Her conclusion sums up important points and, like Joseph T. Snow, Jerry R. Rank, and Ricardo Castells, albeit all for different reasons, she notes that Calisto is difficult to understand. While the conflict between desire and social norms is evident in Calisto’s character and central to his and the work’s tragedy, he is also comical: “A besotted buffoon … [who] misreads the motives of those around him and … floats in a world with his own erotic desires as the center of his universe” and while, in the end, love is cruel and tragic, we laugh Hispanófila 33 (1968): 1–6, and Duquesne Hispanic Review 7, no. 2 (1968): 15–23; and Jerry R. Rank, “ ‘O cruel juez, y que mal pago me has dado …’: Or, Calisto’s Urban Network,” in Fernando de Rojas and Celestina: Approaching the Fifth Centenary, ed. Ivy A. Corfis and Joseph T. Snow (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993), 155–64. On lovesickness, see, for example, Michael Solomon, “Calisto’s Ailment: Bitextual Diagnostics and Parody in Celestina,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 23, no. 1 (1989): 41–64; Ricardo Castells, “El mal de amores de Calisto y el diagnóstico de Eras y Crato, médicos,” Hispania 76, no. 1 (1993): 55–60, and Fernando de Rojas and the Renaissance Vision. Phantasm, Melancholy, and Didacticism in Celestina (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 47–62; Eukene Lacarra Lanz, “Calisto y el Amor Hereos,” Ínsula, no. 633 (1999): 20–22. On love and humoral temperament, see, for example, Anthony J. Cárdenas, “The ‘conplisiones de los onbres’ of the Arcipreste de Talavera and the Male Lovers of the Celestina,” Hispania 71, no. 3 (1988): 479–91; Charles F. Fraker, “The Four Humors in Celestina,” in Fernando de Rojas and Celestina, op. cit., 129–54; Bienvenido Morros Mestres, “La melancolía de Calisto,” Celestinesca 34 (2010): 75–97. On ineptitude and egotism, see, for example, Lida de Malkiel, who uses the term “dreamer-egoist” (egoísta soñador) to refer to Calisto (La originalidad artística, pp. 347– 405, esp. pp. 347–49); M.a Dolores Peláez Benítez, “Retórica y misoginia en la caracterización egoísta del héroe sentimental: Aquiles y Calisto,” Dicenda. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 21 (2003): 211–25. On his reliance on others, see, for example, Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística, pp. 356–58. On generosity, see, for example, Joseph Thomas Snow, “Sobre la caracterización de Calixto y Melibea,” in Imago Hispaniae. Homenaje a Manuel Criado de Val, ed. Ángel Montero Herreros et al. [Kassel: Reichenberger, 1989], 459–72). On Calisto’s generosity, while it is true, as critics point out, that he pays Celestina handsomely, if we view Calisto as lovesick and not as someone thinking properly, being “out of tune” with reality, as Sempronio says of the lute in Act 1 (218), then perhaps such generosity might be not a virtue but rather witness to his muddled thinking: overpaying the bawd for her help, which exacerbates her avarice and leads to tragedy. On his paradoxical nature, see Raymond E. Barbera, who noted: “For Rojas the problem was to present an ‘unhero,’ a man outwardly possessed of strength, youth, and energy and yet doomed to play a negative role, galvanized by the sight of a maiden only to languish and to allow others to achieve for him what should have been an easy triumph…. Rojas, to underline his despair and pessimism, chooses a protagonist youthful but eviscerated, lacking in spiritual and moral fibre.” (“Calisto: The Paradoxical Hero,” Hispania 47, no. 2 [1964]: 256–57, esp. p. 256).

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“at the fool in love.”8 Indeed, at many moments Calisto’s actions seem incongruous and laughable, such as his response to Melibea when she asks him to be gentler in his lovemaking in Act 19, where he responds: “He who wishes to eat a bird, first must pluck its feathers out” (571; 236). There is no narrator to guide us in understanding Calisto, and the characters speak of him from differing perspectives. Celestina describes him in Act 4 as perfection itself and says he sings like Orpheus (322–23). Yet we have heard him sing in Act 1, where Sempronio comments that the lute is out of tune (218), describing not only the song but also Calisto’s frame of mind and probably his voice. Moreover, both Pármeno and Sempronio poke fun at Calisto in Act 8 when they hear him singing (394–95).9 In Act 9, Areúsa praises Calisto, saying that he could have any number of women who would cause him much less bother than Melibea (408). Then, moments before her death, Melibea describes him as a gentleman of noble lineage, virtuous, and good (587), a description also provided in the General Summary at the beginning of the work, which speaks of Calisto’s intelligence, breeding, charms, and medium estate (207).10 What we see from Calisto’s actions, however, seems to contradict Melibea’s and the Summary’s portrayal. He is not always the well-bred suitor. As J. R. Law discusses, given contemporary definitions of “nobility,” to talk of Calisto as a noble gentleman is ironic, if not also parodic.11 Calisto may be part 8  Connie L. Scarborough, “The Tragic/Comic Calisto: Obsessed and Insecure,” Celestinesca 34 (2010): 179–200, p. 198. Rank observes that Calisto “does not spring solely from literary antecedents,” and regardless of his foolish portrayal, he represents the bourgeois society of his day and must be read in that context (“Calisto’s Urban Network,” p. 156). Castells sees the complexity of Calisto as stemming from his world of dreams and fantasies (“Calisto and the Imputed Parody of Courtly Love”). See Snow, “Sobre la caracterización,” esp. pp. 464–65, and note 11 below. On the conflict of desire, Scarborough (“The Tragic/Comic Calisto,” p. 197) cites Enrique Baltanás, “El matrimonio imposible de Calisto y Melibea (notas a un enigma),” Lemir 5 (2001): 1–17. On desire in Celestina, see also E. Michael Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 9  On Calisto’s singing, see also Severin, Tragicomedy, pp. 31–36. 10  On Melibea’s description of Calisto, see Corfis, “Imagining Celestina,” eHumanista 19 (2011): 113–36, esp. pp. 117–18. 11  J. R. Law, “Calisto as the Antithesis of Fifteenth-Century Nobleza,” in La Chispa ‘83. Selected Proceedings. The Fourth Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, ed. Gilberto Paolini (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1983), 153–58. It is important to underscore that Celestina is a multifaceted work. That Calisto seems to parody the courtly lover, or focus principally on his sexual desire, does not mean that Celestina is only about parody or desire or that Calisto does not have dimensions beyond passion, especially if one compares the Comedia and Tragicomedia. Snow notes that Celestina’s variety of perspectives makes Calisto more complex than what he may appear at first blush, especially if we

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of the urban rich, and thus upper class and noble, but he does not seem to embody noble characteristics or even courtly rhetoric at times, as when, contrary to Melibea’s wishes, he is willing to have a witness to their lovemaking in Act 14 (501) and rips off her clothes in Act 19 (cited above).12 As Deyermond and Martin discuss, Calisto is not well served in his lovemaking by the standard authorities. Martin outlines the misuse of courtly rules. The lover’s knowledge of Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore fails him.13 Calisto approaches Melibea directly without courteous preamble, which according to De Amore should be done only with a harlot (1.6.21–24).14 Moreover, Calisto’s words echo the De Amore’s dialogues that address a woman of lower social status, and his first speech focuses on Melibea’s beauty, not her virtue. According to De Amore, beauty alone is not worthy of love and only the simple lover desires physical grace and comeliness (1.6.3–12). In this way, Calisto makes several blunders in the initial scene and, as Andreas states, love is diminished if the woman realizes that her lover is foolish or oversteps the bounds of courtesy (2.3.3), which is what Melibea sees in Calisto at the start. Even the servants make fun of his moping, whining, and exaggerated behavior with Melibea’s girdle.15 Calisto would be one of those whom Andreas would describe as a simple or less-than-worthy lover. In addition, De Amore states that to win love one should cultivate an attractive appearance, “honesty of character, fluent and eloquent speech, abundant riches, and a readiness to grant what the other seeks” (1.6.1–2). Calisto may be handsome, charming, and rich, as described by take into account Melibea’s words, which are very different from those of other characters (“Sobre la caracterización,” pp. 464–65). 12  John England shows how Calisto behaves worse than Areúsa, who in Act 7 was embarrassed to have Pármeno in her bed with Celestina present. Calisto “go[es] against Melibea’s clear command … [and] appears to have no sense of shame” (“ ‘Testigos de mi gloria’: Calisto’s Bestial Behaviour,” La corónica 28, no. 2 [2000]: 81–90, esp. p. 87). 13  Deyermond, “Text-Book Mishandled,” esp. pp. 220–21; Martin, Love’s Fools, esp. pp. 73–79, and in particular p. 77 for reference to discourse recommended for use with a woman of lower social class; Corfis, “Conflict of Ovidian and Courtly Love,” esp. pp. 396–403, where I develop Calisto’s code of love, some of which I summarize here. De Amore, composed in the late twelfth century, supposedly at the request of Marie de Champagne, codified the basic tenets of courtly love. 14  Andreas Capellanus, [De Amore] On Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982). References will be given by book, chapter, and section, which apply to Latin and English versions. 15  For examples of how other characters make fun of Calisto’s actions, see Sempronio’s asides in Act 1 (218–23, 230–31), Pármeno’s and Sempronio’s asides in Act 6 (338, 341, 343), and Calisto’s excesses with Melibea’s girdle in Act 6, upon which even Celestina comments (351).

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some in the text, and Melibea perhaps does not know of his childish behavior as ridiculed by Sempronio and Pármeno. Yet, even given all that, his actions lack courtesy and honesty at various moments with Melibea. He disobeys her wishes when they are together, cries at her garden gate, contracts a notorious bawd to negotiate the affair, and in a sense buys Melibea through payment to Celestina, as Nicholas Round and others have noted.16 In recent decades, critics have also reconsidered Leriano’s characterization. He has been described as the iconic courtly lover who dies to serve and protect his lady’s honor.17 Dorothy Severin defines Leriano in those terms but qualifies the description by saying that “he is not in fact a typical courtly lover but an extreme case of adherence to the laws of courtly love.”18 Critics such as Severin, Elizabeth Howe, and Regula Rohland de Langbehn, among others, begin to see cracks in Leriano’s courtly facade.19 He perhaps is not as perfect as he seems, for while he embodies many courtly ideals and takes the love code to an extreme (i.e., dying for love), his own missteps cast public suspicion on the woman’s honor and seem to cause the sequence of events. This is not to say that Leriano does not honor and worship his lady. He is constant in love and does not wish to harm his beloved, to mention only a few characteristics

16  Nicholas G. Round, “Conduct and Values in La Celestina,” in Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honour of P. E. Russell, ed. F. W. Hodcroft et al. (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981), 38–52, esp. p. 51. See also Lacarra, who includes Melibea in the parody of payment for love (“Parodia de la ficción sentimental,” p. 23). Rohland de Langbehn also remarks on Calisto using deceit to win Melibea (“Parodia de la novela castellana,” esp. p. 93). 17  See, for example, Whinnom’s editions of San Pedro, Cárcel de amor, pp. 7–43, esp. p. 25, and Prison of Love, p. xxi. Within the romance, the narrator—the Auctor—describes Leriano to be a man of perfect judgment (92). 18  Severin, Tragicomedy, p. 26. 19  Elizabeth Teresa Howe, “A Woman Ensnared: Laureola as Victim in the Cárcel de amor,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 21, no. 1 (1987): 13–27; Severin, “La parodia del amor cortés” and Religious Parody. According to Rohland de Langbehn, sentimental texts show an exaggerated tragic hero in a grotesque world (“Parodia en la novela castellana,” p. 87), and while sentimental texts may incorporate ironic elements and Leriano may be seen as exaggerated and excessive, she cautions that each character needs to be viewed and defined individually. Leriano is different from the others (ibid., p. 93). She also discusses how lovers find themselves in repressive situations or unequal in their love and how, mixing courtly and comic modes, Celestina’s author uses parody to criticize not just courtly love but an erotic world that causes love (“Carta respuesta a ‘The Genre of Sentimental Romance,’ ” La corónica 32, no. 2 [2004]: 223–25).

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that clearly separate him from Calisto. However, perhaps Leriano makes some errors in judgment that Calisto will exaggerate.20 As the Cárcel de amor narrative begins, we do not know how Leriano fell in love. It would seem that love resulted from observing Laureola’s beauty, which is consistent with De Amore: seeing the woman’s comeliness sparks attraction, for which reason blind men cannot truly experience the emotion.21 In his first letter, Leriano mentions Laureola’s physical appearance as the cause of his love (99). He then tells the narrator of her beauty before writing his second letter (106). He refers again to her attractiveness in that same letter (107) as well as mentions it in his last missive (151). In this, Leriano’s communication, especially his initial letter, perhaps seems inappropriate, for it goes right to the point of his suffering, mentioning the woman’s beauty with no preamble or focus on her virtue. We know the Auctor had prior conversation with Laureola on general pleasantries, especially telling her of the wonders of Spain before presenting the first letter, but we do not know if Leriano had previous contact with Laureola. If not, then this communication omits any general courtesy and directly addresses his love (99). In fact, the letter seems more complaint and criticism than praise. For this reason, in the context of courtly norms, the Auctor’s comment—that Leriano exercised discretion in making the letter brief and not saying more—appears ironic, since courtly discretion and praise of the lady did not seem to guide Leriano (100).22 As mentioned above, 20  On Celestina continuing parody, see, for example, Severin, Religious Parody, pp. 76–80, and her “The Sentimental Genre: Romance, Novel, or Parody?,” La corónica 31, no. 2 (2003): 312–15. 21   De Amore, Book 1.5.6 and 1.1.9–11, states that upon seeing and loving, one then finds a go-between to help win the woman’s favor. Leriano and Calisto follow this pattern and process. In Celestina, with the initial dialogue between Calisto and Melibea, we do not know if this is the first time Calisto has ever talked to Melibea. In Act 2, Pármeno explains that the cause of Calisto’s love was seeing Melibea in her garden (274), but they know each other’s names in Act 1, Scene 1, indicating some prior knowledge or contact (see Deyermond, “Text-Book Mishandled”; Corfis, “Conflict of Ovidian and Courtly Love,” p. 398). Neither Cárcel de amor nor Celestina provide much information on how love begins; readers simply enter into the narrative with the young man smitten by love, with beauty playing a role in that love. 22  Severin notes that the self-absorbed focus on suffering and desire in Cárcel de amor is perhaps reminiscent of San Pedro’s earlier romance and Arnalte’s uncourtly behavior (Religious Parody, p. 10). It is worth noting that while Leriano does not follow exact courtly rules in his letters, his practice partially coincides with Ovidian advice. Ovid counsels that the lover should write his lady in a style as if he were speaking to her. If she refuses to read the letter, the man should not give up but persevere. If she will not write back, the

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De Amore prescribes that, after greeting a woman, a man should not start with words of love (1.6.21–24) or center on the woman’s beauty alone, which is precisely the mistake Calisto makes with Melibea in Act 1, Scene 1. While De Amore refers to oral discourse in its models, written missives seemingly should fall under the same rules. The protagonists’ status in Cárcel de amor is noteworthy. Leriano is of the high nobility, son of Duke Guersio and Duchess Coleri. Laureola is princess of Macedonia. Her station is important, as Laureola herself states, since the rules of conduct and honor apply even more strictly to those of high and royal lineage (96, 103). The woman on whom Leriano has set his sights is not just any noble woman; she is the daughter of King Gaulo. We have another piece of information regarding Leriano from his second letter: it has been a year, or slightly more than a year, that he has loved Laureola (107). In Celestina, Calisto is of the bourgeois, urban nobility. We know his father holds some control over the judge (508). Although Calisto refers to Melibea as being of high, old, and noble station (229), it would seem that she also belongs to the urban aristocracy: daughter of Pleberio, a man who is described as wealthy and powerful. Little else is explained, except that, as Melibea states before her death, Pleberio was acquainted with Calisto and his family (587). There is no noble title used in Celestina to refer to the lovers or information about how long Calisto has loved Melibea (see also note 21 above). Returning to Cárcel de amor, Leriano explains to the Auctor why he has asked him to come to the Prison of Love. He requests that the Auctor tell Laureola of his suffering (91–92). Leriano has chosen the Auctor as his go-between. This is significant since the Auctor is a foreigner to Macedonia and does not understand the culture in which he is asked to maneuver. The Auctor informs Leriano of the obstacles: his dull wit, Laureola’s high station, the gravity of the affair, and the difference in speech (93). The Auctor apparently does not feel sufficiently fluent in the language for the embassy at hand. He then describes that, upon arriving at court, he first familiarizes himself with social protocol and the palace, but the more he studies the situation, the less he understands how to proceed. He finally integrates himself into a group of young courtiers. From there, he comes to the notice of the women of the court and then to Laureola’s attention (93–94). Love etiquette, as found in De Amore, speaks to the role of the go-between as an accepted practice (1.1.9–11). Andreas explains that love can be revealed to man should not compel the lady to do so but simply see that she is reading the letters, for she will eventually reply, even if it is with an angry response (Ovid, The Art of Love, ed. J. H. Mozley [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979], Book 1, ll. 467–86).

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three people: the man’s confidant, the woman’s confidant, and a go-between on whom the lovers mutually agree (2.6.32–33). In the Courts of Love, De Amore also describes the dangers of using a man in such a role (2.7.37–40). Thus, a mediator can help protect the secrecy of the love and assist in communication, but, if not chosen well, that person can put the affair at risk. In Cárcel de amor, Leriano chooses an emissary unfamiliar with court culture and one whom Laureola does not accept, for with the first exchange she tells the Auctor not to speak of the matter again. Indeed, the only reason she does not have him killed for his audacity in approaching her is that he is a foreigner in the land (96). Being a foreigner puts the Auctor at a disadvantage to understand the court around him, but, ironically, it saves his life. Interestingly, Melibea echoes Laureola’s words of rejection in her initial reaction to Celestina in Act 4 (see note 3 above). Both Melibea and Laureola view the go-between as unacceptable. However, after Melibea’s initial angry response, she then accepts Celestina as emissary. Laureola, on the other hand, flatly rejects the Auctor and, after receiving Leriano’s first letter, warns him a second time never to talk of the matter. She reminds him of the danger that his very presence represents: others will see them speaking or learn of their conversation and will assume that she treats the Auctor kindly—or at least does not have him killed—because she delights in his message, which is not the case, according to her (96). Yet in spite of the fact that Laureola rejects the Auctor as go-between, the Auctor ignores her command and continues his mission to pursue Leriano’s cause, hoping to bring some good news to the suffering lover (97). Likewise, Leriano continues to use the Auctor as emissary even after learning of Laureola’s response. In doing so, the Auctor and Leriano jeopardize Laureola’s honor by persisting in a request that she has rejected. According to Howe: “Both Leriano and his emissary stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the danger in which they place Laureola by their single-minded pursuit of their own interests…. [B]oth men ignore the implications of what they do and, as a result, compound the danger to Laureola.”23 The Auctor later understands that he has mistaken for love what were really signs of pity. He is a fallible narrator, interpreting what he sees from a personal (and foreign) perspective (98).24

23  Howe, “A Woman Ensnared,” p. 19. 24  On the narrator, see Whinnom, Prison of Love, pp. xxvi–xxvii. I take the term “fallible” from Whinnom. Peter N. Dunn states: “Both the lover aided by his envoy and later Persio and the jealous guardians at court have to interpret the signs of Laureola’s conduct, and they do so guided by their own passions and desires” (“Narrator as Character in the Cárcel

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When we compare the go-betweens in Cárcel de amor and Celestina, both are ill chosen but for different reasons.25 The Auctor is a foreigner; Celestina, as Pármeno tells Calisto in Act 1, is untrustworthy and notorious (239–47). Leriano does not heed the Auctor’s protestations that he is not suited for the task. Calisto does not heed Pármeno’s negative portrayal of Celestina in Act 1 or his excellent advice in Act 2 not to pay money to the bawd. As Pármeno states, it would be better to give favors and presents directly to Melibea. The young servant warns Calisto that by confiding in Celestina, he gives the old woman power over him (273). Additionally, both go-betweens do more than carry messages. They enter into the action and determine outcomes. That Celestina manipulates those around her is clear in her treatment of Pármeno in Act 1, her conversation with Lucrecia in Act 4, as well as her interview with Melibea in that same act, to name just a few instances. The Auctor’s manipulation of events in Cárcel de amor is perhaps, in some cases, unintended. Laureola’s second letter is a good example. The Auctor does not send Laureola’s missive to Leriano upon its receipt but rather decides to wait to deliver it personally (128). In that letter, Laureola asks Leriano to use discretion and not rescue her from prison if it would cast suspicion on her good name. She would rather he protect her honor than save her life (127). The Auctor’s participation in determining when to provide information truly makes him a “prime mover in the plot,” as Keith Whinnom states.26 Like Celestina, the Auctor has significant impact on the actions surrounding the lovers. Laureola’s second letter brings up another courtly concern: obedience to the woman’s will (De Amore, 2.1.9–10).27 Laureola’s request not to rescue her if it will impact her honor is ignored by Leriano (127). While freeing Laureola from the tower may be an unwitting disobedience on Leriano’s part, since he believes he can save both the woman and her honor, there are other examples. He keeps writing her when he is told not to do so; he continually presses his de amor,” Modern Language Notes 94, no. 2 [1979]: 187–99, p. 195). There is no objective interpretation of Laureola’s feelings. 25  Severin points to the choice of go-between in Celestina as a parody of Cárcel de amor, since she sees the Auctor as a discreet emissary (Tragicomedy, pp. 28–29). Yet, some of the details, while not negating his discretion, question him as an appropriate choice. 26  Whinnom, Prison of Love, p. xxvi. See also Howe, “A Woman Ensnared,” p. 18. 27  The idea of Leriano as the not-so-obedient lover was noted by Pamela Waley, who discusses inconsistencies in Leriano’s actions and even his death as contrary to Laureola’s wishes (“Love and Honour in the Novelas sentimentales of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de Flores,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 43 [1966]: 253–75, esp. pp. 261–63).

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case simply because he feels himself to be deserving of her attention.28 Neither does Calisto obey Melibea’s wishes. We need only think of his lovemaking in Act 14 and Melibea’s request in Act 19 to be gentler, which he ignores. Another courtly rule of love is discretion, emphasized in San Pedro’s Sermón, a work most likely composed after Arnalte y Lucenda and before Cárcel de amor. The Sermón sets out several precepts of love, among them secrecy (even to die to keep the love secret), discretion, avoiding inappropriate messengers, not sending letters that might cause harm, not revealing the lady’s name or speaking of the love to anyone or showing signs of love in public, and being virtuous and well-bred.29 While Leriano shows himself, for the most part, to be concerned with serving Laureola and protecting her good name, there are moments when he breaks the rules set forth by San Pedro. A good example is Leriano’s second letter, which accuses Laureola of being cruel, ungrateful, and causing him to suffer (107–8). This prompts communication from her, which

28  While perseverance is an important aspect of courtly love, the lover should obey the woman, even if it is to desist in his request for her love, such as in De Amore’s first Court of Love (2.7.1–5). On the other hand, Leriano may legitimately feel himself to be deserving of his lady’s attention since De Amore says that honesty of character alone makes a man worthy of love (1.6.46–48 and 2.8.46, Rule 18). If Laureola errs, it is in this: not loving an honest man. However, Laureola is not an ordinary woman; her social station as princess places on her an additional burden of honor. Moreover, to judge Leriano’s character, we only know what the characters say and what the Auctor tells us, and he may be narrating from a certain bias. The lack of completely objective information is something that Celestina will exploit more fully through dialogue form. 29  Diego de San Pedro, Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda y Sermón, in Obras completas, vol. 1, ed. Keith Whinnom (Madrid: Castalia, 1973), pp. 174, 176–77. Much of what the Sermón outlines follows De Amore’s rules: e.g., not to display physical signs of love in public (2.1.5–6), not to reveal one’s love or reveal the identity of the beloved, to take care not to send letters with any possible identification of the sender, suffer, and obey the lady (De Amore, Rules of Love, 2.8.44–48). The importance of the secrecy of letters is described in Book 2.7.51. Another rule which is interesting with regard to Leriano is that “a lover exacts from an unwilling partner bitter love” (2.8.44, Rule 5), which is also developed in Book 1.2.8, where it states that love must come voluntarily. Leriano pressures Laureola for her love and the end is bitter. Whinnom in his introduction to San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (esp. pp. 35–43) and Frederick A. de Armas discuss the importance of the Sermón for understanding Cárcel de amor (“Algunas observaciones sobre La cárcel de amor,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 8 [1974]: 393–411, also in Duquesne Hispanic Review 10 [1971]: 107– 27). Howe also discusses Leriano’s actions in light of the Sermón (“A Woman Ensnared,” pp. 15–16).

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gives Leriano the strength and will to go to court. Once there, Persio recognizes in Leriano the signs of love, with dire consequences (113).30 Persio’s written accusation and challenge to Leriano, and the latter’s response, provides further insights that may cast a slight shadow over the lover’s discretion. First, Leriano and Persio were friends (115). If the confidences Leriano says he shared with Persio include his love for Laureola, then Leriano has broken love’s secret to an unworthy confidant, as was the case with Arnalte and Elierso in San Pedro’s earlier romance. Then, to defend Laureola from Persio’s accusation, Leriano does not need to confirm his love, as he does.31 He could simply defend the woman’s virtue, as did one of the lovers in De Amore’s Courts of Love (2.7.1–5). Laureola alludes to and perhaps foreshadows this misstep in her first letter, stating that men think more of proclaiming their love than protecting the woman’s reputation, the former of which she entreats Leriano not to do (110). Leriano would seem to fail to heed that plea when he confesses his love as he accepts the challenge to battle. This confession will come back to haunt him as one of the reasons why the King is reluctant to pronounce Persio’s guilt and restore Leriano’s honor after the aborted combat (121). Thus, even in comparison to San Pedro’s own standard in the Sermón, Leriano fails to reach perfect courtliness, since he publically reveals the signs of love. As Andreas warns, once love is publicized, it ends (2.4.2). Lack of discretion, even if only a small part of Leriano’s character, points to a comparison with Calisto, who, on a larger scale, does not guard the secrecy of love. While Leriano confides in the Auctor and then declares his love in his response to Persio, Calisto lets Sempronio, Celestina, Pármeno, Tristán, and Sosia all in on the “secret.” Calisto makes his love known to many more than the confidant and go-between mentioned by De Amore (2.6.32–33).32 Another essential theme in love is suffering. Love is suffering, as De Amore’s first words state. Suffering continues until love is balanced between the two parties (1.1.1–2). In Cárcel de amor, in Leriano’s first letter to Laureola, he states that he has not served her, but if she considers his suffering as service, then he has done more than she can ever repay (99). Upon delivering the letter to Laureola, the Auctor emphasizes that she is obliged to Leriano for his great suffering (95). Having received Leriano’s letter, Laureola provides no response and repeats that the Auctor will probably misinterpret her actions and believe 30  Severin notes that confiding in the Auctor and using him as go-between, as well as revealing signs of love to Persio, show Leriano breaking the love code advised by San Pedro (Religious Parody, p. 18). 31  Leriano speaks of his amorous feelings for Laureola (“voluntad enamorada,” 116). 32  Iglesias discusses the parody of guarding love’s secret (Una nueva mirada, pp. 103–07).

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her to be in love, which, she insists, is not the case (103). Laureola understands the ambiguity of her actions, and perhaps, one could argue, she hopes to be ambiguous and is actually in love, though there is no explicit confirmation of that fact. In Celestina, suffering also plays a role. In Act 1, Melibea looks for some service from Calisto but does not find it in the first scene where he mishandles courtly rhetoric, indicating clearly at the initial stage of courtship that his is an illicit love. Calisto mopes in the dark after Melibea sends him away, but, like Leriano, neither can he accept his fate, and he openly bemoans his pain to Sempronio, who cannot shake Calisto from his despair and proposes a solution: Celestina. In Act 1, Calisto complains of a burning pain for Melibea (218). In Act 4, Celestina says Calisto is “sick” (“enfermo”) (312). Melibea uses the word “suffering” (“doliente”) (314) and Celestina quickly redefines her description from lovesickness to a toothache to appease Melibea’s anger.33 In Act 12, suffering again plays a part, as Calisto laments his fate at Melibea’s second, yet feigned, rejection at her garden door at midnight. She arranged the meeting through Celestina after confessing her love for Calisto in Act 10, but when Calisto arrives expecting a lover’s welcome, Melibea rejects him a second time. Calisto breaks into tears. Melibea’s test is successful. Calisto suffers, and suffering, as superficial as it may seem, is enough to provide Melibea proof of Calisto’s sincerity. In this, Cárcel de amor and Celestina differ, for unlike Laureola, Melibea accepts the lover’s suffering as sufficient to respond to his love. Moreover, if Leriano at first has not served Laureola and offers suffering as service, he later challenges and fights Persio, gathers an army, and storms the castle to free his lady from an unjust prison. He actively serves and defends Laureola. Calisto, in his lethargy, hands the affair over for others to arrange. His “service” is none at all. In fact, as mentioned earlier, Calisto, for all intents and purposes, buys Melibea through Celestina, who uses deceit in her negotiations and transactions. Then, once Melibea accepts Calisto and love is shared by both parties, Calisto’s pain, but not his lust, subsides. Here again, it is important to remember the words of De Amore, that “excessive indulgence in pleasure hinders love”; love is absent where there is only lust (1.5.7–8 and 1.10.4–7).

33   On the importance of Calisto’s toothache, see, for example, Geoffrey West, “The Unseemliness of Calisto’s Toothache,” Celestinesca 3, no. 1 (1979): 3–10, and Javier Herrero, “The Stubborn Text: Calisto’s Toothache and Melibea’s Girdle,” in Literature among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age, ed. Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 132–47.

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Leriano’s love, on the other hand, is never accepted, so suffering never ends, which leads to his death as a final service and sacrifice. Leriano’s third letter summarizes his love for Laureola, his willingness to die for her, and his hope to rescue her. In this letter, more than in any other, Leriano refers to Laureola’s merit, not just her beauty. Then, once Laureola is freed from prison and restored to honor, Leriano returns to his original petition that she save him from suffering. However, Laureola never gave Leriano hope of love. He and the Auctor (mis)interpreted her external reactions. In the end, Laureola does her duty and holds true to her good name and royal station. After all Leriano’s efforts, the woman firmly refuses to respond further to his letters, and Leriano does what he should have done from the beginning: obey her request. As Severin observes: “Leriano … puts Laureola’s honor and life at risk by his inappropriate behavior, and after precipitating and winning a war in order to rescue her, he then tries emotional blackmail on her. When this fails, he commits a passive suicide by starvation.”34 Leriano’s death has been the object of various scholarly studies.35 What is important for this essay is that the lover’s death is intentional and deliberate. Leriano dies as a final act of service. However, as Pamela Waley has discussed, the lover’s death goes against the woman’s wishes, since in her last letter Laureola asks him to be strong and live to protect her honor from malicious gossip.36 Ironically, while Leriano finally obeys Laureola’s request to stop pursuing her love, at the same time he disobeys her wishes and dies. The death of the male lover is an important point of comparison between Leriano and Calisto. Leriano chooses his own death. Calisto dies by accident: tripping on the ladder while descending Melibea’s garden wall.37 In the 34  Severin, Religious Parody, p. 10. 35  See for example, Joseph F. Chorpenning, “Leriano’s Consumption of Laureola’s Letters in the Cárcel de Amor,” Modern Language Notes 95 (1980): 442–45; E. Michael Gerli, “Leriano’s Libation: Notes on the Cancionero Lyric, Ars Moriendi, and the Probable Debt to Boccaccio,” Modern Language Notes 96 (1981): 414–20; Domingo Ynduráin, “Las cartas de Laureola (beber cenizas),” Edad de Oro 3 (1984): 299–309; Leonardo Funes and Carmen de la Linde, “Cartas bebidas por Leriano: sobre el desenlace de Cárcel de Amor,” Journal of Hispanic Research 2 (1993–94): 61–66; Keith Whinnom, “Cardona, the Crucifixion, and Leriano’s Last Drink,” ed. Alan Deyermond, in Studies on the Sentimental Romance (1440– 1550). Redefining a Genre, ed. Joseph J. Gwara and E. Michael Gerli (London: Tamesis, 1997), 207–15; E. Michael Gerli, “Leriano and Lacan: The Mythological and Psychoanalytical Underpinnings of Leriano’s Last Drink,” La corónica 29, no. 1 (2000): 111–28. 36  Waley, “Love and Honour,” p. 153. See also note 27 above. 37  Snow compares the two deaths to show that while Leriano’s sacrificial suicide occurs in the specific context of sentimental fiction, of which readers were well aware, Calisto’s death occurs in a literary world where values change from moment to moment, subject to

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Tragicomedia, the irony and tragedy are greater than in the Comedia, as the perceived danger to which Calisto responds is nothing more than Traso el Cojo, who represents no real threat.38 Additionally, as De Amore states (1.4.1), and as Leriano discusses in his defense of women, love ennobles men to be better than they otherwise would be; it makes them want to achieve great things. In particular Leriano mentions that women “inspire in [men] boldness to attempt great enterprises; [women] give [men] heart to hope. When lovers meet with danger, they account it an occasion to win glory” (70).39 However, with Calisto, after the first night of love, we do not see him ennobled. Tragically, when at last Calisto rises to the occasion to take action and defend his servants, he trips and falls.40 There is no benefit from love in Celestina. As Pleberio states in his lament, love kills its own servants (603). Rather than ennobling, love is deadly.41 San Pedro’s Arnalte y Lucenda incorporates comic moments through irony and an uncourtly lover.42 Then, as Whinnom has discussed, the Sermón parodies ecclesiastical discourse in burlesque form, documenting important aspects of courtly love, some of which Leriano ignores.43 That Cárcel de amor fortune’s whims and deceitful circumstances (“Sobre la caracterización,” p. 462). Severin also compares the death of the two male lovers and sees Calisto’s accidental fall as almost comic in its particulars (Tragicomedy, p. 29). 38  Iglesias discusses the death of the lover as ironic (Una nueva mirada, p. 99). Carlos Heusch studies Calisto in the Comedia and Tragicomedia and concludes that, among other things, the Tragicomedia reduces the comic elements found in the earlier version, with Calisto at the center of the ideological conflict surrounding love (“Les avatars de Calixte de la Comedia à la Tragicomedia,” in Fernando de Rojas. La Celestina. Comedia o tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Georges Martin [Paris: Ellipses, 2008], 157–75.). 39  Spanish original: “[H]ázennos fuertes para sofrir; causan osadía para cometer; ponen coraçón para esperar; cuando a los amantes se les ofrece peligro se les apareja la gloria” (161). Iglesias notes the irony and parody of ennobling love in Celestina (Una nueva mirada, pp. 91–94). 40  Critics such as Lida de Malkiel (La originalidad artística, pp. 359–60) have seen a moment of bravery in Act 12, when Calisto hears Lucrecia’s voice and believes he has been betrayed. Even if it means his death, he is determined to stay at Melibea’s garden door. However, he stands his ground for his own passion, not for the benefit of others, and ironically the voice he hears is that of Lucrecia, who represents no danger at all. 41  See Severin, Tragicomedy, pp. 46–47. 42  One only need remember Arnalte dressing as a woman to speak to Lucenda at mass, having his servant search the garbage for a letter, and his actions at a masque that threaten to reveal Lucenda as his beloved, among other moments (see Severin, Religious Parody, pp. 9–10). 43  See, for example, Whinnom, in his introduction to San Pedro, Tractado de amores de Arnalte y Lucenda y Sermón, esp. pp. 64–69.

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would have ironic or parodic moments and play with courtly ideals might seem almost a normal progression in San Pedro’s art. Rojas, like San Pedro, portrays love as both comic and tragic.44 Yet, while there are similarities between Celestina and Cárcel de amor, the works are very different. San Pedro develops Leriano’s interior emotion and turmoil with sentiment externalized through allegory, letters, and conversation with the Auctor. In Celestina, Calisto is oblivious to Melibea’s emotions and to most of what goes on around him. We do not see his veneration of the woman except in some pat speeches about Melibea’s beauty and being a Melibean (220). In Acts 13 and 14, we see his recognition of the seriousness of the situation as he reflects on his servants’ death and possible consequences, but it is fleeting. Thoughts of the servants quickly fade as he returns to think only of Melibea. The sentiments that Calisto expresses ring hollow. In this, he differs from Leriano, who shows a depth of emotion, albeit mostly as pain. What Rojas created was innovative in style, form, use of social classes, development of the go-between, and characterization.45 Yet, in spite of differences, there are points of contact between Leriano and Calisto: the choice of a less-than-appropriate emissary, occasional willful disobedience to the woman’s wishes, indiscretion, as well as a self-centered focus on suffering. The cracks in Leriano’s courtliness may reveal the beginnings of a Calisto. Howe posits: “If the question posed by San Pedro in the Sermón, ‘¿Qué más beneficio quiere [el hombre] que querer lo que ella quiere?’ were to be put to Leriano, he would answer, ‘lo que quiero yo.’ ”46 In some instances, perhaps, that might be true. It certainly would be Calisto’s response for almost every aspect of his love.

44   Celestina itself has been discussed as an ars amandi/reprobatio amoris. See, for example, Eukene Lacarra Lanz, “Ars amandi” vs. “Reprobatio amoris.” Fernando de Rojas y La Celestina (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, University of Minnesota, 2003); Bienvenido Morros Mestres, “La Celestina como remedium amoris,” Hispanic Review 72, no. 1 (2004): 77–99. 45  Scholars have discussed how Celestina breaks new ground in Castilian letters. Among others, and following Alan D. Deyermond (A Literary History of Spain. The Middle Ages [London: Benn, 1971], pp. 166–70), Severin discusses the original author’s model as a humanistic comedy, which Rojas takes “in a new direction, that of the tragic sentimental romance” or “parodic sentimental romance in dialogue” (Tragicomedy, pp. 27, 26). Snow notes that while Cárcel de amor and Celestina are indebted to and inspired by fifteenthcentury love literature, they are very different, which shows Rojas’s innovation (“Sobre la caracterización,” p. 461). 46  Howe, “A Woman Ensnared,” p. 16.

CHAPTER 9

The Story of Hero and Leander: A Possible Unknown Source of Celestina Bienvenido Morros Mestres For Selena, without whose help this work would have been impossible

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Critics have dealt with the possible influence of the story of Hero and Leander on specific passages of Celestina, especially on the second last act. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo was the first to observe that Melibea’s suicide scene is indebted to Hero’s death.1 Since then, several scholars have suggested other possible influences of this story on Celestina, while others have discarded the suggestions as being inconclusive or irrelevant.2 To definitively determine the possible influence of Hero and Leander, we need to know which versions of that story may have inspired the authors of Celestina. The two texts known in the fifteenth century with the most complete renderings are in Ovid’s Heroides and Musaeus’s Epyllion.3 Ovid’s Heroides was widely read in the Middle Ages. Musaeus’s poem, on the other hand, became known only much later, first in its original Greek version (Venice, 1494 and 1495), and later in the Latin translations of Aldus Manutius, which are attributed to Marcos Musuro (Venice, c. 1498) in the paraphrased version by Guillermo Maras (Paris, 1511).4 Besides 1  Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela (Madrid: Bailly Bailliére, 1910), 3:493. 2  Melibea’s suicide may have other sources, as I have pointed out in Bienvenido Morros Mestres, “Oriana y Melibea: De mujer a mujer,” Revista de Literatura Medieval 17 (2005): 193–219. Specific details in the text point to the model of Hero, as will become evident in this article. 3  Musaeus, Opusculum de Herone et Leandro (Paris: Christiani Wecheli, 1538). See Martin Sicherl, “Die Musaios-Ausgabe des Aldus Manutius und ihre lateinische Übersetzung,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 19 (1976): 257–76. 4  For the authorship of the first Latin version, see Deno John Geanakopolos, Greek Scholars in Venice. Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 120n41. For other translations, see Roland Béhar, “ ‘Empezó a recebir aquella vista de aquel sol que aserenaba el mundo’: El Leandro de Boscán y la filografía del Renacimiento,” Studia Aurea 7 (2013): 267–302, p. 269, and “La Favola © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004349322_010

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these two sources, the commentators of Virgil added more information about the two lovers, probably extracted from the Alexandrian version, today lost, that inspired Ovid and Musaeus. Therefore, Rojas did not need to have read Musaeus’s poem to know about Hero’s suicide, since Servius described it in his commentary on Virgil’s Georgics.5

Interpretation of the Fable of Hero and Leander in the Middle Ages

The medieval authors introduced two important changes in their re-creations of Hero and Leander: the inclusion of scenes from another legend with an equally tragic ending, that of Ceyx and Alcyone, and the treatment of the initial love between the protagonists as not reciprocal. This second change entailed one of the story’s nurses becoming a procuress and having to convince Hero to love Leander correspondingly. As Josep Pujol clearly demonstrates, Joan Rois Corella included these two elements in his Istòria de Leànder y Hero (c. 1460).6 However, he was not the first to introduce such additions, as they were present in previous versions of the legend, such as Giovanni Girolamo Nadal’s Italian poem, Leandreride (c. 1380). Nadal’s poem, however, had very limited circulation, as indicated by the fact that only three fifteenth-century manuscripts survive. In this study, I want to call attention to the significant coincidences between Leandreride and Celestina, and, secondarily, to Corella’s text. These three texts demonstrate a high degree of agreement, enabling us to postulate a common source.

The Story of Hero and Leander, and Celestina Through Leandreride: Falling in Love Through a Third Person

The first concurrence between Celestina and Leandreride is in the two texts’ initial scenes when the lovers meet. While the men fall instantly in love, the women reject them. Musaeus, on the other hand, has Hero and Leander fall in love with each other immediately. In their first meeting, Leander and Hero agree to meet again, secretly because her parents will not approve of their love, di Leandro e d’Ero de Bernardo Tasso: Fuentes y contaminaciones con otras fábulas,” Studi Rinascimentali 12 (2014): 131–56, p. 131. 5  Bienvenido Morros Mestres, “La moralización del Leandro de Boscán: Orígenes, difusión e interpretación de una fábula,” Studia Aurea 7 (2013): 199–266, p. 218. 6  Josep Pujol, “Noves fonts ovidianes, pràctica escolar, Boccacci, al Leandre e Hero de Corella,” Cultura Neolatina 72, nos. 1–2 (2013): 153–83.

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to satisfy their desires. Nadal, however, makes Hero clearly reject Leander, who, lovesick, resorts to a go-between in order to change Hero’s mind. Nadal and the author of the first part of Celestina both depict offended, enraged young women whose rejections send their suitors to their respective bedrooms to cry their cruel fate. When Calisto meets Melibea in the first scene, he is happy for the opportunity to meet her alone. Melibea, shocked by his daring speech, rejects him flatly for his lechery: “Be gone, you selfish fool. I can’t bear to think a man felt it right in his heart to tell me of the delights of forbidden love” (¡Vete, vete de ahí, torpe, que no puede mi paciencia tolerar que haya subido en coraçón humano conmigo el ilícito amor comunicar su deleite!) (1; 26).7 In Nadal’s story, Leander—in Sestos, attending the celebration of the Greek victory over Xerxes, King of Persia—sees Hero among the crowds. Leander, injured by Cupid with a golden-tipped arrow, falls instantly in love. Hero, however, injured only by a lead-tipped arrow, remains indifferent to Leander. After listening to his daring words, she recriminates him for his impudent audacity: “You imprudent / I do not know the origin of your amorous fire” (Male acorto / non so donda ti venga tanto ardire) (1.7.60–61, p. 18).8 The two rejected suitors, Calisto and Leander, return home and, lying in their beds, lament their ill-fated love. Aware of their masters’ sadness, Calisto’s servant, Sempronio, and Leander’s nurse, Manto, question them as to the reasons for their sadness. Initially, the two men refuse to reveal their reasons, but finally give in, though they do so for different motives. After expelling Sempronio from his bedroom, Calisto calls him back to sing for him the saddest song he knows. Before entering Calisto’s room, Sempronio wonders what may have triggered his master’s change in mood: “What setback has so quickly blighted my master’s good fortune, and, worse still, addled his brain?” (¿Cuál fue tan contrario acontecimiento que assí tan presto robó el alegría deste hombre, y lo que peor es, junto con ella el seso?) (2; 28). Leander’s nurse, Manto, whose name is the same as Tiresias’s daughter and who can predict the future, enters as she normally does, and, seeing his face and eyes covered with tears, openly asks about his sadness: “My sweet boy, she said, what is wrong with you, why are you crying? / Why your sighs and weeping? / Tell me the reason of your pain (Filiol mio dolce—disse—, or che hai, che cride? / Or che sospiri e che pianti son aquesti? / Deh, dimi la cason de la tua dolia) (1.9.42–44, p. 19). 7  English quotes from Celestina are by page number from Peter Bush’s translation (New York: Penguin, 2009), followed by the original Spanish from Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, ed. Bienvenido Morros Mestres (Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 1996) by page number. 8  The quotes of Leandreride are from Giovanni Girolamo Nadal, Leandreride, ed. Emilio Lippi (Padova: Antenore, 1996) by book, canto, verse, and page number. The English translations are mine. I thank Jose Luis Martín and Devid Paolini for helping me with the translations.

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Sempronio, after discovering the cause of his master’s woes, encourages him to hire the services of the procuress Celestina. Manto, upon hearing Leander complain about Hero’s rejection, offers her own services. Manto and Celestina pay respective visits to Hero’s and Melibea’s houses in order to let the young women know of their rejected suitors’ sadness.9 Celestina visits Melibea with the excuse of selling yarn, while Manto comes with a letter from Leander. The conversations during the visits are similar. Celestina pretends to have come to visit Melibea’s mother, previously her neighbor. The mother does not recognize her initially. Eventually, she leaves Celestina alone with her daughter because she needs to pay an urgent visit to her sister, who is sick. Unlike her mother, Melibea remembers Celestina, who has aged more than expected in the two years since she has seen her last: You have really aged. They’re right when they say time doesn’t pass in vain. I tell you, I only recognize you by the slash on your face, though I seem to remember you as being beautiful. You look like another woman. You’ve changed so much (Vieja te has parado; bien dizen que los días no se van en balde. Assí goze de mí, no te conociera sino por esta señaleja de la cara. Figúraseme que eras hermosa; otra pareces, muy mudada estás). (50; 104) Later, in the presence of Calisto and his servants, Celestina confirms not only that she used to live close to Alisa but also that their relationship was one of trust and familiarity. She also points out that Melibea is now a grown woman (74; 139). Once Melibea’s mother Alisa is gone, Celestina talks about the disadvantages and pains of old age—clearly a strategy to induce Melibea into enjoying her youth. Immediately, indirectly, she alludes to Calisto. Previously, Celestina had alluded to the convenience of having a husband and the problems caused by the absence of a man in a household: “A house without males soon pales, the spindle turns when chins don’t wag” (Assí que donde no hay varón, todo bien fallece. Con mal está el huso cuando la barba no anda de suso) (51; 105). When Melibea hears the name of Calisto, enraged, she threatens 9  The characters of Manto and Celestina are so similar that this cannot be a mere coincidence. For instance, the two women knew the young men from birth. Manto was Leander’s wet nurse and took care of him during his childhood. Celestina was at least somehow familiar with Calisto in his childhood, since she acted as the midwife at his birth. Celestina mentions this familiarity to Melibea in Act 4, while cunningly misinterpreting the young woman’s question about the duration of Calisto’s supposed toothache as if she were asking about his age.

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Celestina with death: “I can tell you, if I wasn’t worried about my reputation and didn’t want this man’s derring-do to get around, I’d make sure, evil woman, that your brain and body were ended in one fell swoop” (Por cierto, si no mirase a mi honestidad, y por no publicar su osadía desse atrevido, yo te hi­ ciera, malvada, que tu razón y vida acabaran a un tiempo) (53; 108). In the Leandreride, Manto travels from Abydos to Sestos. Before meeting Hero, she makes sure that her family is absent so she can talk with the young woman alone. In their conversation, Manto alludes to Hero’s mother, of whom she claims to have been a good friend. Then she mentions her vow of chastity as a priestess of Diana and the need to break the vow to search for a husband. She introduces the commonplace collige, virgo. rosas, implying the importance of enjoying youth. Many years have elapsed since she has seen Hero. Since then, Hero has changed from a child into a nubile woman: Ten years have elapsed, / It was before milady abandoned this life / Since she is not dressed with these clothes / But as the wife of a good man of Abidos, / I was here another time, if God does not deceive me / And under the protection of the confidence / Your mother gave me, mistress Casalimpha, / While I wanted it, this was my nest. / I remember it quite well, there was never / A nymph more beautiful than her, her reputation / Is purer than the clean water of a spring. / You, my young girl, called your mother / When you were two years old / Then you cried, not happy or sad / Now I see that much of / your youth has passed / and you do not have a husband (Do not take my words wrong) / It hurts me that you are not married yet / Or engaged to a noble, handsome man / It does not matter how beautiful or white a rose is / If much time passes before it is collected / Falling to the ground loses its beauty (Ben sono omai compiti quindeci anni / pria che madonna usisse di esta vita, / che non vestita, figlia, di esti panni, / ma come moglie di buono hom di Abido, / altra volta qui fui, se iddio me isganni; / e sotto l’ombra dil recepto fido / di tua madre, madona Casalimpha, / mentre che volli, questo fu mio nido. / Ben me ‘n rimembro assai; non fu mai nimpha / di lei più bella: ancora la sua famma / più chiaro il pande che di fonte linpha. / Tu, pargoletta, chiamavi la mamma, / quando ciò fu essendo infra el bimato; / talor piangevi, non lieta né gramma. / Or ch’io vezzo che troppo se n’è andato / del tempo di tua etate giovenile, / né marito ti vedo ancora a lato (non prender, filia, il mio parlar a vile), / io mi condolio che omai non sei sposa, / né data a huomo formoso e gentile. / Sia quanto puote bianca o bella rosa: / se longo tempo va che non si coglia, / cadendo a terra, perde ogni sua posa). (2.4.17–39, p. 28)

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After praising the holy sacrament of marriage, using Hero’s parents as an example, Manto gives Hero Leander’s letter. When Hero realizes Manto’s true intention, she cannot curtail her rage and threatens Manto in terms nearly identical to Melibea’s threat: “And if not, I think it would be convenient / For my honor, that your stupidity is uncovered / You must be paid as you deserve” (E se non che mi par che si isconvegna, / per honor mio, che toa stoltezza i’panda, / ben ti faria pagar come sei degna) (2.5.40–42, p. 31). Manto’s and Celestina’s reactions to the threats are similar, though not identical. Celestina resorts to disguising Calisto’s lovesickness as a toothache, while Manto retorts that reading a letter does not imply a concession on the part of Hero. The two young women, in spite of having threatened the procuresses, try to keep their parents unaware of the situation, becoming accomplices to the astute old women. Celestina and Manto are also similar in that they both instill the seed of love in the two girls on their first visits. While Celestina, on her second visit, manages to convince Melibea to meet Calisto, Manto needs a few more visits to move Hero. Hero and Melibea become much more docile, even eager to follow their advice. Celestina, whom Melibea has asked to come a second time, makes a remark about the color of Melibea’s face: “What sickness is that, my lady? I can see the fever raging in the bright color of your cheeks” (¿Qué es, señora, tu mal, que assí muestra las señas de tu tormento en las coloradas colores de tu gesto?) (114; 196). Equally, Hero blushes when Manto visits her the second time: “Truly Hero, with her rosy cheeks, from the windows sees him come” (Veramente Her, co ‘l viso rosato, vide venir per una fenestrella (2.6.58–59, p. 34). In previous texts, such as Pamphilus and Cárcel de amor, the young women first blush and then turn pale when they see the procuresses or the messengers that their suitors send. The fact that only Hero and Melibea blush but do not turn pale shows that the two texts are closely related.

Nocturnal Love Encounters

The agreed meetings between Hero and Leander and Calisto and Melibea curiously take place in similar situations of mourning: Calisto reaches Melibea’s garden after the deaths of Celestina, Pármeno, and Sempronio; Leander reaches Hero’s tower after her father and two siblings have succumbed to the plague. The first sexual encounter between the lovers is also similar. When Melibea notices that Calisto is tearing apart her clothes, she begs him to content himself with the two first gradus amoris, seeing and touching, and renounce the next one, the factum or coitus:

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Enjoy what I enjoy, which is seeing you and being with you. Don’t seek or take something that once taken you cannot restore. Don’t damage what all the treasure in the world cannot mend (Goza de lo que yo gozo, que es ver y llegar a tu persona; no pidas ni tomes aquello que, tomado, no será en tu mano volver. Guarte, señor, de dañar lo que con todos los tesoros del mundo no se restaura). (151; 248) Since Calisto refuses to obey her, she insists that Calisto respect her virginity: I swear your tongue may say what it wants, but your hands can’t take whatever they want. Be still, my lord. Now I am yours, be content to enjoy what you can see, because this is the true reward of lovers. Don’t try to steal the greatest gift nature has bestowed on me (Por mi vida, que aunque hable tu lengua cuanto quisiere, no obren las manos cuanto pue­ den. Está quedo, señor mío. Bástete, pues ya soy tuya, gozar de lo exterior, desto que es propio fruto de amadores; no me quieras robar el mayor don que la natura me ha dado). (151; 250) Calisto refuses, using the trope, directly taken from the text of Hero and Leander, that his passion is like a sea fare and the culmination in coitus is like reaching port: My lady, I’ve spent my whole life looking forward to this moment. How can I renounce it when it’s on offer? […] My whole life’s been coursing towards the flame of your desire. Don’t expect me now to moor quietly outside the pretty harbour and rest after all that grief (Señora, pues, por conseguir esta merced toda mi vida he gastado, ¿qué sería, cuando me la diessen, desechalla? […] Nadando por este fuego de tu deseo toda mi vida, ¿no quieres que me arrime al dulce puerto a descansar de mis pasados trabajos?). (150–51; 248) When Hero feels Leander’s hands touching her, afraid for her honor, she asks him to be satisfied with having been accepted into her tower: “Where is the price of my honor? Are you insane / It should be enough for you to have been brought here / My God, don’t be ungrateful or a villain” (Ove è il prezzo / de l’honor mio? Se’tu venuto insano? / Bastite che tu sei quivi condotto; / per dio, non esser ingrato o vilano) (3.3.33–36, p. 93). Like Calisto, Leander replies that he cannot feel satisfied until he reaches the final pleasure: “Do not move / Supreme pleasure of my life / If you do not want to give me a mortal blow” (Non far più motto, / de la mia vita supremo diletto, / se non mi vuoli dar di morte il

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botto) (3.3 37–39, p. 93). Initially Leander, more considerate than Calisto, only watches and touches her. Hero, probably following the example of Galatea in Pamphilus, allows him to do so if he does not endanger her virginity: Let me put my hand on your breast / And the apples born in the garden of love / And touch and see, or chosen present! / I will allow you to do it / She said, but do not harm me in any other way (Lasciami poner qui la man al petto, / e’ pomi nati en l’amoroso orto / e tocare e vedere, o dono elletto! / Et Hero allora, cum sembiante acorto: / Io ti concederò questo di gratia /—dise—, ma de altro no mi fare torto). (3.3.40–45, p. 93) But Leander does not keep his word and, following in the Ovidian and pseudoOvidian tradition, takes advantage of his strength to rape Hero. As we can see, Melibea and Hero both try to deny the men access to their bodies, i.e., “ver y llegar a tu persona” and “tocare e vedere” respectively.10 After having consummated their love, the lovers continue to meet every night until accidents provide tragic endings to the two stories. Eager to reach Melibea, Calisto leaves his house, walks through the city streets and climbs the walls of Pleberio’s garden every night; similarly, Leander swims every night across the Hellespont to enter the tower where Hero awaits. Also similarly, Calisto and Leander must take a dangerous trip back to their homes after their exhausting sexual encounters. Leander must interrupt his visits because the autumn storms unsettle the sea; Calisto cannot come every night to visit Melibea, probably because the deaths of Celestina and of Pármeno and Sempronio trigger violent riots and skirmishes in the city streets in the nights following. Some nights, the two enamored young men cannot satisfy their sexual desires on their visits. Nadal explicitly states that Leander, exhausted, wants to spend the night sleeping next to Hero after swimming across the Hellespont: “Oh, how often Leander came / To sleep with Hero and perhaps undefeated / In a way that it is not honest for me to describe” (Oh quante volte Leandro veniva / a star cum Hero in somno e forse invito, / per modo tal che honesto è ch’io no’l scriva!) (3.9.49–51, p. 108). Melibea reminds her servant that Calisto never fails to make the meeting, but on some occasions he cannot have her:

10  In Pamphilus, the description of the sexual encounters resembles Nadal’s poem and Celestina, although it does not include references to the gradus amoris. See Pamphilus de amore, ed. L. Rubio and T. González Rolán (Barcelona: Bosch, 1977), vv. 233–44.

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And for the last month, as you’ve seen, he’s come every night and scaled our garden wall as if it were a battlement, and on many a visit he came in vain, and didn’t cause me any more grief or trouble (Y después, un mes ha, como has visto, que jamás noche ha faltado sin ser nuestro huerto escalado como fortaleza, y muchas haber venido en balde, y por eso no me mostrar más pena ni trabajo). (167; 276)11 When their lovers are late for their visits, Melibea and Hero share with their servants their fear that a dreadful accident may have happened to the young men. Nadal followed Ovid’s model in the expression of this fear, while Rojas resorted to the same source as the Italian version. While waiting for Calisto’s arrival, Melibea sings a pastoral song that reveals her fear: “It’s midnight past still he’s not here. / Does another gaze make him linger?” (La media noche es pasada / y no viene; / sabedme si hay otra amada / que lo detiene) (182; 298). Hero complains to her nurse that Leander did not come the previous night. As in Melibea’s song, the nurse suggests another woman as a possible reason: “He does not remember / If, as I believe, from your love / She said, a more beautiful woman distracts him” (Non gle soviene, / s’i com’io credo, già del to amor ponto /—dicea—, più bella donna lui ritiene) (3.9.19–21, p. 107).12 On their first night of love, Melibea complains to her servant about Calisto’s delay, contemplating several causes that may have delayed Calisto on his way to her garden, including an encounter with the night patrol, a fall into a hole, or dogs that she hears barking in the distance. Similarly, in Nadal’s version, following Ovid, Hero imagines obstacles that delay her lover, such as the strong winds impeding his swim across the Hellespont. Another similarity between the two texts is how Melibea’s maid, in her song, refers to her mistress’s habit of embracing Calisto as soon as he jumps the walls into the garden, without even allowing him to take off his armor: “She’ll see him jump, give him such a hug!” (¡Oh cuando saltar le vea, qué de abrazos le 11  In this, she is contradicting Sosia, who tells Areúsa in the next act that Calisto has not visited Melibea even eight times in the past month. 12  Fernando Castro Guisasola, Observaciones sobre las fuentes literarias de La Celestina (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1973), pp. 69–70, points out similarities between the suspicion that another lover may have delayed Calisto and the similar behaviors of Hero, Demophonte, Ariadne, and Penelope in Ovid’s Heroides. For the sources of Melibea’s song, see José Manuel Pedrosa, “ ‘La media noche es pasada,/ y no viene’ Avatares de una canción, entre La Celestina y Alejo Carpentier,” Celestinesca 38 (2014): 85–112.

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dará!) (181; 297). In Ovid’s Heroides, Leander remembers how Hero, against the advice of her nurse, wades into the sea to embrace and kiss him: “Keep you from getting your foot wet at the edge of the water. / You welcome me with an embrace, and join with happy kisses” (Ne fieret prima pes tuus udus aqua. / Excipis amplexu feliciaque oscula iunguis) (18.100–101).13 Also, Ovid’s Hero, to make the time pass faster, remembers her impetuous embraces (she even uses the same verb, although, logically, in the first person): “For now I seem to see you already swimming close, / To bear your wet arms now around my shoulders” (Nam modo te uideor prope iam spectare natantem, / bracchia nunc umeris umida ferre meis) (19.59–60). Nadal includes a similar scene in which the lovers embrace by the sea, but it is Leander who initiates the action, running to embrace Hero, who awaits him on the beach: “As soon as he put his feet on the beach / He runs fast and straight to embrace her / And she did the same” (Possia che del teren fu segnorile, / dritto et acceso corse ad abraciarla, / et ella ad altro tanto non fu vile) (3.2.91–93, p. 91). We can conjecture that the equivalent scene appeared in the unknown source under the same terms. To make the woman initiate the embrace is a variation that has been transferred to Celestina.

Lament, Suicide, and Burial

Nadal’s and Rojas’s texts coincide noticeably in their endings. Nadal included elements of the legend of Ceyx and Alcyone. In Musaeus’s poem, Hero, after seeing Leander’s corpse brought to her tower by the waves, throws herself into the sea without having time to lament. In Nadal’s poem, feeling that Leander is dead, Hero runs toward the beach and is followed by her nurse: “She moves around crying and screaming; / And her nurse followed her / Comforting her with her pious words” (Quivi piangendo va e vociferando; / e la nutrice sua pur la seguiva, / cum pii sermoni quella confortando) (3.14.58–60, p. 147). The nurse tries to console her and makes her aware of the danger that she risks to her reputation if she continues screaming: “And the nurse told her: ‘Where / is your previous commonsense?’ And she said: ‘Sense and honor / do not concern me anymore, I am dying’ ” (E la nutrice a lei: “Tuo senno prisco / ove è ito, figlia?.” E lei: “Senno et honore / non curo, madre, più, poich’io perisco”) (3.14.43–45, p. 147). When Hero identifies Leander’s corpse, she laments the loss of him: “Or my good Leander, the only pleasure / Of my life in the early years” (O bon Leandro, solo piacimento / de la mia vita nel tempo primaio …) (3.14.7–8, 13  The English translation is from http://heroides.org/ by James M. Hunter.

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p. 148). Her nurse tries to console her, stating that the flowers of her pleasure have withered, as Leander’s tragic death took place in winter. Immediately, before falling dead on Leander’s corpse, Hero remembers his visits, as well as their love: “Leander came to me in love / In truth, he has come to me; oh poor me, / Because I found him like him again like this” (Veniva a me Leandro inamorato, / anci, è venuto a me; deh, guai me trista, / che sì per tempo l’aggio ritroato!) (3.16.37–39, p. 151). The narrator then describes how the people of the city of Sesto weep for the tragic death of Hero. Manto comes by boat from Abydos to Sestos to attend the funeral of the two lovers and ensures the two are buried together with the same epitaph: But as the news of the wrath / Was known by the inhabitant of Abidos, the old Manto / Who cries and tortures herself for the event / Went by boat to Sesto; and after much crying / They were buried in a tomb / On which they wrote an epitaph: / “Love, which had made a pure soul / of Leander and Hero, who are here reunited, / brought them together to a cruel death / and they are together in death as they were in life” (Ma come la novella de tanta ira / fu nota agli Abidensi, vaccio Manto, / che di tal fatto si piange e martira, / navicó a Sesto; e doppo longo pianto / fur sepeliti in una sepoltura, / a la qual soprascrisser da l’un canto: / “Amor, che aveva fatto una alma pura / di Leandro e de Hero, che son propinqui ivi, / condusee insieme loro a morte dura / e morte stano insiemi cum`fer vivi”). (3.17.61–70, p. 154) Following his sources, Nadal altered Hero and Leander’s story with elements from Ceyx and Alcyone. For instance, the hybridization of the two stories is clearly present in Alfonso X’s General Estoria.14 As for Hero’s planctus (lamentation), Nadal could not have followed Musaeus’s poem, if he knew it through an indirect source, because in Musaeus’s version Hero does not proffer any laments. Evidently, Nadal was likely inspired by Alcyone lamenting on two separate occasions in front of her servant, which he read directly in Ovid and/or in the unknown source he followed for other passages. In her dreams, Alcyone sees the spirit of her spouse Ceyx, who has drowned in a shipwreck. Still asleep, she calls him and asks for a joint death. She wakes up screaming and her servants come to her room:

14  Bienvenido Morros Mestres, “La moralización del Leandro de Boscán: Orígenes, difusión e interpretación de una fábula,” Studia Aurea 7 (2013): 199–266, pp. 223–25.

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And cried out: “Wait for me! Where do you vanish? We will go together.” Roused by her own voice, and her husband’s image, she started up out of sleep. First she gazed round to see if he was still there, the one she had just seen. At the sound of her cry the servants had brought a lamp (Exclamatque “mane! Quo te rapis? Ibimus una.” / Voce sua specieque uiri turbata soporem / excutit et primo si sit circumspicit illic, / qui modo uisus erat; nam moti uoce ministri / intulerant lumen). (11.676–80)15 Alcyone tells her nurse that she desires to follow her spouse in death and to be buried in the same tomb, sharing, if not the same urn for their bones, at least the same epitaph (11.705–707). Then she runs toward the beach and finds Ceyx’s corpse. After lamenting his death, she climbs to a breakwater and throws herself onto his dead body. In her fall, however, she turns into a halcyon. Ceyx’s body also turns into a halcyon and together they fly away. In his version of the legend of Hero and Leander, the Valencian poet Joan Roís de Corella resorted to a source close to Nadal’s. Corella mixed elements from Alcyone’s planctus with Ovid’s Heroides, but not in the same way as Nadal. In the first planctus of Corella’s Hero, before Leander’s spirit appears, she ponders whether he may be dead or if another woman is keeping him away: As the sea calmed down, my heart died for fear that Leander is resting on the skirt of another woman. And I do not know which one of the two misfortunes would hate the most: that he died for me in the seas and cold and wet lay on my skirt and I dead in his arms, and that we were laid to rest together in tomb; or that, living but away from me, he was in her rooms (Com la mar assossegua, lo meu cor se mor, recelant que Leànder en la falda de algun altra reposa. E no sé qual de dos mals, pero major, avorreria: ho que mort per mí en les aygües, fret, banyat estigués en la mia falda e yo, ab ell, morta en sos braços, dins un sepulcre nos tanquasses, ho que, vivint de mí apartat, de altra estigués en l’estrado). (168–69)16

15  The English translation is from Anthony S. Kline, available online at http://ovid.lib .virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome.htm. 16  The quotes from Corella’s text are by page number from Joan Roís Corella, “La Istòria de Leànder y Hero,” in Les proses mitològiques, ed. Josep Lluís Martos (Alacant/Barcelona: Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana/Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2001): 151–78. The English translations are mine. I thank Jose Luis Martín for helping me translate the text.

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In the second planctus, when Hero sees Leander’s corpse in the distance and comes down to the beach, she feels responsible for his death: “How can I, still alive, cry over you, who died because of me? […] I will live in pain because I caused your death” (Quin plant sobre·l teu cos puch yo, encara viva, mirant a tu, mort per mí, dignament plànyer? […] Donchs viuré yo, perquè la tua mort, per mi causada, dolgua) (171–72). At this point, Hero is not only talking to Leander’s parents but also to her father, letting him know that he will attend his daughter’s wedding and funeral at the same time—in Nadal’s version, Hero’s father and siblings had died of the plague (172). Finally Hero, invoking Leander, says that she won’t prolong his funeral; she has decided to die over his dead body, which she will anoint not with perfume but with her own blood; she will use the cloths prepared to dry his body when he came out of the sea to visit as the shroud that will cover their two dead bodies. She gives the instructions on how to bury them not to the father but to her nurse: And you Leander, forgive me if I shorten your funeral. […] It will be better that, dying for you over your body, with my blood washing and warming up your already cold body anoints you. And with those cloths that I had ready to dry your living body, my nurse, who loved you not less than me, wraps and buries us embracing each other as a single body, in a tomb so narrow that our bones together finally turn into dust (E tu, Leànder, perdona si més llargues les tues obsesèquies no celebre. […] Donchs, serà millor que, morint per tu e sobre tu, ab la mia sanch lavant hi escalfant lo teu cos ja fret, enbalssemant unte. E, ab aquelles teles que per exugar a tu viu aparellades tenia, la mia dida—la qual a tu no menys que a mí amava—abduys abraçats semblants a un cos, amortallant nos embene. Hi en un sepulcre tan estret nos tanque, que·ls nostres ossos mesclats a la fi en una pols se converteixquen). (172) For Hero’s death, Corella followed the model of Thisbe, making her stab herself with the sword that Leander carried and die over his body.17 Rojas also mixed the two stories, but for Melibea’s death he followed the traditional version of the suicidal jump, described by Musaeus and later by Servius. For Melibea’s final allocution to her father, Rojas followed the words Thisbe uses to address her and Pyramus’s parents.

17  Corella is not the first to make Hero die this way since, as Josep Pujol has shown, he probably read about this death in the glosses to Dante’s Purgatory by Jacopo della Lana (Pujol, “Noves”).

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Evidently Rojas followed the tradition of mixing the two fables. He wrote two separate lamentations for Melibea: one in the presence of her maid, after she hears Calisto’s servants announce his death, and the second as a later lamentation delivered in the presence of her father from the tower before jumping to her death. For these two separate lamentations, Rojas did not follow the story of Pyramus and Thisbe or the original version of Hero and Leander, but a later version with elements taken from Ceyx and Alcyone. From this version he probably took the theme of burial in the same tomb and the disproportionate praises Melibea pours upon the illustrious young man for whose death she feels responsible. The final part of Celestina contains some curious details that sometimes match Nadal’s poem, sometimes Corella’s, and sometimes even the two at the same time. Because of these similarities, he likely followed a version close to Boccaccio’s Fiammetta in which all these elements were already combined. When Melibea hears Tristán’s and Sosia’s reactions to Calisto’s mortal fall, she attempts to climb the garden wall to see the dead body. She states that, if she cannot see him, she will scream in desperation. In this her first lamentation, she resorts to the same hedonistic argumentation of Hero in Nadal’s poem: I’m a sobbing mass! What’s happened? What dreadful thing has happened? Help me climb these walls, Lucrecia. I must see the cause of my grief or I’ll scream my father’s house down. My ecstasy and pleasure have evaporated, my happiness is ruined! (¡Oh desconsolada de mí! ¿Qué es esto? ¿Qué puede ser tan áspero acontecimiento como oigo? Ayúdame a sobir, Lucrecia, por estas paredes. Veré mi dolor; si no, hundiré con alaridos la casa de mi padre. Mi bien y mi plazer todo es ido en humo; mi alegría es perdida; consumiose mi gloria). (185; 303) Later, as part of the first lamentation, she insists on the same idea, reproducing a near literal version of a verse of Jorge Manrique’s famous coplas for the death of his father: “Oh saddest of the sad! So short our time to pleasure! So quick to turn to sorrow!” (¡Oh la más de las tristes, triste, tan poco tiempo posseido el plazer, tan presto venido el dolor!) (304). Her lamentation also includes near identical words to Corella’s text: “She tore her hair, her clothes and the skin of her breast and face, the saddest woman in the world” (Rompé los seus cabells, les vestidures ensemps ab lo cuyro del pit e de la cara, la trista sobre totes les altres adolorada) (170). Lucrecia, as Hero’s nurse did, asks Melibea to curb her grief and encourages her to leave the garden, not to call her father’s attention, and not to endanger her reputation:

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Mistress, don’t scratch your face or rent your hair. Pleasuring soon turns to saddening. What planet ever experienced such a sudden reversal? Don’t be so feeble? Get up! Don’t let your father find you in this suspicious place (Señora, no rasgues tu cara ni meses tus cabellos. […] ¿Qué poco corazón es éste? Levanta, por Dios, no seas hallada de tu padre en tan sospechoso lugar, que serás sentida. […] ¡Aviva, aviva!, que mayor mengua será ha­ llarte en el huerto que plazer sentiste con la venida ni pena con ver que es muerto). (185–86; 304) In the second lamentation, Melibea, like Hero, has moved to a different place, the tower. There, in sight of where her lover died, she intends to commit suicide. She has gotten rid of Lucrecia, who has gone to ask Melibea’s father to stand at the bottom of the tower. What Melibea utters reveals the sources Rojas followed: “Go down and tell him to stop by the foot of this tower. I must tell him something he must pass on to my mother” (Baxa a él y dile que se pare al pie de esta torre, que le quiero dezir una palabra que se me olvidó que hablase a mi madre) (198; 308). The words “by the foot of this tower” (al pie de esta torre) can be traced back to Musaeus’s “παρα κρηπιδα δέ πύργου.” Neither Ovid nor Servius included them, but in the Middle Ages Alfonso X used them in General Estoria (c. 1230), as did Francisco de la Torre in Libro de las veinte cartas y quistiones (probably written before 1446), and Corella—all probably inspired by a gloss to Ovid’s Heroides. Clearly Rojas was imitating Hero’s death, as described by Musaeus and known in the Middle Ages through Servius’s glosses. Rojas, however, also took into account Nadal’s and Corella’s models in making Melibea move away from Hero: from the bottom of the tower to its top. Melibea’s climbing of the tower is influenced by Alcyone, moving in the opposite direction to Hero, who comes down from her tower to embrace her lover and die. Once Melibea is atop the tower, Pleberio, Melibea’s father, at the bottom, becomes the equivalent of Hero’s dead lover. While Hero throws herself on top of Leander’s corpse to die, Melibea falls close to where her father stands. For this ending, Rojas was clearly influenced by Seneca’s tragedy, Medea, which ends with Medea leaving her nurse behind and climbing to the roof with her two children, slitting one’s throat. From there, she throws her children’s bodies to their father, Jason, who, impotent, witnesses from the ground.18 18  As far as I know, nobody has connected the deaths of Seneca’s Medea and Melibea. Although Medea, after killing her children, disappears in a cart with wings, the similarities with Melibea’s death are several, such as Jason trying to reach the roof of the house but finding the door locked.

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In her second lamentation, the one addressed to Pleberio, Melibea feels compelled to let him know her reasons for committing suicide. She starts by alluding to the clamor coming from the surrounding streets where people have learned of Calisto’s death. For the description of the clamor, Rojas followed a source very close to the one Nadal used to describe how Hero’s death stirred the citizens of Sestos. Melibea confesses that she is responsible for Calisto’s death. Although Rojas might have taken this confession from Ovid, only Nadal included it in the final lamentation. Melibea goes on to tell her father of the affair she had with Calisto and of the many dangers he faced to visit her in the garden. This detail resembles both Nadal’s and Corella’s descriptions of the risks Leander ran crossing the Hellespont. In his final planctus, Pleberio, talking to his wife, points to where Melibea fell so that she can see the body torn to pieces: “Look at the broken bits of the girl you bore and I fathered” (Ves allí a la que tú pariste y yo engendré, hecha pedazos) (193; 313).19 Only Musaeus included a similarly macabre detail. The medieval authors, if they ever knew this detail, omitted it, choosing instead the death of Isolde and making Hero die while embracing Leander’s torn and mangled corpse. Once Melibea has explained the reasons for her death to her father, she asks him to bury her next to her lover’s tomb in a joint funeral ceremony for the two: “My beloved father, I beg you, if you ever loved me in this past, painful life, make sure we have a joint funeral and that our graves are side by side!” (Ruégote, si amor en esta pasada y penosa vida me has tenido, que sean juntas nuestras sepulturas, juntas se hagan nuestras obsequias!) (191; 313). That she asks not for the same tomb for the two bodies but for two different tombs next to each other, as in some versions of Tristan and Isolde, is important. For this specific funeral request, Rojas might have followed Thisbe’s similar demand to her and Pyramus’s parents, who in life had opposed their love. Corella included the same request in his version of Hero and Leander, whose deaths he described following the model of Pyramus and Thisbe. Although Alcyone declares the same wish as Melibea and Thisbe, she does not utter the 19  This macabre detail could be based on Hippolytus’s death in Seneca’s Phaedra: “Far and wide the fields are stained with blood, and his head, dashed on the rocks, bounds back from them. The brambles pluck away his hair; the hard stones ravage that lovely face, and his ill-fated beauty is ruined by many a wound” (Late cruentat arua et inlisum caput / scopulis resultat; auferunt dumi comas, / et ora durus pulcra populatur lapis / peritque multo uulnere infelix decor) (vv. 1093–96, English translation from http://www.library .theoi.com). In the Catalan novel, Curial e Güelfa (c. 1435), the suicide of Camar also includes a reference to the broken head. Curial e Güelfa, ed. Lola Badia and Jaume Turró (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2011), p. 472. See also Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, “Sobre el teatro de la muerte en La Celestina: El ‘cuerpo hecho pedazos’ y la ambigüedad macabra,” eHumanista 5 (2005): 113–25.

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words when she is in front of Ceyx’s dead body, but only in her first lamentation, before coming to the beach. This request is clearly influenced by the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Nadal’s Hero does not state her wish to share the tomb, although the voice of the narrator explains that they were buried together. Possibly, Nadal, for this narration of the conjoint burial as a past event, followed a model which combined details of Hero’s and Thisbe’s deaths. Just before jumping to her death, Melibea, interrupting her words to her father, invokes Calisto, asking him to wait for her; she has decided to follow him in death: “My love and lord, Calisto, wait for me, I am coming! Stop, wait for me. Don’t get angry if I linger and tell my father the whole story. I owe him this and much more” (Oh mi amor y señor Calisto, espérame, ya voy! ¡Detente si me esperas! No me incuses la tardanza que hago dando esta última cuenta a mi viejo padre, pues le debo mucho más) (191; 313). Both Thisbe and Alcyone could be models. They utter similar invocations.20 Even the description of Hero’s death in Ovid’s Metamorphoses includes details taken from the death of these two other women, reproducing nearly the same words: “I will follow you to destruction, and they will say I was a most pitiful friend and companion to you” (Persequar exctintum letique miserrima dicar / causa comesque tui (Met. 4.151–152). In Heroides, Leander wonders if he will die while crossing the stormy Hellespont, imagining Hero contemplating his dead body, which the waves have pushed onto Sestos’s beach: “Nevertheless, I wish to be cast forth on those shores, / And that my shipwrecked limbs may be held by your harbor. / Indeed you will weep, and deign to touch my body, / And ‘Of this death,’ you will say, ‘I was the cause’ ” (Optabo tamen ut partis expellar in illas / et teneant portus naufraga membra tuos. / Flebis enim tactuque meum dignabere corpus / et “mortis” dices “huic ego causa fui”) (18.197–200). At the end of the epistle, Hero tells Leander a dream. Exhausted, she has fallen asleep and sees a dead dolphin which the waves have washed onto the beach. Although she refuses to interpret her dream, she is sure she will kill herself if Leander dies similarly. When Alcyone sees Ceyx’s spirit in her dreams, she realizes he is dead and decides to accompany him. She repeats this desire before requesting to be buried together, using the same words as Thisbe. For his description of Melibea’s words to her father from the tower, Rojas probably followed a model close to Corella’s version of Hero and Leander, which was also, though to a lesser degree, close to Nadal’s version. In this source, Rojas might have found practically the same ideas and motifs: the brief narration of a love affair, the woman’s sense of guilt for the lover’s death, an 20  Castro Guisasola, Observaciones, pp. 73–74, points out the coincidences with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. See also Bienvenido Morros Mestres, “Sonetos para Irene (y también para Dido) en el Renacimiento italiano,” Italianistica 43 (2014): 65–90.

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invocation first to the parents (especially to her father, who opposed this love) and later to the dead lover, and the request to share the tomb (including, perhaps, a common funeral). Conclusion Celestina’s authors, especially Rojas, combined elements from at least three different stories, those of Hero and Leander, Ceyx and Alcyone, and Pyramus and Thisbe, which other authors previously combined in their stories. Rojas had in mind the fable of Hero and Leander during the development of his love story, making Calisto walk across dangerous streets every night to visit Melibea. One of the dangers he faces in his nocturnal expeditions is the formidable wall that eventually takes his life. Unlike Leander and Pyramus, he does not die while coming to see his lover, but while leaving. Melibea commits suicide, jumping from the highest point of the house, while moving also in the opposite vertical direction as Hero in the medieval version.21 To this basic plot, Rojas added episodes attached to the story of Hero and Leander during the Middle Ages, including the intervention of a procuress and the two lamentations of the young woman after her lover’s tragic death. He embellished and elaborated these episodes with new details, some of which he might have read in medieval sources. For instance, the threats the young woman proffers against the procuress are contrasted with her complicit silence when her parents interrupt the conversation. Equally, that the sexual encounter takes place during a period of mourning, after the death of relatives or servants, enhances the event. Rojas found these elaborations in texts such as Nadal’s Leandreride and Corella’s Història de Leànder e Hero. Given that he did not seem to have consulted these two texts directly, he must have used a common source shared by the two but today lost. If Rojas’s story had only coincided in a few details or episodes with these two texts, we could think that he was following a different tradition with similar episodes. But because the coincidences are many and significant, we can postulate that Rojas took them from a text that is a common source for Nadal’s and Corella’s work. This allows us to postulate the existence of an unknown source for Celestina that narrated the story of Hero and Leander, mixed with elements taken from the stories of Ceyx and Alcyone, and Pyramus and Thisbe.

21  See Martín Casariego Córdoba, El amor y la literatura (Madrid: Anaya, 1999), p. 33.

Themes and Readings

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CHAPTER 10

“Aquellos antigos libros”: Approaches to Parody in Celestina Ryan D. Giles Vladimir Nabokov famously described parody as a “game,” specifically one that “plays iridescently around the spray” of the “serious.”1 His description provides a fruitful way of beginning to think about classic texts in which parody is a central feature. Alongside the early seventeenth-century Don Quixote, Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina or Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, written just over one hundred years earlier, is one of the best-known examples of parody in the history of Spanish literature. My purpose in this essay is to provide a framework for how the parody present in the text has been studied, and, at the same time, to offer some suggestions for furthering this line of investigation. Just as Cervantes’s knight famously tries to embody and live out ideals and deeds from chivalric novels, the words and actions of Rojas’s doomed lovers and the eponymous go-between are inspired by examples found in a slew of books that circulated widely at the dawn of the printing age. First Calisto and then Melibea express their pseudo-religious, erotic desires in ways that are, to different degrees, self-consciously scripted. Calisto’s servants and the go-between Celestina mouth authoritative discourses on healing, devotion, and ethics in a scheme to profit from their master’s lust. These performances result in the death of the two lovers: Calisto falls from a ladder used to scale the wall surrounding his lady’s house, and Melibea commits suicide by jumping from a tower in front of her father. Also, Calisto’s servants, Sempronio and Pármeno, are executed after murdering Celestina for not sharing the proceeds of the fatal affair. Rojas’s parodic game is playful, but at the same time highlights serious issues at stake in a text that ends in a scene of hopeless despair, with Melibea’s father contemplating her lifeless body. Before reviewing the critics who have studied the parodic aspects of Rojas’s work, I will elaborate on the concept of parody. Important insights into the functions of parody were developed in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, and, in more recent years, Linda Hutcheon and Margaret Rose. Bakhtin explained “polyphony” as a process in which discourses of authority, 1  Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 76.

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be they “rhetorical, philosophical,” or “religious,” among others, are subjected to a “comic-ironic contre-partie” or doubling voice. Importantly, target discourses are not minimized or shut down through parody, but instead made to coexist alongside ironic voices.2 Later, Genette re-conceptualized parody as a form of “hypertextuality,” which he described as text “grafting” itself onto an earlier text, resulting in its “transformation.”3 While Genette uses the word parody specifically to describe playful transformations of individual texts, my use of the term, closer to Bakhtin’s findings, can also extend to genres. Hutcheon’s definition is similarly broad, as it emphasizes the importance of intertextuality in the reception of parodic works, so that the “encoder” communicates a shared code to an audience that serves as its “decoder.” Parody is for her an “imitation with critical distance” and a “repetition with difference,” as well as a “re-coding” and “trans-contextualization” of its target.4 Finally, Rose focuses on the outcome of this process as one of “comic refunctioning” of what she calls “performed material.”5 Celestina, as we will see, illustrates the validity of each of these approaches to understanding parody: it is polyphonic, interand hyper-textual, and a comic performance and tour de force. Not all of the early readers would have been capable of decoding its many parodic targets, but some could play the game with Rojas, especially those belonging to the rich intellectual environment of the University of Salamanca, where the text emerged. For the sake of convenience, I will divide the primary targets of parody explored by critics into three categories: courtly love and lovesickness, religiosity, and learned references. The first category has undoubtedly received the most attention, for example in the studies of June Hall Martin McCash, Dorothy Severin, María Eugenia Lacarra, and, more recently, Yolanda Iglesias. Martin McCash observes how Celestina subverts the model of courtly love as elaborated in the late twelfth-century of Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, in which love is idealized, seen as an ennobling feeling, while lowly worldly desires are eschewed. Whereas the garden of pure love in the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose is devoid of lechery, Calisto enters into Melibea’s garden to declare an 2  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 53. 3  Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 5–6. 4  Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 37 and pp. 8–12. 5  Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 52.

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adoration motivated by lust—a lust that is mirrored by his servants. Whether or not Rojas read De amore or Roman de la Rose, Martin McCash’s study demonstrates how Celestina parodies courtly ideals that are represented in these works.6 Later, Severin showed how the Tragicomedia ironically restages aspects of the Spanish sentimental novel, in particular Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de Amor (1492), a book we know Rojas owned.7 Like Leriano, the amorous hero in Cárcel de Amor, Calisto claims to be suffering from the mental anguish of amor hereos (lovesickness). His psychological symptoms of lovesickness are, however, mocked by his servants. María Eugenia Lacarra has provided further insights on how the courtly language Calisto employs to praise Melibea is later comically applied to the old whore, Celestina: “Oh glorious hope for my desired end! Oh end for my delightful hope! Oh healing for my suffering, alleviation of my torment, my restoration, vitality of my life, resurrection from my death!” (¡O gloriosa esperança de mi desseado fin! ¡O fin de mi deleytosa esperança! ¡O salud de mi passión, reparo de mi tormento, regeneración mía, vivificación de mi vida, resurrección de mi muerte!) (250–51).8 His lovesickness is also belied by his vulgar cursing, and an ability to laugh at jokes made at his expense: “Damn you! You have made me laugh, which I had not thought to do” (Maldito seas! Que fecho me has reyr, lo que no pensé) (222).9 Yolanda Iglesias synthesizes many of these findings, and also points out how the servants’ affairs with women who work for Celestina deepen the parody of the sentimental novel, as does the unflattering portrayal of Melibea’s parents—not to mention the way in which Celestina’s alleged magic and verbal manipulations provide a pretext for the girl’s uncourtly desires.10

6  June Hall Martin McCash, Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the Courtly Lover (London: Tamesis, 1972). 7  Dorothy Severin, “Humour in Celestina,” Romance Philology 32 (1978): 274–91, and Tragicomedy and Novelistic Discourse in Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Cárcel de Amor is mentioned in Rojas’s will, which includes a complete inventory of Latin and vernacular books belonging to the author. See Fernando del Valle Lersundi, “Testamento de Fernando de Rojas,” Revista de filología española 16 (1929): 369–88. 8  The English translations of Celestina are mine. The Spanish quotes followed by page numbers are from Peter Russell’s edition of Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina (Madrid: Castalia, 1991). 9  María Eugenia Lacarra, “La parodia de la ficción sentimental en la Celestina,” Celestinesca 13, no. 1 (1989): 11–29. 10  Yolanda Iglesias, Una nueva mirada a la parodia de la novela sentimental en La Celestina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009).

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As this brief review makes clear, approaches to Rojas’s parody of love and of lovers have been extensively studied by critics. However, the topic is not exhausted. In the centuries after its publication, the Tragicomedia spawned a vast and complex array of receptions in the form of sequels, imitations, and translations into English, French, Italian, and neo-Latin, among others.11 Research into these works has increased in recent decades, and will no doubt continue to provide valuable insights into the afterlives of Celestina and her infatuated clients. Still unexplored are the many ways in which Rojas parodies the suffering of lovers, and how the subversion of medieval literary traditions was interpreted and adapted by readers, translators, and imitators in early modern Spain and across Europe. Barbara Fuchs, for instance, has demonstrated the importance of this kind of approach in the case of English imitations, as they reveal “a vexed dynamics of cultural indebtedness and national distinction” in which writers emulated, but at the same disclaimed, Spanish literary models.12 The ways in which receptions and adaptations reflect cultural connections between Spain and other nations could shed further light on histories of literary influence. As mentioned earlier, writers of parody assumed that at least part of the expected audience would be in the intertextual “know”—or “in on” the trans-contextualized joke. Of course, the telling of these jokes varied at different times and places. To cite one example, Ana María Murillo has shown how the early eighteenth-century English translator Captain John Stevens transformed Calisto into an outright “lustful ravisher” who speaks of his desires much more explicitly than in the original Spanish, while foregoing many of the amorous platitudes that Rojas used to provoke laughter.13 It seems unlikely that Stevens’s Enlightenment audience would have viewed Calisto as a mock courtly lover, but they might have associated his actions with perceptions of Spanish decadence and moral corruption—as a source of entertainment and novelistic inspiration, and a projection of censorious attitudes toward an historical rival.

11  For the early translations of Celestina, see Kathleen Kish, “Celestina as Chameleon: The Early Translations,” Celestinesca 33 (2009): 87–98. 12  Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 78. 13   Ana María Murillo Murillo, “Love and Chastity in Two Early English Versions of La Celestina,” in Proceedings of the II Conference of Sociedad Española de Estudios Renacentistas Ingleses, ed. S. G. Fernández-Corugedo (Oviedo: University of Oviedo, 1992), 203–17, p. 211.

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Studies of parodic religiosity in Celestina have centered on the portrayal of the old bawd and on aspects of Calisto’s quasi-devotional behavior. A number of critics have commented on the lover’s heresy in Act 1, when Calisto proclaims to be a “Melibean,” rather than a Christian, and prefers her favors to the glories of the saints: “If Purgatory is like this I would rather that my soul went with brute animals than thereby achieve the glory of the saints […] I am a Melibean and I adore Melibea and believe in Melibea and love Melibea” (Si el purgatorio es tal más querría que mi spíritu fuesse con los brutos animales que por medio de aquél yr a la gloria de los sanctos […] melibeo soy y a melibea adoro y en Melibea creo y a Melibea amo) (219–20). Manuel da Costa Fontes was the first to explore the way in which Celestina is characterized as a sinful counterpart to the Virgin Mary. He observes, for instance, how the procuring “mother” is celebrated as an “old whore” (puta vieja) wherever she goes, in a travesty of how the Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, is traditionally represented as being celebrated by the natural world.14 Celestina is an unholy mediator and advocate, petitioned and adored by sinners like Calisto as their wouldbe patron saint. Whereas the most important attribute of Mary is her purity, Celestina serves as an antithesis, infamous for her ability to falsify virginity: “In her dealings with virgins, some she remade with animal bladders and others were cured with stitching. She had fine needles […] silk threads […] with this she worked wonders […] for charity’s sake she healed many orphans and errant girls who commended themselves to her” (Esto de los virgos, unos fazía de bexiga y otros curava de punto. Tenía agujas delgadas […] hilos de seda […] Hazía con esto maravillas […] remediava por caridad muchas huérfanas y erradas que se encomendavan ella) (244–55). In an earlier study, I have also considered how the eponymous character is ironically associated with the cult of Mary Magdalene.15 This saintly woman was characterized during the Middle Ages as a reformed sinner who miraculously recovered her maidenhood and overcame the vanity of worldly beauty, becoming the patron saint of repentant prostitutes and cosmeticians. The old bawd reverses these attributes through her role as the operator of a brothel who dedicates herself to producing cosmetics, and to the creation and sale of counterfeit virgins. Apart from his ridiculous veneration of Celestina, Calisto makes a spectacle of himself while praying at the Church of the Magdalene 14  Manuel da Costa Fontes, The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Delicado (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), pp. 239 and 242. 15  Ryan D. Giles, The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

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in Act 8, as if in a parody of the tradition of holy fools.16 Recently, Santiago López-Ríos has also shown how Calisto’s worshipful treatment of Melibea’s sash or “cordón” can be interpreted as parodying the excesses of the late medieval cult of relics, since the object is hyperbolically said to have touched all of the holy sites in Jerusalem.17 At the same time, as Andrew Beresford points out, Melibea’s promise to furnish Calisto with a prayer to St. Apollonia alludes ironically to the martyrdom of this holy virgin, whose torturers broke her teeth when she refused to denounce Christ.18 The prayer is ostensibly requested as a means of alleviating Calisto’s toothache, a euphemism for sexual desire. Following the famous ideas of Gilman, Costa Fontes and others have seen such allusions as evidence of Rojas’s pessimistic outlook on Christianity, influenced by his experience as a New Christian, a converso or a descendent of converted Jews—although so-called Old Christians from the period also engaged in similar parodic writing.19 Whatever Rojas’s dedication to the new faith at the time the tragicomedy was composed, it is clear that he made efforts to be seen as a committed, even pious Christian by the end of his life.20 However, many characters in the text treat religion with what can only be described as irreverent cynicism. Verses included in the preliminaries or epilogue of versions of Celestina call on readers to remember the Passion of Christ, but this is the only explicit mention of the Savior. Though often downplayed, these verses are of considerable importance, not just a token gesture to the sacred truth of Christianity: 16  This tradition of the holy fools stretches back to the writings of the Apostle Paul, who urged his followers to allow the world to see them as fools for the sake of Christ (1 Cor. 4:10). Examples of early Fathers of the Church and medieval saints engaging in laughable spectacles of holy madness, including Francis of Assisi, can be found in the classic study of John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 17  Santiago López-Ríos, “ ‘Señor, por holgar con el cordón no querrás gozar de Melibea’: La parodia del culto a las reliquias en la Celestina,” Modern Language Notes 127, no. 2 (2012): 190–207. 18  Andrew Beresford, “ ‘Una oraçión, señora, que le dixeron que sabías, de Sancta Polonia para el dolor de las muelas’: Celestina and the Legend of St Apollonia,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78 (2001): 39–57. 19  Costa Fontes, The Art; Stephen Gillman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of La Celestina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 20  Alan Deyermond is among the critics who has viewed Rojas as a sincere Christian, and also explored his links to the Franciscan movement in late medieval Spain. Alan Deyermond, “Fernando de Rojas from 1499–1502: Born-Again Christian?,” Celestinesca 25, no. 1 (2001): 3–20.

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Let us forget the vices that so capture us, Not to confide in vain hope; Let us fear that One who with thorns and lance, Lashes and nails had his blood spilled: In his holy wounded face they spit; Vinegar with honey was his drink; On each holy side was allowed a thief: May He take us, I pray, with the believers (Olvidemos los vicios que así nos prendieron, No confiemos en vana esperança; Temamos Aquel que espinas y lança, Açotes y clavos su sangre vertieron: La su santa faz herida escupieron; Vinagre con hiel fue su potación; A cada santo lado consintió un ladrón: nos lleve, le ruego, con los que creyeron). (193) Further insights into the treatment of religion in the book might be gained, for example, by considering an ironic link with the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus, known by medieval hagiographers as Dismas and Gestas. The former was saved and the latter condemned, whereas Pármeno and Sempronio are both revealed to be avaricious criminals and are executed without hope for salvation. The good thief of the Gospel, in contrast to the obstinacy of unbelief, was understood as illustrating the power of faith, repentance, and grace even at the last moment of a life lived in sin. In Christian iconography, the good thief and the personified Church traditionally appeared on the right side of the crucified Lord, whereas the impenitent thief and the blindfolded Synagoga were on the left. In Celestina, Pármeno’s early attempt at preserving his morality is no match for the corrupting influence of Celestina and other characters in the tragicomedy. Readers, confronted with the fact that they lived in a society of thieves who followed the damning example of Gestas, were warned to assume the role of a Dismas. Another interesting topic related to the Passion of Christ is the division of spoils. While the soldiers at the Crucifixion drew lots to divide the Savior’s belongings, deciding not to tear his seamless tunic (John 19:23–24), Celestina refuses to share the profits from Calisto’s passionate love affair. As Costa Fontes notes, this story is blasphemously referenced by Calisto himself in reference to Celestina’s murder: “They were audacious and striving; now or later they had to pay. The old woman was evil and deceitful, as it seems she made deals with them, and so they quarreled over the Just One’s cloak” (Ellos eran sobrados y

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esforzados; agora o en otro tiempo de pagar habían. La vieja era mala y falsa, según perece que hacía trato con ellos, y así que riñeron sobre la capa del justo) (494–95).21 The way in which the two servants’ characterization draws on meanings attached to the soldiers (and thieves) at the Crucifixion and the symbolism of Christ’s garment deserves more attention. Significantly, the dividing of Christ’s garments was understood as symbolizing the spread of the Church, while the seamless tunic represented its unity, as well as the virginal conception of the Savior’s flesh.22 As Carolyn Walker Bynum has observed in her most recent study of relics and other sacred matter, late medieval Christianity understood the material world through notions of the fragmentation of bodies and things. Matter was believed to hold the potential to miraculously reveal God’s indivisible unity and thereby transcend its corruptibility.23 Celestina, on the other hand, employs parodically desacralized images to tell a tale of disunity, conflict, and corruption in which bodies are irrevocably broken, punctured, and severed—in keeping with Rojas’s Petrarchan view of a world in conflict and at odds with itself, first introduced in the preliminaries to the text. This fragmentation can even be interpreted as anticipating modern forms of materialism and nontranscendent subjectivities, as Michael Gerli has recently argued.24 Celestina requests gifts not easily sharable or divisible as a means of greedily keeping all the material spoils of the doomed love affair. Apart from her “seamless” theft, the old bawd is given to ironically quoting Jesus, as when she first enters Melibea’s house with malicious intentions but gives a greeting from the Gospel of Luke (10:5): “Peace be in this house!” (¡Paz sea en esta casa!) (301). In the same scene she flatters Melibea by calling her the “perla preciosa” or Pearl of Great Price, thus alluding to Christ’s parable of the merchant who sold everything in order to purchase the one thing of greatest value, understood as the Kingdom of Heaven (311). The wisdom of Christ’s words are once again subjected to irony in the bawd’s mouth, as she implicates Calisto’s willingness 21  Costa Fontes, The Art, p. 144. 22  There is a longstanding, highly influential tradition that associated Mary and the Incarnation with weaving and the production of seamless textiles. See Ryan D. Giles, “Sewn Without a Needle: The Chasuble of St. Ildephonsus in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora,” La corónica 42, no. 1 (2013): 281–97. This, of course, contributes to seeing Celestina’s counterfeit work with needle and thread as a parody of Marian attributes. 23  Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011). 24  Michael Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 36.

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to foolishly give away his goods for the sake of a worldly lust that will lead to his death. It is not just spiritual wisdom that Rojas subjects to parody in Celestina, but also other philosophical, ethical learning. Critics have shown how the first Act, famously attributed by Rojas to an unspecified earlier author, introduces a pattern in which references to classical auctoritas, such as Aristotle, Virgil, and Seneca, are humorously undermined in favor of insights gained from worldly experience and skepticism.25 This undermining of authority tragically culminates in the final pages of the text, when Melibea cites examples of lovers from antiquity before giving up on the moralizing readings recommended by her father and committing suicide: “I would speak to you with some consoling words, before coming to my wished-for end, excerpted and compiled from those old books that you, to better sharpen my mind, asked me to read; were it not that my mind has lost them, being damaged by such a great disturbance” (Algunas consolatorias palabras te diría antes de mi agradable fin, coligidas y sacadas de aquellos antigos libros que tú, por más aclarar mi ingenio, me mandavas leer; sino que ya la dañada memoria con la grand turbación me las ha perdido) (589–90). Ottavio di Camillo has taken this kind of approach a step further, suggesting that the work parodies scholastic and earlier humanistic ethics, to the extent that it creates a new kind of discursive space, liberated from authoritative strictures and certainties.26 Some of the most important work to date on the importance of this kind of wisdom in Celestina has been carried out by Louise Fothergill-Payne. She finds that translations of Seneca, as well as pseudo-Senecan works and glosses available during the late fifteenth century, significantly influenced the tragicomedy. Of particular interest is the subject of friendship, employed by Celestina to convince Pármeno to join in the conspiracy against his master and win Areúsa as his prize. Fothergill-Payne notes that learned readers and translators of Seneca, such as Alonso de Cartagena, made connections between the Stoic’s letters and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in order to emphasize the importance of virtue in true friendships. Pseudo-Senecan writing from the period, namely the Título de la amistanza y del amigo (Treatise on Befriending and Friends), also warned against “loca amistad” (mad friendship) that is not based 25  See George Shipley, “Authority and Experience in La Celestina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 62 (1985): 95–111; and Francisco Layna, “Conocimiento frente a experiencia en el primer acto de Celestina: Una posible discordancia temática,” Celestinesca 23, no. 2 (1999): 61–86. 26  Ottavio di Camillo, “Ética humanística y libertinaje en La Celestina,” in Humanismo y lite­ ratura en tiempos de Juan del Encina, ed. Javier Guijarro Ceballos (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1999), 69–82.

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on virtue, but on lower motives, such as infatuation with women.27 Celestina’s advice parodies this kind of philosophical reflection on good versus bad friendships, as she tells Pármeno: “The pleasure is keeping company with friends in sensual things, and in particular recounting the stuff of love affairs” (El deleyte es con los amigos en las cosas sensuales, y especial en recontar las cosas de amores) (262). Recalling her Epicurean relationship with Pármeno’s mother, Claudina, which relied on enjoying the world together, Celestina promises that he will find a good friend in Sempronio for the mutual pursuit of goodness, profit, and pleasure: The remedy of misfortune is with friends. Where can you better achieve this relationship than where the three purposes of friendship concur: as is known, for goodness for profit and pleasure? For goodness: see how the will of Sempronio conforms to your own and the great similarity that you and he have in virtue. For profit, that is at hand, if you are in agreement. For pleasure: it is similar, since your age disposes you for all manner of delights, which bring youths together more readily than the old, as happens with gaming, dressing up, making jokes, eating and drinking, arranging for love, in each other’s company (En los infortunios el remedio es a los amigos ¿dónde puedes ganar mejor este deudo, que donde las tres maneras de amistad concurren, conviene a saber, por bien y provecho y deleite? Por bien: mira la voluntad de Sempronio conforme a la tuya y la gran similitud que tú y él en la virtud tenéis. Por provecho: en la mano está, si sois concordes. Por deleite: semejable es, como seáis en edad dispuestos para todo linaje de placer, en que más los mozos que los viejos se juntan, así como para jugar, para vestir, para burlar, para comer y beber, para negociar amores, juntos de compañía). (260) Celestina’s speech not only evokes the three motivations of friendship according to Aristotle and later philosophers, but also echoes the observation in Nicomachean Ethics that “friendships of young people seem to be based on pleasure. For their lives are guided by emotion, and they pursue most intensely what they find pleasant and what the moment brings […] friends are more indispensable in bad fortune.”28 As Fothergill-Payne points out, audience members familiar with philosophical commentaries on the subject “may 27  Louise Fothergill-Payne, Seneca and Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 43. 28  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp. 219 and 269.

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well have smiled at Celestina’s mixing and matching of Stoic, Epicurean, and Aristotelian truths […] the many references to Aristotle in Celestina may well reflect a superficial acquaintance with the Greek philosopher such as the average reader might have gathered.”29 In addition to parodying classical thinking on how friendships can improve character, Celestina’s text also appears to target Aristotelian ideas about how friends can have negative effects on each other. Aristotle held that friendship between those equal in merit increases their virtuousness, allowing them to mutually become better persons and reach their full human potential. However, when friends are drawn together for low motives, they will mirror each other, increasing their vices and wickedness. I would suggest that this notion of vicious friendship seems to inform Celestina’s rhetoric concerning the fellowship of Pármeno and Sempronio. Aristotle’s description in Nicomachean Ethics certainly applies to the kinds of relationships that the old bawd is interested in promoting and exploiting, even as she ironically speaks of the equitable “virtud” of her two helpers (230, 254, 271). Just as servants in Rojas’s text imitate their masters’ love lives at a vulgar level, they befriend each other in a way that parodies the virtuousness of noble friendship. This is only one among many examples from learned references and influences as to how parody works in Celestina. As I hope to have shown in this short essay, studies of parody have shed considerable light on Rojas’s text, in particular on meanings attached to the idealized suffering of lovers, medieval religious devotion, and philosophical wisdom. One of the most important innovations in Celestina is how it parodically combines, recodes, and remakes earlier discourses, resulting in a polyphonic and hypertextual masterpiece, anticipating developments in the early modern novel. We have seen how, for centuries, the story of the old bawd inspired a steady stream of translations, sequels, and reworkings. Targets of parody in the tragicomedy range from biblical to hagiographic sources, literary traditions of courtly love, and virtue ethics—from particular works such as Cárcel de Amor to entire genres and bodies of writing. Celestina is at times a very funny book, but one that can provoke both insouciant and uncomfortable laughter. Its use of parody, as I have suggested, delves into big and serious ideas such as materiality and fragmentation, the meaning of friendship, and societies and subjects divided against themselves. Critical appreciation of the work’s intertextual complexity is ongoing, as its multifaceted resonances and ironies—or what Nabakov would call its playful iridescence around the “spray” of seriousness—continue to challenge scholars. Rojas mines and reconstitutes accepted authorities and received truths found in the canon of what Melibea, 29  Fothergill-Payne, Seneca, p. 37.

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before jumping from the tower, calls “old books” (590). Some critics have even wondered whether a famous pronouncement made by her grieving father should be interpreted as yet another example of parody: “Our joy in the well” (Nuestro gozo en el pozo) (594). For some, the contrived, rhyming phrase can be understood as an ironic moment in his otherwise serious planctus or lamentation. Far from lessening the power of Pleberio’s speech, this final, parodic note could ultimately have the effect of making his grief all the more devastating. The mourning father finds himself unable to stop imitating formulaic expressions of the kind found in the “old books” that failed his daughter in the end.

CHAPTER 11

Risky Business: The Politics of Prostitution in Celestina Enriqueta Zafra Guárdelo Dios de piedra y niebla […] ò mas no de puta vieja (God protects him from the elements […] but not from an old whore)1 Gonzalo Correas

∵ As many critics have pointed out, sexual commerce is a central ingredient of Celestina. Maravall is one among many to have noticed that the intrigues of the old procuress Celestina and her protégées are not filler but an essential element of the play, to the point of constituting its kernel.2 Indeed, the underworld of prostitution, the characters that inhabit it and their ups and downs, provides Rojas a cast and a stage to present and explore the illegal reality of prostitution outside the sanctioned brothels of the period. From this point of view, the fiction of Celestina serves him as a laboratory for exploring legal 1  Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), ed. Louis Combet (Bordeaux: Institut d’Etudes Ibériques et Ibéro-américanes, 1967), my translation. 2  José Antonio Maravall, El mundo social de La Celestina (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), p. 17. An important contribution to the study of prostitution in Celestina is Eukene Lacarra Lanz, “El fenómeno de la prostitución y sus conexiones con La Celestina,” in Historias y ficciones: Coloquio sobre la literatura del siglo XV, ed. R. Beltrán, J. L. Canet, and J. L. Sirera (València: Universitat de València, 1990), 267–78. Also by the same author are “La evolución de la prostitución en la Castilla del siglo XV y la mancebía de Salamanca en tiempos de Fernando de Rojas,” in Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina: Approaching the Fifth Centenary, ed. Ivy Corfis and Joseph T. Snow (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993), 33–78; and “Legal and Clandestine Prostitution in Medieval Spain,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 79 (2002): 265– 85. See also Yolanda Iglesias, “La prostitución en La Celestina: Estudio histórico-literario,” eHumanista 19 (2011): 193–208; and Jorge Abril Sánchez, “Una familia de meretrices: Prostitutas públicas y privadas, cortesanas, rameras y putas viejas en La Celestina,” Celestinesca 27 (2003): 7–24.

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and moral issues surrounding prostitution precisely around the same years in which some forms of prostitution were legally sanctioned and regulated. By doing this, he is anticipating some of the debates of the next hundred years that would result in an official yet unrealistic across-the-board banning of prostitution in the seventeenth century. The last decade of the fifteenth century was especially important for the legal status of sexual commerce in Spain: the authorities took measures to control and regulate the chaotic world of prostitution through the mancebías (bawdyhouses or brothels that were officially sanctioned). As Menjot has pointed out, mancebías mushroomed after 1498, when the authorities started to give licenses to open this kind of institution to anybody who requested them.3 In the early years of the sixteenth century mancebías existed in de Segovia, Cuenca, Toledo, and Valencia, this last one being especially notorious for its size.4 The Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella were very interested in controlling the until-then chaotic outlet of mercenary sexuality as part of their all-encompassing program to stabilize and consolidate their kingdoms. They were not attempting to impose a new sexual morality on society, but were acting simply for practical reasons. As Moreno Mengíbar and Francisco Vázquez García have shown, at the time many new policies implemented by the cities and the crown coincided in pointing out the close connection between street prostitution, pimps, and the existence of armed groups at the service of local nobility. The best way to put an end to a pervasive climate of violence and insecurity that often bordered on insurrection and even civil war was to curb it at its roots by controlling sexual commerce.5 The legalization of mancebías aimed not only at curbing criminal activity. It also aimed at improving public health, which was seriously affected by syphilis and other communicable diseases. Equally, it intended to improve the fiscal 3  Denis Menjot, “Prostitutas y rufianes en las ciudades castellanas a fines de la Edad Media,” Temas medievales 4 (1994): 189–204, p. 197. 4  Lacarra Lanz, “El fenómeno de la prostitución y sus conexiones con La Celestina,” p. 270; see also Manuel Carboneres, Picaronas y alcahuetes o la mancebía de Valencia: Apuntes para la historia de la prostitución (Valencia: Bonaire, 1978), and Carmen Peris, “La prostitución valenciana en la segunda mitad del siglo XIV,” Revista d’ Història Medieval 1 (València: Universitat de València, 1990), 179–99. 5  Andrés Moreno Mengíbar and Francisco Vázquez García, “Formas y funciones de la prostitución en Andalucía en la edad media: El caso andaluz,” Norba, Revista de Historia, no. 20 (2007): 53–87, p. 55. Also by these two authors are Crónica de una marginación: Historia de la prostitución en Andalucía (siglos XII–XX) (Cádiz: Biblioteca Andaluza de Arte y Literatura, 1999), and Historia de la prostitución en Andalucía (Sevilla: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2004).

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situation of the cities by allowing them to tax sexual commerce. However, the implementation of mancebías sanctioned by the authorities and tolerated by a complicit but sometimes-embarrassed Catholic Church partially failed because it never succeeded in monopolizing the offer of mercenary sex. Often inns and taverns remained a competing scenario for freelance prostitution, as is later reflected in the famous literary characters of the prostitutes Maritornes, Tolosa, and Molinera in Don Quixote (1605–15), or the main character in La pícara Justina (1605).6 Clandestine forms of prostitution coexisted with legalized prostitution and, when all forms of prostitution were banned in 1623, it would thrive even more. Lacarra classifies sexual workers of the time into three categories. The first group were the putas de mancebía (bawdyhouse women), who lived in the designated areas and worked only in the authorized institutions. Following official regulations, they could have no relatives in the city in which they worked. Also, they were not allowed to have relations with Jews or Muslims. Most important, they were expected not to carry transferable diseases. This last point was enforced by weekly compulsory medical examinations.7 The women were subject to pay rent for their food and lodging to the person in charge of the mancebía. The second group were the rameras (harlots), who were independent prostitutes who did not work within the mancebía system. They attracted their clients in their walks through streets, or they displayed a bough outside their house to proclaim their trade (rama in Spanish, therefore the denomination rameras). The last group were the enamoradas (kept women), who were the highest echelon of sexual trade. They entertained selected groups of long-term lovers, of which often one was the main supporter of her expenses. This coexistence between different forms of sexual commerce and the Catholic Monarchs’ efforts to regulate sexual commerce by channeling it through the mancebías are reflected in Celestina. The mancebía of Salamanca was inaugurated in 1497. On July 17th Prince Juan of Aragon bestowed the direction of the place to a García de Albarrategui, a minor servant of the Catholic Monarchs.8 After the death of Prince Juan of Aragon in the same year, the city 6  Enriqueta Zafra, Prostituidas por el texto: Discurso prostibulario en la picaresca femenina (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009), p. 93. 7  At the time, Juan de Mariana, in his Tratado contra los juegos públicos (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1854), recommends specific measures to prevent diseases, such as regular medical visits in the mancebías and the banning of sick women from the establishments and their subsequent treatment in public hospitals (448). 8  The lot designed for the mancebía was entered in city records on November 19, 1498, as “in the district on the other side of the bridge by the tanners” (en el arrabal allende la puente cerca

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of Salamanca, alleging the rents that the business could generate for the municipal budget, appealed the decision. The Catholic Monarchs agreed to transfer the control of the mancebía to the city, which, after compensating García de Albarrategui, made the city officer Juan Arias Maldonado the administrator. Fernando de Rojas, who was studying law in Salamanca in the years in which he finished his book, witnessed the effects of an official mancebía in the city on the world of sexual commerce. These changes could not but affect him, who, as a student, was part of the targeted clientele of this new institution. Students were notorious for their frequentation of prostitutes and brothels. In his proverb 1485, Horozco describes students in the following disapproving terms: “Students waste their time frequenting prostitutes at night, sleeping, strolling, getting drunk, gambling and other shenanigans” (Gastan el tiempo en andar / de noche y en puterías / en dormir y pasear / borrachear y jugar / y en otras bellaquerías).9 Although, as Baranda has pointed out, the existence of the mancebía is never mentioned in Celestina, the coincidence in time between the composition of Celestina and the opening of this establishment is significant. Furthermore, the book can be considered a pioneering testimony of the debate on the toleration or banning of sexual commerce that would start several decades later in a formal way.10 Rojas’s decision to make prostitution a central ingredient of the book that he was writing in nearly the same years in which the new regulations for prostitution were implemented has to be interpreted as part of his interests as a student of law. As Fernández Rivera has pointed out about the genre of commedia humanistica, to which Celestina belongs, “most of [these] comedies were probably written by professors or students as examples or exercises for the courses of rhetoric, which were an important component of the curriculum at universities of the time.”11 We think that this idea can be extended beyond the study of rhetoric to reach the study of law. Celestina should be partially considered a scholarly exercise in which a law student rehearses, in a playful way, some the legal implications of the behaviors of the de las tenerías) (Consolación Baranda, “Cambio social en La Celestina y las ideas jurídicopolíticas en la Universidad de Salamanca,” in El mundo social y cultural de La Celestina, ed. Ignacio Arellano and J. M. Usunárriz (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert, 2003), 9–25, p. 17. 9  Sebastián Horozco, El teatro universal de los proverbios, ed. José Luis Alonso Hernández (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1986), proverb 1485, p. 319. 10  Consolación Baranda, “Cambio social en La Celestina y las ideas jurídico-políticas en la Universidad de Salamanca.” 11  Enrique Fernández Rivera, “Celestina as Closet Drama,” in A Companion to Early Modern Hispanic Theater, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 7–18, p. 9.

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fictional characters. Seduction of a virgin, procurement, illegal prostitution, theft, and homicide are some of the crimes committed by the characters in the play. Rojas was well prepared for this legal exercise that dealt with sex-related offenses. The list of books he left in his will includes, among many other legal books, a copy of the medieval manual De secretis mulierum, a kind of abbreviated encyclopedia dealing with many aspects of human sexuality. The book was useful for him because, as Fernández Rivera has noticed, “his work as a lawyer probably implied dealing with cases, such as wedding contracts, etc., in which establishing the virginal status of a woman was part of the process. For this purpose, De secretis mulierum contained valuable technical information that could be used in the trials.”12 The book also informed Rojas on some aspects of prostitution and its legitimacy, which was a frequent subject of discussion among those who practiced and studied law at the inn at which Rojas stayed at the University of Salamanca. Celestina can be seen as an opportunity to deploy the subtleties that a lawyer can run into when confronting real-world prostitution at the time. Let’s examine how the world of prostitution is portrayed in Celestina and how the pros and cons of its legalization are weighed up in the plot.13 In Act 9, Rojas includes a description of the halcyon days of illegal prostitution that preceded the new mancebías. In the banquet scene in Celestina’s house, she tells Pármeno, Sempronio, and their lovers, Areúsa and Elicia: “You didn’t know me when I was prosperous twenty years ago […] My love, I remember the day when nine lasses sat round this table where your cousins are now and the oldest wasn’t more than eighteen and the youngest under fourteen” (Bien paresce que no me conociste en mi prosperidad, hoy ha veynte años … Yo vi, 12  Enrique Fernández Rivera, “El De secretis mulierum en La Celestina y en la biblioteca de Fernando de Rojas,” Neophilologus 99, no. 3 (2015): 407–18, p. 407. 13  For historical considerations of urban prostitution in the Spain of the time, besides the works already mentioned by Andrés Moreno Mengíbar and Francisco Vázquez García, Manuel Carboneres, and Denis Menjot, see Miguel Jiménez Monteserín, Sexo y bien común: Notas para la historia de la prostitución en la España Moderna (Cuenca: Ayuntamiento de Cuenca, 1994). See also María Teresa López Beltrán, “Evolución de la prostitución en el reino de Granada a través de las ordenanzas de la mancebía de Ronda,” in Realidad histórica e invención literaria en torno a la mujer, ed. María Teresa López Beltrán (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1987), 11–23; Ángel Luis Molina Molina, “Del mal necesario a la prostitución del burdel de Murcia,” Contrastes, Revista de Historia, no. 11 (1998–2000): 111–25; Marjorie Ratcliffe, “Adulteresses, Mistresses and Prostitutes: Extramarital Relations in Medieval Castille,” Hispania 67, no. 3 (1984): 346–50; María del Carmen García Herrero, “El mundo de la prostitución en las ciudades bajomedievales,” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas 4 (1998): 67–100.

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mi amor, a esta mesa donde agora están tus primas assentadas, nueve moças de tus días, que la mayor no passava de deziocho años, y ninguna avía menor de quatorze) (109; 234).14 Those were the days when prostitution, if not legalized, was accepted, even protected, as a lesser evil. Such pragmatic tolerance had been supported since the days of the Fathers of the Church, such as Saint Augustine, who saw prostitution as a necessary cloaca or sewer for the convenient disposal of the lust of men. Prostitutes, therefore, helped to keep social order by protecting the honor and chastity of unmarried women, wives, nuns, and honest widows.15 For the reasons mentioned above of crime control and taxation, the Catholic Monarchs felt it necessary to regularize the functioning of this social safety valve. The possibility for men to resort to prostitutes to quench their sexual drives was considered to protect the institution of matrimony. An example of the havoc that uncontrolled male sexuality could cause is the story of Melibea. Hers is a textbook case of the dangers that many well-to-do families faced if they did not manage to protect their daughters against libidinous young men. As Ricardo Córdoba has proved, seducing or raping an unmarried woman in medieval Castile affected wedding contracts in very specific ways. Not only was the possibility of entering into such a contract with a suitable man jeopardized if the bride-to-be was not a virgin, but the amount of the dowry had to be increased as indemnity for such blame on the woman, even in cases in which she had been victim of rape.16 Rojas makes it clear that Melibea’s parents are painfully aware of the risks of having a nubile daughter. In Pleberio’s words, “the four main things sought in marriage [are]: first, understanding, reputation and virginity” (de las quatro principales cosas que en los casamientos se demandan, conviene saber: [es] lo primero discreción, honestidad y virginidad) (165; 302). Not surprisingly, it was common in the period to refer to virginity in monetary terms, calling it a treasure or caudal (wealth). For instance, Juan de la Cerda wrote in Vida política de todos los estados de mujeres (1599): “Virginity is a big treasure […] If our daughters endanger it by talking to suspicious men, they deserve to have their tongues cut, or if they wanted to go 14  The Spanish quotes are from the Tragicomedia by page number from Dorothy Severin’s edition of Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987). The English quotes of Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009). In a few cases, the translations are adapted or provided to match the literal sense of the original Spanish words. 15  Gustavo E. Ponferrada, “Santo Tomás y la prostitución,” Sapientia 45 (1990): 225–30. 16  Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave, El instinto diabólico: Las agresiones sexuales en la Castilla Medieval (Córdoba: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba, 1994), p. 23.

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around the streets on their own, have their legs severed” (Es tan gran tesoro la virginidad […] Y si ellas [las hijas] quisieran ponerla en peligro, hablando con hombres sospechosos, han de cortarles las lenguas. Y si quisieren mirar, sacarles los ojos, y si quisieren callejear, cortarles las piernas).17 The repetition of similar advice in manuals of the period evidences that instances in which the reputation of an unmarried woman was endangered were common.18 In any case, it is too late for Melibea’s parents, who only begin to talk about the convenience of marrying off their daughter a month after she has started her affair with Calisto. A central issue in the sexual economy of the period is obedience within the family, both within the patriarchal family made up of parents and children, especially daughters, and the family-like relation between prostitutes and their “mothers,” as Celestina and the madams of the mancebías were called. Due obedience is mentioned by Celestina in the same scene in which we see her refer to her halcyon days as a madam: “They all obeyed and honored me. I was respected by the lot and nobody went against my wishes. Everything I said was good and right. I gave everyone what they needed and they took what I sent: lame, one-eyed or one-armed, they saw the customer who brought in the most money as the healthiest” (Todas me obedescían, todas me honrravan, de todas era acatada; ninguna salía de mi querer; lo que yo dezía era lo bueno […] no escogían más de lo que les dava; coxo o tuerto o manco, aquél avían por sano que más dinero me dava) (10; 235). Celestina’s words about obedience are echoed in the conversation that, later in the play, Alisa has with her husband about the possible marriage of Melibea. She is positive that her daughter will marry whoever they choose, since “We shall order her to accept whoever it may be, red- or blue-blooded, ugly or handsome. It will be a joy for her, and she’ll take 17  Juan de la Cerda, Vida política de todos los estados de mujeres: En el cual se dan muy provechosos y cristianos documentos y avisos, para criarse y confesarse devidamente las mujeres en sus estados (Alcalá de Henares, 1599), Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid R 4067, p. 15 (my translation). 18  Among the many manuals of behavior for women of the period, we should mention Álvaro de Luna, El libro de las virtuosas mujeres (1446), ed. Manuel Castillo (Valladolid: Maxtor Editorial, 2002), and Mosén Diego de Valera, Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres (1440), ed. María Ángeles Suz Ruiz (Madrid: El Archipiélago, 1983). The sermons of famous preachers, such as Vicente Ferrer (1350–1507), often dealt with the issue. Many studies exist that analyze what women read at the time. See, for instance, Barbara Whitehead, ed., Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500–1800 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), and, specifically for the Spain of the time, Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández, eds., Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

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him with good grace” (que si alto o baxo de sangre, o feo o gentil de gesto le mandaremos tomar, aquello será su plazer, aquello avrá por bueno) (168; 306). However, Melibea, who is furtively listening in on the conversation, tells her servant Lucrecia that she’d rather be “a good lover than an unhappy spouse” (buena amiga que mala casada” (167; 304). From her words, we can infer that Melibea is fully aware of the consequences of having accepted Calisto as a lover and having had unwed sex. As Mazo Karras writes, Melibea knows that “if a man asks a woman to be his lover, it means he considers her a prostitute; if he thought she were chaste, he would not ask, and if she is not chaste, she is a prostitute.”19 That lawyers of the period ran into similar situations as part of their professional duties is proven by Barahona, who lists many legal cases dealing with the virginity of the bride in the province of Vizcaya between 1528 and 1735. In his study, Barahona makes a legal differentiation between courtship and seduction that is pertinent to the case of Melibea: It was one thing to seek a partner for marriage, but quite another to seduce someone and engage in a sexual affair with all its profound consequences and responsibilities. Given the stakes, seduction was an extraordinarily risky undertaking, which required determination, skill, and more than a touch of deviousness.20 Rojas, conversant with the legal implications of such acts, makes it clear that Calisto is not a suitor looking for a bride but a seducer who resorts to all kinds of “determination, skill … and deviousness.” Besides the chicaneries of Celestina and her alleged black magic, other factors that imply an act of disobedience toward her parents contribute to facilitating the seduction of Melibea. An important contributing factor is pernicious readings. As Lucía Megías and Marín Pina have pointed out, chivalry novels were often accused of making young virgins dream of surreptitious sexual encounters, as well as inciting married women and widows to lecherousness.21 Luis Vives is one of the many moralists of the period who 19  Ruth Mazo Karras, “Sex, Money and Prostitution in Medieval English Culture,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. J. Murray and K. Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 201–16, p. 209. 20  Renato Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528– 1735 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 14. 21  José Manuel Lucía Megías and Ma Carmen Marín Pina, “Lectores de libros de caballerías,” in Amadís de Gaula: Quinientos años de libros de caballerías, ed. José Manuel Lucía Megías

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voices this charge against some readings: “What does a girl have to do with weapons, the very mention of which is unbecoming to her? […] a young woman cannot easily be of chaste mind if her thoughts are occupied with the sword and sinewy muscles and virile strength” (73). Also, in his De institutione feminae Christianae (1523), Vives mentions the book Celestina by name among the readings that are pernicious for women: “New ones appear everyday: Celestina, the brothel-keeper, begetter of wickedness.”22 Moralists like Vives are not worried so much about the content per se of a book written, as its title page advertises, as “Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, composed as a caution to crazed lovers who, overcome by their immoderate appetites, call and deem to be their gods” (reprenhensión de los locos enamorados que, vencidos de su desordenado apetito, a sus amigas llaman y dizen ser su dios […] [y] en aviso de los engaños de las alcahuetas y malos y lisonjeros sirvientes) (my translation; 82). What concerns Vives and many moralists is the misinterpretation of the graphic scenes included as counter-examples in the book. Not surprisingly, talking about sacred oratory, Rebhorn has noticed how the preachers were expected to be aware of the danger of presenting counter-examples too vividly: Imagining the rhetorically trained preacher as a physician whose task is to tear out the vices by the roots from the souls of his auditors, Fray Luis de Granada also recognizes the very fine line between good and bad rhetoric, between medicine and poison: “I leave to the prudence of the preacher what caution is to be used in removing vices of this sort, lest we offer people poison or material of some grave offensiveness in place of health-giving medicine.23 Similar danger affects the readers of Celestina if they do not succeed in applying the proper conclusion to the vivid examples of sinfulness. Legalized prostitution was expected to somehow counteract the bad effect of these readings on impressionable women by offering an outlet of lesser evil (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España, Sociedad Española de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2008), 289–311. 22  Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 75. 23  Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 131. Much later, in its prologue, the anonymous Vida y costumbres de la madre Andrea (1650), ed. Enriqueta Zafra, trans. Anne J. Cruz (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2011) shows a clear awareness of this danger but deems it as necessary (146).

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for the uncontrollable sexual drive of young men like Calisto. Melibea, enticed by Celestina, her pernicious readings, and her own sexual drive, gives in to the requests of Calisto. The situation could have been prevented from the beginning if Calisto had resorted to prostitutes to quench his sexual drive. Single young men like him were the main clientele of legalized prostitution, thus helping to protect the honor of nubile women of good families, such as Melibea. Why Calisto did not resort to this remedy is never explained in the book. Areúsa, one of the protégées of Celestina, is outraged that Calisto prefers Melibea to her professional services: “I can’t think what Calisto sees in her to drop all the others he could get his hands on much more easily and pleasurably” (No sé que se ha visto Calisto [en Melibea] porque dexa de amar otras que más ligeramente podría aver y con quien más él holgase) (104; 228). But Sempronio retorts that their similarly high social status is what makes Calisto and Melibea desire each other: “Calisto’s a gentleman and Melibea’s well-to-do, and those born with pedigree seek each other out. It’s hardly surprising if he loves her rather than other women” (Calisto es cavallero, Melibea hijodalgo; assí que los nascidos por linaje escogidos búscanse unos a otros. Por ende no es de maravillar que ame antes a ésta que a otra) (105; 229). Areúsa’s complaints are, however, especially meaningful since Calisto is not seeking marriage and the relationship he establishes with Melibea is not that of a suitor but of a seducer. With all this in mind, we think that Rojas is writing this story as a case study in seduction and its possible legal consequences. He is also questioning the practicality of using prostitution, legal or illegal, to protect the honor of young women because, as is evident in this case, it does not suffice to save the honor of Melibea. Furthermore, the existence of an underworld in which characters like Celestina, Areúsa, and Elicia pullulate and cavort contributes to the machinations that lead to the seduction of Melibea. After giving in, Melibea becomes dangerously close to the group of women who were considered part of the realm of prostitution at the time: women from well-to-do families, daughters or widows of honorable families who were punctually the occasional victims of procuresses.24 Many years before the debate would become public, Rojas is advancing a condemnation of prostitution, institutionalized or not, for its inefficiency and for offering the breeding ground for a criminal underworld. Our vision of Rojas’s intention disagrees with Baranda’s opinion that Celestina depicts a world that is changing for the best. According to Baranda, this is especially the case regarding prostitution, which is beginning to be put 24  Lacarra, “La evolución de la prostitución en la Castilla del siglo XV y la mancebía de Salamanca en tiempos de Fernando de Rojas,” p. 37.

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under control, as well as regarding a more equalitarian judicial system and better behavior of the men of the Church.25 We think that Celestina preludes the debates that will result in the complete yet ineffectual prohibition of sexual commerce in later centuries. Indeed, the new laws enforced by the Catholic Kings negatively affected Celestina, who went from having several girls working for her in her home to having to take considerable risks to continue practicing her profession. Her incursion into Pleberio’s house to seduce Melibea is indeed a risky business, and she knows it. As clearly stated in the Partidas of King Alfonso X, such an attempt was punishable by death: “He who sells his own wife must be sentenced to death. The same sentence must be applied to the person who pimps a married woman, a virgin, a religious woman or a widow of good reputation for a profit” (qualquier que alcahotease a su mujer, debe morir por ende. Esa misma pena debe haber el que alcahotease a otra mujer casada, o virgen, o religiosa, o vibda de buena fama por algo que le diesen o le prometisen dar) (Ley 2.666).26 Celestina falls completely under this description: she sells innocent girls, even the most secluded ones and married women. In the case of Melibea’s seduction, she is understandably worried because she has never dealt with a young woman in such a high position: “I could lose my life in all this if they get wind of my plans for Melibea. If they decide not to kill me, I could be badly humiliated, whipped or tossed up in the air” (si me sintessen en estos passos de parte de Melibea, que no pagase con pena que menor fuesse que la vida; o muy amenguada quedasse, quando matar no me quisiessen, manteándome o açotándome cruelmente) (44; 149). The several professional roles that Celestina plays in the world of prostitution throughout her life, from her days as an apprentice to her final stage as a master of the trade, offer Rojas the opportunity to go over the career of a prostitute. According to Father Mariana, these career stages are demarcated by age: “Prostitutes, once they are past their prime, they become procuresses who profit from their experience to fool and damage people; the brothels are the very seminaries for these women and their bad effects” (Las rameras, pasada la flor de su edad, se hacen terceras, y por la larga experiencia saben mil mineras de engañar y hacer daño; de suerte que los burdeles son seminarios certísimos 25  Baranda, “Cambio social en La Celestina y las ideas jurídico-políticas en la Universidad de Salamanca,” p. 22. Other critics disagree with this improvement. For instance, Yolanda Iglesias sees foul play in the way in which the deaths in Celestina are handled in “Implicaciones legales de las seis muertes en La Celestina: un acercamiento histórico literario,” Romance Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2015): 59–70. 26  Alfonso X, Las siete partidas del rey Alfonso el sabio, cotejadas con varios códices antiguos por la Real Academia de la Historia, Tomo 3 (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1807).

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desta gente y destos daños).27 In her good days, Celestina led a house in which nine women between the ages of fourteen and eighteen worked for her, but before that, she was an apprentice to Elicia’s grandmother and Pármeno’s mother.28 It is not clearly stated that she worked as a prostitute, except for a brief ironic retort to Sempronio when he is asking her for money: “Did you rescue me from the whorehouse?” (¿Quítasme de la putería?) (143; 273).29 At the time the events of the play take place, her days of splendor as a madam are behind and working with her remains only a girl, Elicia, who furthermore is not a very diligent learner of the trade: Why didn’t you get the tackle and start working on the job? You need to get some practice. You’ve seen me do it enough times. If not, you’ll be a dead weight all your life without skills or income. And when you’re my age, you’ll be sorry you were so lazy because an idle youth leads to a dismal old age. I was better than your grandmother, may she rest in peace. She taught me this trade, but I knew more than she did within a year (¿Por qué tú no tomavas el aparejo y començavas a hazer algo? Pues en aquellas tales te avías de abezar y de provar, de quantes vezes me lo as visto hazer. Si no, ay te estarás toda tu vida, hecha bestia sin officio ni renta. Y quando seas de mi edad, llorarás la holgura de agora […] Hazíalo yo mejor quando quando tu abuela, que Dios haya, me mostrava este officio, que a cabo de un año sabía más que ella). (91; 210) While Celestina is proud of her proficiency in her work, Elicia hates her work: “I hate this trade, but you’d die for it” (Yo le tengo a este officio odio; tú mueres tras ello) (91; 210). Indeed, Celestina is truly entrepreneurial in her line of work. She even knows how to diversify her business to maximize profit. According to Pármeno: “She was a mistress of six trades, namely: seamstress, parfumier, a dab hand at painting faces and patching maidenheads, a bawd and a bit of a witch. The first trade was a cover for the others” (Ella tenía seys officios, 27  Juan de Mariana in Tratado contra los juegos públicos (446), my translation. 28  The text of Celestina gives us some information on the times that Celestina is compelled to move to keep her business. See Joseph T. Snow, “Celestina’s Houses,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86, no. 1 (2009): 121–33; and Peter Russell, “Why did Celestina Move House?,” in The Age of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1516, ed. Alan Deyermond and Ian Macpherson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 155–61. The ages for prostitutes are stated, for instance, in Lozana andaluza as between twelve and forty. See Francisco Delicado, Retrato de la Lozana andaluza, ed. Claude Allaigre (Madrid: Cátedra, 1985); and Diego de Valera, Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres, p. 367. 29  My translation.

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conviene a saber: labrandera, perfumera, maestra de hacer afeytes y de hazer virgos, alcahueta y un poquito hechizera. Era el primero officio cobertura de los otros) (15; 110). Her entrepreneurship extends also to how she diversifies the ways in which she acts as a procuress: besides Elicia, who works from within Celestina’s house, she also counts on the freelancer Areúsa, who works under her tutelage but somehow independently. Areúsa, more an enamorada (kept woman) than a ramera (prostitute) is proud of this independence that allows her to choose her lovers and limit herself to a selected amount of protectors: I swear by all the pleasures in my life that it’s true, women who serve noble ladies never enjoy love’s thrall and sweet rewards […] That’s why, mother, I’ve always preferred to live in my little house, free and my own mistress, and not in their luxurious palaces, like a prisoner under their thumb (Assí goçe de mí, que es verdad, que éstas que sirven a señoras ni gozan deleyte ni conocen los dulces premios del amor […] Por esto me bivo sobre mí, desde que me sé conoscer, que jamás me precié de llamar de otrie sino mía […] Por esto madre, he querido más bivir en mi pequeña casa esenta y señora, que no es sus ricos palacios sojuzgada y cativa. (109; 232–33) It is the independent-minded Areúsa who takes revenge for her lover’s and Celestina’s deaths through the pimp Centurio. This miles gloriosus is a braggadocio who has thirty women working for him, as his father and his grandfather did in their times. He adopted the name Centurio after his grandfather, who was the pimp of a hundred women (316). His intervention at the request of Areúsa triggers the tragic denouement of the play; destiny proves wrong Correas’s proverbs, “The tears of whores, or the threats of pimps and the word of a merchant you should not trust” (lágrimas de puta, amenazas de rufián y juramentos de mercader, no se han de creer) and “The tears of whores or the swearing of a pimp you should not trust” (Ni a la puta por llorar, ni al rufián por jurar, ni los has de creer, ni te has de fiar).30 Centurio delegates the revenge to his colleague, the crippled Traso, a similarly cowardly pimp. But, by chance, his ineffectual actions result in the deaths of Calisto and Melibea. The actions of Celestina’s protégées, Areúsa and Elicia, after her death represent another stage in the life of a prostitute, that of having to go on their own after the loss of their mentor. Areúsa, once again, proves to be the most proactive of the two. She asks Elicia to move to her house: “Bring your clothes 30  Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), ed. Louis Combet (Bordeaux: Institut d’Etudes Ibériques et Ibéro-américanes, 1967), my translation.

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and jewels to my house, and keep me company, because you’ll feel very lonely, and sadness thrives on solitude” (passa a mi casa tu ropa y alhajas, y vente a mi compañía, que estarás muy sola, y la tristeza es amiga de la soledad) (163; 299). Elicia replies that she does not want to give up Celestina’s old house because of the established reputation of the place: “I’d like to accept and enjoy your sweet company, but I can’t, because it would go against my own interests. I hardly need tell you what I mean, sister, because you know the state of play. People know where I live, and I’ve got my regulars and that place will always be known as Celestina […] And also the few friends I have know I live there” (no podrá ser por el daño que me vernía; la causa no es necessario dezir, pues hablo con quien me entiende; que allí hermana, soy conoscida, allí estoy aparrochiada; jamás perderá aquella casa el nombre de Celestina […] Y también essos pocos amigos que me quedan no me saben otra morada) (164; 300). She also proves to be highly practical when she adduces that the rent for the house is paid. Both prostitutes are shown as pragmatic people who, in spite of their sorrow, realize that in their world one has to recover fast after a major blow. Areúsa epitomizes practicality when she exclaims: “A new love helps forget the old. A newly born son puts the three stillborn out of mind, and a replacement helps bring back happy memories and past pleasures” (Con nuevo amor olvidarás los viejos; un hijo que nasce restaura los tres finados; con nuevo sucesor se pierde memoria y plazeres perdidos del pasado) (163; 300). Elicia too is aware of how her mourning for the deaths of Celestina and her lover is damaging her business: “This mourning is getting me down. Nobody walks past my house or down my street these days. I don’t hear musicians at dawn, and my friends no longer write songs to me. Nobody has knife fights or rows over me at night, and worst of all, no money or presents are coming in” (Mal me va con este luto, poco se visita mi casa, poco se passea mi calle; ya no veo las músicas de la alborada […] y lo que peor siento, que ni blanca ni presente veo entrar por mi puerta) (169; 307). But she decides to follow the advice of Areúsa, who has become her new mentor: “So I’ll cast off my weeds, stop being sad, and halt the tears that have flowed so readily […] Let’s get out my mirror and some cleaning liquid, because my eyes are in a proper state, and get out my white clothes, embroidered ruffles, and garb for going about town […] I’ll sweep my doorstep and wash the street down so everyone can see I’m grieving no more” (deponer el luto, dexar tristeza, despedir las lágrimas […] anden pues mi espejo y alcohol […] anden mis tocas blancas … barreré mi puerta y regaré la calle, porque los que passaren vean que es ya desterrado el dolor) (169–70; 307–8). In the same vein, Areúsa continues her affair with Centurio. Areúsa, a highly practical, up-to-date prostitute, shows that she can adapt to any changes that her career may throw at her.

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We would like to conclude by reinstating that the world of prostitution is integral to Celestina. The intervention of a woman in the highest echelon of this underworld, Celestina, triggers the tragic results. Celestina and her environment epitomize the world of prostitution at the time. Her professional activities encircle all the aspects of prostitution, from the seduction of young women to the finding of suitable clients in churches and markets. But, as if making literal Elicia’s words that zealous Celestina would die for her job (91), she will die because of her avarice in her professional task. Rojas is presenting the readers with the complex politics of prostitution in the period. As a student of law, he pays special attention to the legal subtleties in a period in which new regulations were changing the landscape of prostitution. In spite of the many changes, an important message in Rojas’s work is that taking part in the seduction of a young virgin from an honorable family was likely to be found out and punished.

CHAPTER 12

A Guidebook for Two Cities: The Physical and the Political Urban Space in Celestina Raúl Álvarez-Moreno Critics agree on the distinct urban character of Celestina, a book written with the readership of the university city of Salamanca in mind, and produced and distributed—or commodified—by the predominantly urban book industry of the early modern period. Celestina’s plots evidence its urban origins. As Scarborough wrote, the municipality and the city activities are necessary for the development of the story.1 The events of the text, alluded to or remembered, are always part of city life, inside or outside the city walls. Furthermore, the cityscape helps define the characters: Celestina has a strong preference for walking around the city in her many trades, while her pupil Elicia prefers to work at home. The important role of the city in Celestina befits a book written toward the end of the fifteenth century when the castle and the monastery ceased to be the backbone of social life and the seat of economic, political, and cultural power, which moved to the “burgo” (medieval town or borough). The new cities were defined by their mercantile-monetary economy, the rivalries among different urban groups, and the Monarchsʼ interest in reaffirming their power against the nobility through control of the new spaces and their dwellers. The increasing importance of money for the city economy and the consolidation of the modern state were particularly important for the reorganization of urban space. As Lefebvre wrote, “money and commodities, still in statu nascendi, were destined to bring with them not only a ‘culture’ but also a space.”2 The physical space of the city filled with markers of the new order, such as the tower clocks that struck what has been called merchant’s time.3 At the same time, the district in which people lived and worked became an 1  Connie Scarborough, “Urban Spaces in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea,” in Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), p. 566. 2  Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 265. 3  For the concept of merchant’s time, see Jacques Le Goff, “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages,” in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Jacques Le Goff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 29–42. For its application to Celestina,

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important indicator of their social position. As Lacarra noticed, Celestina’s move from Pleberio’s neighborhood to the outskirts of the city has to be understood in light of the new institutional regulations of economic activities and city zoning issued under the Catholic Monarchs.4 As space and location became more disputed, they had to be clearly demarcated. Urban regulations imposed a spatial separation of classes that helped reinforce social hierarchies. When Lucrecia, Pleberio’s servant, sees Celestina approaching her master’s house, she asks her: “What on earth brings you to this neighborhood that you seem to avoid these days? (¿Cuál Dios te trajo por estos barrios no acostum­ brados?) (45; 114).”5 Lucrecia’s question reveals the characters’ awareness of the spatial order of the city. Similarly, Celestina’s machinations against Pleberio’s household may be read as an act of resentful resistance or insubordination against the spatial rearrangement of the city. I begin my analysis of the predominance of urban space in Celestina by differentiating between the geographical or material city, and the institutional and human community that occupies and regulates its space. For this purpose I will resort to Isidore of Seville’s distinction between urbs, or the city understood as a physical entity (buildings, streets, walls); and civitas, or the city as a group of citizens united by bonds of community (governance and laws).6 Lefebvre, Zumthor, and De Certeau, who problematize this simple division by considering the materiality of the city as an ideological factor, will help me articulate that, in Celestina, the notion of urbs does not appear as an abstract, neutral, and homogeneous frame, or as a stone-made container of lives.7 I will

see Enrique Fernández Rivera, “El reloj, la hora y la economía del tiempo en La Celestina,” Celestinesca 34 (2010): 31–40. 4  María E. Lacarra, “El fenómeno de la prostitución y sus conexiones con La Celestina,” in Historias y ficciones. Coloquio sobre la literatura del siglo XV, ed. Rafael Beltrán et al. (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 1992), 267–78, p. 275. 5  The Spanish quotes of Celestina are by page number from Francisco J. Lobera et al., eds., La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000). The English quotes of Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009). 6  Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, ed. Stephen A. Barney et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15.2.1. 7  Lefebvre, The Production, p. 94 and The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 2–3, 58; Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117; Paul Zumthor, La medida del mundo. Representación del espacio en la Edad Media, trans. Alicia Martorell (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994), p. 36.

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structure my article as a guidebook for these two cities.8 On the one hand, I will deal with the textualized physical city. I will emphasize its constructed nature, such as the spatial practices that make the city possible, as well as the practices that define it. On the other hand, I will discuss the city as a social construct by paying attention to its moral, economic, and political aspects, as well as to the relations between individuals and society. I believe these two cities can serve as maps that lead to a better understanding of the main readings of Celestina as reactions to what happens in its civitas. When discussing the physical city, some Celestina critics have noted its non-aprioristic singularity in the book, i.e., the inexistence of space before it is generated by the text itself. Thus, Lida de Malkiel wrote that the scenarios and their stages are not a given but created as the action requires them. Similarly, Gilman noticed how Celestina’s spatial dimension is embedded in the dialogues and emerges naturally from them. I am not claiming that Celestina produces urban space in a different way than other texts do. What matters is that, thanks mainly to its intensity, metalinguistic awareness, dialogic form, lack of narrator, and socio-cultural context, this play is one of the best examples of how space emerges as a socio-historical contingent and human practice determined by (and which determines) the varied contexts and purposes speakers bring to words. Continuing this line of thought, we can state that the urbs of Celestina is not the materialization of a pre-existing geometry, but a recreation by performative linguistic encounters between the characters, and between the author and the readers. Therefore, trying to identify a street of Salamanca with one of the streets in the book is pointless because Celestina does not “take place” in Salamanca, Toledo, or Talavera, neither in a generic city nor an “indefinite” city.9 The truth is that the action does not “take place” in any city; rather, it “gives place” to a city. Because we are dealing not with urban space depicted or reflected in the text, but with urban space truly “created” by the text, we must focus on its process of production, which must be understood as an ongoing relation between word uses and human activities (operational processes). Therefore, our object of study is not urban spaces in the abstract, but rather the ways in which the characters inhabit and seize them. For this objective, De Certeau’s distinction 8  We could even speak of a “third city,” the one evoked in the engravings of early modern illustrated editions of Celestina. See Raúl Álvarez-Moreno, “Casa, torre, árbol, muro: hacia una morfología del escenario urbano en las ediciones antiguas de Celestina,” Celestinesca 39 (2015): 113–36. 9  Patricia Botta, “Itinerarios urbanos en la Celestina de Fernando de Rojas,” Celestinesca 18, no. 2 (1994): 113–31, p. 128.

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between space (espace) and place (lieu) is useful. From this perspective, the city in Celestina is more than simply a pre-existing location that is given meaning (espace); it is rather the product of activity, of human actions and relations (lieu). It is, in other words, a “practiced place.”10 The urbs in the book is then an ensemble of perceived, practiced, lived, used, walked, and remembered urban places, the result of a network of social relations among specific individuals at given times. Although we must acknowledge that the books Rojas and the readers read, as well as the paintings and engravings they saw, conditioned their production of the urban landscape, the spatial experience that interests us is eminently discursive.11 It comprises and is constituted by the characters’ practice of space that is guided by specific needs, convenience, desire, pleasure, and opportunity, which are discursively formulated.12 Thus, Pleberio builds towers and plants trees to increase his prestige among his social peers, as well as for the individual pleasure of possessing, transforming, and transmitting space to his inheritors. Two main principles articulate this context-guided discursive move from structures to actions, or, as Gilman put it, to a radically spatial “structure of happening”:13 dynamism and relations—the latter term mainly in the sense of conflict. In Celestina, urban space is constituted mostly in transit and/or through an integrated system of performative relations based on affinity and opposition (analogy/conflict), as well as intersection and juxtaposition. To me, this explains why Lida de Malkiel put so much emphasis on the spatial 10  See De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117. Such a concept of space as open to mutable structures and relationships, and as created and interpreted by the actions of the players who inhabit it, resonates with Lefebvreʼs assertion that space is produced by social practice, lived and experienced in an everyday context (The Production, pp. 93–94). Moreover, the performativity involved in such a conception of place connects Celestinaʼs spatial production to habitus or the principle that governs everyday life practice while producing (or reproducing) inhabited space. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 52, 55. 11  María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística de La Celestina (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1962), p. 151, and Ángel Gómez Moreno, “La torre de Pleberio y la ciudad de la Celestina (un mosaico de intertextualidades artístico-literarias … y algo más),” in El mundo social y cultural de La Celestina, ed. Ignacio Arellano and Jesús M. Usunáriz (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2003), 211–236. 12  For De Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, “space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts” (p. 117). 13  Stephen Gilman, “Fortune and Space in La Celestina,” Romanische Forschungen 66, no. 3–4 (1955): 342–60, p. 347.

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freedom and cinematographic dynamism distinguishing Celestina from previous literature. This way of creating space also explains Scarborough’s position that in Celestina, urban spaces are more than a mere backdrop for the story.14 The motif of discordia universalis, or generalized conflict, which Celestina’s prologue uses as a guiding principle, also dictates how the urbs is produced in the whole text: not only do spaces create and take meaning through conflictive relations with each other, but also the characters fight among themselves to take control of these spaces.15 For instance, Celestina’s house, in contrast to Pleberio’s and Calisto’s, is textually created by its discordant functions and by the near-theatrical performances inside it that mark it as a site of exchange (dynamic activity) within a network of sexual and social relations, as studied by Deyermond.16 Dynamism and relations are instantiated through constitutive operations, such as circulating, pointing, marking, or penetrating in the present, or in the past through memory. These operations result in space creation and appropriation, while emphasizing openness, mutability, and instability. They help define characters and concepts, and develop the storyline. Finally, by allowing unexpected uses of spaces (i.e., a church as a place for sexual negotiations), they disturb the status quo, instead of keeping things “in place,” in social, gender, or moral terms. Circulation offers both the elementary way of constituting the urbs and the basic movements to experience it. As in De Certeau’s theorization of the rhetoric of walking, the rhetorical operations at work in this selective and changing process—inclusion (abbreviatio), exclusion (ellipsis), reversal (irony), change (metaphor), expansion (amplificatio)—are also crucial to the characters’ appropriation of space.17 Circulation is also one of Celestina’s defining features. Her role of go-between depends on mobility and urban spatialization, as is implied in the name of one her literary predecessors, Trotaconventos (woman who walks between convents).18 Both Celestina and her friend Claudina are clearly defined as peripatetic figures whose social function emerges as they overcome city barriers, break spatial restrictions, and prove themselves able 14  Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad a, pp. 149–62; Scarborough, “Urban Spaces,” p. 566. 15  As Michael Gerli maintains in Celestina and the Ends of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 198, places and spaces in Celestina are not renderings of the real, but sites crisscrossed by conflicting forces of representation. 16   Alan Deyermond, “Divisiones socio-económicas, nexos sexuales: La sociedad de Celestina,” Celestinesca 8, no. 2 (1984): 3–10. 17  For the different means by which places are appropriated though the “rhetoric of walking,” see De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 100. 18  Juan Ruiz (Arcipreste de Hita), Libro de Buen Amor, ed. Alberto Blecua (Barcelona: Planeta, 1983), p. 73.

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to change and adapt to ever new situations while in pursuit of their trades. This capacity is especially how Celestina defines and marks the space she passes through, approaches, or withdraws from. Her defining and marking of the space compensates for the lack of stage directions in the text, and also creates the effect of a three-dimensional town in which absolute freedom of movement is possible.19 Circulation, together with pointing, often renders space both verbalized and visible, as when Sosia tells Tristán: “Come and take a look before she [Elicia] turns the corner […] It’s Elicia, Celestina’s servant, and a very lovely, lively madam lives in the house she’s now entering” (Llégate acá y verla [a Elicia] has antes que trasponga, […] aquélla es Elicia, criada de Celestina. aquella casa donde entra, allí mora una hermosa mujer muy graciosa) (157–58; 283). Celestina’s monologue, as she walks to Pleberio’s house in Act 4, is an interesting instance of double spatial appropriation. With her long skirt flying loose as she walks, the old bawd shapes her urban itinerary by turning the cityscape she encounters (the four men she runs into, the stones getting out of her way) into omens of the fortune of her mission in Pleberio’s house. The scene concludes when Celestina sees Pleberio’s servant, Lucrecia, in the distance, thus creating her destination: Pleberio’s front door. Also, as she walks, the bawd metaphorically assigns a circulatory movement to her whole enterprise. Appropriating and penetrating Pleberio’s space become “my path” (mi camino); her intentions are transformed into “these steps” (estos pasos) (44; 111); her insecurities into “Shall I go home or go on?” (iré, o tornarme he?) (44; 112); and her final decision to enter is turned into the speech act “I want to go” (Ir quiero) (45; 113). Claudina also constructs her “good reputation” and “her credit” at the same time as she constructs the city she walks on: through a circulating habitus from home to tavern and vice versa (100–101; 44–45). Similarly, Claudina’s excursions with Celestina to buy or consume alcohol take them to places other than traditional women’s meetings places—the washing place, the fountain, the church—thus subverting the spatial restrictions imposed on women at the time. These excursions with Claudina, which Celestina remembers with nostalgia, highlight memory as another important mechanism for creating urban space in the book. The remembered urbs takes on a temporal or historical dimension that concretizes and prevents it from being an abstraction. Memory plays a similar role with Celestina’s house. During the banquet in her house, Celestina contrasts—and therefore creates for the reader—her current dwelling with her 19  Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 105.

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recollections of the more luxurious house she inhabited during her prosperous years as a madam. A similar differentiation between present and past conditions helps to textually (re)create Calisto’s place in Act 14, when he complains about the ingratitude of the judge who executed Pármeno and Sempronio. The diminished present condition of the house is set against the evocation of a time when his family was more powerful and influential. Finally, memory serves to (re)generate spaces that are required by the character’s specific words and actions. In Act 12, the “other people’s houses and places” and “the garden of Mollejas” (249–50) in which, respectively, Pármeno fights rivals without fear and Sempronio brawls bravely, are spaces produced by the two servants in their attempts to justify their cowardly desertion of Calisto at night. As we saw, Celestina’s urban topography results from the creation of the urbs as demanded by the action at specific moments and marked by each character’s mode of spatial appropriation. Three distinctive features characterize the resulting urban space. The first one is the instability of delimitations (inside/ outside, public/private, center/periphery, high/low), which generates spaces that are easily opened and penetrated by bodies and words, with important ideological consequences. Walls and doors act as ineffective barriers symbolizing the disintegration of identity and class.20 In the same vein, homogenous, one-purpose spaces are rare and endangered: Celestina’s house is a place of public work and pleasure for Elicia but, after Celestina’s death, it becomes her private space for mourning. Similarly, Celestina turns the sacred space of the church into a public space for her business deals, while men of the Church come to her house “to weep for their sins” (a llorar sus pecados) (16; 55).21 Another good example of the repurposing of single-use spaces is Claudina’s transformation of the public square, intended as the public stage where she is exposed and punished for her witchcraft, into a space for private and professional self-promotion: “If I broke my foot, it was only for my own good, because now I am better known than I was before” (si me quebré el pie, fue por bien, porque soy más conocida que antes) (83; 172). In the vertical axis, the opposition high/low also fails to uphold the differentiating meanings and values normally assigned to its scale. As Czarnocka showed, Melibea, trapped within horizontality (the house and the garden), seeks verticality as a way out in her 20  Halina Czarnocka, “Sobre el problema del espacio en la Celestina,” Celestinesca 9, no. 2 (1985): 65–74, pp. 65–68; Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire, p. 195. 21  Additionally, and in ironic counterpoint to the new urban classes’ association of indoors with safety and outdoors with danger, Celestina often feels less threatened in the street than within Pleberio’s or even Calisto’s four walls, and ultimately she is killed inside her own house.

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rebellion.22 The final scene, staged around Pleberio’s tower, offers a good example of urban space re-appropriation. Melibea’s final speech and suicide seize the tower, symbol of patriarchal and monetary power. Meanwhile, Pleberio is compelled to remain silent and impotent at the foot of the tower. The second feature that characterizes Celestina’s urbs is the significance of in-between spaces. The intermediate areas between the street and the houses, such as thresholds, stairs, and ladders, acquire critical significance in the work.23 As Moner pointed out, these liminal zones are precincts of high dramatic potential, especially suitable for complex theatrical interactions.24 The in-between spaces are also sites of transition, heterogeneous spaces of intersection and juxtaposition, configured around conflicting ideologies, views, interests, and needs. In Act 1, during her first visit to Calisto’s house, Celestina sets up a threshold space when Pármeno disqualifies her as an “old whore” in front of Calisto. In her counterbalancing words, she constructs Sempronio as a loyal and unselfish servant and herself as an assertive but charitable old woman, ready to risk her own life to serve Calisto (18; 64). Similarly, Lucrecia’s arrival at Celestina’s house and Areúsa’s diatribe against masters generate the threshold and the waiting interval in Act 9 (107; 212). Stairs also serve as transitional spaces, as when they are created by Lucrecia’s announcement of Celestina’s initial arrival at Pleberio’s house. They also become the point of intersection where antagonistic individuals (Celestina/Alisa and Pleberio) and social groups (low class/high class) collide. Lucrecia’s uneasiness in uttering the notorious name of Celestina during her first visit to Pleberio’s house represents, at the level of speech, this collision between two different social levels and their conventions (46; 115). The third defining characteristic of the practice of space in Celestina is fragmentation. Two or three houses stand for the whole city in Celestina, a representational practice perhaps inherited from Roman theater. The city can be invoked by allusions to the Church of La Magdalena, the square, and remembered fragments of the cityscape. The space that separates the three houses (Celestina’s, Calisto’s, and Pleberio’s), and through which the characters move, is also part of the cityscape. Here, I agree with Rodríguez-Puértolas on the 22  Czarnocka, “Sobre el problema,” p. 66. 23  Fadrique de Basilea, who printed the first edition of Celestina (1499), devoted five out of seventeen woodcuts to these intermediate spaces, suggesting that he understood their relevance to how the readers experienced the text. 24  Michel Moner, “Espacio dramático y espacio simbólico en la Celestina de Fernando de Rojas,” in Studia aurea: Actas del III Congreso de la AISO (Toulouse, 1993), ed. Ignacio Arellano et al. (Pamplona: Griso, 1996), 279–90, p. 280.

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perspectivist and fragmented structure of Celestina’s urban space, as well as with Stamm’s claim that the lack of precision and scarcity of data are a calculated use in the text.25 Even urban signs (marking) are not free of rhetorical manipulation. The absence of heraldic crests or coats of arms on the walls of the houses does not help to establish whether Calisto or Pleberio are truly of noble origins or merely nouveau riche. On the other hand, the garland of flowers—ramo in Spanish—that prostitutes (rameras in Spanish) placed outside their homes to announce their trade and mark their place of work is omitted in Celestina’s description of Areúsa’s place before Areúsa takes Pármeno to her bed. However, this mark is implicitly mentioned by Tristán when he warns Sosia of Areúsa’s deceitfulness, calling her a “marcada ramera” (announced prostitute) (316; 179). The vagueness in the description of the city demands the reader’s participation in completing the three symbolic urbes, which we will see Celestina includes. The three urbes are practiced and subjective, produced to fulfill communicative needs, which can be related to the characters’ views on the world or Weltanschauung. For Sosia, as well as for Celestina and even for Pleberio, the city is a site of exchange and economic activity or a fair. Thus, through synecdoche and asyndeton, Sosia constitutes an image of the city at dawn by enumerating the morning chores of its active inhabitants (the rich, clerics, peasants, shepherds). Sosia warns Calisto that these citizens may see him returning from his nocturnal love encounters and consequently cause damage to his reputation (153; 276). Secondly, for Celestina, Pármeno, Sempronio, and Melibea, the urbs is a tortuous space, a convoluted path full of dangers, an uneven ground where one can easily stumble, fall, and die while going about one’s business. In other words: it is a labyrinth and a battleground, as defined in several passages of the book. Because of the intrinsic risks of the city, Celestina feels safer walking down the middle of the street than on the raised walkways on the sides, closer to the houses (128; 237). Likewise, before her second date with Calisto, anxious Melibea imagines Calisto falling down a sewer or a deep hole (150; 271) while coming to visit her—and eventually he will die from a fall, though from a wall. Pármeno and Sempronio, when reclaiming their share of the spoils from Celestina, adduce that their weapons are dented after a hazardous night of fending off blows in the dangerous city streets (255; 142). Lastly, 25  James R. Stamm, La estructura de la Celestina (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1988), pp. 59, 144; Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, “Esa ciudad…,” in La Celestina, V Centenario (1499–1999). Actas del Congreso Internacional (Salamanca—Talavera de la Reina—Toledo—La Puebla de Montalbán, 1999), ed. Felipe Pedraza et al. (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2001), 133–46, pp. 134–35.

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for Melibea the urban space, initially the pleasurable setting of her garden, also becomes a mourning site or “vale of tears” (valle de lágrimas, 190; 332) when she resorts to prosopopoeia and synecdoche to describe the entire city as a living organism weeping for Calisto’s death. In the pessimistic soliloquy that ends the story, Pleberio assembles the tropes of market, labyrinth, and valley of tears and applies them to the whole world and human life. These three metaphorical cityscapes reveal how Celestina’s physical city often overlaps with the community that populates and makes it possible. Indeed, every city implies a collectivity of individuals who, even if they do not feel part of it, partake of the same government (city council), institutions, and laws, as well as of the same interests and values. In other words, the verbally-constituted physical space is also and foremost a social space or civitas serving as a stage for relations—mostly power relations—in the fields of morality, economy, culture, politics, and law. This strategy is at work, for instance, when Celestina accepts Calisto’s job, partly to attest her professional and social status against “the new women plying my trade” (las nuevas maestras del oficio) (60; 138). Equally, she considers her professional activities and herself within the community from an ethical, economic, and political perspective: she is not morally worse than other old ladies in town, especially those of the so-called respectable society who come to solicit her in her own house to do their dirty work. The community in Celestina is, as civitas, a political entity in which actions not only have political implications, but also take place within a structure or association that is political in nature. The concept of the community as a political entity was a current concept in the university circles in which Celestina originated. For Aristotle, the communal aspect of virtue (civil virtue) implied that politics was the realization of ethics because human beings were happier within society. I believe that, in Celestina, Rojas was reflecting on the impact that the different facets of the human being—including love—had on their roles as members of a civitas. This preoccupation is echoed in how the “Letter of the Author to a Friend,” which was introduced as the prologue to early editions of Celestina, speaks of the significance of the book hic et nunc, for “our common fatherland” (5; 201). Thus, critics such as Gerli and Brocato confirmed the importance of this political aspect of the text in their studies of the characters’ rivalries, conflicts, and passions within the conceptual frame of the body politic and the contemporary politics of early modern Castile.26

26  Gerli, Celestina and the Ends, pp. 164–83; Linde Brocato, “ʻTened por espejo su finʼ: Mapping Gender and Sex in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities,

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Let’s look now at how Celestina presented the political city or polis and how its features can be exploited to articulate three different readings of the book. During the Middle Ages, political theory evolved from the discussion of a ruler’s virtues to a reflection on the civitas. The evolution intensified during the fifteenth century, when medieval kingdoms became modern states, as Spain under the Catholic Monarchs. Scholastic thinkers and humanist intellectuals elaborated on Aristotle’s ideas on politics, adding new ones from Augustine’s The City of God and especially from Roman law. They conceived the ideal civitas as the embodiment of the tota multitudo (the whole population), which included within itself all other forms of human association (family, neighborhood, friends, legal community, etc.). Also, the civitas could be a synecdoche for higher-level communities, such as state or kingdom. These thinkers envisioned the civitas as a stage upon which communal wellbeing could be achieved if the community was properly united and regulated. Demarcations between the different social groups, clearly delimited and assiduously patrolled, were a prerequisite for social harmony. The community described in Celestina is far removed from this ideal community. It is a civitas in crisis, not the united, stable, regulated, and hierarchically defined, properly instituted (recte instituta) state that the propaganda of the Catholic Monarchs touted to have achieved. This defective civitas was the result of a period marked by succession problems, the consolidation of power in the hands of the newly centralized state, and the persecution of the conversos.27 However, two other contemporary social issues are reflected in the civitas depicted in Celestina: the instability resulting from the socioeconomic decline of the urban middle classes, and the tensions generated by the monarchy’s attempt at controlling university governance through royal patronage. This move underlined rivalries among faculties, professional groups, and religious orders at the University of Salamanca.28 Also present is the crisis of the individual at the dawn of modernity—a sort of existential crisis that Rodríguez-Puértolas called a fragmentation of the person and that includes a questioning of the personal position and role within the community and the

Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory Hutcheson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 325–65. 27  See Gerli, Celestina and the Ends, pp. 8–9. 28  José Luis Martín Rodríguez, “La ciudad y la Universidad de Salamanca en torno a 1500,” in La Celestina. V Centenario, pp. 49–78; José M. Monsalvo, “Violence between Factions in Medieval Salamanca: Some Problems of Interpretation,” Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 3 (2009): 139–70.

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civitas.29 In this sense, Celestina exposes this crisis in the same order of the Aristotelian progression from the individual to the group: private behavior (ethics), family (economy), and society (politics). A combination of shortcomings characterizes the political city in crisis of Celestina. First, the civitas is presented as not united. The city space appears divided and divisive, as if exemplifying the discordia universalis mentioned in the prologue. Reversing the traditional trope of organic agreement of the body politic, the members of the political body in Celestina never act in harmony, not even in the community of delinquents created by Celestina. The individual members or organs of this dysfunctional body politic continuously quarrel and pursue selfish goals. Gerli is right when he speaks of dismemberment and envisions the dispute about the beauty of Melibea’s body in Act 9 as a displacement of the disharmony of the body politic.30 The prevailing disunion implies an unbridgeable separation between what is good for the individual and for the group (family and civitas), contradicting the tenets of Aristotelian political theory and undermining the crucial political concept of “common good.” Accordingly, in Celestina, the characters concern themselves exclusively with their individual wellbeing, subverting the categories and mechanisms that usually bind the fabric of the civitas and which make the common good possible. A clear example of this deeply rooted social disharmony is the treatment of caritas (altruistic love or charity) in Celestina. In its widest sense, which extended the love for God to love for the neighbor, caritas played an essential role in counteracting social dissent by binding the medieval community to God and its members to each other. Conversely, in Celestina’s civitas, caritas is totally detached from the common good. Rather than mutual support and altruistic love, caritas becomes selfish carnal love (cupiditas), as when Celestina manipulates caritas in her argumentation to convince Melibea and Areúsa to accept Calisto’s and Pármeno’s sexual advances, telling the women that by accepting Calisto and Pármeno as lovers, they are healing sick men. The result is that the limits between caritas and cupiditas blur. In other passages, caritas becomes merely selfish profit (lucrum). In town, “for charity’s sake she [Celestina] would cure orphan and wayward girls” (remediaba, por caridad, muchas huérfanas y erradas) (17; 61). Pármeno appeals to charity to justify his greedy alliance with Sempronio and Celestina against his master: “You should

29  Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, “Celestina o la negación de la negación,” Verba hispánica 15 (2007): 17–34, p. 25. 30  Michael Gerli, “Dismembering the Body Politic: Vile Bodies and Sexual Underworlds in Celestina,” in Queer Iberia, 363–93.

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not run away from love or do your brothers down” (Amor no se deve rehuir, caridad a los hermanos) (27; 79). Another facet of social bonding in medieval political thought debased in Celestina is friendship (amicitia).31As Bernaschina pointed out, friendship appears as an embittered ethical-political institution in Celestina. Deyermond noticed that the seven passages in the text dealing with friendship, taken from Petrarch, misrepresent Petrarch’s idealization of friendship and place it at the same level as sexual passion and greed.32 Indeed, none of the three philosophical traditions of friendship are invoked to serve unity, agreement, and common wellbeing in the civitas of Celestina. Friendship, understood as natural virtue, according to the Stoic model, is ignored when Celestina convinces Pármeno to act against his master and social cohesion. Equally, the Aristotelian conception of friendship as useful does not contribute to social peace, as proved by the slaughtering of Celestina by her supposed friends Pármeno and Sempronio. Finally, friendship as pleasure, in the Epicurean tradition, is also inoperative in the story, as when Celestina, before dying, recognizes that her relationship with her friend Claudina was not as pleasurable as she had previously stated (142; 259). We can conclude that friendship, in any of its traditional interpretations, does not help the unity and harmony between characters of different social status (Pármeno and Calisto) or even between those of similar status (Pármeno, Sempronio, Celestina, and Claudina). Similar lack of harmony and unity affects other unifying institutions present in the text, such as family and marriage. Pleberio’s family, as well as the family-like group formed by “mother Celestina” and her pupils, cannot keep its members together and ends up in dissolution.33 Marriage between Calisto and Melibea is never presented as a feasible union: Melibea emphatically rejects the possibility of her marriage to Calisto, or any other man, in the scene in 31  As unity of wills, the Aristotelian notion of citizenship was a diluted type of friendship. It was often combined with the Stoic idea of the human being’s natural sociability in the application of love and friendship to political bonds. See Antony Black, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 597. 32  Vicente Bernaschina, “Las políticas de la amistad en La Celestina: el caso de Pármeno,” Celestinesca 34 (2010): 9–28, p. 10; Alan Deyermond, “Las fuentes petrarquescas de la Celestina,” in Estudios sobre La Celestina, ed. Santiago López-Ríos (Madrid: Istmo, 2001), 105–27, p. 117. 33  José Antonio Maravall, El mundo social de La Celestina (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), pp. 75–81, shows how family, understood in the broader medieval sense that included servants, cannot offer cohesion in Celestina because the master-servant relationship was evolving to a pre-capitalist employer-employee relationship.

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which she overhears her parents planning to marry her (164; 298). In Pleberio’s case, the expected unitive effect of marriage is equally inoperative: his years as a family man did not ensure him either the tranquillitas animi or equanimity needed to die peacefully, nor the protection against the pernicious effects of love on youths that the treatises of moral philosophy promised. His only heiress’ death leaves him without any civic or legal continuity in the civitas. The unity of the civitas also relied on its members’ ability to communicate and understand each other through words.34 However, as Bobes pointed out, Celestina is a patent example of how dialogue, in spite of its rhetorical and even literary perfection, may not contribute to mutual understanding among interlocutors of the same and, much less, of different social classes.35 As a result of miscommunication, the political city of Celestina lacks order (ordo) and harmony. Pármeno justifies his break with his master through a reversal of words and their meanings: “[T]hat [the herd] calls traitors clever and good and loyal men fools” (pues a los traidores llaman discretos; a los fieles, necios) (35; 92). Pleberio complains that love, the mover of the world, is not called by its proper name, which should be a less flattering one; he ends up completely alone and isolated, in what Sánchez y Sánchez called “the failure of community.”36 Indeed, love, both in its religious meaning of caritas and that of amor hereos (erotic love), brings not harmony but chaos to the civitas in Celestina. In the tradition of courtly love, amor hereos counted on a code that imposed order through a separation of genders and classes, as well as a series of steps that aimed at sublimating sexual passion. In Celestina, courtly love fails not only as the rhetorical discourse to which Calisto resorts to reach Melibea, but also as social inhibitor of desire: it does not curtail Calisto’s sexual violence during his encounters with Melibea. The conventions of courtly love also fail to keep genre, social, and sexual limits in place, as the interactions of the characters prove. On the other hand, the replacement of virtus (virtue) with utilitas (practicality) constantly creates frictions in the human polity represented in the work. The characters are able to distinguish between good and evil, but they always act for their sexual, economic, or emotional (revenge) interests; in

34  For instance, following Aristotleʼs Politica, el Tostado states this idea in De optima politia (1436). Alfonso de Madrigal (el Tostado), De optima politia, ed. Nuria Belloso (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 2003), p. 129. 35  María del Carmen Bobes, El diálogo. Estudio pragmático, lingüístico y literario (Madrid: Gredos, 1992), p. 273. 36  Samuel Sánchez y Sánchez, “Death Gets Personal: Inventing Early Modern Grief in 15th Century Spain,” Celestinesca 34 (2010): 145–77, p. 159.

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Celestina’s civitas, even keeping the appearances of being virtuous (honestas), as with Pármeno and Melibea, does not pay off. Courteousness, or good manners, also falls short in this civitas. In the fifteenth century, courteousness had evolved from curialitas, or inner intellectual knowledge that manifests itself as moral knowledge, to a more practical quality in which reason, morals, and language combined with good manners to insure peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding.37 But in Celestina courtesy is deployed only to take advantage of others. Once their purpose has been reached, the characters discard courtesy, as Celestina does when she leaves Calisto’s house as soon as he gives her the gold chain. At the same time, the characters are aware that politeness can be merely empty words: Areúsa has no problem considering Sosia’s flattering words as formulaic compliments (173; 302). Furthermore, courtesy, far from preventing conflict and neutralizing violence, may trigger them: during the banquet in Celestina’s house, Sempronio’s praise of Melibea’s beauty triggers the rage of Elicia and Areúsa, revealing the underlying social tensions between classes. Similarly, Alisa’s polite farewell words to Celestina the first time the old bawd comes to her house (“we’ll have more time to chat some other day” [118]) facilitates Celestina’s second visit, which brings devastating effects to Alisa’s family. Legal justice, another traditional institution of unity and understanding in the civitas, also fails to curb social chaos in Celestina. Not only does its deterring power (vis coactiva) fail to prevent the criminal actions of the characters, but its application is also neither efficient nor unquestionably fair.38 The judge punishes Celestina’s murderers so expediently just because the constable happened to be passing by when they were apprehended. Besides, Calisto complains about the expediency of the judge who executed Pármeno and Sempronio in the public square, calling into question his impartiality in settling the case (154; 278). Finally, the fluid limits or even the break of gender, sexual, and social boundaries add to the disorder in the civitas of Celestina. In medieval political theory, the clear distinction between the members of the body politic was deemed necessary to establish a hierarchical division that insured harmony. For the body to function properly, each part had to be hierarchically defined and separated. This is not the case in Celestina, where not only the physical barriers of 37  Concepción Cárceles Laborde, Humanismo y educación en España (1450–1650) (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1993), p. 217. 38  Consolación Baranda, La Celestina y el mundo como conflicto (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2004), sees in Calistoʼs monologue an authorial defense of fair justice that is independent from nobility. Other critics, such as Francisco Bautista, “Realidad social e ideología en La Celestina,” Celestinesca 32 (2008): 37–50, disagree.

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the walls (urbs) but also ideological barriers (civitas) are repeatedly trespassed, as if to denounce that they are constructs of contingent nature.39 Servants, as Sempronio and Tristán, have no problems in voicing their desire to enjoy the sexual favors of noble Melibea; women, like Melibea and Celestina, show their desire to be allowed to follow men’s freer sexual mores; equally, Areúsa wants to live independently in her own house, as men do. The same disregard for the decorum of one’s position is noticeable when noble Calisto makes love to Melibea in the garden like a brute, while the servant Pármeno performs like a gentleman in his encounter with the prostitute Areúsa.40 We can conclude, emphasizing that the ideal civitas of the political treatises, united, ordered, and harmonic, is far removed from the reality of Celestina. Next to the demystification of the ideal socio-political space or civitas, the physical space or urbs is not presented as properly protected by walls or by the institutions that justified the medieval urban community. Following Aristotelian ideas, I prefer to call it a civitas in crisis or transgressa, rather than use moral allegories (biblical harlot, Babel) or call it a dystopian urban fiction. In any case, our explanation of the reasons for the author presenting the city in such terms will fashion our readings of the text. If we believe that Celestina has conventional didactic intentions, this dysfunctional civitas would teach ex contrariis, working as an anti-exemplum, as a deforming mirror that emphasizes the defects of social reality. If we read the book from a critical-doctrinal lens, its intention would be the same as in the previous case, but its humanistic slant would help to question whether scholastic methods and morality are compelling enough to move readers and authorities to react; readers can be moved to action much more by crude, real-life fiction and vivid rhetoric, as that in Celestina. Finally, if we read the work as a subversive book, the presentation of a failed civitas aims at debasing a city founded on contingent and conventional principles, not on transcendental and natural ones. The city, which stands for the state, is ultimately denounced as an ideological construct founded to legitimize prerogatives. In the three readings, the term “city” may stand for the whole kingdom since contemporary Castile was metaphorically

39  As Gerli states in Celestina and the Ends, “[Celestina] is a work that portrays not only the blurring but also the deliberate encroachment of socially consecrated boundaries … of late fifteenth-century Castile” (p. 15). 40  The proliferation of sexual possibilities and the alteration of sexual borders (homosexuality, voyeurism, bestiality, etc.) made Sergio Fernández call Celestina a promiscuous, Dionysian text in “La amplitud sexual en La Celestina,” in A quinientos años de La Celestina (1499–1999), ed. Sergio Fernández and C. E. Armijo (Mexico: UNAM, 2004), 17–32, p. 18.

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represented in the abstract (in genere) as a city in political theory at the time.41 As prescribed by the Moral Philosophy, any reader, but especially those of the university milieus for which Celestina was conceived, could easily make the connection with the political reality of the Catholic Monarchs behind this negative representation of a city.

41  See, for example, Pedro de Osma, Comentario a la Ética de Aristóteles, ed. José Labajos Alonso (Salamanca, 1996), p. 375.

CHAPTER 13

Magic in Celestina Patrizia Botta One of the most debated issues among Celestina scholars has been the role of magic. Scholars have written profusely on magic’s presence in the text, its role in the dramatic action, Rojas’s belief in the existence of magic, and whether Melibea is a victim of Celestina’s spells or is merely seduced by her powers of persuasion. Critics have also questioned whether Celestina is a witch or sorceress, and whether the devil she several times invokes is only a dramatic resource to adorn the action or if the Devil really intervenes in the events. In their different answers to these and other questions, critics have defended different, often opposite, positions, some critics having even changed sides over the years.1 We will begin considering their arguments by examining the passages which mention magic in Celestina. Most important here is the description of Celestina, especially of her many trades, some of which clearly relate to magic. For instance, the first time her name is mentioned, Sempronio states she is “a cunning dabbler in the magic arts and every other kind of evildoing” (hechicera, astuta, sagaz en cuantas maldades hay) (10; 1.56).2 Later, Lucrecia calls Celestina “the old lady they stuck in the pillory for dabbling in magic” ([la vieja que] empicotaron por hechicera) (46; 4.88). In Act 1, we have Pármeno’s long, detailed, even “expressionist”3 description of Celestina as she is about to enter Calisto’s home (14–16; 1.59–62). In it, Pármeno gives a comprehensive report of her laboratory or pharmacy, with the many and mysterious ingredients she uses for her magical practices, especially those “for curing love” (remediar amores) (17; 1.62). His long report ends with the sentence: “And the whole lot [was] pure stuff and nonsense” (y todo era burla y mentira) (17; 1.62), 1  A detailed review of the bibliography of magic in Celestina is included in my article “La magia en La Celestina,” Dicenda 12 (1994): 37–67, which can be consulted online at https:// revistas.ucm.es/index.php/DICE/article/viewFile/DICE9494110037A/13122. The article contains many of the ideas I present here. A bibliography of the studies has appeared since the publication of the article and can be seen in the appendix at the end of the present study. 2  The quotes from Celestina are by page number from the English translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009), followed by the Spanish original version by act and page number taken from Dorothy S. Severin’s Spanish edition of Celestina (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1969). 3  Carmelo Samonà, “La nascita del teatro moderno: la città, i pastori, la corte,” in La letteratura spagnola dal Cid ai Re Cattolici (Firenze: Sansoni Accademia, 1972), 1:215–49.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004349322_014

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a statement critics have interpreted differently. Celestina’s words at the end of Act 3 also refer to ingredients and concoctions: before invoking Pluto, she asks Elicia to go to the attic and bring her some ingredients she needs, most of which were not mentioned by Pármeno in Act 1 (41; 3.84). Celestina’s request is immediately followed by her important invocation of Pluto, also much discussed and differently interpreted by critics, as we will see. Other passages dealing directly with Celestina’s magic are included in two of her monologues: the first in Act 4, in which she interprets omens (45; 4.87); the second in Act 5, in which she directly addresses the devil (60; 5.102) (she also addresses the devil in short asides in other passages) (47, 53; 4.90, 95). Finally, in Act 7, we have Celestina’s extended description of Claudina, whom she calls a “witch” when talking to Claudina’s son, Pármeno (80–81; 7.122–24). Celestina’s description, here, amplifies what she says in Act 3 when speaking with Sempronio (36–37; 3.81–82). Besides these extended passages, the book contains several other small references to magic, as well as objects that have magic-symbolic connotations, as we will see. We will examine now the scholarship on magic in Celestina, its main themes, tendencies, and methods. A theme of interest for many critics is Celestina’s many trades. According to Pármeno, “she was a mistress of six trades, namely: seamstress, parfumier, a dab hand at painting faces and patching maidenheads, a bawd and a bit of a witch” (Ella tenía seris oficios, conviene a saber: labrandera, perfumera, maestra de hazer afeites y de hazer virgos, alcahueta y un poquito hechicera) (15; 1.60). We are later informed she is a “children’s doctor” (física de niños) (16; 1.61), and “an expert in precious or magic stones” (lapidaria) (46; 4.88). Furthermore, Lucrecia says that Celestina practices more than thirty trades, one being magic (46; 4.88). Some critics have resorted to doctors and pharmacists to help them because Celestina’s trades, her ingredients, and the tools she uses can be best understood by those with knowledge of the history of medicine and pharmaceuticals. Critics have also looked for help in classical and medieval sources on these issues, as well as in literary and historical documents, which we will try to summarize in the following paragraphs. An important line of research has resorted to the identification of literary sources of the prototype for the procuress and her gradual transformation into a witch.4 Such characters are present in the work of Horace, Tibullus, 4  See Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela [1905–1915] (Madrid: CSIC, 1943), 3:219–458; Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, “Antecedentes del tipo celestinesco en la literatura latina,” Revue Hispanique 15 (1906): 372–86; Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, ed. Julio Cejador y Frauca (Madrid: La Lectura, 1913); María Rosa Lida, “El empleo de la magia,” in La originalidad artística de La Celestina (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1962), pp. 220–26; Fernando Toro

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Propertius, Ovid, Lucan, and Apuleius. Also, this prototype partially corresponds to famous women of antiquity, such as Medea, Hecate, Circe, Dipsas, Acantis, and Canidias, as well as to female figures of Spanish literature, such as the Trotaconventos of the Libro del Buen Amor. Also, some stanzas of Juan de Mena’s Laberinto (copla 241 et ss.) and a passage from the Arcipreste de Talavera’s Corbacho (part 2, chap. 3) contain references to objects echoing those Celestina uses in her trades. Equally, critics have identified possible Arabic sources, such as El Collar de la Paloma. However, although Celestina clearly shows the influence of these models, she presents some unprecedented characteristics as well—for instance, her deep knowledge of the human psyche. The study of non-literary sources also yields important findings. Two main directions of this approach are: the research of traditional historical sources and of the history of medicine. Among those following the first approach, we can include the work of important historians, such as Julio Caro Baroja, who has researched the lives of real witches and their practices in the time of Rojas.5 Especially fruitful are the documents from inquisitorial processes, including those published by Cirac Estopañán.6 Critics have also studied treatises on the control and repression of witchcraft composed in the fifteenth century, such as the notorious Malleus maleficarum (1484) or Pedro Ciruelo’s Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías (Barcelona, 1628). Finally, some scholars have examined pertinent data taken from what we know of the private life of the period. As a result of these investigations, Celestina’s tools and ingredients clearly match the ones mentioned in contemporary historical documents, especially the ones listed in the inventories of the judicial or inquisitorial process against alleged witches. Another important finding is that the practice of Garland, “Celestina, hechicera clásica y tradicional,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, no. 60 (1964): 438–45; Tomás González Rolán, “Rasgos de la alcahuetería amorosa en la literatura latina,” in Celestina y su contorno social (Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre Celestina, Madrid junio 1974, from now on referred to as Actas Celestina) (Madrid: Hispam, 1977), 275–91; Florentino Castro Guisasola, Observaciones sobre las fuentes literarias de La Celestina (1924; repr., Madrid: Revista de filología española, Anejo 5, 1973). 5  Julio Caro Baroja, “La magia en Castilla durante los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Algunos mitos españoles (Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1944), 185–303; Las brujas y su mundo (1961; repr. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1966); and “Arquetipos y modelos en relación con la historia de la brujería,” in Brujología (Actas del Congreso de San Sebastián 1972) (Madrid: Seminario, 1975), 179–228. See also Peter Russell, “La magia como tema integral de la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea,” in Studia Philologica. Homenaje a Dámaso Alonso (Madrid: Gredos, 1963), 3:337–54; and Toro-Garland, “Celestina hechicera.” 6  Cirac Estopañán, Los procesos de hechicerías en la Inquisición de Castilla la Nueva (Tribunales de Toledo y Cuenca) (Madrid: CSIC, 1942).

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magic, especially the form involving the cult of Satan, and people’s belief in it, were deeply seated in Europe at the time. Some Spanish cities, such as Toledo and especially Salamanca, had a reputation in Europe for being hubs for the study of witchcraft and the occult. Rumors circulated that universities taught these subjects clandestinely. As a matter of fact, treatises in manuscript form dedicated to the occult circulated in abundance in Salamanca in those years. Also, many women in the city applied themselves to practices related to witchcraft. In other words, they were the historical witches who Caro Baroja studied, the same ones who probably inspired Rojas.7 Also among the non-literary documents that may inform magic in Celestina, critics have studied medical and pharmacological treatises from antiquity, especially those of Dioscorides and Plinius, that circulated during the Middle Ages and later. These include texts such as Macer floridus, de virtutibus herbarum, popular between the tenth and eleventh centuries, or the translation into Spanish of Dioscorides’s De materia medica (1555) by Andrés Laguna, the personal physician of Emperor Charles V, as well as a commented edition of the same book by Amato Lusitano (1553).8 Once again, these books contain many factual coincidences with Celestina, such as the herbs in Celestina’s laboratory. But the study of these texts is most useful in elucidating the uses of many of the products in Celestina’s laboratory.9 Some critics have also pointed out coincidences with Arabic treatises of pharmacology. Particularly, the finding of an aljamiado (Spanish written in Arabic letters) manuscript in the city of Ocaña, not that far from Toledo and Rojas’s hometown, has helped some critics hypothesize that Rojas knew Arabic and Hebrew and perused manuscripts of this kind.10 Closely connected to the above-mentioned studies are those that analyze the passage in which the laboratory is described. That passage has been 7  Montague Summers, The Geography of Witchcraft (1927; repr. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), especially chap. “Spain,” pp. 588–614. 8  Modesto Laza Palacios, El laboratorio de Celestina (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1958); Antonella Cammisa, Magia e stregoneria ne Celestina di Fernando de Rojas (Glossario) (thesis, Università di Roma, 1981–82, dir. Carmelo Samonà). 9  The supposed virtues of these plants and ingredients are obscure, not only to modern readers, but also to the contemporaries of Celestina, as the many spelling mistakes in the early editions evidence. For instance, saúco (elder tree) was rendered as sauce (willow), and mostaza (mustard) as the nonsensical mostajo. I have gathered these mistaken forms from the collatio codicum of the early editions that we performed at the University of Rome. 10  Juan Martínez Ruiz and Joaquina Albarracín Navarro, “Farmacopea en La Celestina y en un manuscrito árabe de Ocaña,” in Actas Celestina, 409–25.

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studied from a linguistic perspective with the help of the mentioned ancient sources, as well as historical and etymological dictionaries, by Modesto Laza Palacio, Marti-Ibáñez, and Martín-Aragón Adrada, among others.11 More recently, Celestina’s laboratory has been studied with structuralist methods, which highlight the clear division of the laboratory into two chambers (downstairs and upstairs), respectively subdivided into different sections, corners, and subsections. The text itself establishes homogenous sections by the order in which the ingredients are classified according to their uses.12 For instance, face makeup (aguas de rostro) is listed next to scented water (aguas para oler), rinses to turn hair golden (lejías para enrubiar), and face paints (aceites para el rostro) (16; 1.62). The instruments she uses are stored in specific locations: “She had a room full of wired coils” (Tenía una cámara llena de alambiques), “all hanging from the ceiling” (en el techo de su casa colgadas), “she kept a painted box […] on a shelf” (tenía en un tabladillo, en una cajuela pintada) (16; 1.61–62). The text makes clear that Celestina not only owns the ingredients but also owns the instruments and containers for their distillation and conservation: she owns ceramic of glass, drug jars, as well as many “wire coils, narrowneck vessels” (alambiques, redomillas y barrilejos) (26; 1.61), and many others. Given the close relationship between magic and medicine at the time, when sorcerers knew some medicine and doctors some magic, with magic being often more trusted than medicine, some critics have studied Celestina’s expertise from a medical point view.13 Not surprisingly, Celestina talks sometimes 11  Laza Palacios, El laboratorio. See also Félix Marti-Ibáñez, “El arte médico de Celestina,” El siglo médico 96 (1953): 133; Marti-Ibáñez, “The Medico-Pharmaceutical Arts of Celestina: A Study of a Fifteenth-Century Spanish Sorceress and Dealer in Love,” International Record of Medicine and General Practice Service 169 (1956): 233–49; Marti-Ibáñez, “The Magical Arts of Celestina,” M.D., Oct. 1967, 11–16; Julián Martín-Aragón Adrada, Los saberes médicos en Celestina (PhD diss., Toledo, 1961; Puebla de Montalbán, 1974); Martín-Aragón Adrada, “La medicina en Celestina. Vida científica de la sociedad,” Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina 2 (1962): 1–5; Daniel Devoto, “Un ingrediente de Celestina,” Filología 8 (1962): 98–104; and Alfonso D’Agostino, “Mantillo de niño: Talismani ed elisir d’amore da Alfonso el Sabio a Celestina,” Quaderni di Letterature Iberiche e Iberoamericane 2 (1984): 97–101. 12  Marti-Ibáñez, “The Magical”; Guillermo Folch Jou et al., “Celestina: ¿Hechicera o boticaria?,” in Actas Celestina, 163–67; Patricia Finch, Magic and Witchcraft in the Celestina and its Imitations (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1981, dir. Bruno Damiani); Ana Vian Herrero, “El pensamiento mágico en Celestina, ‘Instrumento de lid o contienda,’ ” Celestinesca 14, no. 2 (1990): 41–91. 13  J. M. Fuentes de Aymat, “La botica de Celestina,” Medicamenta 5, no. 44 (1951): 267–68; Rafael Cerro González, “Celestina y el arte médico,” Medicamenta 39, no. 389 (1963): 166; Julián Martín-Aragón Adrada, Los saberes médicos en La Celestina (PhD diss., Toledo, 1961;

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as if she were a doctor. For instance, in Act 10, during her second visit to Pleberio’s house, she behaves like a doctor and Melibea assumes the role of a patient. Furthermore, we know that Celestina uses her surgical skills for the reconstruction of hymens. For this delicate task, she owns the appropriate tools: “Furriers’ needles and waxed silk thread” (agujas delgadas de pellejeros, y hilos de seda encerado) (16; 1.61), as well as hemostatic, astringent substances.14 She specializes in diagnosing and treating all kinds of gynecological problems, such as the menstrual disorders of Areúsa in Act 7.15 She is also a midwife and a children’s doctor, and her use of technical terms makes some critics wonder if Rojas, and even Celestina, had studied medicine. Many of Celestina’s activities are so related to witchcraft that the two fields overlap. As a maker of perfumes and cosmetics, she uses the same ingredients as the doctors and surgeons of the time. However, magic is her main trade. Before discussing this issue, we must point out that critics often indiscriminately use the terms “magic,” “sorcery,” and “witchcraft” as if they were synonyms. Magic is an umbrella term that includes witchcraft and sorcery, but the distinction between the latter two is not clear. For some critics, sorcery implies white magic, and witchcraft black magic. For others, what differentiates sorcery from witchcraft is the presence of the devil in some form in the latter. Finally, some critics consider sorcery an individual, urban trade, and witchcraft collective and rural. In the case of Celestina, the most defining factor is the presence of the devil, which clearly makes her a witch. The invocations of the devil in the text are undeniable, but critics have debated whether Rojas presents magic as a real force influencing the events. Along this line, the most controversial issue is whether Melibea’s fast change of mind is due to Celestina’s witchcraft or only to psychological factors.

Puebla de Montalbán, 1974); and Martín Aragón Adrada, “La medicina en La Celestina. Vida científica de la sociedad,” Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina 2 (Madrid, 1962): 1–5. 14  Félix Marti-Ibáñez, “The Medico-Pharmaceutical Arts of LC: A Study of a FifteenthCentury Spanish Sorceress and Dealer in Love,” International Record of Medicine and General Practice Service 169 (1956): 233–49; Enrique Fernández Rivera, “El De secretis mulierum en La Celestina y en la biblioteca de Fernando de Rojas,” Neophilologus 99, no. 3 (2015): 407–18. 15  Vian Herrero, “El pensamiento”; Cerro González, “Celestina y el arte médico”; Enrique Fernández Rivera, “El simbolismo de la menstruación en La Celestina” in “De ninguna cosa es alegre posesión sin compañía,” Estudios celestinescos y medievales en honor del profesor Joseph Thomas Snow (New York: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2010), 1:158–70.

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Those who deny the active role of magic in the development of the action resort to the following arguments to prove their position: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

Melibea is won over by love. Enough time elapses for Melibea to undergo a change of mind, resulting in her psychological transformation. Melibea’s change is mostly due to Celestina’s powers of persuasion and rhetoric. Celestina corrupts Pármeno without having to resort to magic, only her words. Melibea’s attraction to Calisto exists much in advance of Celestina’s intervention, since, in her Act 10 monologue, Melibea states she was struck by love at first sight (153; 10.112). If Melibea’s change can be explained through psychology, magic is unnecessary, even superfluous: the events of the story evolve as if magic did not intervene. The only scenes in which magic is an “organic” or integral ingredient in the story are the invocation of Pluto in Act 3 and the recollection of Claudina in Act 7. However, these two episodes do not move the action forward: the description of Claudina merely evokes past events and the same applies to the scene of the invocation of Pluto, which is so literary, archaic, and full of Latinized words that its style does not match the rest of the book. This passage is the only one in which Rojas departs from his usual contemporary Spanish scenarios. It is clearly set apart by the strong presence of literary echoes (especially of Lucan and Juan de Mena) and the inclusion of pagan deities. What has been called the “classical connection” of the spell becomes even stronger in the twenty-one-act version with the addition of new mythological references, such as the one to the three Furies. The result is an erudite excursus, an ornament. Rojas does not believe in magic. Sorcery is the last trade of Celestina’s mentioned by Pármeno. Besides, he deemphasizes her status as a fullfledged sorcerer by calling her “a bit of a witch” and disqualifying her supposed witchcraft as “the whole lot pure stuff and nonsense” (“un poquito hechicera” and “todo era burla y mentira”) (60, 62; 1.15, 17). Furthermore, Pármeno does not elaborate on her actual practices as a witch, but limits his description to enumerating the ingredients and tools she uses for her many trades. Rojas introduces magic as a concession to the customs of the period. His extended description of Celestina’s laboratory responds more to his proclivity for the picturesque than to his interest in the matter.

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These arguments were put forward by Menéndez y Pelayo (who, paradoxically, defends the Satanism of Celestina), Américo Castro, and, especially, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, who articulated most of them.16 Her forceful argumentation made the anti-witchcraft position so prevalent that the debate seemed settled until 1963, when the prestigious Hispanist Peter Russell wrote against the consensus.17 According to Russell, magic was important for the transformation of Melibea, the dramatic action, and the tragic denouement; in other words, magic was an integral, not an ornamental theme in Celestina. Although Russell’s arguments are mostly taken from previous studies, he was the first critic to mount a coherent defense of the active role of witchcraft in Celestina based on both literary and historical considerations. Since then, practically all critics have agreed with his position and some have gone even further in them. As I did before, I will list the arguments supporting this position, omitting the critic’s names for expediency.18 In general, these arguments call attention 16  Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes; Ramiro de Maeztu, Don Quijote, Don Juan y Celestina. Ensayos en simpatía (Buenos Aires: Austral, 1926); Américo Castro, “El problema histórico de Celestina,” in Santa Teresa y otros ensayos (Santander: Historia Nueva, 1929), 193–215; Laza Palacios, El laboratorio; Lida de Malkiel, “El empleo de la magia”; Toro-Garland, “Celestina, hechicera”; and many others. 17  Russell, “La magia.” 18  Julius Berzunza, “Miscellaneous Notes on Witchcraft and Alcahuetería,” The Romanic Review, no. 19 (1928): 141–50; Franz Rauhut, “Das Dämonische in der Celestina,” in Festgabe zum 60 Geburtstag Karl Vossler (Munich: Hüber, 1932), 117–48; José Bergamín, “Rojas, mensajero del infierno: Releyendo Celestina,” Revista de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias 6, no. 9 (1952): 61–74; Marti-Ibáñez, “The Medico-Pharmaceutical”; Mario N. Pavia, “The Celestinas,” in Drama of the Siglo de Oro: A Study of Magic (New York: Spanish American, 1959), 30–46; Caro Baroja, Las brujas; Devoto, “Un ingrediente”; T. Vilardell Viñas, Aspectos de la brujería en Celestina de F. de Rojas (thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 1962, dir. Martín de Riquer); Russell, “La magia”; Maravall, El mundo social; M. J. Ruggiero, The Evolution of the Go-Between in Spanish Literature through the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Frederick A. de Armas, “The Demoniacal in Celestina,” South Atlantic Bulletin, 36, no. 4 (1971): 10–13; Francisco Rico, “Brujería y literatura,” in Brujología, 97–117; Caro Baroja, “Arquetipos”; Joaquín Casalduero, “La señora de Cremes y el dolor de muelas de Calisto,” in Actas Celestina, 75–79; Alan Deyermond, “Hilado-cordóncadena: Symbolic Equivalence in Celestina,” Celestinesca 1, no. 1 (1977): 6–12; Deyermond, “Symbolic Equivalence in Celestina: A Postcript,” Celestinesca 2, no. 1 (1978): 25–30; Elizabeth Sánchez, “Magic in Celestina,” Hispanic Review 46 (1978): 481–94; Finch, Magic; Pedro Cátedra, “Amor y Magia,” in Amor y Pedagogía en la Edad Media (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1989), 85–112; Vian Herrero, “El pensamiento”; and many others (see appendix for recent bibliography).

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to how often magic is alluded to in the text and presented as proof that Rojas was interested in the issue. They also note the recurrent characterization of Celestina as a sorcerer. 1.

She is called a sorcerer by four characters, who, in order of intervention, are Sempronio, Pármeno, Melibea, and Lucrecia. Furthermore, it is the first thing that is said of her in the text, by Sempronio in Act 1 (15; 1.56) 2. Some ingredients in Celestina’s laboratory, enumerated by Pármeno, evidence that she practices sorcery. Especially incriminating are the ingredients “for curing love” (remediar amores) (17; 1.62). These ingredients named by Pármeno coincide with those mentioned in inquisitorial processes and treatises on magic of the period. Without going into detail, we can say that these ingredients had a reputation for having magical powers, especially with regards to erotic matters. A good example is “babies’ crown” (mantilla de niño) (17; 1.62), the portion of the amniotic sac wrapped around the head of some newly-born. It was also considered an amulet and a powerful ingredient for love potions.19 Another argument supporting Celestina as an active witch is the one that suggests many ingredients in her laboratory are animal parts. This matches the origin of many products used for sorcery in the period. 3. Celestina’s interaction with her clients is that of a sorcerer asking them for personal items to use in incantations. This practice relies on a tenet of magic: an object that was in close contact with a person could transfer that person’s properties to another person. This practice offers an explanation as to why “from some [Celestina] demanded the very crust they ate, from others their clothes, others, their hair” (a unos demandaba el pan do mordían; a otros, de su ropa; a otros, de sus cabellos) (17; 1.62). Later, she famously asks Melibea for her girdle (cordón). We know as well that Celestina also performs strange rituals on the bodies of her clients, including painting mysterious signs on their hands and giving them objects made of clay or lead, or hearts made of wax that were pricked with needles. 4. Celestina has many specific abilities and pieces of knowledge that characterize her as a sorcerer: she is an expert in herbs, deducible from the ingredients she keeps in her lab; and she knows about magic stones, as Lucrecia states (46; 4.88) and Celestina confirms (60; 5.102).

19  Devoto, “Un ingrediente”; D’Agostino, “Mantillo de niño.”

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5. Celestina knows how to predict the future. The presence of Moorish beans (habas moriscas) (17; 1.62) in her laboratory implies that she knows how to foretell the future by rolling and reading them. Also, as we saw, she reads her own future by interpreting as omens what she sees on her way to Melibea’s house in Act 4. Let’s examine now two of the passages in the text which have been related to witchcraft: 1.

2.

The text defines Claudina, Pármeno’s mother, as a witch. She is never on stage and her figure is only evoked by Celestina in Act 7 while Celestina is trying to convince Pármeno that his own mother practiced the same trade he distrusts. Claudina desecrates dead bodies, “wandering from cemetery to cemetery at midnight looking for materials for our trade” (se andaba a media noche de cimenterio en cimenterio buscando aparejos) (80; 7.122). We also know that she goes to road junctions at night, the typical place for witches to meet since antiquity. At the junctions, Claudina collects soil for her potions or removes the teeth from hanged men—it was customary to expose hanged bodies at the junctions. The extraction of teeth from executed men relates to the belief that a body part has the properties of the whole body. The teeth of convicts, often young and healthy men, could then transmit these attributes to a new owner. We also know that Claudina knows how to enter magic circles or pentagrams, a means witches used to communicate with the devil and demons. Her interaction with demons is confirmed by Celestina, who states that demons are afraid of Claudina and rush to meet her when she invokes them. Furthermore, even if demons’ nature makes them prone to lie, “they dared not lie to her and she had them in her iron grip” (no le osaban decir mentira, según la fuerza con que los apremiaba) (81; 7.123). Finally, we know that Claudina was arrested by the Inquisition and accused of witchcraft “because they’d caught her at night collecting earth by a crossroads by candlelight” (porque la hallaron de noche con unas candelillas, cogiendo tierra de una encrucijada) (82; 7.124). Most critics are careful to distinguish between Celestina the sorcerer and Claudina the witch. Some, however, have defended that Celestina is also a witch, and have even suggested she is a renowned one. For this, they have adduced her long, close relationship with Claudina and her own dealings with the devil. They have argued that she must be considered a witch because she lived with Claudina in her youth and learned “the best tricks of my trade from her” (todo lo mejor que sé de mi oficio) (38;

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3.81). Not surprisingly, Celestina refers to their activities as “our trade” (nuestro oficio) (80; 2.122). As Claudina, in her youth, Celestina frequented cemeteries at night and removed the shoes from hanged men (80; 2.123). Later, in her old age, she continues her nocturnal incursions, as evidenced by her mention of “a bit of rope I found in the fields when it was raining and dark” (un pedazo de la soga que traje del campo la otra noche cuando llovía y hacía escuro) (41; 3.84)—the rope with which a man was hanged was considered to have magic powers in love matters. As we saw, she knows how to enter magic circles, although she complains that she was much better at it in her youth and that Claudina, more so than her, excelled at it. Finally, Celestina undergoes the same tribulations as Claudina: “We did everything together and they caught us doing it together. They arrested, accused and sentenced us together” (juntas lo hicimos, juntas nos sintieron, juntas nos prendieron y acusaron, juntas nos dieron la pena) (81; 7.123). After Claudina’s death, Celestina continues to be persecuted and punished: “Brushed and tarred three times … stuck in the pillory” (emplumada; empicotada) (33, 46; 2.77, 4.88). She is also aware that her dealings with Calisto may bring her a terrible punishment, as she states in her monologue in Act 4 (44; 4.86). Some critics contend that Celestina is a witch because she appeals to the devil in her incantations.20 Indeed, when talking to the devil, she calls herself “your most renowned server” (tu más conocida cliéntula) (42; 3.85). She calls him a good friend and kindred spirit in several asides (47, 53; 4.90, 95). Because of her acquaintance with the devil, she unsurprisingly conjures him to help her seduce Melibea in Act 3. During the incantation, she threatens him with retaliation if he does not obey her, an attitude common in the testimonies of real witches of the period. She even uses the same language and formulas recorded in historical documents about witches.21 Eventually, she signs an agreement with the devil: “When you have done this, you can bind me to your will” (y esto hecho, pide y demanda de mí a tu voluntad) (42; 3.85). Even if the divinity she invokes in this incantation is the Greco-Roman deity, Pluto, she accompanies the name with epithets traditionally reserved for the Judeo-Christian devil: “Proud captain of the fallen angel […] governor […] of sinful souls” (capitán de los condenados ángeles […] gobernador de las pecadoras ánimas) (42; 2.85). This is indeed Satan, in spite of the presence of elements from classical

20  Berzunza, “Miscellaneous Notes”; Ruggiero, The Evolution; Finch, Magic. 21  Toro-Garland, “Celestina, hechicera.”

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antiquity in the invocation.22 Several elements in the incantation reinforce the demonic aspect. For instance, she resorts to snake oil and ram’s blood. These two animals are typical symbols of the devil: Satan famously adopted the form of a snake in Genesis, and he typically appears in the form of a ram in the Sabbaths. Celestina soaks the thread with the snake oil, implying that the devil enters it. Although the text does not say what she uses the ram’s blood for, some critics think that she might drink it, as if in a black mass in which she is the priestess in parody of the Christina mass common to the Sabbaths.23 Another indication of Celestina as the priestess of a devilish cult is that she organizes banquets for people of the Church, transforming the monasteries into brothels, according to Pármeno’s description of her in Act 1.24 Fornication and debauchery among people of the Church and in holy precincts was considered a sign of diabolic activity, especially when it took place during the festivities of the Christian calendar, such as Christmas or Easter. We know that Celestina organizes these kinds of events “on such holy occasions as the Stations of the Cross, night-time processions, dawn or midnight masses, and other special times” (en tiempo honesto como estaciones, procesiones de noche, misas del gallo, misas del alba y otras secretas devociones) (16; 1.60–61). The text also mentions that Celestina is often busy at midnight, the typical hour in which Satan met with the witches. Accordingly, the scar she has on her nose (17; 1.62) is for some critics the distinction or mark that the devil inflicted upon his servants during these ceremonies.25 Celestina talks to the devil not only in the scene of the incantation but also on other occasions, including the above-mentioned asides in Act 4 and in the monologue in Act 5, in which she thanks him for his help (60; 5.102). That she talks to the devil when nobody can hear her—in asides, monologues, and in the long scene of the incantation—evidences that she does not do so to impress other people but because she truly believes in black magic.26 The devil, invoked to help Calisto satisfy his sexual desires, and with whom Celestina signs a pact, is, according to some critics, an important, powerful actor in the story, even if invisible and silent. He intervenes as a furtive force that alters the minds of all the characters, even Celestina, and determines the 22  Russell, “La magia.” 23  Mac E. Barrick, “Celestina’s Black Mass,” Celestinesca, 1, no. 2 (1977): 11–14. 24  Javier Herrero, “Celestina: The Aging Prostitute as Witch,” in Aging in Literature (Troy, Michigan: International Book Publishers, 1984), 31–47; and “Celestina’s Craft: The Devil in the Skein,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1984): 343–51. 25  Cejador, Celestina; Finch, Magic. 26  Menéndez y Pelayo, Orígenes.

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action of the plot from the incantation of Act 3 until the death of Celestina in Act 12. Several critics think that the devil is actually understood to be present in the thread sold to Melibea and that he acts on her through a process of philocaptio (love spell).27 In 1977, Alan Deyermond defended this position in the most articulate and convincing way, taking further Peter Russell’s ideas.28 Later, other critics added new observations, pointing out imagery of demonic animals in the text, such as the ram, the bat, the black cat, and, especially, the viper mentioned in the Prologue (211; 41), Act 1 (17; 1.62), Act 5 (62; 5.104), and Act 10 (114; 10.154).29 Also, some critics see an allusion to the snake reproduced in the shape of the thread in the illustrations of early editions, which would prove that Celestina’s readers understood perfectly the thread’s symbolism and the spell it carries. Recently, some researchers have pointed out the presence of words in the text that are closely related to magic and the devil and refer to objects common in the witchcraft of the period, such as the girdle, often used in spells, especially the philocaptio type, to “tie” magic snares.30 Words implying the idea of ensnaring, such as “hold,” “tie,” or “wrap” (asir, atar, envolver) are present in the text. Another example of such double-meanings is Calisto’s toothache: witches were reputed to use the devil’s teeth to sharpen objects for their practices and, as we saw, the teeth of hanged men were used for love potions.31 Similarly, toothache was a common euphemism for sexual frustration, while to extract or remove a tooth meant sexual pleasure or culmination. “To get somebody’s teeth on edge”—an expression used by Celestina in Act 9 (90; 9.148)—meant sexual arousal. The yarn of thread is also the center of several other double meanings: words such as “spin,” “knit,” “seam,” and “sew” (hilar, tejer, labrar,

27  For instance, Russell, “La magia.” 28  Deyermond, “Hilado”; and “Symbolic.” 29   Barrick, “Celestina’s”; Geoffrey West, “The Unseemliness of Calisto’s Toothache,” Celestinesca 3, no. 1 (1979): 3–10; Rosario Ferré, “Celestina en el tejido de la cupiditas,” Celestinesca 7, no. 1 (1983): 3–16; Herrero, “Celestina”; Herrero, “Celestina’s”; Herrero, “The Stubborn Text: Calisto’s Toothache and Melibea’s Girdle,” in Literature Among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age, ed. Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 132–47 and 166–68; Manuel da Costa Fontes, “Celestina’s Hilado and Related Symbols,” Celestinesca 8, no. 1 (1984): 3–13; and Costa Fontes, “Celestina’s Hilado and Related Symbols: A Supplement,” Celestinesca 9, no. 1 (1985): 33–38. 30  Herrero, “Celestina”; and “Celestina’s.” 31  West, “The Unseemliness.”

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and coser) were all euphemisms for the sexual act.32 If these verbs allude to the sexual act, the instruments used in such activities stand for male and female genitals: skein and needles (deja and aguja), hole (agujero), tip of the needle (punta), stitch (punto), and many others. Also part of this semantic group is Celestina’s use of her reputation as a seamstress (labrandera) as a front for all her many illegal trades. Rojas’s contemporary readers immediately noticed these double meanings. This abundance of sexual words may have influenced Rojas to call the first version of his text “Comedia.”33 Finally, some critics see the thread and the different fabrics in the story as metaphors for the text itself and the act of writing.34 The fabric or cloth was also interpreted as the trap or net that the devil and Celestina, acting as spiders, set to capture the characters.35 Even the reader is somehow ensnared in the text.36 All these findings prove, in sum, that the theme of magic is “artistically elaborated” in Celestina—i.e., carefully integrated—and that Rojas emphasized it repeatedly, even expanding it for the twenty-one-act version. They also showed the existence in the text of a network of symbols, metaphors, and double meanings structured around magic. The role of magic is then not secondary or merely ornamental. It is a fundamental, though not the sole, factor in Melibea’s change of mind. Personally, I agree with the main points of this position. However, I think that some aspects have not been completely explained. This is the case, for instance, with the allusions to the mysterious signs Celestina draws on the floor when with Sempronio in Act 5: “I can see them drawing lines on the ground with his sword. What the hell are they up to?” (hacen rayas en el suelo con el espada. No sé qué sea) (63; 5.105); the magic formulas that Claudina and Celestina proffer together in Act 7: “The word that she [Claudina] and you [Celestina] said were as one” (las palabras que ella y tú decíades) (91; 7.123); the devils whom Celestina often contacts, as in Act 7 (91; 7.123); and a few more. The transmission of magic knowledge among women, which the text implies, has not been properly studied either. Critics have often noticed that Celestina is the disciple of Claudina,37 and that Elicia, in later books (continuations of 32  Herrero, “Celestina” and “Celestina’s”; Costa Fontes, “Celestina’s Hilado” and “Celestina’s Hilado: A Supplement”; I. MacPherson, “Celestina labrandera,” Revista de Literatura Medieval 4 (1992): 177–86. 33  Costa Fontes, “Celestina’s Hilado.” 34  Ferré, “Celestina en el tejido.” 35  Herrero, “Celestina.” 36  Bergamín, “Rojas, mensajero.” 37  Finch, Magic.

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Celestina), becomes the inheritor or “daughter” of Celestina.38 However, they do not pay much attention to how Elicia learns magic from Celestina. Celestina makes this clear in Act 3 when she asks Elicia for “the wing of that dragon whose claws we plucked the other day” (el ala de drago a que sacamos ayer las uñas) (41; 3.84). After Celestina’s death, Elicia keeps Celestina’s house open and continues her activities. Embracing the tradition of Celestina, considering herself to be Celestina’s heiress, Elicia orchestrates the revenge that will end with the death of Calisto and the suicide of Melibea. Critics have also neglected the fact that Celestina resorts to magic to win Pármeno—Pármeno’s mother, a renowned witch, plays an important role in changing his mind.39 Pármeno also produces a very detailed description of Celestina’s laboratory, since, after all, he is the son of a witch and has direct knowledge of the matter. Although the literary and historical sources of Celestina’s laboratory have been profusely studied, nobody has suggested, as far as we know, that Rojas, as somebody involved in the study and administration of law, might have read the minutes and other documents of Inquisitorial processes. As we said, the documents described in detail the objects in possession of alleged witches. Equally interesting is that most of the fifteenth-century authors of treatises on the persecution of witchcraft were jurists, the most familiar with the issue. Another point in the study of magic in Celestina that the critics have neglected is the language and the rhetoric of magic as a whole.40 It would possibly be fruitful to study the stylistic differences between Pármeno’s predominately enumerative description of Celestina’s laboratory and activities in Act 1, Celestina’s exhortative incantation of Act 3, and the evocative remembrance of Claudina. Regarding the lexicon, we are missing a glossary of words related to magic, which could depart from the findings of previous monographs and articles. The glossary would be useful because some publications are practically impossible to find, including ones by Laza Palacios and Marti-Ibáñez, and because many authors disagree on the meaning of some words and ignore other terms with unestablished meanings. Furthermore, some terms whose meanings seem to be well-established do not seem to match the context Rojas placed them in. A 38  For the treatment of magic in the continuations of Celestina, see Pavia, “The Celestinas”; Ruggiero, The Evolution; B. J. Trisler, A Comparative Study of the Character Portrayal of Celestina and Other Golden Age Celestinesque Protagonists (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1977); Finch, “Religion as magic in the Tragedia Policiana,” Celestinesca, 3, no. 2 (1979): 19–24; Finch, Magic; Jacques Joset, “De Fernando de Rojas a Agustín de Rojas. Presencia de Celestina en El viaje entretenido,” in Actas Celestina, 347–57. 39  Finch, Magic; Herrero, “Celestina.” 40  Rico, “Brujería”; Finch, Magic.

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good example of this is the product mentioned in Celestina to make hair blond but which lacks the oxidizing or lightning power required.41 Another area that could be further studied is the marked difference between the products of vegetal and animal origin in Celestina’s laboratory. She uses the latter ones for her magic, while reserving the vegetal products for medical purposes and to make perfumes. Equally neglected and promising is the treatment of magic in each of the three different versions of the book.42 In Act 1, traditionally attributed to a different author, Celestina appears only as a sorcerer, and not a very dedicated one: “A bit of a witch” (un poquito hechicera) (15, 1.60). In Acts 2 through 16, Rojas makes her a full-fledged witch as implied by her incantation of the devil, the monologues in which she addresses him, her background with Claudina, etc. In the twenty-one-act Tragicomedia, witchcraft and the presence of the devil are reinforced because the added asides in which Celestina talks directly to the devil are added (47, 53; 4.90, 95) and also because of her ability to interpret omens (44; 4.87) and magic rituals (60; 5.102). Further, the remembrance of Claudina is expanded (39; 3.81–82) and some remarks about Melibea being possessed are introduced (121; 10.161). Nine new instances of the words “sorcerer” and “sorcery” (hechicera, hechicería) are added, to a total of thirteen, as well as one new instance of “witch” (bruja). Most curious is that all these words, as all the allusions to magic, are in Acts 1 through 12, and they end with Celestina’s death in Act 12; no more references to magic exist in the remaining nine acts. In the text, magic disappears with Celestina. Significantly, Sempronio, who makes the first allusion to Celestina as a sorcerer when describing her in Act 1, is the last one to call her so when he kills her in Act 12. As in a circular process that evokes magic circles, Sempronio introduces and eliminates Celestina and her sorcery in the story. Finally, a subject that deserves more attention is whether Rojas believed in magic. Some critics think that Rojas was skeptical and that he introduced magic in the text only to mock it. But if Rojas did not consider magic integral to the dramatic plot, we cannot explain why he bothered to develop the sorcerer of Act 1 into a witch, or why the characters of the book believe in magic.43 In any case, clearly Rojas was careful not to show sympathy or signs of approval for magic and the characterization of Celestina as a witch or sorceress, since the Inquisition would not have approved. He distanced himself from this position especially by killing Celestina and all other characters involved with magic. Furthermore, in the paratexts of the book, we can also read a condemnation of 41  Cammisa, Magia. 42  Russell, “La magia”; Ruggiero, The Evolution; Vian Herrero, “El pensamiento.” 43  Vian Herrero, “El pensamiento.”

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magic by the author and by the editor Proaza. Even the title page warns against “The deceptions of servants of procuresses” (los engaños que están encerrados en sirvientes y alcahuetas). In the “Letter to a Friend,” the author warns against the “deceitful dabblers in the magic arts” (muejeres hechiceras) (201; Carta.36). In the acrostic verses, there is a warning against “Trusting any bawd or false maid” (alcahueta ni falso sirviente) (205; Octavas acrósticas, 39), as well as in the “Síguese” or “Incipit,” and even in the summary of the plot, the final octava stanzas by the author and by Proaza. This insistence supports the thesis of the moralizing intention of the author, of which Bataillon was the main defender. But we can also deduce that, with this insistence, Rojas is clearly telling his readers he does not approve of what he describes in his text in such detail. The clear rejection of witchcraft seems to have protected Celestina; when the book was included in the Index of Forbidden Books, only a few passages, such as Calisto’s words in Act 1, stating he is not a Christian but an adorer of Melibea (4; 1.49–50), were expurgated, while the treatment of magic was left untouched.44 Curiously, the cult of Melibea bothered the Inquisition, while the cult of the devil and the heretic practices of witchcraft that seem to displace religion in the story were left unchanged.

Appendix: Studies on Magic Published After 1993 (see note 1)

Armijo, Carmen E. “La magia demoníaca en Celestina.” In A quinientos años de Celestina (1499–1999), 161–70. Mexico: Fac. de Filosofía y Letras UNAM, 2004. Beltrán Llavador, Rafael. “Tres magas en el arte de la seducción: Trotaconventos, Plaerdemavida y Celestina.” In El arte de la seducción en el mundo románico medieval y renacentista, 29–38. Valencia: Universitat de València, 1995. Canet Vallés, José Luis. “Hechicería versus libre albedrío en Celestina.” In El jardín de Melibea, 201–27. Burgos: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2000. Cárdenas-Rotunno, Anthony. “El pacto diabólico en Celestina.” In Celestina V Cen­ tenario (1499–1999), 369–76. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2001. Cárdenas-Rotunno, Anthony. “Rojas’ Celestina and Claudina, in Search of a Witch.” Hispanic Review 69 (2001): 277–97. Conde, Luis. “Celestinas, pócimas y filtros de amor: Dietario de brebajes y conjuros.” Leer 25 103 (1999): 90–92. Corry, Jennifer M. “Celestina.” In Perceptions of Magic in Medieval Spanish Literature, 178–90. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2005. 44  Otis H. Green, “The Celestina and the Inquisition,” Hispanic Review 15 (1947): 211–16.

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Escalante, Justo María. “Filtros de amor y maleficios de odio.” In Satanismo erótico. El amor, el sexo y la lujuria en los procesos e historias de la Magia Negra y la Hechicería, 169–80. Barcelona: Humanitas, 1998. Esteban Martín, Luis Mariano. “Claudina, del recuerdo a la vida.” Celestinesca 24 (2000): 77–86. Fernández Rivera, Enrique. “Celestina en la comedia de magia: Los polvos de la madre Celestina (1841) de Hartzenbusch.” Theatralia, no. 10 (1998): 89–104. Folger, Robert. “Passion and Persuasion: Philocaption in Celestina.” La Corónica 34, no. 1 (2005): 5–29. García Soormally, Mina. Magia, hechicería y brujería entre Celestina y Cervantes. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2011. Gerli, Michael. “ ‘Agora que voy sola’: Celestina, Magic, and the Disenchanted World.” eHumanista 19 (2011): 157–71. Gómez Moreno, Ángel, and Teresa Jiménez Calvente. “A vueltas con Celestina-bruja y el cordón de Melibea.” Revista de Filología Española 75 (1995): 85–104. Jardin, Jean-Pierre. “Célestine et les démons.” In Fernando de Rojas, Celestina. Comedia o tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Georges Martin, 81–100 (Paris: Ellipses, 2008). Lara Alberola, Eva. “La hechicera Celestina y el misterio de su philocaptio.” Per Abbat 6 (2008): 63–80. Lara Alberola, Eva. “Celestina, hechicera, y Maestro Guillermo y Maestre Pasquín, nigromantes, cara a cara. Duelo de titanes mágicos: de la Edad Media al Renacimiento.” In Estudios de literatura medieval. 25 años de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval. XIV Congreso Internacional de la AHLM, 561–69. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2012. Lara Alberola, Eva. Hechiceras y brujas en la literatura española de los Siglos de Oro. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2010. Lara Alberola, Eva. “La hechicera en la literatura española del siglo XVI. Panorámica general.” Lemir, no. 14 (2010): 35–52. Lara Alberola, Eva. “La magia en el Entretenimiento de Orfeo y Eurídice.” Celestinesca 28 (2004): 47–68. Lara Alberola, Eva. “Testamento de Celestina: una burla de la hechicería.” Celestinesca 30 (2006): 43–88. Leaños, Jaime. “Celestina: ¿Philocaptio o apetito carnal?” Fifteenth-Century Studies no. 32 (2006): 68–82. Lima, Robert. “The Arcane Paganism of Celestina: Plutonic Magic versus Satanic Witchcraft in Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.” Neophilologus 82 (1998): 221–33. Lima, Robert. “The Pagan Pluto: Touchstone of Celestina’s Magic in Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea.” In Stages of Evil: Occultism in Western Theater and Drama, 83–97. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005).

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Lozano-Renieblas, Isabel. “Celestina en el contexto de los pactos demoníacos.” In Celestina 1499–1999. Selected Papers from the International Congress in Comme­ moration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of Celestina, New York, November 17–19, 1999, 153–64. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2005. Martínez Ruiz, Juán. “La magia de la aliteración en Celestina y en la tradición mudéjar de Ocaña (Toledo).” In Homenaje al profesor Antonio Gallego Morell, 359–73. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1991. Molinos Tejada, M.a Teresa. “Modelos y precedentes clásicos del conjuro en el acto III de Celestina.” Faventia 31, nos. 1–2 (2009): 179–88. Moral de Calatrava, Paloma. “Magic or Science? What ‘Old Women Lapidaries’ Knew in the Age of Celestina.” La Corónica 36, no. 1 (2007): 203–35. Morales, Ana María. “Celestina, hechicería y alcahuetería.” In A quinientos años de Celestina, (1499–1999) 149–60. Mexico: Fac. de Filosofía y Letras UNAM, 2004. Morros, Bienvenido. “Celestina como remedium amoris.” Hispanic Review 72 (2004): 77–99. Pacheco López, Miriam. “Procesos inquisitoriales en Talavera de la Reina: sus paralelos con Celestina.” In Celestina V Centenario, 1499–1999, 559–67. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2001. Pérez de León, Vicente. “La excepcionalidad de la magia de los vínculos y el desafío de las clases sociales en Celestina.” Dicenda. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 29 (2011): 265–87. Pérez Priego, Miguel Ángel. “El conjuro de Celestina.” In El mundo como contienda: Estudios sobre Celestina, 77–88. Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2000. Pérez Priego, Miguel Ángel. “Tratados y prácticas mágicas en la literatura española medieval y renacentista.” In Daímon Páredos. Magos y prácticas mágicas en el mundo mediterráneo, 275–94. Madrid-Málaga: Ediciones Clásicas, 2002. Sauve, Michel. “Célestine et le pouvoir magique.” In Vol. 2 of Hommage à Nelly Clemessy, 591–612. Nice: Association des publications de la Faculté des lettres de Nice, 1993. Severin, Dorothy S. “Celestina and the Magical Empowerment of Women.” Celestinesca 17, no. 2 (1993): 9–28. Severin, Dorothy S. “Mena’s Maga, Celestina’s Spell and Cervantes’ Witches.” Donaire 13 (1999): 36–38. Severin, Dorothy S. “The relationship between the Libro de Buen Amor and Celestina. Does Trotaconventos Perform a Philocaptio Spell on Doña Endrina.” In A Companion to the Libro de Buen Amor, 123–30. London: Tamesis, 2004. Severin, Dorothy S. “Was Celestina’s Claudina Executed as a Witch?” In The Medieval Mind. Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, 417–24. London: Tamesis, 1997. Severin, Dorothy S. “Witchcraft in Celestina: a Bibliographic Update since 1995.” La Corónica 36, no. 1 (2007): 237–43.

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Severin, Dorothy S. Witchcraft in Celestina. London: Department of Hispanic studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1995. Sevilla Arroyo, Florencio. “Amor, magia y tiempo en Celestina.” Celestinesca 33 (2009): 173–214. Snow, Joseph T. “Alisa, Melibea, Celestina y la magia.” Ínsula, no. 633 (1999): 16–18. Snow, Joseph T. “Two Melibeas.” In Nunca fue pena mayor (Estudios de literatura española en homenaje a Brian Dutton), 655–62. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1996. Solomon, Michael. “Pharmaceutical Fictions: Celestina’s Laboratory and the SixteenthCentury Medical Imaginary.” In Medieval Iberia. Changing Societies and Cultures in Contact and Transition, 99–109. Woodridge: Tamesis, 2007. Teijeiro Fuentes, Miguel Ángel. “Dejó la vieja Celestina fama de hechicera o el tema de la magia en las continuaciones celestinescas.” Estudios humanísticos. Filología 23 (2001): 389–409. Vian Herrero, Ana. “Transformaciones del pensamiento mágico: El conjuro amatorio en Celestina y en su linaje literario.” In Cinco siglos de Celestina, 209–38. Valencia: Universitat de València, 1997.

CHAPTER 14

Lovesickness and the Problematical Text of Celestina, Act 1 Ricardo Castells As José Luis Canet Vallés observes, Celestina is, according to critics, a text with considerable problems in its textual tradition.1 Act 1’s brief encounter between Calisto and Melibea, beginning with the ecstatic comment of the galán (suitor), perhaps offers the best example of such textual difficulty: “Melibea, I look at you and see why God is great” (En esto veo, Melibea, la grandeza de Dios) (1; 1.27).2 Unsurprisingly, controversy surrounds Celestina’s short first scene, characterized by an undefined location, enigmatic speech from both characters, and, above all, a sudden, confusing change in Melibea’s attitude toward Calisto. Despite these internal contradictions—or simply because of the need to find a simple explanation for the dialogue—almost all modern scholars accept the brief description appearing in the argumento (summary) preceding Act 1: “Calisto ran into the garden in pursuit of his falcon, saw Melibea and immediately felt love stirring” (Entrando Calisto una huerta en pos de un halcón suyo, halló allí a Melibea, de cuyo amor preso, comenzóle de hablar; de la qual rigorosamente despedido, fue para su casa muy sangustiado) (1; 1.25). In the prologue to the Tragicomedia of 1502, Fernando de Rojas indicates that the argumentos or summaries, which first appeared in the Comedia of 1499, are in fact the work of the book’s printer, Fadrique Alemán de Basilea. At the same time, Rojas reveals that the argumentos are part of a larger controversy about the work’s true significance:

1  José Luis Canet Vallés, introduction to Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2011), 12–65, p. 14. 2  The quotations from Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009), followed by the Spanish original by act and page number from Fernando de Rojas, Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Raymond Foulché-Delbosc (Barcelona: L’Avenç, 1902). The translations of other sources are mine, unless otherwise noted.

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So when ten people get together to listen to this comedy being read, and all have such differing views, as is usually the case, who will deny there won’t be arguments over something that can be interpreted so differently? For even the printers have added their points, have put explanations or summaries at the beginning of each act, briefly stating what happens: something quite unnecessary if one considers how the ancient writers got by without them (Así que cuando diez personas se juntaren a oír esta comedia en quien quepa esta diferencia de condiciones, como suele acaecer, ¿quién negará que haya contienda en cosa que de tantas maneras se entienda? Que aun los impressores han dado sus punturas, poniendo rúbricas o sumarios al principio de cada acto, narrando en breve lo que dentro contenía; una cosa bien escusada según los antiguos escritores usaron). (214; 81) Rojas may be open to different interpretations of Act 1, but the comments above suggest he is not completely satisfied with the argumentos.3 As a result, and unsurprisingly, modern scholars also have objections to the printer’s textual additions. Stephen Gilman, for example, notes: “[I]f we as readers want to find out what Celestina is really about, these argumentos are the last place to which we ought to turn.”4 Although Gilman recognizes that the argumentos present significant textual problems in an already difficult text, he curiously exempts the summary of Act 1 from this criticism: “Unlike the first act, the quality of these argumentos—their performance of their descriptive function—is so inadequate that Rojas’ disclaimer [in the Tragicomedia’s prologue] has generally been believed.”5 Nevertheless, Gilman’s confidence in the first summary begs the question of why readers would accept this particular argumento if the printers’ additions do not provide an adequate frame for Celestina. Martín de Riquer, conscious of the difficulty of analyzing a work by two different authors, along with summaries by a third contributor, examines Act 1 3  According to Francisco J. Lobera et al., Rojas adopts an ironic tone in the argumentos. Discussing the definition of punturas, Lobera et al. sustain that the author ironically uses technical terms of the printing press to suggest that the printers’ intervention was excessive (20n46). Moreover, they note that the word escusada means innecesaria, adding that Rojas is clearly against this intervention (20–21n48). Francisco J. Lobera, Guillermo Serés, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Carlos Mota, Íñigo Ruiz Arzalluz, and Francisco Rico, eds., La Celestina: Tragedia de Calisto y Melibea, by Fernando de Rojas and “Antiguo Autor” (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011). 4  Stephen Gilman, The Art of La Celestina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), p. 216. 5  Gilman, The Art, p. 212.

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without taking into account the accompanying argumento at all. Riquer’s idea is to read the first Act as closely as possible to the antiguo autor’s original text, so he excludes any new material added when the Auto was incorporated into the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea—Riquer’s research took place before the discovery of the Celestina de Palacio manuscript, so he did not know another version of the primitive text’s beginning existed. Riquer concludes that the argumento to Act 1 is unreliable because it is inconsistent with the first scene in the original version. He states that if we carefully consider the first exchange between Calisto and Melibea, we realize their words do not correspond to a fortuitous encounter. Calisto has begged God for the opportunity to meet Melibea. Against what the argumento states, Calisto, while chasing his falcon, does not seem to have run into Melibea. Their dialogue never mentions birds, and there are no implicit indications he is picking the falcon up, while Melibea is equally silent on the supposedly present bird.6 As Riquer notes, Calisto had to be already in love with the young woman before the beginning of Act 1 since he speaks to Melibea about his “secret yearning” (secreto dolor) and about the “pledges, sacrifice, devotion or pious works I ever offered God to this end” (el servicio, sacrificio, devoción y obras pías, que por este lugar alcanzar [tiene] a Dios ofrecido) (1; 1.27). As a result, Riquer concludes that, in its original form, the first scene does not take place in the garden and has nothing to do with the search for a missing falcon. More importantly, since the lost bird of prey is not mentioned in Celestina until Act 2—during a conversation between Calisto and Pármeno, written by Fernando de Rojas— Riquer concludes that the interpretation that appears in the argumento does not correspond to the first author’s concept of the opening scene. Rather than taking place in Melibea’s garden, Riquer proposes a church as the location of the conversation between Calisto and Melibea because of the scene’s many religious allusions, which he believes reflect the spiritual environment of the problematic encounter.7 A. Rumeau accepts Riquer’s idea that the opening scene is not the same episode that Pármeno mentions in Act 2, and he also concludes it has nothing to do with the argumento to Act 1. Rumeau believes the first scene represents a second meeting between the two characters in which an already enamored Calisto declares his love for Melibea, perhaps inside a church.8 W. D. Truesdell 6  Martín de Riquer, “Fernando de Rojas y La Celestina,” Revista de Filología Española 41 (1957): 373–95, p. 384. 7  Riquer, “Fernando de Rojas,” p. 385. 8  A. Rumeau, “Introduction a Celèstine: ‘una cosa bien escusada’,” Les Langes Néo-latines 60 (1966): 1–26.

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repeats Riquer’s approach by reading Act 1 independently of the argumento, but validates only one part of Riquer’s interpretation: “What was convincing about the Riquer arguments was not the placement of the scene within a church, but rather the proofs that it could not possibly have been in Melibea’s garden.” According to Truesdell, what’s most important about the first scene is that the antiguo autor (old or original author) does not mention any specific location at all. Truesdell believes this to be a deliberate and significant omission: “The author could only have been trying to indicate that this initial and all-important scene took place nowhere, outside of conventional space, in unlocalized ‘abstract’ space […] without spatial and/or temporal concretization.”9 Despite Riquer, Rumeau, and Truesdell’s objections, most scholars accept the traditional interpretation of the opening scene, including critics and editors such as María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, Charles B. Faulhaber, Peter Russell, Michael Solomon, José Luis Canet, Santiago López Ríos, E. Michael Gerli, and José Antonio Torregrosa Díaz, among others.10 Nevertheless, by adopting the conventional reading of this key scene, modern scholars ignore the extensive textual evidence in Fernando de Rojas’s continuation indicating that Calisto and Melibea’s first meeting occurs before the start of Act 1.11 This essential point first appears in Calisto and Pármeno’s conversation in Act 2, wherein Pármeno reveals Calisto’s neblí (a type of falcon) ended up in Melibea’s garden “the other day” (el otro día) (33; 2.89). Melibea adds that she spoke with Calisto “the other day” (el otro día) (44; 5.128) or “many days ago” (muchos días son passados) (119; 12.246), and “that noble young gentleman spoke to me of his love many, many days ago” (muchos y muchos días son pasados que ese noble caballero [le] habló en amor) (119; 10.228). Melibea also tells Celestina she has been suffering over Calisto for “a week” (ocho días) (4.133), while Calisto admits he fell in love 9  W. D. Truesdell, “The Hortus Conclusus Tradition, and the Implications of its Absence in the Celestina,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 20 (1973): 257–77, p. 265. 10  María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística de La Celestina (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1962); Charles B. Faulhaber, “Celestina de Palacio: Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, Ms. 1520,” Celesitnesca 14, no. 2 (1990): 3–39; Peter E. Russell, introduction to Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Madrid: Castalia, 1991), 11–173; Michael Solomon, “Calisto’s Ailment: Bitextual Diagnostics and Parody in Celestina,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 23 (1989): 41–64; Canet Vallés, introduction to Comedia de Calisto y Melibea; Santiago López Ríos, introduction to La Celestina (New York: Vintage Español, 2010), 9–55; Michael Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); José Antonio Torregrosa Díaz, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Acotaciones críticas y textuales y versión modernizada (PhD diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2015). 11  Miguel Garci-Gómez, Calisto, soñador y altanero (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994), pp. 9–11.

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with Melibea at first sight—“how many days before now” (cuántos días antes de agora) (my translation; 12.245)—and as a result of his infatuation has seen her “night after night” (tantas noches) in his love-struck imagination (71; 6.154). Moreover, once Celestina assures Calisto that Melibea loves him, he responds that he will finally be able to rest in the evenings: “God go with you, mother. I must sleep and rest awhile and make up for past sleepless nights so I’m fresh for this evening” (Dios vaya contigo, madre. Yo quiero dormir y reposar un rato para satisfacer las pasadas noches) (127; 11.237). Notably, Rojas repeats the approximate time references of Calisto and Melibea’s first meeting in Acts 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, and 12 in the sixteen-act Comedia, so this information is restated so many times that there can be no doubt about his authorial intention. Some critics offer innovative interpretations in an attempt to solve the temporal and textual contradictions of the opening scene. Manuel Asensio, for example, concludes that if Pármeno indicates in the second Act—unquestionably on day one of the three-day Comedia—that Calisto and Melibea met “the other day” (el otro día) (33; 2.89), this means the first scene represents a kind of prologue to the rest of Celestina. Even though there is no separation between what we now call the first and second scenes in the princeps edition of the Comedia,12 Asensio believes that there must be a separation of several days between them.13 More recently, James R. Stamm agrees that the conversation between the two future lovers represents a dramatic prologue to the rest of the work.14 Stephen Gilman, on the other hand, rejects this interpretation and instead concludes—with a notable lack of documentation or textual evidence— that the first two scenes are joined by the subjective time he sees operating generally in Celestina.15 María Rosa Lida de Malkiel and Dorothy Sherman Severin share this critical approach, with minor variants.16 Based on these controversies, Canet correctly emphasizes Celestina’s textual difficulties, for over the years scholars have struggled even to establish precisely when and where the work begins. Significantly, several important factors 12  See Foulché-Delbosc’s edition of the Comedia, p. 2, or the facsimile of the Burgos edition in Cervantes Virtual, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/bib/bib_obra/celestina/obra .shtml (fol. 2r). 13  Manuel Asensio, “El tiempo en La Celestina,” Hispanic Review 20 (1952): 28–43. 14  James R. Stamm, La estructura de La Celestina (Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca, 1988). 15  Stephen Gilman, “A Propos of ‘El tiempo en La Celestina’ by Manuel Asensio,” Hispanic Review 21 (1953): 42–45; and “El tiempo y el género literario en La Celestina,” Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1945): 147–59. 16  Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad; Dorothy Sherman Severin, introduction to La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987), 9–64.

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in the opening scene help explain this uncertainty. Firstly, the short conversation between Calisto and Melibea is the only scene lacking clear temporal and spatial definition. The dialogues between the different characters normally indicate an approximate time of the day and a precise place in the unnamed city, but, surprisingly, the only specific reference in the opening scene is the enigmatic allusion to “this timely spot” (tan conveniente lugar) (1; 1.27). In addition, the dialogue is so brief that the two characters never mention exactly when the conversation occurs, which means that the temporal separation between the first two scenes could be as short as a few minutes, or perhaps as long as several days. If we consider the many contradictory interpretations and textual difficulties surrounding Celestina’s opening scene, there is no question a proper understanding requires the reader to fix this dialogue in time and space, and, more importantly, to do so based on reliable internal and external evidence. Bruce W. Wardropper notes that Celestina is one of “many Spanish literary texts […] truly ‘undecidable’ ” because of uncertain composition and publication history, but he also believes these works are culturally referential because they exist within a larger literary and social context.17 For example, while Wardropper believes that Celestina “is a text loath to surrender its mysteries,” he also notes that Antonio Maravall’s analysis of the “deterioration of the master-man relationship” in early modern Spain demonstrates that the work “refer[s] to a clearly defined historical circumstance.”18 Wardropper believes that no matter how unreliable or unstable Spanish texts may be, modern scholars can still make significant critical advances by respecting the original definition of philologia found in the Diccionario de autoridades as “A science that includes Grammar, Rhetoric, History, Poetry, Antiquities, Interpretation of Authors and generally of the Critic, with the general speculation of all the other Sciences” (Ciencia compuesta y adornada de la Gramática, Rhetórica, Historia, Poesía, Antigüedades, Interpretación de Autores, y generalmente de la Crítica, con especulación general de todas las demás Ciencias).19

17  Bruce W. Wardropper, “An Apology for Philology,” MLN 102, no. 2 (1987): 176–90, p. 179. 18  Wardropper, “An Apology,” p. 186. 19  The Diccionario de autoridades, published between 1726 and 1739, is the earliest Spanish lexicographic dictionary. It reflects the early uses of Spanish words taken from famous authors and old sources, and can be compared to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). It can be consulted online at http://www.rae.es/ recursos/diccionarios/diccionariosanteriores-1726–1996/ diccionario-de-autoridades.

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Miguel Garci-Gómez approaches Celestina philologically as he attempts to solve the many contradictions in the opening scene. Much like Riquer, Garci-Gómez believes that, in order to understand the Auto properly, we must read Act 1 independently of both Rojas’s continuation and the printers’ argumentos.20 Based on his analysis of the text, Garci-Gómez concludes that the enigmatic conversation at the beginning of the primitive text is not an actual encounter, but rather a dream or vision that the already enamored Calisto has of his beloved Melibea. According to this interpretation, Calisto does not meet Melibea at the beginning of Celestina at all because he never leaves his house during Act 1. On the contrary, the first meeting between Calisto and Melibea occurs some time before the start of Act 1, which means that Celestina begins in medias res.21 Calisto then has a romantic vision about the young woman in his own bedroom—unquestionably the most convenient place for such a dream-world encounter—before he wakes up and calls for Sempronio in the second scene. I accept Garci-Gómez’s reading of the Auto in my own research, initially because Calisto’s amorous dream serves as the model for similar episodes in the dialogue novels of the Celestinesque genre. There are comparable oneiric scenes in the anonymous Comedia Thebayda, Comedia Serafina, and Comedia Ypólita (published together in 1520 or 1521); Feliciano de Silva’s Segunda Celestina (1534); Gaspar Gómez de Toledo’s Tercera Celestina (1536); Sebastián Fernández’s Tragedia Policiana (1547); Alonso de Villegas Selvago’s Comedia Selvagia (1554); and Lope de Vega’s La Dorotea (1632). The Comedia Selvagia, for example, is the only Celestinesque work with two protagonists: Flerinardo and Selvago. In the first Act, the two young men talk about the contrast between chaste love and sensual desire, but Act 3 presents Flerinardo waking from a dream. The galán remembers that he spoke with his beloved Rosiana while he slept, almost as Calisto speaks to Melibea at the beginning of Celestina: Not other that, having passed all night in diverse thoughts, towards dawn I fell deeply asleep, and wonderful things, although obscure, appeared to me […]The lady who holds my hear captive appeared to me so full of rage and anger against me as she is beautiful and charming to everybody […] After considering my fear, with a more appeased face, she told me: 20  Garci-Gómez, Calisto, soñador, p. 3. 21  Significantly, almost all the works in the Celestinesque genre begin in medias res, as we see, for example, in the argumento to the first Act or cena of Feliciano de Silva’s Segunda Celestina, ed. Consolación Baranda (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), p. 113.

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“Oh you, who have shown to be my true captive […] you really deserve my rage because of your insanity since not only you violated my purity with your damned thought, but also, after having questioned my honesty, you boast about with everybody” (No otro sino que habiendo toda la noche gastado en diversos pensamientos, ya cerca de la aurora me vino un profundo sueño, en el qual cosas maravillosas, aunque bien oscuras, me fueron presentadas […] La señora que en captividad mi corazón tiene puesto, se me demostró con tanta ira y enojo contra mí, quanta hermosura y beldad con para con todos tiene […] Habiendo, pues, algún tanto mis muchos miedos considerado, con algo más apacible rostro, desta manera me habló: “¡Oh tú, que por tan mi verdadero captivo te has mostrado […] como a la verdad eres digno a que rigurosamente mi crueldad contra tu locura proceda, pues no solamente violaste mi limpieza con tu dañado pensamiento, mas, aun poniendo mi honra en condición, te jactas y vanaglorias a todos manifestarlo”).22 Unlike Calisto, Flerinardo feels a sincere and honest love for Rosiana, so in the dream he assures her he is not suffering from an uncontrolled madness of sensual passion. Finally convinced of Flerinardo’s undying devotion, Rosiana changes her attitude completely, but in this case the young woman moves from an initial rejection of the galán’s advances to a final acceptance of his love. With this positive outcome, Flerinardo fondly recalls the unexpected transformation in his beloved Rosiana once he awakens from the dream: “Then she, with her face suffuse with love, replied: ‘Because I see you repent and the sin has not been committed, I will forgive you.’ After saying these words, she suddenly disappeared from my sight, and I woke up from my deep sleep” (Entonces ella, con rostro amoroso y apacible, me respondió en esta manera: ‘Por ver tu mucha contrición y que aún el pecado no se puso por obra, yo quiero por ahora perdonarte.’ Pues dichas estas palabras, súbitamente de mi vista se desapareció, y yo de aquel profundo sueño fui libre).23 Essentially, Garci-Gómez’s interpretation means there can be no spatial or temporal separation between the first two scenes of the Auto. This approach then not only rejects Asensio’s dramatic prologue to Celestina, but also Gilman’s notion of subjective time. Yet, in order to show that the first scene takes place in Calisto’s feverish imagination, we must first find a specific connection between the galán’s lament at the end of the first scene—“I leave devastated by this cruel twist in my fortunes” (Iré como aquel contra quien solamente 22  Alonso de Villegas Selvago, La comedia llamada Selvagia (Madrid: Colección de Libros Raros o Curiosos V, 1873), p. 57. 23  Villegas Selvago, La comedia, pp. 58–59.

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la adversa Fortuna pone su studio con odio cruel)—and his cry to his servant at the beginning of the second scene: “Sempronio, Sempronio, where the hell are you, Sempronio?” (¡Sempronio, Sempronio, Sempronio! ¿Dónde está este maldicto?) (1; 1.28). While no obvious link exists between the two comments, Rojas’s continuation presents Calisto calling out to his servants precisely at the moment when he awakens from lovesick dreams during the second and third mornings of the Comedia. At the start of the second day, Pármeno returns home after spending the evening with Areúsa. Sempronio tells him that their master is still in his bedroom “raving in his sleep” (devaneando entre sueños) (97; 8.195), but Calisto calls out to them the moment that he wakes up: “Who’s that down there? Lads!” (¿Quién habla en la sala? ¡Moços!) (98; 8.196). Calisto repeats the same pattern during the Comedia’s third morning, as he again cries out for his servants: How pleasant to sleep after my enchanting conversation with an angel! […] Oh blissfully lucky Calisto, if what happened was no dream? Did or didn’t I dream it? Did I imagine it or did it happen? I wasn’t alone. My servants went with me […] I’ll summon them so they can confirm me in my ecstasy. Tristanico! Lads! (Oh cómo he dormido tan a mi placer después de aquel azucarado rato, después de aquel angélico razonamiento! […]¡Oh dichoso y bienandante Calisto, si verdad es que no ha sido sueño lo pasado! ¿Soñélo o no? ¿Fue fantaseado o pasó en verdad? Pues no estuve solo; mis criados me acompañaron […] Quiero mandarlos llamar para más confirmar mi gozo. ¡Tristanico! ¡Mozos! (145; 13.263–64) The master’s cry, signaling that the lovesick galán has just awakened from a dream, is also common to the Celestinesque genre itself. Although there are similar scenes in the Comedia Serafina, the Segunda Celestina, the Tercera Celestina, and the Tragedia Policiana, the clearest example appears in the Comedia Selvagia. When the protagonist Selvago wakes up after dreaming about his beloved Isabela, the young man comments: “What is this? Wasn’t I in the kingdom of my lady, full of her grace and enjoying her godly glory? Then, how am I in my bed? There is no doubt that it was a deceiving dream. I will confirm it with another person. Lads, lads” (¿Qué será esto? ¿Por ventura no estaba yo agora en el reino de mi señora, lleno de su gracia y gozando de su soberana gloria? Pues, ¿cómo me hallo en mi lecho? Sin duda que con algún fingido ensueño he sido engañado; bien será me certifique de segunda persona. ¡Mozos, mozos!).24 With so many identical episodes in Rojas’s continuation, as well as in the Celestinesque genre, Calisto’s cry undoubtedly confirms he 24  Villegas Selvago, La comedia, p. 134.

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has just finished dreaming of Melibea while the shout for Sempronio, in turn, confirms Calisto has spent the entire first scene sleeping in his own bedroom. A further textual reference indicates Calisto never leaves his house at the beginning of Act 1. Once Calisto sees Sempronio, he tells the servant: “Off to my bedroom, sly wretch, and make my bed!” (¡Anda, anda, malvado, abre la cámara y endereza la cámara!) (2; 1.29). Sempronio immediately responds, “Señor, luego. Hecho es” (1.29), which, according to José Antonio Torregrosa Díaz, means, “Immediately, sir, it is done.”25 As Garci-Gómez observes, Sempronio would not enter Calisto’s bedroom in order to make the bed unless the galán had just gotten up.26 In addition, Garci-Gómez notes that the oneiric sequence in the Auto has a possible model in the beginning of the Paulus, an anonymous humanistic comedy that—as Ramón Menéndez y Pelayo and María Rosa Lida de Malkiel observe—exhibits numerous similarities to Celestina. According to Garci-Gómez, the opening scene represents a near repetition of the Latin comedy’s opening since in both cases the protagonists angrily call their servants after waking up from a glorious dream.27 Moreover, I have studied the possible relationship between Calisto’s opening dream and Andreas Capellanus’s De amore. According to Andreas, lovesickness is the result of a young man establishing visual contact with an attractive young woman. Her phantasm enters his body through the eyes, and this illusory figure eventually dominates his thought process to such an extent that her image becomes a constant presence in his daytime imagination and nighttime dreams. Since Andreas indicates that a young man suffering from lovesickness should seek the assistance of a helper and a procuress, then the relationship between Calisto, Sempronio, and Celestina follows the French chaplain’s ideas quite closely. More importantly, since the Paulus and De Amore represent possible cultural models for Celestina’s opening scene, the presence of amorous dreams in Latin texts from Italy and France presents the possibility that the oneiric sequence and the phantasmal image of the beloved could be one of the common characteristics of medieval lovesickness.28 In this case, Calisto’s dream forms part of a long cultural tradition familiar to Rojas and the Celestinesque authors. As I have indicated in other writings, the amorous dream is culturally referential because it is a common element in 25  Torregrosa Díaz, Tragicomedia, p. 96. 26  Garci-Gómez, Calisto, soñador, p. 19. 27  Garci-Gómez, Calisto, soñador, p. 17n5. 28  Ricardo Castells, Calisto’s Dream and the Celestinesque Tradition: A Rereading of Celestina, Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 81–88.

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amorous literature from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century.29 Two of the most complete studies on lovesickness or amor hereos are Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition, 1621) and Jacques Ferrand’s De la Maladie D’Amour, ou Melancholie Erotique (1623). Both treatises study the origins of erotic melancholy and its place in European letters, and both confirm that the dreams and visions of the beloved are one of the most typical symptoms of this malady. According to Burton, for example, “Her sweet face, eyes, actions, gestures […] are so surveyed, measured, and taken, by that Astrolabe of phantasy, and so violently sometimes, with such earnestness and eagerness, such continuance, so strong an imagination, that at length he thinks he sees her indeed; he talks with her, he embraces her.”30 Both studies take most of their examples from European fiction and poetry, but we also know that the amorous vision is much more than an artistic convention. One of the clearest cases appears in the letters of the nun Héloïse (1101–64) to the theologian Abélard (1079–1142), her husband and father of her child. Just like Calisto, Héloïse’s thoughts are dominated by her lover’s phantasm, an image accompanying her even as she sleeps: In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep […] Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word (Quant à moi, ces voluptés de l’amour que nous avons goûtées ensemble m’ont été si douces, que le souvenir ne peut m’en déplaire ni même s’effacer de ma mémoire. De quelque côté que je me tourne, elles se présentent, elles s’imposent à mes regards avec les désirs qu’elles réveillent; leurs trompeuses images n’épargnent même pas mon sommeil […] Ce n’est pas seulement ce que nous avons fait, ce sont les heures, ce sont les lieux témoins de ce que nous avons fait, qui sont si profondément gravés dans mon cœur avec ton image, que je me retrouve avec toi dans 29  Ricardo Castells, Fernando de Rojas and the Renaissance Vision: Phantasm, Melancholy, and Didacticism in Celestina, Penn State Studies in the Romance Literatures (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 9–28. 30  Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols. (London: Dent Everyman’s Library, 1964), 3:559.

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les mêmes lieux, aux mêmes heures, faisant les mêmes choses: même en dormant, je ne trouve point le repos. Parfois les mouvements de mon corps trahissent les pensées de mon âme, des mots m’échappent que je n’ai pu retenir).31 Héloïse’s letters to Abelard reveal that the dreams and visions of amor hereos were a typical physiological experience in the Middle Ages, and explain why there is little difference between this apparently authentic description on the one hand, and the erotic phantasms appearing in French and Italian literature on the other. In fact, the lyrical traditions of the fin amor and the dolce stil nuovo repeatedly stress the importance of the beloved’s image in the lovestruck poet’s imagination. As a result, the fanciful likeness of the dama plays a more important role in these verses than her actual physical presence. The woman’s imaginary representation thus appears time and again in the lover’s dreams throughout the Middle Ages, as we see for example in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés, Dante’s La vita nuova, Petrarch’s le rime in morte di Madonna Laura, Boccaccio’s L’Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta and Amorosa visione, and even in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sonnets and commentaries. There are also important visual examples of the lovesick protagonist lying in his bed, not only in the illustrations to early editions of Celestina, but also in other fifteenth-century European works. Enrique Fernández Rivera studies the woodcut illustrations for Act 13 found in the 1499 Burgos edition of La Comedia, which show the image of Calisto, awake in bed and with the hand at the end of his bent arm holding his head. According to Fernández Rivera, this figure is similar to the image of Leriano struck by lovesickness depicted in one of the engravings of the Zaragoza edition of Cárcel de amor (Pablo Hurus, 1493). Both drawings recall an episode from the Histoire d’Olivier de Castille et d’Artus d’Algarbe, where a bedridden Olivier, lovesick for Hélène, is visited by her and one of her servants (Louis Cruse, Basilea, 1492). Since amor hereos is just one manifestation of medieval melancholy, this edition of Olivier de Castille includes a similar image of Artus, fainted in bed, which in turn matches the woodcut of a Spanish translation coincidentally in a 1499 Burgos edition published by Fadrique Alemán de Basilea.32

31  Abelard and Heloise, Lettres d’Abélard et d’Héloïse, trans. M. Greard (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1974), pp. 80–81. The English translation is from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1917), p. 133. 32  Enrique Fernández Rivera, “Calisto, Leriano, Oliveros: Tres dolientes y un mismo grabado,” Celestinesca 36 (2012): 119–42.

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Since amorous visions represent a longstanding and recognizable tradition in European culture, Fernando de Rojas and the Celestinesque authors would understand and accept Calisto’s opening dream more easily than modern readers. Rojas clearly sees this behavior as an essential part of the young man’s character, repeatedly presenting the galán as an amorous dreamer in his continuation of Celestina. The best example of Calisto’s hallucinatory nature appears in Act 14 of the Tragicomedia when he returns home with his servants after a glorious night with Melibea. Calisto decides that, from then on, he will spend his days in his bedroom and his evenings in Melibea’s garden paradise: “I shall spend my days in my chambers and my nights in that sweet paradise, in that pleasant bower on lush green grass among welcoming shrubs” (De día estaré en mi cámara, de noche en aquel paraíso dulce, en aquel alegre vergel entre aquellas suaves plantas y fresca verdure) (146; 14.281). Leaving little doubt about what he will be doing in his room, he indicates that he will spend that day recalling his beloved’s angelic image in his daytime imagination: “What do I gain if the iron clock strikes twelve and the sky’s clock doesn’t? However early you rise, dawn doesn’t break any the sooner. ‘But, dear imagination, you do have the power to help me. Bring to my dreams the angel presence of her radiant face, to my ears the gentle sound of her words’ ” (¿Qué me aprovecha a mí que dé doce horas el reloj de hierro si no las ha dado el del cielo? Pues por mucho que madrugue no amanece más aína. Pero tú, dulce imaginación, tú que puedes me acorre. Trae a mi fantasía la presencia angélica de aquella imagen luziente; vuelve a mis oídos el suave son de sus palabras) (157–58; 14.282). Calisto’s recollections of Melibea in the Tragicomedia mirror the Auto’s opening scene, as his limerent fantasy again recreates her image in his bedroom. Despite Rojas’s insistence on Calisto’s illusionary reality, however, the most accurate description of the young man’s condition is not found in Celestina at all, but rather in Francisco López de Villalobos’s gloss to his own translation of the Anfitrión (1544). Villalobos—the personal physician to Ferdinand the Catholic and Emperor Charles V—once again corroborates that the beloved’s phantasm overpowers the young lover’s dreams until the moment he wakes from his realistic vision: Among the potentiae and inner senses, there is one called potential imaginative, […] which excels at making and composing images […] This potential is sometimes affected by a form of insanity called alienation, and a bad, rebellious humor that obfuscates the spirit where the images are formed makes false images […] in such cases, the imagination is false and deceptive. Everything that it makes is influenced by obfuscation, and the alienated person talks only about it and is out of himself, to the point

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that he does not see or hear anything they tell him […] This affects men in love, who always have the image of their beloved woman in their mind, and they are therefore unable to occupy their imagination with anything else; they spend all their time transported by this image […] they talk to it, they sing about it, they go to sleep and wake up with it (Entre las potencias y sentidos interiores hay una que se llama imaginativa […] [que] es maestra de hacer imágenes y componerlas […] Esta imaginativa adolesce algunas veces de un género de locura que se llama alienación, y es por parte de algún malo y rebelde humor que ofusca y enturbia el espíritu do se hacen las imágenes, fórmase allí la imagen falsa […] [y] si la tiene, es mentirosa y enajenada la imaginación, y cuanto piensa, todo es del metal de aquella imagen que allí está, de aquello habla el alienado, y en ello está rebatado y trasportado de tal manera, que no oye ni ve ni entiende cosa que le digan […] Los enamorados son desta materia: que la imagen de su amiga tienen siempre figurada y fija dentro de sus pensamientos, por donde no pueden ocupar jamás la imaginación en otra cosa; en esta imagen […] están trasportados y rebatados todas las horas; con ella hablan, della cantan y della lloran, con ella comen y duermen y despiertan).33 López de Villalobos thus confirms the presence of the young woman’s image in the lover’s imagination as a common physiological condition well known in Renaissance Spain. While modern scholars would naturally be skeptical of Garci-Gómez’s assertion that Celestina’s first scene represents a feverish dream, a contemporary reader would know that this fantastic vision is precisely what one would expect from a lovesick Calisto. Yet even if we ignore the confusing argumento to Act 1, and concentrate strictly on the text of the dialogue— either in the version contained in Rojas’s complete version l or in the Celestina de Palacio manuscript—we are still left questioning precisely how Fernando de Rojas and the other Celestinesque writers came to identical readings of the opening scene.34 Since all of these authors repeatedly present their young 33  Francisco López de Villalobos, Anfitrión, comedia de Plauto (Madrid: BAE 36, 1950), 461– 93, pp. 488–89. 34  While the Celestina de Palacio adds more complexity to an already difficult text, this manuscript represents only one of the many questions surrounding an ultimately unknowable work. Francisco Lobera Serrano considers the text of La Celestina in the Manuscrito de Palacio to be worse, from a literary and artistic point of view, than the printed version. “Sobre historia, texto y ecdótica, alrededor del Manuscrito de Palacio,” in La Celestina V Centenario (1499–1999), Actas del congreso internacional, ed. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez,

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protagonists at the moment that they awaken from an erotic vision, they would not likely have written similar episodes unless following the same literary model. Nevertheless, if we read Act 1 without preconceptions, we still lack any definitive indication of Calisto being in the midst of an early-morning dream. This missing proof surprisingly appears with Charles B. Faulhaber’s remarkable discovery of the Celestina de Palacio manuscript. This fragment of today’s Act 1 includes—using Miguel Marciales’s terminology—the Incipit and the Argumento general to Celestina. Since the Argumento general does not appear in printed form until the second edition of the Comedia (Toledo, 1500), it appears that Fernando de Rojas added this summary to the second printing. Thanks to Faulhaber’s discovery, however, we now know Rojas would have seen the Argumento general in the manuscript he found in Salamanca, although this summary curiously was not incorporated into the Burgos Comedia of 1499. According to the Celestina de Palacio’s Argumento general, “Calisto […] was captive of the love for Melibea, a young beautiful woman, of noble and distinguished ancestry […] The lovers and those who helped them came to a disastrous, bitterly ending. For the beginning of this, the adverse fortune propitiated a convenient location where the desired Melibea presented herself to Calisto’s presence” (Calisto […] fue preso en el amor de Melibea mujer moça muy generosa de alto y serenisima sangre […] Vinieron los amantes y los que les ministraron en amargo y desastrado fin. Para comienço delo qual dispuso el adversa fortuna lugar oportuno donde ala presençia de Calisto se presento la deseada Melibea) (fol. 93v). The end of the Argumento general unquestionably challenges the conventional reading of the first scene. In the first place, the antiguo autor indicates that Melibea appears to Calisto, and not the other way around.35 In the second place, the Argumento general refers to la deseada Melibea, which means that the text begins in medias res because the antiguo autor presents an alreadyenamored Calisto at the beginning of the manuscript. While these two references contradict the notion that Celestina begins with a casual encounter in Melibea’s garden, at first glance they do not suggest the entire opening scene is a lovesick vision. Unquestioningly, critics conclude that la presencia de Calisto (the presence of Calisto) refers to his physical presence, which follows the early definitions of presencia found in Sebastián de Covarrubias (“La asistencia personal, latine praesentia”) and the Diccionario de autoridades: “Personal attendance or the situation of the person who is in front of or in the same place Rafael González Cañal, and Gema Gómez Rubio (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2001), 79–86, pp. 88–89. 35  Faulhaber, “Celestina de Palacio,” p. 24n25.

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of another person” (La assistencia personal, o el estado de la persona que se halla delante o en el mismo parage que otra) (lema 1). While we can easily accept the standard reading of this sentence, we need to rethink the idea that somehow Melibea presented herself to Calisto’s presence for the simple reason that this comment makes no sense whatsoever in any language in any time. Fortunately, the Diccionario de autoridades includes more definitions than Covarrubias, including one meaning of the word presencia that is far more useful for an analysis of the Argumento general: “In the moral sense, it means the actual memory of something or its representation. Latín. Repraesentatio specierum, vel praesentia” (En sentido moral se toma por la actual memória de alguna espécie, o representación de ella. Latín. Repraesentatio specierum, vel praesentia) (lema 4). The Diccionario, therefore, indicates presencia does not necessarily mean someone’s material presence, as it can also mean a person’s memoria or representación.36 As far as I know, the archaic use of presencia is no longer used, but the following definition still appears in the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy of the Language RAE as “5. Figurative speech: Memory of an image or idea, or its representation” (5. Fig. Memoria de una imagen o idea, o representación de ella). Based on this information, we can finally understand why so many Renaissance authors would have recognized Celestina’s opening scene as a vision appearing to Calisto while sleeping in his bedroom. These writers would have known that, in effect, the Argumento general indicates that “the adverse fortune propitiated a convenient location where desired Melibea presented herself to the memory of Calisto” (dispuso el adversa fortuna lugar oportuno donde a la memoria de Calisto se presentó la deseada Melibea) (24). Thanks to the Diccionario de autoridades, we now have a conclusive textual reference confirming that the entire first scene occurs in Calisto’s memory. As Riquer observes, Calisto addresses Melibea by name and mentions his “secreto dolor” because he has already met and fallen in love with her, though we have no way of knowing if this happened in a garden, a church, or in the Plaza Mayor.37 Since Calisto is unquestionably in love at the beginning of Celestina, logically he would exhibit the symptoms of medieval lovesickness in scene one, including the amorous vision of his beloved in his early-morning memory.

36  The Diccionario’s definition of representación is also useful: “It is also applied to the figure, imagen or idea that takes the place of reality” (Se aplica assimismo a la figura, imagen o idea que sustituye las veces de la realidad) (lema 4). 37  Riquer, “Fernando de Rojas,” p. 385.

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According to the available written evidence, there is no question that GarciGómez’s reading of the first scene finds substantial textual proof in the antiguo autor’s Auto, in Fernando de Rojas’s continuation of Celestina, in the dialogue novels of the Celestinesque genre, in the French and Italian lyrical traditions, in medical texts from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, and finally in the Diccionario de autoridades. While few twenty-first-century critics accept the idea of Calisto’s dream, a philological approach to the text provides extensive, convincing, and consistent support for this innovative interpretation. More importantly, the idea of Calisto’s dream successfully resolves many of the textual difficulties in Act 1 that have plagued Celestina scholarship for decades. At this point, one might ask if traditional scholars can present comparable evidence—or any corroboration whatsoever—to reinforce the standard yet flawed reading of scene one. Unfortunately, there is little chance that we will ever discover any documentation to confirm that Celestina’s brief and confusing opening scene, undefined in space and time, is a chance encounter in Melibea’s unmentioned garden that occurs while Calisto recovers an unacknowledged bird of prey.

CHAPTER 15

Jesus and Mary, Christian Prayer, and the Saints in Celestina Manuel da Costa Fontes The virtual absence of the names “Jesus” and “Mary” from a medieval and supposedly highly moral work like Celestina is very surprising since, after all, it was apparently written to warn young people against illicit love affairs, including the one that causes the deaths of its protagonists, Calisto and Melibea, as well as against evil procuresses and bad servants.1 Whereas the text mentions the name of God no less than 223 times throughout the twenty-one acts,2 there are only 3 overt references to the Blessed Mother, none of which reflect any genuine devotion, and the 5 occasions on which the name of Jesus is mentioned could be easily replaced with expletives.3 The manner in which prayers and scriptural materials are used is also surprising, for they are invariably proffered in hypocritical ways, as part of a strategy of corruption and deception. Some characters even pray to God for help to sin, and there is a definite lack of reverence for the saints. As Rojas himself says in his prologue, his work can be interpreted in many contradictory ways: “who will deny there won’t be arguments over something that can be interpreted so differently?” (¿quién negará que aya contienda en cosa que de tantas maneras se entienda?) (214; 81). An examination of these issues will surely enhance our understanding of his art.

1  The incipit of the title page is as follows: “Síguese la Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, compuesta en reprehensión de los locos enamorados que, vencidos en su desordenado apetito, a sus amigas llaman y dizen ser su dios. Assimismo hecha en aviso de los engaños de las alcahuetas y malos y lisonjeros sirvientes” (82). Quotes and references from the English translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009) are followed by Dorothy S. Severin’s edition of the Spanish original (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987). At times, I modify the translations, and provide my own as well. 2  Jerry R. Rank, “The Uses of ‘Dios’ and the Concept of God in La Celestina,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 5 (1980–81): 75–91, p. 77. 3  Manuel da Costa Fontes, The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Delicado (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2005), pp. 133–35; most of the arguments presented here condense portions of chapters 4 and 5 of that book.

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Let us begin with prayer and material drawn from the Scriptures. As soon as she arrives in Melibea’s home, Celestina greets the maid, Lucrecia, with the words “Peace be on this house” (Paz sea en esta casa) (45; 151), thus echoing the advice of Jesus to the apostles (“As you enter the house, salute it. If then that house be worthy, your peace will come upon it” [Matt. 10:12–13]), but what the procuress is bringing into that home, of course, is precisely the opposite. When Melibea suggests that Celestina ought to leave because it seems that she has not yet eaten, the woman paraphrases the words used by Christ to reject the devil’s temptation to make him turn a stone into a loaf of bread: “And you know what God said against the tempter from hell, that we can’t live on bread alone?” (Y no sabes que por la divina boca fue dicho, contra aquel infernal tentador, que no de sólo pan biviriemos?) (51; 158). The procuress’s role here, however, is the opposite of Christ’s, for, like the devil, she also intends to tempt Melibea. When another of Calisto’s servants, Pármeno, begins to capitulate to Celestina, who wants him to be friends with Sempronio so as to extract as much as possible from their master, he says to himself in an aside: “You should never say no to peace. Blessed are the meek, because they shall be called the children of God” (La paz no se deve negar, que bienaventurados son los pacíficos, que hijos de Dios serán llamados) (27; 127). Thus, he misapplies the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of St. Matthew (5:9). When Celestina tells Pármeno how his mother, Claudina, had been punished as a witch, she states that the priest who came to comfort her had said: “Blessed are those persecuted by the law for they shall possess the kingdom of heaven” (bienaventurados eran los que padecían persecución por la justicia y que aquéllos poseerían el reyno de los cielos) (82; 199). In this instance, it is a priest who reportedly misapplies another Beatitude (Matt. 5:10). These Beatitudes are not really prayers, but they have been treated as such. Notwithstanding his implicit presence here, the name of Jesus is never mentioned. In the examples that follow, Calisto and Melibea pray in order to sin. When Calisto tells Sempronio to fetch a procuress, Celestina, to ask her for help to get Melibea into bed, he begs God to lead his servant to her just as he guided the Three Wise Kings to Bethlehem with the star. Once again, the name of Jesus fails to come up: “Oh, almighty enduring God, who guides those who’ve lost their way, who guided the kings from the Orient by a star to Bethlehem and duly returned them home, I humbly beg You to guide my Sempronio so he can turn my pain into pleasure, and I can finally reach the goal I desire, not that I deserve to!” (¡O todopoderoso, perdurable Dios, tú que guías los perdidos, y los reyes orientales por el estrella precedente a Bethleén truxiste y en su patria los reduxiste, húmilmente te ruego que guíes a mi Sempronio, en manera que convierta mi pena y tristeza en gozo, y yo indigno meresca venir en el desseado

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fin) (11; 104). The heresy of this prayer is compounded by Calisto’s reference to the fact that God helps “those who’ve lost their way” (los perdidos), because God guides lost souls away from sin, not to sin even more. Calisto decides to spend a whole day at St. Mary Magdalene’s in order to pray for Celestina’s success: “Get me my clothes. I’ll go to Mary Magdalene and pray for God to guide Celestina and convince Melibea to remedy my illness or soon put an end to my days” (Dacá mis ropas; yré a la Madalena; rogaré a Dios aderece a Celestina y ponga en coraçón a Melibea mi remedio, o dé fin en breve a mis tristes días) (98, modified; 219). The crazed lover then adds that he will not leave church or eat anything until he receives good news. Obviously, one does not pray to God for illicit sex. When Celestina arrives at the church to say that Melibea has agreed to meet with him at night, the ecstatic Calisto addresses the following prayer to God: “O Lord God, O Father who art in heaven, I beg you, please don’t let this be a dream!” (O Señor Dios, Padre celestial, ruégote que esto no sea sueño) (125, modified; 251). What we have here is another prayer in reverse. During the first tryst, desperate because the doors of the garden prevent him from getting closer to Melibea, Calisto proffers yet another sacrilegious prayer, asking God for them to burn down: “I pray to God for a fire to burn down these hateful doors, one that’s equal to the fire scorching me, because they’d burn with a third of those flames!” (¡O molestas y enojosas puertas, ruego a Dios que tal huego os abrase como a mí da guerra, que con la tercia parte seríades en un punto quemadas!) (134; 262). When Melibea fears that her father will become aware of the grave sin she is committing, Calisto denies the involvement of sin because her favor has been granted by God’s saints: “My lady and my whole world, how can you can say what God’s saints have granted me is a sin? That fine old woman brought me your happy message today when I was praying before Mary Magdalene’s altar” (O mi señora y mi bien todo, ¿por qué llamas yerro a aquello que por los santos de Dios me fue concedido? Rezando hoy ante el altar de la Madalena me vino con tu mensaje alegre aquella solícita mujer) (134; 263). This is incredibly sacrilegious. Once again, Christian prayer is being inverted. Moreover, Melibea’s capitulation occurs while Calisto prays fervently for her surrender in a church dedicated to a former sinner, St. Mary Magdalene. The equally lovesick Melibea makes a prayer of the same kind earlier, when, anxious for Celestina to arrive after sending Lucrecia to fetch her, she asks God to help her hide the true cause of her malady and pretend that something else ails her: “I implore you, sovereign God, […] to give my wounded heart the patience and strength to hide my passion. Don’t tarnish the leaf of chastity I’ve pinned over my amorous desire, and make it clear it’s something else, not this that tortures me” (O soberano Dios, […] humilmente suplico: des a mi herido

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coraçón sofrimiento y paciencia, con que mi terrible passión pueda dissimular, no se desdore aquella hoja de castidad que tengo assentada sobre este amoroso desseo, publicando ser otro mi dolor que no el que me atormenta) (113; 238). Although Melibea, like Calisto, is out of her wits because of the madness that love has induced, this does not excuse the sacrilege of asking God for help in deceiving anyone. Melibea’s final prayer, commending her parents to God just before committing suicide, is even more sacrilegious, for she offers her soul to him (a Él offrezco mi alma) (192; 335) as she is about to jump from the tower in her garden before the eyes of her desolate father, Pleberio, putting an end to the life that only God had the right to take. There is no question that prayer is consistently reversed, and the saints do not fare any better. We have already seen how Calisto attributes his luck with Melibea to Mary Magdalene and the intercession of the saints. Then there is the case of the prayer of St. Appolonia, a folk spell that Celestina requests from Melibea in order to cure Calisto’s ailing “tooth” (55; 164)—“toothache” being a metaphor for sexual arousal. Although hilarious, this hardly shows any respect for the saint, whose martyrdom included having all of her teeth knocked out. When Celestina arrives at Areúsa’s house in order to arrange for her to sleep with Pármeno, who waits outside, the old bawd greets the girl as follows: “By God and the archangel Saint Michael! You are so plump and firm! Such lovely breasts!” (¡Bendígate Dios y el señor Sant Miguel Ángel, y qué gorda y fresca que estás; qué pechos y qué gentileza!) (85; 202). Invoking God and the supposedly handsome St. Michael to praise the beauty of a prostitute may be flattering to Areúsa, but it is hardly respectful to the Archangel, to say nothing of God. At one point, Celestina compares Calisto to a St. George in full armor: “In arms, a real Saint George” (Pues verle armado, un sant Jorge) (57; 167). Since she is trying to convince Melibea to go to bed with the lovesick Calisto, there is no question that the word “in arms” (armado) is used here in the sense of rigidus or sexually aroused, as it often was in openly erotic poetry.4 In a nutshell, there is no question that prayer, the New Testament, and the saints are consistently used in negative ways, without a single exception to the contrary. As what follows will confirm even further, at times the blasphemy is so monstrous that such inversions cannot likely be simple literary parody, but rather the contrary—shameless blasphemy in the guise of parody. In the examples given above, the names “Mary” and “Jesus” are systematically avoided. As we know, those two names, along with references to the Holy Trinity, appear very often in Catholic prayers. Although their names appear 4  Pierre Alzieu, Robert Jammes, and Yvan Lissorgues, eds., Poesía erótica del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona: Crítica, 1984), s.v. “armar,” “armado.”

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elsewhere within the twenty-one acts, their use is such that they might as well not be there. The three overt references to the Blessed Mother, none of which reflect any genuine devotion, and the five occasions on which the name of Jesus is mentioned, I repeat, could be easily replaced with expletives. Jesus and Mary are very much present in Celestina, however. Both Celestina and Melibea are implicitly associated with the Virgin, and Calisto is associated with Jesus. Let us begin with Celestina. Her very name implies that she is some sort of celestial figure, just like the Mother of Jesus, and many of the titles used to designate the Virgin are deliberately given to her. Whereas Catholics often refer to Mary as Mother, practically everyone who addresses the old bawd also calls her mother, and, at one point, Sempronio, as if in ecstasy upon seeing her, even calls her “blessed”: “Blessed mother, my desire is so big! I thank God for allowing me to see you” (Madre bendita, ¡qué deseo traigo! Gracias a Dios que te me dexó ver) (my translation; 104). Even more awed, Calisto adores her as if she were a goddess, refers to her healing hands, and kisses the ground upon which she walks: “Come in, key to my happiness. […] Salvation for my suffering, balsam for my torment, regeneration, lifeblood for my life, resurrection from this death! I want to be near you and kiss your healing hands. My base self holds me back. I deserve only to worship the earth you tread, and thus bow down and kiss it out of reverence to you” (¿Qué hazes, llave de mi vida? […] ¡O salud de mi passión, reparo de mi tormento, regeneración mía, vivificación de mi vida, resurrección de mi muerte! Desseo llegar a ti, cobdicio besar essas manos llenas de remedio. La indignidad de mi persona lo enbarga. Dende aquí adoro la tierra que huellas y en reverencia tuya la beso) (19, modified; 116). As if this were not enough, Calisto goes on to call her “my lady and mother” (señora y madre mía) (my translation; 176), “my lady and queen” (reyna y señora mía) (my translation; 178), and other such names: “Precious jewel, salve to my sufferings, mirror to my eyes!” (O joya del mundo, acorro de mis passiones, spejo de mi vista) (123, modified; 249), “What was that, my joy and repose?” (¿Qué dizes, gloria y descanso mío?) (123, modified; 249). Clearly, the titles that Calisto bestows upon Celestina reflect those used for the Virgin, whose litany also hailed her as “Mater purissima,” “Mater castissima,” “Mater inviolata,” and “Regina Virginum.” Being a whore and procuress, Celestina is the antithesis of all these qualities. Enamored of Melibea, the lovesick Calisto seeks her help to cure his “infirmity”—i.e., to seduce Melibea— love having been considered a serious illness, at least in courtly poetry and the medical manuals of the time, according to which coitus was the best remedy. Hence, Calisto’s reference to Celestina’s healing hands echoes other titles given to Mary: “Salus infirmorum,” “Refugium peccatorum,” and “Consolatrix afflictorum.” Celestina is also a healer, refuge, and comfort to lovers, sinners, and

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the afflicted who seek her assistance. However, she “redeems” them by leading them into more sin. Besides sharing these titles with the Virgin, Celestina is portrayed as being much more than a mere mortal in other ways, as if she were also some sort of divine figure. As we have just seen, Calisto is so gratified by her presence that he kisses the ground upon which she walks when he first meets her, and later kneels before her when she brings him news of her successful “intercession” before Melibea (67; 180). On one occasion, he even tells her: “[I]n everything you do, you seem to be more than a mere woman” (en todo me pareces más que muger) (my translation; 183). Obviously, such manifestations of devotion are not usually rendered to other human beings. As Morón Arroyo well understood, Calisto adores her as if she were the Virgin Mary.5 Like the Blessed Mother, Celestina is also linked with the rosary, which she uses not to pray, but to count the maidens in her charge and the number of customers she can get them. As Sempronio explains, “What she’s counting with her beads are the maidenheads to mend, the number of love-stricken in the city and the lasses she’s looking after” (Lo que en sus cuentas reza es los virgos que tiene a cargo y quántos enamorados ay en la cibdad, y quántas moças tiene encomendadas) (101; 223). The Blessed Mother, on the other hand, encourages us to pray the rosary for the sake of sinners. Celestina’s house constitutes an important part of the numerous parodies which, together, amount to a deliberate allegory. Whereas many churches are especially dedicated to the Virgin, bearing her name in one form or another, the old bawd’s home, which is really a whorehouse, functions as a shrine where anti-Marian and anti-Christian rites are performed. The congregation includes servant girls who apparently go there to practice their sewing under the direction of Celestina, the high priestess who uses her ability as “labrandera” (master seamstress) to cover her less honorable activities: “The first trade was a cover for the others, and on that pretext many serving wenches came into her house to be sewn up and sew shifts, ruffles and many other things besides” (Era el primero officio cobertura de los otros, so color del qual muchas moças destas sirvientes entravan en su casa a labrarse y a labrar camisas y gorgueras y otras muchas cosas) (15, modified; 110). A seamstress uses the needle, a phallic symbol, in her profession, and the girls who come to her house to get screwed (“a labrarse”) give up the virginity that the Blessed Mother represents, especially as “Regina Virginum.” Note that the word “labrar” also means “to plough,” i.e., “to fornicate.” “Labrar camisas” (to sew shifts) alludes to the blood shed by 5  Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, Sentido y forma de La Celestina (Madrid: Cátedra, 1984), p. 20.

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the girls while losing their virginity, for “la camisa” also constitutes a reference to menstruation.6 The congregation includes students, stewards, and clergymen’s servants to whom Celestina sells the virginity of the servant girls: “She was a great friend to students, palace stewards and abbots’ servants. She sold them the innocent blood of the poor girls, and they gave it up easily, prompted by the mended maidenheads she promised” (Assaz era amiga de studiantes y despenseros y moços de abades. A éstos vendía ella aquella sangre innocente de las cuytadillas, la cual ligeramente aventuravan en esfuerço de la restitución que ella les prometía) (15, modified; 110). The reference to the “innocent blood” (sangre inocente) these girls shed while being deflowered implies a sacrificial offering involving blood, an offering which is tantamount to an anti-Marian rite. Whereas the Blessed Mother would like each and every one of those maidens to remain pure, Celestina, her antithesis, does everything in her power to ensure that they do not. The blood that they shed also recalls the sacrifice of the Mass, where the wine becomes the blood of Christ. Thus, coitus is represented as a communion of sorts, bringing Christ into the picture as well. His presence is implicit in terms that are anything but devout. In their turn, Celestina’s apprentices bring other girls—more closely guarded ones—to her flock; the latter are able to come to her shrine less frequently, however, because they can get away only late at night, a time that Rojas ironically designates as “honest occasions” (tiempo honesto) (16, modified; 110). The congregation is large enough to hold stations, night processions, midnight and early morning masses, and other “secret devotions”: “She didn’t stop there but used these girls to make contact with women whose status confined them indoors, until she got her way with them and on such honest occasions as stations of the cross, night-time processions, dawn and midnight masses, and other secret devotions” (Subió su hecho a más: que por medio de aquellas, comunicava con las más encerradas, hasta traer a execución su propósito, y aquestas en tiempo honesto, como estaciones, processiones de noche, missas del gallo, missas del alva, y otras secretas devociones) (15–16, modified; 110). These ceremonies constitute metaphors for sexual activities.7 The reference to “women whose status confined them indoors” (las más encerradas) 6  Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Felipe C. R. Maldonado, rev. Manuel Camarero (Madrid: Castalia, 1994), p. 246. 7  María Eugenia Lacarra, “Sobre los ‘dichos lascivos y rientes’ en Celestina,” in Nunca fue pena mayor. (Estudios de literatura española en homenaje a Brian Dutton), ed. Ana María Collera and Victoriano Roncero López (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1996), 419–33, p. 426.

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probably embodies a reference to nuns, since the girls living in convents, being more closely guarded, could manage to escape only in the middle of the night. This interpretation is supported by Pármeno’s claim to have seen many covered women going into the house: “I saw many of these ladies enter her house with their faces covered. Hot on their heels came men barefoot and contrite, muffled up, their breeches unbuttoned, ready to weep for their sins” (Muchas encubiertas vi entrar en su casa; tras ellas hombres descalços, contritos, y reboçados, desatacados, que entravan allí a llorar sus peccados) (16, modified; 110–11). The women’s faces are covered, at least in part, by their habits, and they are followed by monks, since they cover their faces in a similar manner. Note that “hombres descalzos” means not just barefooted men, for “descalzos” was also used in reference to monks belonging to religious orders that walked barefoot, as imposed by monastic rule.8 These monks pull the hoods of their habits so as to cover their faces (“rebozados”) and not be recognized, rather than as a sign of contrition (“contritos”), for they enter with their breeches already unbuttoned, eager to “weep” (ejaculate) for their “sins.”9 Although they vowed chastity just like the nuns, their vows cannot withstand the magnetic attraction of the lecherous cult headed by Celestina, who parodies the Virgin Mary’s role as “Refugium peccatorum” and “Consolatrix afflictorum” in this context. Celestina’s flock, then, includes laity and clergy alike, and she labors constantly to attract more followers to her cult. This is why she is always visiting churches, convents, and monasteries. As Pármeno informs Calisto, “she worked so hard she never missed mass or vespers or left unvisited a monastery or convent, and that’s where she set up trysts and deals” (Con todos estos affanes, nunca passava sin missa ni bíspras ni dexaba monasterios de frayles ni de monjas; esto porque allí hazía ella sus aleluyas y conciertos) (16, modified; 111). Thus, Celestina focuses her attacks precisely on the places of her rival religion, where, as we will see, she is treated as if she were a divine figure. When Melibea’s mother, Alisa, asks her to pray for her sister, who is not feeling well, Celestina promises to do so with her own rosary and to go from monastery to monastery, charging the monks who are “devoted” to her to do the same (48; 154). When she went to church in her golden days, she boasts, the men gave her money, made vows to her, and some even kissed the hem of her mantle: “There they offered me money, vows, other gifts, kissed the hem of my cloak, and some even kissed my face to make me even happier” (Allí se me offrescían dineros, allí promessas, allí otras dádivas, besando el cabo de mi manto, y aun algunos en la cara por me tener más contenta) (110, modified; 235). Such manifestations 8  “Órdenes de religiones que profesan andar descalzos,” Covarrubias, p. 410. 9  Lacarra, p. 426.

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of devotion could be equally directed to the Virgin Mary, and Celestina’s status as high priestess of a rival religion is made even clearer when she adds that, when she returned home, the clergy hurried to pay her tithes: “As soon as each one received God’s tithes, they’d come to my door to feed me and the girls devoted to them” (Cada qual como lo recibía de aquellos diezmos de Dios, assí lo venían luego a registrar para que comiesse yo y aquellas sus devotas) (110; 236). The text also implies the elevation of Celestina to divine status when Pármeno informs Calisto that every person, animal, instrument, rock, or thing she passes that is capable of producing a sound calls her “Old Whore” and that, although she “spent time” with many men, she was so insatiable that her now deceased husband had to rebuild his strength constantly by eating many “huevos asados” (roasted bull’s testicles) in order to keep up with her: “Carpenters, wool carders, weavers sing that name; farmers in their orchards, plowed fields, or engaged in harvesting spend time with her every day. […] Wherever she is, everything that makes a sound sings out that name. Oh, how her husband had to eat loads of roasted mountain oysters! What else can I tell you but that, if a stone strikes another, it sings out: ‘Old Whore’!” (Cántanla dos carpinteros, péynanla los peynadores, texedores; labradores en las huertas, en las aradas, en las viñas, en las segadas con ella passan el afán cotidiano. […] Todas cosas que son hazen, a doquiera que ella está, el tal nombre representan. ¡O qué comedor de huevos assados era su marido! Qué quieres más, sino que, si una piedra topa con otra, luego suena ‘¡Puta vieja!’) (my translation; 108–09). Pármeno’s description seems inspired by Psalm 148, in which everything in Creation praises the name of the Lord, just as everyone and everything capable of making a sound calls Celestina an “old whore,” a title she gladly accepts, taking it as a compliment. Rojas had the audacity to create her as the antithesis of the Blessed Mother who, in 1499, could indeed be regarded as being extremely “old.”10 As her antithesis, Celestina is an insatiable nymphomaniac, an arch-whore whose main purpose is to destroy virginity. Her house is really a shrine, a temple of lust where her young apprentices, besides giving up their “innocent blood,” attract others to the cult over which she presides. Celestina, who is capable of provoking lust even in rocks, has been extremely successful in this capacity. According to Sempronio, she is responsible for the defloration and subsequent restoration of more than five thousand virgins in the city in which she lives (10; 103). Celestina herself boasts that very few girls have been able to 10  Kenneth Brown, “Chistes para judíos, chistes para conversos y chistes para cristianos: el repertorio del chiste en Celestina,” ms., p. 32. I would like to thank Prof. Brown for making this paper available to me.

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escape her net (37; 141). Since this far exceeds the needs of a mere procuress, what we have here constitutes a determined, systematic attack on the virginity simultaneously represented and promoted by the figure of the Blessed Mother. The parody of the Marian cult, then, is really multifaceted. Celestina’s role as an arch-whore is a direct, blasphemous parody of Mary’s perpetual virginity as defined by the Catholic Church—ante partum, in partu, and post partum; her amazing success in the systematic defloration of the maidens in town constitutes a reversal of the chastity encouraged as an imitation of the Blessed Mother. Rojas ridicules the idea of virginity even more through Celestina’s technical ability to restore deflowered maidens to their original status: “As for maidenheads, some she mended with bladders, others with a needle and thread” (Esto de los virgos, unos hazía de bexiga y otros curava de punto) (my translation; 112). The implication is that virginity does not really matter, for it can be easily “restored.” Once lost, however, the virginity with which the maidens parallel the Blessed Mother’s exalted status can never be regained. Celestina’s role as a procuress, of course, constitutes a major perversion of the Marian cult. As Mediatrix and Coredemptrix, the Blessed Mother helps souls to reach heaven; Celestina, on the other hand, leads her clients to a carnal paradise. As Calisto informs Pármeno, he needs “someone to intercede, a mediator” (intercessor o medianero) (my translation; 134) in order to reach his objective. At one point, Melibea also refers to Celestina as “mediator for my health” (medianera de mi salud) (my translation; 238). As Morón Arroyo has explained, the old bawd plays the role of the Virgin in helping Christians reach salvation.11 Obviously, any procuress is a mediator by virtue of her profession, but the numerous parodic correspondences between Celestina and the Virgin leave little or no doubt that the old bawd is deliberately created as an antithesis of the Blessed Mother. Mary mediates or intercedes for us before her Son. Celestina does precisely the opposite, for she uses the devil in order to help her customers reach the carnal paradise that they desire. As priestess of her own cult, she conjures him through the black mass that she celebrates in the whorehouse which, as we have seen, also represents a kind of shrine. While preparing for this diabolical perversion of the central part of the Christian Mass, Celestina orders Elicia to bring her “the goat’s blood down and a few of the clippings you cut from its beard” (la sangre del cabrón, y unas poquitas de las barvas que tú le cortaste) (147, modified; 42). Being one of the most incontinent animals in nature, the goat symbolizes lust as well as the devil, and its blood parodies the wine which, through transubstantiation, is 11  Morón Arroyo, p. 19.

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transformed into the blood of Christ during Mass.12 Note that Catholicism stresses a real, rather than a symbolic or spiritual presence in the Eucharist. Through this blood, Celestina conjures the devil instead, commanding him, as if he were physically there, to get into the thread which she plans to use as an excuse to enter into Melibea’s house. This diabolical ceremony also embodies a simultaneous attack on and denial of transubstantiation, a central Christian dogma. Since the blood of the goat parodies the blood of Christ, the implicit presence of Jesus is clear, and there is no question but that, whereas his Mother is associated with an insatiable old whore, he is implicitly associated with the devil. Celestina certainly believes in the effectiveness of the rite which she has performed. When Melibea becomes angry with her upon hearing Calisto’s name, she exhorts the devil in the yarn to do the job he is supposed to perform: “Watch out, buddy; this is looking like a lost cause!” (¡Ce, hermano, que se va todo a perder!) (53, modified; 162), and, upon leaving, she credits him with her success (60; 171). Thanks to his help, she is able to persuade Melibea to lend her belt rope, reputed to have touched “every holy relic in Rome and Jerusalem” (todas las reliquias que ay en Roma y Hierusalem) (55; 164), in order to cure Calisto’s “toothache.” The relics in which medieval Christians placed so much faith turn out to be utterly useless. When Melibea surrenders the belt, she is also surrendering the chastity which it represents.13 Whereas the Blessed Mother endeavors to take the faithful to heaven with the help of her Son, Celestina assists those who fall into her clutches to reach a carnal paradise with the help of the antithesis of Christ, the devil whom she summons in cases that are especially difficult, such as Melibea’s. The idea of paradise is put forth through the polysemous nature of the beautiful garden where Calisto and Melibea make love. Melibea’s idealized description (182; 322–23) first brings to mind the topical locus amoenus. Since it is a garden, it also evokes paradise, because gardens were often used as symbols of paradise in medieval literature. Calisto has already referred to it as such: “I shall spend my days in my chambers and my nights in that sweet paradise, in that pleasant garden, among those gentle plants and cool verdure” (De día estaré en mi cámara, de noche en aquel paraýso dulce, en aquel alegre vergel, entre aquellas suaves plantas y fresca verdura) (156, modified; 292). Since Calisto is associated with Adam and Melibea with an apple,14 and this garden 12  Mac E. Barrick, “Celestina’s Black Mass,” Celestinesca 1, no. 2 (1977): 11–14. 13  F. M. Weinberg, “Aspects of Symbolism in La Celestina,” MLN 86 (1971): 136–53, p. 136; Peter N. Dunn, “Pleberio’s World,” PMLA 91 (1976): 406–19, p. 414. 14  Costa Fontes, pp. 152–54.

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is the place where they taste the forbidden fruit (i.e., sex without the sanction of marriage), there is no question that Melibea’s “huerto” is another Garden of Eden. As Morón Arroyo has pointed out, Calisto’s and Melibea’s love is consummated in paradise.15 The walls that surround the garden render it a fortress to be besieged, a hortus conclusus representing the chastity or virginity Melibea shared with the Blessed Mother, and, as in medieval Christian art, the enclosed garden is emblematic of the Virgin Mary, standing for her perpetual virginity.16 In her purity, Mary was like a fortress, a garden whose walls had not been breached, despite having conceived Christ, thus retaining her virginity. Since Melibea was a virgin and Calisto manages to penetrate this garden, the blasphemy is clear. The ladder which Calisto must use to scale the walls parodies the ladder of Jacob, whose rungs represented the virtues needed to reach heaven in medieval iconography.17 Therefore, the garden where Calisto achieves his “Gloria” (orgasm) by making love to Melibea is also an allegory of the spiritual Christian heaven for which the terrestrial Garden of Eden stood in the first place. Notwithstanding the moral obstacle and the chastity represented by its walls, Calisto simultaneously penetrates the “huerto” which constitutes “a widespread euphemism for the female sexual organs,”18 the Garden of Eden, and the Christian heaven inhabited by the Christian God and his saints, and also by the Blessed Mother, whose perpetual virginity the hortus conclusus also represents. Celestina, who is both associated with and described as a snake, makes possible Calisto and Melibea’s initial tryst in the garden. The serpent, of course, also represents the devil, being associated with lust as well. After Celestina conjures him in the black mass, commanding him to get into the yarn, she proceeds to anoint it with snake’s oil, and, at one point, Sempronio describes her as a serpent (62; 174). Thanks to her viper’s tongue, she is also a temptress,19 just like the devil who, disguised as a serpent, caused Adam and Eve to taste the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Ironically, Celestina herself, while 15  Morón Arroyo, p. 49. 16  Weinberg, p. 143. 17  Raymond E. Barbera, “Medieval Iconography in the Celestina,” Romanic Review 61 (1970): 5–13, pp. 11–12. At another level, this parallels the association of love with war in courtly poetry, where the lady is, at times, portrayed as a fortress which the lover must conquer by breaching its walls. Françoise Maurizi, “La escala de amor de Calisto,” Celestinesca 22, no. 2 (1998): 49–60. 18  Weinberg, p. 138. 19  See Reynaldo Ayerbe-Chaux, “La triple tentación de Melibea,” Celestinesca 2, no. 2 (1978): 3–11.

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tempting Melibea, alludes to that very role of the devil, a role which she is in the very process of duplicating: “And don’t you know that the divine lips said against the tempter from hell that we can’t live by bread alone?” (¿Y no sabes que por la divina boca fue dicho, contra aquel infernal tentador, que no de sólo pan biviriemos?) (51, modified; 158). As already pointed out, what we have here is another implicit reference to Jesus and, obviously, his words are being placed in a distorted, perverse context, for Celestina uses them in order to convince Melibea to make love with Calisto. Whereas the old bawd, as a snake, leads her followers into sin and damnation with the help of the devil, the Blessed Mother intercedes with her Son in order to lead her followers to salvation. Calisto and Melibea’s carnal paradise, then, has much in common with the Garden of Eden as well as with heaven. Calisto’s fall to his death from the top of the ladder he uses to penetrate this paradise corresponds to Adam’s Fall, and Melibea’s suicide from the top of a tower, being the result of a fall, reflects the expulsion of Eve. Thus, their apparent punishment reenacts the drama of our first parents, rendering them another Adam and Eve. Further evidence suggests that the correspondences between Melibea’s garden, the Garden of Eden, and the spiritual Christian heaven were deliberate. Besides reenacting the drama of our first parents, the transformation of the protagonists corresponds to the dogma which viewed Mary as the new or second Eve and Christ as the new or second Adam. Together, Mother and Son reenacted the story of the Fall in reverse, for the birth of Christ made it possible for humanity to regain the paradise lost by Adam and Eve, with the difference that the original earthly Garden of Eden now became transformed into a spiritual paradise to be attained only after death.20 Celestina links Calisto deliberately with Christ, and Melibea with the Virgin Mary. Since they sleep together, the idea is incredibly blasphemous, at least from a Christian perspective. How Rojas could possibly dare to do such a thing is difficult to understand, but the evidence that follows will show that he had this in mind. As a virgin, Melibea parallels the Blessed Mother. Rojas placed her in a hortus conclusus which, besides recalling Mary’s perpetual virginity, suggests the Garden of Eden as well as the Christian heaven. Right after making love with Calisto for the first time, she complains that he has caused her to lose “the name and crown of a virgin for such brief delight” (el nombre y corona de virgen por tan breve deleyte) (my translation; 286), bringing to mind the fact 20  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300), The Christian Tradition, A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 3 (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 167.

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that, as Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Mary was often portrayed with a crown.21 Thus, Rojas links Melibea with the Blessed Mother, Queen of Virgins, right after she loses her virginity. Calisto is like a new Adam in Melibea’s paradise, and Celestina describes him to the enamored Melibea as another Christ who will redeem her from the “wound” that afflicts her: “My lady, my noble maiden, you mustn’t worry about your health. When God the Almighty gives the wound, he immediately sends a cure. And I know of a flower born unto this world that can set you free” (No desconfíe, señora, tu noble juventud de salud; que quando el alto Dios da la llaga, tras ella embía el remedio. Mayormente que sé yo al mundo nascida una flor que de todo esto te delibre) (118, modified; 244, emphasis added). There is no question that “flower” was one of the names traditionally used to designate Christ.22 Rojas applied it to the lovesick Calisto and decided to compound the heresy, making it even greater, by suggesting that God had sent him to cure Melibea’s infirmity, just as God the Father had sent Christ to redeem humanity from original sin. Rojas also made God responsible for the wound from which Melibea suffers, a wound that, besides recalling the wounds of Christ, functions as a metaphor for her vagina as well as for sexual desire. Since Calisto is another new Adam and Melibea another new Eve, the monstrosity of what Rojas did becomes readily apparent. Further textual evidence supports the thesis presented here. When Calisto arrives at the door of her garden for the first tryst, Melibea asks who told him to come, and he replies: “The woman who deserves to rule the whole world” (Es la que tiene mereçimiento de mandar a todo el mundo) (132, modified; 259). These words could have been addressed to the Virgin as well. Right after, when Melibea says that she came only to tell him to forget about her, Calisto protests, stating that she holds “the keys to my perdition or my salvation” (las llaves de mi perdición y gloria)23 (my translation; 260), as if he could achieve salvation only through her. This, of course, recalls the role of the Virgin as Mediatrix. Mollified, Melibea calls him “my lord and joy” (mi señor y mi bien todo) (133; 261), as if he were another Christ, and the ecstatic Calisto thanks her with words that could apply to the Blessed Mother as well: “My lady, my hope for salvation, relief for my sorrow and happiness for my heart!” (¡O señora mía,

21  Pelikan, pp. 168–69. 22  Costa Fontes, pp. 158–59. 23  Besides referring to the glory of the redeemed in heaven, the word “gloria,” we recall, is also used in the sense of “orgasm.”

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esperança de mi gloria, descanso y alivio de mi pena, alegría de mi corazón!) (133, modified; 261).24 Rojas then goes on to make the alignment of Calisto and Melibea with Jesus and the Virgin Mary even clearer. During the second tryst, Melibea begins by calling herself Calisto’s “servant” (sierva) and “captive” (cativa) (150; 284), thus behaving like a mystic nun in the throes of a divine vision. Calisto, who already has her in his arms, replies with epithets that are transparently sacrilegious, and the rapture that he describes is anything but mystical. When Melibea at first denies him the heavenly “glory” he seeks, he protests that it is unjust for her to refuse him “sweet harbor” after all he has suffered on her account: “Don’t ask me to be such a coward. No man who loves as greatly as I do could ever be that. My whole life’s been coursing towards the flame of your desire. Don’t expect me now to moor quietly outside the sweet harbour and rest after all I went through” (No me pides tal covardía; no es hazer tal cosa de ninguno que hombre sea, mayormente como yo, nadando por este huego de tu desseo toda mi vida. ¿No quieres que me arrime al dulce puerto a descansar de mis passados trabajos?) (284–85, modified; 151, emphasis added). Besides its erotic connotations, Calisto’s reference to Melibea as “dulce puerto” is related to one of Mary’s titles because of a linguistic pun on her name: “Maria Maris Stella.”25 In the words of Gonzado de Berceo, “She is the port to which we all rush.”26 As patron of sailors, the Blessed Mother guides people to a good, safe harbor, and, since all human beings are regarded as sailors in this life, “the image of Mary as the star guiding the ship of faith was an especially attractive one.”27 Calisto’s reference to Melibea as “buen puerto” does not necessarily indicate anything blasphemous in itself, of course, but Melibea’s reply suggests otherwise: “Now I am yours, be content to enjoy what you can see, because this is the true reward of lovers. Don’t try to steal the greatest gift nature has bestowed on me. Remember that the good shepherd fleeces his sheep and cattle, but he doesn’t destroy and ravage them” (Bástete, pues ya soy tuya, gozar de lo esterior, desto que es propio fruto de amadores; no me quieras robar el mayor don que la natura me ha dado; cata que del buen pastor es propio tresquilar sus ovejas y ganado, pero no destruyrlo y estragallo) (151, modified; 285, emphasis added). The good shepherd is none other than Christ, of course. The fact that Melibea 24  Since “pena” was a euphemism for the penis (Costa Fontes, p. 286n13), these words involve yet another level of heresy. 25  Pelikan, p. 162. 26  “Ella es dicha puerto a qui todos corremos.” Gonzalo de Berceo, Milagros de Nuestra Señora, 2nd ed., ed. E. Michael Gerli (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987), 35c. My translation. 27  Pelikan, p. 162.

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refers to Calisto as “buen pastor” right after he addresses her as “buen puerto” cannot be discarded as a mere coincidence. Notwithstanding the humor which is present in the utilization of the two expressions—Melibea’s “buen puerto” also stands for her vagina, and Calisto, unlike a good shepherd, intends to do more than just “shear” her—the two comparisons are simply heretical. Since Calisto and Melibea make love shortly afterward, what is artistically projected here is an incestuous relationship between Mother and Son. The religious imagery continues. At one point, Melibea addresses Calisto, once again, as if he were Christ, and she herself a mystic in the throes of the divine vision: “Delicious treason, sweet surprise! Is it the master of my soul? I can’t believe it. Where were you, dazzling sun? Where were you hiding your bright rays?” (O sabrosa trayción, o dulçe sobresalto, ¿es mi señor y mi alma, es él? No lo puedo creer. ¿Dónde estavas, luziente sol? ¿Dónde me tenías tu claridad escondida?) (182; 322). As they are making love for the third time, Calisto tells Melibea: “My lady, I hope day never dawns, such is the ecstasy my senses feel at this exquisite contact with your delicate limbs” (Jamás, querría, señora, que amanesciesse, según la gloria y descanso que mi sentido recibe de la noble conversación de tus delicados miembros). Melibea reacts as follows: “My lord, I’m the one who rejoices. I’m the one who benefits thanks to the incomparable favor you bring me with each of your visitations” (Señor, yo soy la que gozo, yo la que gano; tú, señor, el que me hazes con tu visitación incomparable merced) (184, modified; 324, emphasis added). Calisto is depicted as if he were a god, and Melibea’s gratitude to him for “visiting” her recalls the Annunciation, where an angel visits and tells the Virgin Mary that she has found grace with God, and will conceive and bear a son by the grace of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35). The Blessed Mother then visits her cousin, St. Elizabeth, and proffers the Magnificat, the beautiful prayer in which she thanks the Lord for having chosen her (Luke 1:46–55). Melibea’s gratitude to Calisto for the “incomparable mercy” which he is bestowing upon her recalls the Blessed Mother’s prayer. Up to this point, Calisto has been portrayed as another Christ, i.e., as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Now he is related to the First Person, God the Father, for it is to him that the Magnificat is addressed. Given the context—Calisto and Melibea are in the process of making love for the third time when these words are spoken—the use of this imagery is incredibly blasphemous. In a nutshell, Rojas created two monstrous allegories. Celestina represents the Blessed Mother as Mediatrix, as well as what those who saw her as a common, unfaithful wife thought of her. Melibea represents the Virgin Mary as daughter, wife, and mother of God, which, according to logic, constitutes an impossibility. That is why, when Calisto and Melibea make love, what is being artistically projected is an incestuous relationship between Mother and Son.

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In order for the Son to be one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, as Christians maintained, he would have to sleep with his own mother, fathering himself in the process. Only in such a manner, albeit illogical, could the Virgin simultaneously be mother and wife of God, as well as his daughter. There were those who said as much.28 Notwithstanding the strange absence of the names “Jesus” and “Mary” in Celestina, then, there is no question regarding their implicit presence.29 Their absence reflects the loathing of Jews for those very names because of their tremendous suffering at the hands of Christians throughout the centuries.30 In the name of Christ, thousands of Jews were forced to convert in 1391 and after, and, unsurprisingly, the dislike for the names of Jesus and Mary was passed on to their descendants. This also happened in Portugal, where Crypto-Judaism survives until the present day.31 According to a witness, in Oporto, converso women hated so much the names of Mary and Jesus that they harshly mistreated those who mentioned them.32 Given its apparent Christian solution—Calisto and Melibea are punished for their affair with death and damnation33—many critics believe that Celestina is indeed the moral work that Rojas proclaimed it to be; it can certainly be read as such, but there is more.34 It goes without saying that there is nothing 28  Profit Durán, a rabbi who was forcibly baptized during the riots of 1391, used a humorous syllogism in order to say exactly that to a recently converted friend. Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav and Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1977), p. 90. 29  Incidentally, “Calisto” sounds somewhat like “Cristo,” and “Melibea,” although quite different from “Mary,” begins and ends with the same letters. 30  Joseph Jacobs, Jesus as Others Saw Him. A Retrospect A. D. 54 (New York: Bernard G. Richards, 1925). 31  See Amílcar Paulo’s Os Criptojudeus (Oporto: Athena, 1971); and Os Judeus Secretos em Portugal (Oporto: Labirinto, 1985). 32  Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, Judaísmo e Inquisição. Estudos (Lisbon: Presença, 1987), p. 94. 33  Calisto dies accidentally after making love with Melibea, without confession, in mortal sin, and Melibea commits suicide (see Costa Fontes, pp. 129–30, 133–34). 34  Enrique Fernández agrees that there are numerous antithetical references to Our Lady, including the Annunciation. Although his conclusions are completely different from mine, they are thought-provoking, and, therefore, ought to be brought to the attention of readers: “Las alusiones por antítesis a la Virgen, y a través de ella a la Redención y la Salvación, son la inclusión de ortodoxia mínimamente imprescindible para que, sin perjudicar el tono de la obra, no se la pueda acusar de presentar una visión del mundo sin esperanza totalmente anticristiana. Para lectores acostumbrados a una exégesis alegórica que permitía extraer sentidos religiosos incluso de autores paganos, una interpretación

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immoral in the abundance of sexual metaphors; our medieval ancestors were far earthier than we are. Numerous metaphors and motifs are indeed inspired in the courtly love that Rojas proposed to condemn, beginning with Calisto’s laughable comparison of Melibea with God.35 In fact, humor plays an important role as well, and is often used as cover. Read in isolation, many of the correspondences between Celestina and the Blessed Mother and other religious parodies are extremely funny, and probably caused people to laugh heartily. Thanks to Folke Gernert’s splendid compilation of religious parodies, however, one can see that they were nothing like Rojas’s; they did not embody any ulterior intentions.36 Even in the obscene Carajicomedia (early sixteenth century), which abounds in blasphemous biblical and liturgical citations, dogma and religious truth are never under attack.37 As we have seen, that was not the case with Fernando de Rojas, and only like-minded readers, conversos with similar ideas, were capable of understanding what he was doing.38 The attack against Christian dogmas is too systematic to be discarded as a series of harmless, humorous parodies. If Celestina were a didactic Christian work and nothing else, Rojas would not have needed to avoid the names of Jesus and Mary or to suggest that the Blessed Mother was a whore. That is exactly what he did by creating Celestina as her antithesis. Some of the converts who kept their Jewish faith secretly were imprudent enough to say so publicly. Around 1484, in Ciudad Real, Catalina de Zamora was accused of stating that “Our Lady was a Jewish whore” (que era Nuestra Señora vna puta judihuela).39 Even today, some Sephardic versions of the pan-Hispanic ballad como la aquí presentada era natural y, donde nosotros vemos parodia, ellos veían solamente referencias marianas.” “La antítesis de la Anunciación y el reconocimiento de la Redención en La Celestina,” La Corónica 35, no. 1 (2006): 137–50, p. 148. 35  Theodore L. Kassier, “Cancionero Poetry and the Celestina: From Metaphor to Reality,” Hispanófila 56 (1976): 1–28. 36  Folke Gernert, Parodia y “contrafacta” en la literatura románica medieval y renacentista. Historia, teoría y textos, 2 vols. (San Miguel de la Cogolla: Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica, 2009). 37  Carlos Varo, “Estudio,” in Carajicomedia. Texto facsimilar (Madrid: Playor, 1981), 9–94, p. 45. 38  After José Luis Pérez López’s profusely documented “El converso Fernando de Rojas a la luz del expediente Palavesín,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 83 (2006): 285–315, one can hardly see how anyone can still deny that Rojas was a converso. His father was “penitenciado” by the Inquisition, which also penalized some close relatives, as well as his father-in-law. 39  Haim Beinart, ed., Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: The Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–77), 1:389. My translation.

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El idólatra de María call her “Mary the Whore” (puta María).40 In Portugal, Tovar, a New Christian, told a woman who was praying to Mary: “She is as much of a virgin as the mother who bore me.”41 Around 1465, Salvadora Salvat told her children that St. Joseph was a cuckold and that Jesus was illegitimate: “While Joseph was away, an ironsmith came to the house where Mary was and he did it with Mary, and from this was born Jesus, son of an ironsmith.”42 In 1626, Francisco Maldonado de Silva shared this opinion, since he told the Lima Inquisition that “to say that Mary the Virgin had given birth to Jesus was a lie, because she was but a woman married to an old man, fooled around, got pregnant, and was not a virgin.”43 Some conversos mocked Communion as well. In 1526, a New Christian from Las Palmas remembered having heard his father say to his mother that “God being present in the Host was nonsense.”44 In 1549, the Portuguese João Manuel complained that “they want to make me believe that the host the priest fries at night with his mistress contains the whole and true God the day after.”45 Others complained that, if that were indeed the case, Communion would be a form of cannibalism.46 There are many more such examples. In sum, many conversos saw the dogmas of the Annunciation, Mary’s Perpetual Virginity, and the Incarnation in human terms, regarding her Son Jesus as illegitimate, and thought that Christians were idiots to believe that he was the same and one with God the Father, as well as the Third Person of the 40  Diego Catalán, Por campos del Romancero. Estudios sobre la tradición oral moderna (Madrid: Gredos, 1970), pp. 271–73. 41  “Asy he ella vyrgem como he a may que me pario.” Tavares, p. 94. My translation. 42  “Josep haviendo ydo fuera de casa, vino hun ferrero a su casa, a donde havia dexado a sancta Maria y que aquel ferrero huvo que fazer con sancta Maria y que de alli havia sallido Ihesu Christo, fijo de Ferrero.” Encarnación Marín Padilla, Relación judeoconversa durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV en Aragón: la Ley (Madrid: n.p., 1986), p. 137. My translation. 43  “El decir que la Virgen había parido a Nuestro Señor era mentira, porque no era sino una mujer que estaba casada con un viejo y se fue por ahí y se empreñó y no era virgen.” David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit. The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996), p. 172n62. My translation. 44  Lucien Wolf,  Jews in the Canary Islands. Being a calendar of Jewish cases extracted from the records of the Canariote Inquisition in the collection of the Marquess of Bute, ed. and trans. Lucien Wolf (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1926; Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in Association with the Renaissance Society of America, 2001), p. 68. 45  “Querem-me a mim fazer crer que ha ostea que o clerigo esta fregindo ha noyte com sua mançeba que ao outro dia esta aly deus inteiro e verdadeiro.” Gitliz, pp. 151 and 175n120. My translation. 46  Ibid., p. 150.

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illogical Holy Trinity. They also regarded transubstantiation, Christian prayer, and the saints as nonsense.47 Rojas was merely echoing ideas that were common enough among Jews48 and conversos in fifteenth-century Spain (and after). In this respect— obviously, there is much more to Celestina—his originality lay in his ability to transmute those charges into art in the least dangerous form possible—in an ambiguous, covert, polysemous manner—a transmutation that allowed him to realize his human need to express what he and many others felt concerning the dire situation in which they had to live while preserving deniability. The ever-vigilant Inquisition represented a constant danger, to say nothing about the discrimination that they had to endure.49 There are many such artists wherever repression is found.50 In Spain, the most recent examples occurred during Franco’s long-lasting dictatorship (1939–75).51 One only has to think of playwrights such as Antonio Buero Vallejo52 and Alejandro Casona,53 who managed to elude the censors, publish, and even stage plays in which they criticized the regime right under its nose. As stressed by Fernando Lázaro Carreter, the only good thing about censors has always been their lack of vision and insight.54

47  The very last words of the Tragicomedia, where the disconsolate Pleberio addresses the body of his daughter as if she were still alive, are taken from the Salve, Regina, and, therefore, enclose an indirect reference to the Blessed Mother: “¿Por qué me dexaste triste y solo in hac lacrimarum valle?” (343). Some have interpreted this as proof of the Christian, didactic intentions of Rojas. Given his systematic attacks against Christian dogmas, however, his purpose was to call attention to the constant parodies of the Marian cult throughout his book. 48  See Hasdai Crescas, The Refutation of Christian Principles, trans. Daniel J. Lasker (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). 49  See Albert A. Sicroff’s fundamental Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII, trans. Mauro Armiño (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010). 50  Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952); Fernando Lázaro Carreter, La fuga del mundo como exilio interior (Fray Luis de León y el anónimo del Lazarillo) (Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad, 1986). 51  Paul Ilie, Literatura y exilio interior (Escritores y sociedad en la España franquista) (Madrid: Espiral/Fundamentos, 1981). 52  Martha T. Halsey, From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Recent Plays of Buero Vallejo ( from “La Fundación” to “Música cercana”), Ottawa Hispanic Studies, 17 (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1994); Susan Willis-Altamirano, Buero Vallejo’s Theatre (1949–1977): Coded Resistance and Models of Enlightenment (Frankfurt-New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 53  Harold K. Moon, Alejandro Casona (Boston: Twayne, 1985). 54  “La falta de vista y de olfato ha constituido siempre el único encanto de la censura.” Carreter, p. 32.

CHAPTER 16

Eating, Drinking, and Consuming in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea Connie L. Scarborough Drawing a parallel between reading and eating is not altogether an original manoeuvre. Its use permits one, however, to elucidate aspects of the issue of reading texts which would otherwise be positioned on the margin of serious discussion and deemed, if not unimportant, then at least less significant than the central themes of the textual debate.1 Brad Kessler, in his essay “Toward a Gastronomic Theory of Literature,” equates references to food in literature with hors d’oeuvre in that “they stimulate the reader’s appetite for the larger meal ahead: namely the novel itself.”2 This is a tantalizing idea, one that can be tested and, indeed, I believe proved in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. While one would expect food to play a role in a work that treats physical pleasure and sensory satisfaction, Fernando de Rojas and the anonymous author of Act 1 include food items throughout the text as clues to characters’ motivations, desires, and attitudes. The part that food references play in the games of seduction interwoven throughout the work has been expertly analyzed by Eloísa Palafox.3 In this essay, I would like to build on some of Palafox’s ideas as well as suggest two additional aspects that she does not fully treat—food references that function as metaphors for reading or consuming the text and allusions to food that serve as triggers for characters’ memories. The latter are essential for the reader, for we can only experience events that occurred before the action of the plot by those glimpses of the past that characters choose to recount. Our understanding of events

1  Tomasz Kalaga, “Food for Thought: A Textual Feast,” in Feeding Culture: The Pleasures and Perils of Appetite, ed. and intro. Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwal (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005), 39–47, p. 39. 2  Brad Kessler, “Toward a Gastronomic Theory of Literature,” Kenyon Review 27, no. 2 (2005): 148–165, p. 151. 3  Eloísa Palafox, “Celestina y su retórica de seducción: comida, vino y amor en el texto de la Tragicomedia,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 32, no. 1 (2007): 71–88.

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from the past and how they help to mold the plot of the Tragicomedia is often brought about through allusions to food and drink. In general, we can divide references to food in the Tragicomedia into categories that, in turn, signal their functions within the text. There are references to the consumption of specific foods, most prominently represented in the text in the famous banquet scene that takes place in Celestina’s house in Act 9. Additionally, there are numerous allusions to food and eating in the rich refranero that plays such an important role in the speech of almost all the characters and lends a certain flavor to the discourse. Third, there is the inclusion of words and phrases associated with food and eating as metaphors for sexual pleasure and satisfaction. And lastly, as previously mentioned, food acts as a stimulant for memories, both pleasant and painful. As a most obvious point of departure and central to any arguments about food in the Tragicomedia, let us approach the banquet of Act 9. Firstly, we should remember that the food for the meal that figures so prominently in this act was stolen by Sempronio and Pármeno from their master, Calisto. The items that the two servants, Celestina, Elicia, and Areúsa consume all come from Calisto’s larder. As such, the five diners at Celestina’s table are in a kind of parasitic relationship with the enamored nobleman. Rojas may have borrowed the theme of stealing food from one’s master or mistress from a similar allusion found in Act 1, penned by the anonymous author of this text. In Act 1, when Pármeno is describing Celestina’s oficios to Calisto, he speaks of the many mozas who frequent her house under the pretext of sewing. But, he adds, none come empty-handed: “They all brought rashers of bacon, corn, flour or a jar of wine and other provisions they stole from their mistresses, and even perpetrated thefts of greater note” (Ninguna venía sin torrezno, trigo, harina, o jarro de vino, y de las otras provisiones que podían a sus amas furtar) (15; 242).4 Whereas the young women who enter Celestina’s house may have had some difficulties in stealing from their mistresses, Sempronio and Pármeno seem to have stolen quite openly from Calisto. Given his state of exaggerated infatuation with Melibea, the young nobleman is oblivious to all around him, giving the servants a golden opportunity to take from his provisions at will.

4  The English quotes of Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009). In a few cases, the translations are adapted or provided to match the literal sense of the original Spanish words. The Spanish quotes from the Tragicomedia are by page number from Peter Russell’s edition of Fernando de Rojas, Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1991).

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At the end of the previous Act 8, Calisto, in desperation, goes to the Church of the Magdalene to pray for Celestina’s success in seducing Melibea, with no thought to his home or its contents. The impropriety, if not outright blasphemy, of Calisto’s devotions has been thoroughly treated by other critics.5 I will only add in passing the irony of Calisto’s prayers in a sanctuary dedicated to the saint most associated with prostitution in the popular imagination. In a deceptively simple parallel construction, Act 9 opens with a discussion between Sempronio and Pármeno about Celestina’s acts of devotion. Sempronio likens her counting of rosary beads to tallying up the virgins of the city, their lovers, and the matches she is positioned to make. When Celestina is about her work, Sempronio attributes her assiduousness to a need for food: “When she takes her beads to church, there’s nothing in the larder” (quando va a la yglesia con sus cuentas en la mano, no sobra el comer en casa) (101; 402). And Celestina well knows “who gives the best and what she should call them, to make sure she doesn’t speak to them like complete strangers” (qué despenseros le dan ración y quál mejor, y cómo les llaman por nombre—por que quando los encontrare no hable como estraña) (101; 402).6 Pármeno echoes Sempronio’s opinion that Celestina applies herself to her work out of necessity, especially the need to eat: “Poverty and hunger are the world’s best teachers” (La necessidad y pobreza, la fambre; que no ay mejor maestro en el mundo) (102; 403).7 At the meal presented in Act 9, Celestina praises the abundance of food, but she claims that, in her old age, she has little appetite, that “a crust nibbled by mice can last me three days” (un cortezón de pan ratonado me basta para tres días) (103; 405). With respect to this remark, Palafox observes that, at the same time that she is making her guests laugh, Celestina appears to be trying to elicit compassion in them by contrasting their youth, companionship, and appetite with her situation as a lonely hag who has lost her appetite, unable to enjoy anything but a little wine.8 Celestina sits herself at the table next to a jug of wine and proceeds to give a long litany of the benefits of wine. Her harangue in praise of wine is certainly not original to Rojas since the alcahueta’s love of wine was a popular motif in humanistic comedy.9 Kish especially notes 5   See, for example, David Burton, “Fallen, Unrepentant, and Unforgiven: Calisto at la Madalena,” Celestinesca 27 (2003): 35–41. See also Connie L. Scarborough, “The Tragic/Comic Calisto: Obsessed and Insecure,” Celestinesca 34 (2010): 179–200. 6  This phrase is an addition to the Tragicomedia, not found in the earlier Comedia. 7  On this point, see Palafox, “Celestina y su retórica de seducción: comida, vino y amor en el texto de la Tragicomedia,” especially p. 74. 8  Palafox, “Celestina y su retórica de seducción: comida, vino y amor en el texto de la Tragicomedia,” p. 76. 9  Russell’s above-mentioned edition of Celestina, p. 406n24.

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Celestina’s over-indulgence in wine since, after proclaiming all the positive qualities of the drink, she claims to raise “half a dozen glasses with each meal” (una sola dozena de vezes a cada comida) (103; 406).10 When Pármeno reminds her that experts have written that one should not drink wine but three times during a meal, Celestina claims that Pármeno has read a corrupted text since it must surely recommend thirteen drinks instead of three: “Pármeno, there must be some mistake, a number missing: thirteen, not three” (Hijo, estará corrupta la letra: por treze, tres) (103; 406). Celestina’s remark about a corrupted text is an addition to the Tragicomedia and may be a nod to Rojas’s complaints, as expressed in the prologue, about the changes and errors that publishers may introduce into a work.11 Celestina’s mention of reading a corrupt text is here associated with the act of consuming wine, and opens up for her the possibility of an alternative reading or consumption of the texts to which Pármeno refers. Celestina’s appetite for wine, although prodigious, is not her only craving. She has a thirst for gold, as well as lingering desires for sexual pleasure. The former is patent in her refusal to share any of the gifts she receives from Calisto with Sempronio and Pármeno, and the latter is clearly on display when, for example, she wants to play the voyeuse in the scene in which Pármeno beds Areúsa in Act 7. The allusions to eating and drinking in Act 9 mask a host of other connotations, including sexual appetite, greed, lust, deception, envy—all central themes to the Tragicomedia. For example, envy is on clear display in this same scene when Sempronio dares to call Melibea “beautiful” (gentil) in Elicia’s presence. Elicia initially frames her reaction to Sempronio’s remark in terms of loss of appetite and nausea when she declares, “I swear I’d like to sick up everything, I hate it so much when I hear you say she’s “beautiful” (¡Por mi alma, revesar quiero quanto tengo en el cuerpo de asco de oýrte llamar [a] aquélla ‘gentil’!) (103–4; 406). Finally, when Areúsa and Celestina persuade Elicia to return to the table, she uses eating again as a negative metaphor when cursing Sempronio for lauding Melibea’s beauty: “I hope cancer rots your foul gob!” (¡De mala cancre sea comida essa boca desgraciada [y enojosa]) (105; 410). Celestina’s next reference to food comes in her description of the symptoms of “lovesickness” (mal de amor) that Calisto and other desperate lovers suffer. Among them is the lover’s loss of appetite: “When they eat, their hands forget 10  Kathleen Kish, “The Wines of Celestina and the Omnibibulous H. Warner Allen,” in Nunca fue pena mayor: Estudios de literatura española en homenaje a Brian Dutton, ed. Ana Menéndez Collera and Victoriano Roncero López (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1996), 359–365, p. 361. 11  “For even the printers have added their points” (Que aun los impressores han dado sus punturas) (214; 201).

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to raise the food to their mouths” (están en el acto tan olvidados, que comiendo se olvida la mano de llevar la vianda a la boca) (106; 411). Even though the meal itself as presented in Act 9 is a scene of contention, in many ways, it also serves to cement any lingering fissures in the relationship between Sempronio and Pármeno. Pármeno’s initial warnings to his master about Celestina’s bad reputation and his efforts to dissuade him from employing her services do not sit well with Sempronio, who openly encourages Calisto to resort to Celestina to win Melibea. Only after Pármeno has enjoyed the sexual favors of Areúsa— thanks to Celestina’s intervention—does he throw his lot in completely with that of Sempronio, in a mutual effort to gain all they can from their master’s pursuit of Melibea. Precisely, as a symbol of his unmitigated complicity with Sempronio, Pármeno proposes the meal with their respective lovers at Celestina’s home. Delighted to accept Pármeno’s invitation, Sempronio expresses his satisfaction in terms of food, contrasting the impending pleasure of the meal to come with Calisto’s loss of appetite: “Let’s eat and enjoy ourselves, and let our master fast for the three of us” (Comamos y holguemos, que nuestro amo ayunará por todos) (96; 393). As noted, Pármeno will supply the banqueting food at the cost of Calisto, to whom he no longer feels the remotest loyalty. From his master’s pantry he proposes to steal bread, wine, ham, and chickens, ready to justify their loss with a convenient lie to Calisto, whose lovesickness curtails his appetite: “If he asks after them, I’ll say he ate them” (Que si los pidiere, haréle creer que los ha comido) (97; 394). And if Calisto asks about the turtledoves he ordered for today’s meal, Pármeno has another excuse at hand—“I’ll say they smelt off” (diré que hedían) (97; 394). We, as readers, are not only consumers of the text, but also of characters who are frequently described in alimentary terms in the Tragicomedia. For example, in her efforts to persuade Pármeno to ally himself completely to her cause and that of Sempronio, Celestina speaks to him of the wisdom of old age. She launches into a litany of the benefits of having a wise old woman, like herself, on whom to depend. Her long list of metaphors to describe this wise old woman includes references to food, eating, and drinking: “An old woman you know well […] good fire in winter with roasting spits galore, […] and a good tavern for food and drink” (es una vieja conoscida […] buen fuego de invierno rodeado de asadores […] buena taverna para comer y bever) (78; 359).12 Palafox notes that Celestina also refers to Areúsa in terms applicable to food stuffs. For example, Celestina praises the young woman’s voluptuousness, 12  Palafox, “Celestina y su retórica de seducción: comida, vino y amor en el texto de la Tragicomedia,” p. 77, relates these metaphors to the recurring theme of carpe diem found throughout the Tragicomedia.

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calling her “about to fall” (bien madura) (83; 369), and a woman in whom “everything is so just so” (a punto) (84; 371), and “plump and firm” (gorda y fresca) (85; 372); this same critic points out that when Celestina introduces Pármeno into Areúsa’s bed, she praises his sexual stamina and alludes to her own desires in alimentary terms: “He’s the kind doctors where I come from said I should eat only when my teeth were in a better state” (Destos me mandavan a mí comer en mi tiempo los médicos de mi tierra quando tenía mejores dientes) (89; 379). The metaphorical connection here between eating and engaging in sex is obvious, and the fact that Celestina consumed a quantity of similar youths in her day is one of many allusions to past memories expressed in alimentary language.13 At this point, I would like to examine other references to food items, eating, and drinking as evocative of memories for characters in the Tragicomedia. At the end of Act 9, for example, Celestina recounts tales of her glory days to a mesmerized Lucrecia, Melibea’s maid, who becomes so caught up in Celestina’s memories that she almost forgets the mission her mistress has sent her on. Among the many rewards Celestina claims to have received for her services, especially from the clergy, she names an abundance of foodstuffs: “Chickens and hens, geese and ganders, partridges, doves, legs of ham, wheat-cakes and suckling pigs started to appear on my doorstep” (entravan por mi puerta muchos pollos y gallinas, ansarones, anadones, perdizes, tórtolas, perniles de tocino, tortas de trigo, lechones) (111; 420–21). It would seem that the rich repast she has just enjoyed in the company of Elicia, Areúsa, Sempronio, and Pármeno causes her to remember similar opulent meals from her past, given that she names a number of the same foods that Pármeno and Calisto stole from their master’s pantry. Celestina also speaks of the abundance and variety of wines that filled her home in the past—Monviedro, a Rioja wine; Luque, from the province of Córdoba; Toro, a powerful dark red; and San Martín, a white wine from San Martín de Valdeiglesias, southeast of Ávila. But her memory fails when she tries to remember the other wines that filled her bodega, even though she still recalls their different flavors: “I can still taste the different flavours in my mouth, but all the different place-names have gone from my head” (aunque tengo la diferencia de los gustos y sabor en la boca, no tengo la diversidad de sus tierras en la memoria) (111; 421). So, too, in Celestina’s recollections of her deceased colleague, Pármeno’s mother Claudina, food and wine are stimuli for memories. In Act 3, when the alcahueta tells Sempronio about her former relationship with Pármeno’s mother, she fondly recalls “If I cooked, 13  In his edition, Russell emphasizes Celestina’s allusion to doctors sending her male patients with whom she engaged in therapeutic sex (p. 379n96).

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she’d set the table […] She was so popular everyone invited her to a dram. She never returned home before she’d tasted eight or ten wines: half a gallon in her jar and another half in her body” (Si yo traýa el pan, ella la carne; si yo ponía la mesa, ella los manteles. […] Allá la combidavan, según el amor todos le tenían. Que jamás bolvía sin ocho o diez gostaduras, un açumbre en el jarro y otro en el cuerpo) (39; 285). It would seem that both Celestina and Claudina were inordinately fond of wine, and it is worth noting that this entire section about Claudina was an addition made to produce the Tragicomedia.14 Later, in this same conversation with Sempronio, Celestina upbraids Sempronio when the latter tries to offer some advice about how to proceed with Melibea, reminding him that “when you were born I was already eating crackling” (quando tú naciste, ya comía pan con corteza) (41; 289), yet another allusion to memory in terms of food. In Act 4, during Celestina’s first conversation with Melibea, the alcahueta recalls the abundance of wine in her home before she was widowed: “There was always a spare wineskin at home, an empty one and a full one. I never went to bed without eating a wine-soaked crust and raising my glass in twenty toasts [to my womb], after every mouthful of dunked bread” (sobrado estava un cuero en mi casa, y uno lleno y otro vazío. Jamás me acosté sin comer una tostada en vino y dos dozenas de sorvos, por amor de la madre, tras cada sopa) (51; 312). Celestina justifies her wine consumption because of its medical value, citing its benefits for her womb or madre. Kish reminds us that “It is no surprise that she singles out her womb as the part of her body supposedly kept healthy by the fruit of the vine, given the repeated juxtaposition of the motifs of thirst and sexual desire in the work.”15 This fact is no more apparent than in the seduction scene with Areúsa and Pármeno, when Celestina reproaches Areúsa for not wanting her to witness the two young people making love. The alcahueta refers to the sense of taste when she expresses the envy she feels as she remembers her own sexual pleasures of the past: “Humping. I still get a tingle on these gums of mine, [I did not lose it when my teeth fell]” (Que aún el sabor en las encías me quedó; no le perdí con las muelas) (90; 381). The recollection of memories ultimately proves to be Celestina’s undoing when she reminds Pármeno, one time too many, of the checkered past of his mother, Claudina, and her intimate friendship with her. When Pármeno and Sempronio threaten the alcahueta, demanding their share of the rewards that Calisto has showered on her, Celestina changes tactics; as the two servants are 14  On this point, see Kish, “The Wines of Celestina and the Omnibibulous H. Warner Allen,” p. 360. 15  Kish, “The Wines of Celestina and the Omnibibulous H. Warner Allen,” p. 360.

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about to attack, she leaves off talking about past relationships and tries to solicit pity to convince them to desist. She compares herself to animals about to be slaughtered for food: “Will your frenzied hands attack a tame sheep, a tethered hen” (¿Con una oveja mansa tenés vosotros manos y braveza? ¿Con una gallina atada?) (143; 483). Sempronio’s retort is also expressed in alimentary language when he calls Celestina “you greedy old biddy, [you are a throat very thirsty for money]” (vieja avarienta, garganta muerta de sed por dinero) (144; 484).16 Sexual appetite expressed in culinary terms is best exemplified by the two lovers who give their names to the Tragicomedia. For Calisto, Melibea is, quite literally, a delicate morsel over which he salivates and eventually devours in none-too-delicate fashion. Other characters speak about Calisto and Melibea’s relationship in terms of food or hunting for food. Pármeno remarks to Sempronio during Calisto’s first meeting with Melibea: “I’m certain this young woman is bait or a decoy set to trap him” (soy cierto que esta donzella ha de ser para él cevo de anzuelo, o carne de buytrera) (130–31; 460). When Melibea summons Celestina to her home, she says that her encounter with Calisto in the opening act was like a “poisonous bite” (ponçoñoso bocado) (114; 427) and complains that “snakes are eating my heart out” (comen este coraçón serpientes dentro de mi cuerpo) (114; 428). While these are negative images, they nonetheless underscore the fact that passion and desire, whether pleasurable or painful, are intimately connected to metaphors of food and eating in the Tragicomedia. Vomiting is equated to a reversal of pleasure, as we see in Areúsa’s remark about taking revenge on Calisto for the death of Pármeno and Sempronio. Explaining her plan to Elicia, Areúsa comments, “I’ll make him and his master spew up their banquets” (haré revessar el plazer comido) (163; 528), and later adds, “I’ll give them a cup to drink as bitter as the one they gave you” (Yo te les daré tan amargo xarope a bever qual ellos a ti han dado) (164; 528). The most elaborate examples of food imagery as a metaphor for sexual desire are found in the last sexual encounter between Calisto and Melibea. Lucrecia sings as she and Melibea await Calisto’s arrival. Among the stanzas of particular note is the following: 16  Germán Orduna, “El vino y el pan: del Cid a Celestina,” in Actas del Simposio Internacional “el vino en la literatura medieval española: presencia y simbolismo” (Mendoza: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 1990), 17–30, p. 29 paraphrases Sempronio’s remark as “ávida de vino y de oro” and further comments that the Tragicomedia reflects the underworld of the urban milieu, where wine drinking is a vice and, as such, is associated with gold.

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Wolves spy sheep and gleefully leap. Lambs are on the udder, Melibea with her lover. (Saltos de gozo infinitos da el lobo viendo ganado; con las tetas, los cabritos; Melibea con su amado). (181; 567) Calisto as the wolf after cattle is an apt metaphor for his need to consume the flesh of Melibea and the image of Melibea as the lamb thirsty for mother’s milk is a none-too-subtle allusion to her desire for penetration and ejaculation. Not only the protagonists of the sexual encounter, but also the servants who witness it, use metaphors related to consuming to describe the couple’s passions and coupling. The most famous of the culinary allusions in this scene is, of course, Calisto’s crude retort to Melibea when she asks him not to rip off her clothes: “My love, if you want to taste the bird, first you must get rid of its feathers” (Señora, el que quiere comer el ave, quita primero las plumas) (183; 571).17 With this comment, the reader too is invited to dine, so to speak, with Calisto, who will indeed defrock his lady to consume the pleasures she will provide. Melibea picks up on Calisto’s reference to eating and tries again to dissuade his rough treatment by inviting him, literally, to have something to eat: “My lord, shall I tell Lucrecia to bring us some food?” (¿Señor mío, quieres que mande a Lucrecia traer alguna colación?) (183; 572). But, Calisto’s reply is as blunt as his previous comment about her garments and he makes it perfectly clear that his only appetite is sexual: “I only want to eat your body and hold your beauty in my arms” (No ay otra colación para mí sino tener tu cuerpo y belleza en mi poder) (183; 572). I believe the author of Act 1 and Fernando de Rojas purposely include food and drink and the acts of eating and drinking as invitations to consume and digest the text itself. If the textual references are not in and of themselves convincing, we should notice that even in the introductory and concluding materials to editions of the Comedia and the Tragicomedia, our authors resort to alimentary imagery. In “El autor, escusándose de su yerro en esta obra 17  Many critics have commented on this passage, including Alan Deyermond, “ ‘El que quiere comer el ave’: Melibea como artículo de consumo,” Medievalia, no. 40 (2008): 45–52, p. 571n46; in his edition, Russell contends that Calisto’s use of this vulgar saying is a humorous yet brutal reference to the coarse sexuality hidden behind the pleasantries of courtly love.

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que escrivió, contra sí arguye y compara” (The author apologises for his errors in this work that he wrote, argues and makes comparisons against himself), which appears for the first time in the 1500 edition of the Comedia and in the majority of the Tragicomedias, Rojas speaks of his work as “comida,” stating that “[my work is eaten] and I’m meat for criticizers” (ella [su obra] es comida y a mí están cortando / reproches, revistas y tachas) (203; 189). The act of reading and criticizing the work is here likened to cutting up one’s food. In this same poem, the author uses the tried and true metaphor of putting a bitter pill in something sweet so that the patient will take his medicine as his excuse for including “funny, scurrilous jokes” (dichos lascivos, rientes) to entice the reader to learn the unhappy consequences of forbidden passions and the dangers of alcahuetería: Like a sick man who can’t swallow a bitter pill, nay even comes to fear it, though inside a sweet cake he may eat it, trick your tongue, good health will follow. Similarly my pen is fond of banter feeds in funny, scurrilous jokes to win the ear of miserable folks who love to listen and forget their canker (Como al doliente, que píldora amarga o huye o rescela o no puede tragar, métenla dentro de dulce manjar; engáñase el gusto, la salud se alarga. Desta manera mi pluma se embarga, imponiendo dichos lascivos, rientes, atrae los oýdos de penadas gentes; de grado escarmientan y arrojan su carga). (204; 190) Likewise, in the Prólogo written to justify the modification of the Comedia into the Tragicomedia, Rojas comments on the disparate opinions about the work among his readers with food-related imagery: “Some readers nibble the bones that have no virtue […], others peck at the jokes and common proverbs, praising them highly” (Unos les roen los huessos que no tienen virtud […]; otros pican los donayres y refranes comunes, loándolos con toda atención) (200–201).18 The characters of the Tragicomedia eat, drink, and comment on food. All the pleasures of the flesh as well as the sins of greed, envy, and lust are 18  Emphasis added.

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expressed, at one point or another in the text, with alimentary terminology or imagery. Kessler claims that most good books have a food scene in the first or second chapter.19 While in the Tragicomedia we have to wait until the banquet scene in Act 9 to have a full-blown meal, food references are present in the introductory materials, as well as in Act 1 by an anonymous author. Rojas continued the use of images of consumption and it is especially noteworthy that he significantly expanded and revised these images when he penned the longer Tragicomedia. Passions, both negative and positive, are expressed in images of food. Characters express their attitudes and desires by relying on references to consuming, often imbedded in clever refrains. Food and wine also prompt characters’ memories, which, in turn, frequently include references to past eating and drinking. As we read the text, we wine and dine along with the characters through their many alimentary references. This extra-textual consumption has a parallel within the world of the Tragicomedia, where the characters consume not only food and wine but each other as well in scenes of lovemaking, bartering, and death. We consume as they consume until all the main characters of the work lie dead, victims, as the incipit states, of “inordinate appetite” (su desordenado apetito) (205). 19  Kessler, “Toward a Gastronomic Theory of Literature,” p. 148.

Influence and Posterity

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CHAPTER 17

Modernity and Celestina: The Future of Our Past and of Our Present Antonio Pérez-Romero

The Meaning and Content of Modernity

My study of cultural products of the early modern period in Spain attests to the presence of themes, attitudes, and behaviors we will recognize today as our own, but these took centuries to evolve. Among these products are what I call “manifestos” of modernity, which I will uncover in Celestina. Like many scholars, I reject the narrow traditional hegemonic narrative of modernity, as appropriated by some European countries and the US. Along with the newer concept of modernity, beginning in the Middle Ages and encompassing western Europe, there exists a plausible complementary vision of the start of the modern world that is less imperialist and ethnocentric, proposed by the relatively new academic discipline of “World History” or “Global History.” Representing this new vision, C. A. Bayly posits a convergence of the many players who, in their various societies, adopted what they received from outside, adapted it to their own situations, and contributed back to the mainstream, thus collaborating in its development. Niall Ferguson has commented on Bayly’s work that “at a stroke of a pen, all other general histories of the nineteenth century have become parochial.”1 This clearly also happened to the worn-out ideas about the forging and expanding of modernity, especially given the new historians’ assessment of Spain’s role. Innovative, high-minded, and humanist approaches, such as that of Bayly, therefore, reject any parochial appropriation, preferring a newer, more appropriate research model in our momentous time. I shall concentrate on the growing number of scholars who advance the thesis that each European country, in the long trajectory to modernity, had its own time and ways to approach it, adapting a spirit of change and elements from outside, which it promoted and expanded before adding its own original contributions. These scholars acknowledge an array of “modernities” and, consequently, various manifestations of this powerful cultural stream. 1  C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Global Connection and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), cover copy.

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My study focuses on the role that Spain played up to the period of Celestina. The Iberian kingdoms followed similar path in the early phases of modernity, adding to Castilian-Aragonese cultures, for example, some elements of the literary, political, scholarly, and scientific advances of the Iberian Peninsula’s medieval Islamic and Jewish cultures. Aragon’s power had already spread in the Mediterranean, especially in the Italian peninsula. Once Aragon united with the kingdom of Castile, Spain became the political hegemon for a long time in “Italy”—undoubtedly Europe’s most prestigious and precocious avantgarde cultural center. The emergence of the medieval Iberian kingdoms laid the foundation for later developments. Clearly the Iberian kingdoms, including Portugal, were not on the periphery of European modernity at the very start, but in the thick of it: culturally, politically, and militarily. This is contrary to the theories which can be traced back to eighteenth-century northwestern European historians and their attempt to justify the later prominence of England, France, and Germany. These latter countries capitalized on the Iberians’ imperial decline and loss of prestige along with concomitant internal problems. Northwestern European nations, in effect, revised their own medieval past to portray their heritage as the dominant model of development and to show their former competitors as peripheral. In fact, these northwestern European nations were already forging this narrative in the second part of the seventeenth century. By the period of Celestina, Spain had not reached the cultural heights it would enjoy in the two “golden” centuries which followed. A growing number of scholars agree that Spain contributed significant “foundational” ideas, cultural products, and modern processes general to Western modernity. One example should suffice from the many offered in recent scholarship. Jeremy Robbins writes that “Spanish thinkers decisively altered contemporary conceptions of knowledge, and so paved the way in Spain for intellectual modernity in general and the early Enlightenment in particular.” Robbins considers that “the absence of a major European country [i.e., Spain] from the overall picture of early modern European thought is not simply regrettable but unacceptable. Such an absence is all the more surprising because Spanish intellectuals were in fact avidly read across Europe.”2 Earlier, Robbins defended the thesis that in the seventeenth century, Spanish literature explored the key avant-garde intellectual debates of the time.3 This sense is current among many scholars, and 2  Jeremy Robbins, Arts of Perception. The Epistemological Mentality of the Spanish Baroque, 1580–1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 2 and 3. 3  Jeremy Robbins, Challenges of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature (Lenham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

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is borne out in the analysis of Spanish cultural products now seen as the privileged witnesses and carriers of the first phases of long-term modernity from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Robbins clearly rejects the prevailing hegemonic narrative that leaves Spain out of the modernity mainstream. Western modernity, like world modernity, can be better understood in all its depth and breadth by adopting a broad interpretative model able to incorporate its many varieties and meanings. In this respect, the traditional hegemonic view of modernity is too narrow, nationalist, imperialist, and ethnocentric; above all, it refuses to consider that the Enlightenment is not the beginning of modernity, but the highest point up to then of a centuries-long journey beginning in the medieval period (as we will see below). We must note here the magisterial work on enlightened modernity by Jonathan Israel.4 I take issue with Israel’s treatment of Spain, especially because he considers the Enlightenment as both a break with the past and a distinct new world being created. Thus, he considers its development from no earlier than the second part of the seventeenth century, ignoring both what one might call the “modernity of the Middle Ages” and the stunning surge of modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain. Israel focuses on modernity’s origins in countries like France, Holland, and England while sticking to the traditional hegemonic discourse regarding the forging of the modern world. Israel also misses a new image of the Spanish Enlightenment that has emerged out of the scholarship of the last few decades and placed the country squarely within the Enlightenment mainstream. This omission is surprising, as Spain was still a global power in the eighteenth century, with the most widespread empire until it was overtaken by the English. Two of many publications exemplify this new recognition. The first is a 2015 anthology edited by Jesús Astigarraga, whose “team of experts overturns the myth of the ‘dark side of Europe’ and examines the authentic place of Spain in the intellectual economy of the Enlightenment.” They paint very different “portraits of a de-marginalized, modernizing and enlightened Spain,” highlighting, among other things, “its role in shaping a modern conception of the natural sciences.”5 The second is Tzvetan Todorov’s insightful work on Goya as a major thinker of the Enlightenment, reflecting Spain’s advanced progress in modernity. Todorov portrays Goya as a thinker “no less than his contemporary Goethe,” and shows that Goya was not only among the foremost painters 4  Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment. Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750– 1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5  Jesús Astigarraga, ed., The Spanish Enlightenment Revisited (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015), p. V.

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of his time, but was also one of its most profound thinkers, one completely immersed in Enlightenment thought who strengthened the foundations on which future progress would surely be made.6 New scholarship—supported by overwhelming historical and cultural evidence—corrects the erroneous position that Spain was the backwater of modernity.

Spain and the Modernity of the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is the reference point for the comprehension of a general European way of understanding humanity, a sensibility—with its multiple nuances and national particularities—that can be envisioned as an unfolding of modernity that some scholars think has left a recognizable imprint on contemporary Europe and Europeanized parts of the world. These scholars contend that in order to understand the present, we must thoroughly investigate the past. Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), in his final work, Must We Divide History Into Periods?, elaborates on the main theme of his life’s work: that some modern ideas, behaviors, attitudes, and philosophical, economic, and religious streams were not born in the Renaissance, but sink their roots deep in the medieval earth. In the High Middle Ages, important mental shifts in institutions, politics, culture, economy—in almost every field—were happening in Europe as a consequence of the mercantile and urban revolutions.7 Perhaps the most lucid study on this theme in the kingdom of Castile is that of medievalist Teófilo Ruiz, who describes how ideological changes united a variety of social groups—merchants, traders, prosperous farmers, the lower nobility, intellectuals, prominent writers, and clerics. He also identifies the germination of an ethos that the new scholarship does not attribute exclusively to the traditional bourgeoisie. Ruiz’s model is open and flexible, allowing various sectors to participate. Characteristic of this new sensibility in Western societies is an emancipating secularism that was not necessarily anti-Christian or anti-religious.8 In locating Celestina inside the ideological new world that had been developing, I rely most on the interpretive framework posited by the Argentinean scholar, José Luis Romero. In La revolución burguesa en el mundo medieval,

6  Tzvetan Todorov, Goya à l’ombre des Lumières (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), pp. 9 and 13. 7  Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History Into Periods? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 8  Teófilo Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

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Romero studies the past to understand the present.9 If we look back and retrace the path that brought us to where we are now, we discover a “tenacious continuity” of purpose that is never lost. Romero would argue that the way we live today is a progression of patterns present in the Middle Ages and in the revolution that began with the confrontation of the feudal-bourgeois ethos with the feudal-Christian world. Romero maintains that later concepts and ideas, such as economic mercantilism, philosophical Deism, the Enlightenment, and the world of “eighteenth-century” ideas, constitute the clarification and solidification of a sensibility with foundations laid up to eight hundred years earlier—in the first phase of modernity. Romero’s scope is vast—he explores the trend in cultures all across Europe, but several of his observations are relevant to Spain. Common to all is the bourgeois confrontation with the old mentality, which structured human reality wherein the body was low and mortal while the soul was eternal and supernatural. A person’s duty was to seek salvation, as instructed by the Church, and not to question life in the visible world. But the new mental attitudes were quietly advancing new ways of acquiring knowledge, questioning traditional authorities, and encouraging free discussion and reason. Slowly, commercial and economic change was feeding the abandonment of the subsistence economy, leading to changes in production and the establishment of urban life. Romero shows how the old order took its most serious attack from the cities and spread to other places. Life in cities—already centers of learning and home to professionals, like lawyers and doctors—became attractive, and people flooded to them. In a city, people could live with fewer dangers and better living conditions, while exploiting opportunities to make more money. But such a shift required changing mental attitudes and worldviews, something the migrants were ready to do. From these newcomers to the city, the various sectors of the bourgeoisie were formed. But the new ideas extended beyond farmers and craftspeople. Parts of the nobility began to identify with the urban life and its secularizing thrust. Other groups drawn to the city included merchants, bankers, and rentiers. After a generation or two of hard work, they enriched themselves and became city patricians. Small merchants and craftsmen could also aspire to roles of influence in the city. Castilian and Aragonese monarchs incorporated such people into their governing assemblies. There were bourgeois representatives in the Cortes of the Spanish kingdoms of León in 1188 and Castile soon after, then in Catalonia in 1218 and Aragon in 1232. Their 9  José Luis Romero, La revolución burguesa en el mundo feudal (Buenos Aires: Editorial Suramericana, 1967). See also his Crisis y orden en el mundo feudoburgués (Buenos Aires: Siglos Veintiuno Editores, 2003).

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presence in all these bodies predates their arrival in the English assembly in 1263 and in the French in 1302. The commoners and the simple wage earners also became factors in the urban world, always prepared to act upon their grievances against their employers, seeking more attractive jobs or even withdrawing their labor when the work was hard and the hours long. An open economy produced an open society with opportunities. Commoners, like other sectors of the bourgeoisie, were creating and expanding what we might call the modern human rights. The possibilities of the new system would continue to increase for the emerging exploited or dehumanized groups and individuals, from the Middle Ages to the present. The bourgeoisie was followed by its lower sectors, then by peasants and workers, women, racialized minorities, gays, lesbians, people with disabilities, etc. Egalitarianism, as well as the benefits of prosperity and growing enlightenment, continued to improve human lives. Life became a personal adventure. Every person had the potential to act on his or her environment to affect change (as portrayed notably in the female characters of Celestina). Destiny was not accepted as a fait accompli; rather, it could be molded by the individual. The “adventure par excellence,” writes Romero, was social and monetary improvement or success.10 Self-made bourgeois individuals using their own skills developed a high level of self-esteem (verging occasionally on arrogance) and an attitude that other classes, including women, would adopt. Further, people started to focus on the intrinsic worth of earthly life and the discovery of sexual pleasure, both heightened by the heady tang of prosperity. New emphasis on the individual subjective experience, personal virtue, mental capacity, and skills replaced the transcendent. But rather than replacing it completely with the pleasure principle, it encouraged a new secular transcendence among the bourgeois. Their attitudes were adopted by other sectors of society. The great thinkers of the Middle Ages were developing an empirical attitude requiring observation and evidence as the test for assessing oneself vis-à-vis nature, but not as part of it; direct observation became a tool to increase human knowledge. Personal experience went hand-in-hand with experimentation, taking a practical, technical bent. This new knowledge gave the bourgeois class a dynamism that spilled over into other sectors. Implicit in his attitudes and doings, the bourgeois man set his objectives in opposition to those of traditional masters. He was doing the same thing with nature: putting his own goals and objectives over those once attributed to God. This does not mean that he rejected faith, but rather that the importance and function of God had changed in the relationship. One of Romero’s most insightful 10  Romero, La revolución, p. 466.

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observations regarding the elucidation of the modernity of the Middle Ages is the unchaining of human possibilities. As simple wage laborers became aware of the new order’s inequalities and injustices, they began to crave a different and more egalitarian world. Testifying to this unrest in the Iberian kingdoms are cultural works, such as the Romancero, Celestina, and Lazarillo de Tormes. Some scholars discuss the progression of modernity in Castile. They deal with an idea central to my argument—the importance of language as a tool of progress. Ruiz highlights an incontestable matter of historical record: the spectacular thirteenth-century advancement of the Castilian language in royal and municipal administrations and the writing of history and chronicles, as well as in the crafting of laws, wills, and communications among all sectors of civil society.11 This development opened a crack in the medieval monopoly of Church and clergy in key areas, including written culture; now the Church had a competitor advancing secularization in other ways, as creation of culture had been shifting to some of the educated nobles and “middling” classes since the beginning of the fourteenth century. Around the 1330s there appeared one of the greatest books of the Spanish canon, The Book of Good Love, by the archpriest Juan Ruiz. This is one of the earliest documents reflecting the new sensibility of life on earth, whose key feature was the secularizing outlook. For Teófilo Ruiz, the work is similar to the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales in its “fluid and joyful celebration of carnality, the human body, and its underlying (and not contradictory) reflective Christian purpose.”12 Teófilo Ruiz says that the developments in the Castilian and Catalan languages and literatures made Castile and Aragon a cutting-edge center for literary experiments in poetry and prose. This setting, as we shall see, is a key point for understanding Celestina and the birth of the modern novel. In poetry, the popular Cancioneros, anthologies of romanceros (ballads), later became a sensation throughout Spain with the introduction of the printing press. This poetry has a range of emotions and ideas—often including conflicting views of politics, life, love, and history, as well as many of the ideas, aspirations, sufferings, and comings and goings of women and ordinary people. Castilian became the dominant language in the Peninsula. However, even more importantly for the ethos of the first phases of modernity, as Teófilo Ruiz says, Castilian “provided a suitable vehicle for new sentiments and ideas.”13 José María Monsalvo Antón also considers how 11  Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries. 12  Ibid., p. 173. 13  Ibid., p. 174.

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Castilian became the carrier of high culture in the fields of ideas, literature, and chronicles.14 In the fifteenth century, we have more than one thousand published works (about ten times the previous century’s total), most, significantly, by lay authors. No longer the exclusive territory of the Latin-based Church, now important existential issues were being explored and documented in Castilian, and in ways that challenged or mocked the rich and powerful. Monsalvo Antón, as many others do, considers the Cancionero genre a poetic universe embracing a panoply of feelings and emotions. Led by the expressive ease and agility of the language they spoke, filled with the energy and possibility to interpret the new world unfolding around them, many people were encouraged to become poets. Hundreds of writers assembled approximately fifty Cancionero compilations, making the fifteenth century a golden age of Castilian poetry. This genre, together with the growing corpus of narrative writings from the thirteenth century forward, was instrumental for the creation of Castilian literary sensibility, including Celestina.

Celestina and the Manifestos of the First Phases of Modernity

In the analysis that follows, I review some ideas on the two sides of modernity—destructive (individualist, capitalist) and constructive (human rights, the common good) as they evolved up until the late fifteenth century and as they appear in Celestina. Concerning the constructive side, we must consider the number of discussions of friendship, love, and the joy of sharing. Are they intended to highlight the evil nature of the characters that make and then contradict them? Or simply as literary topics disconnected from real-world issues? These responses deny the socially responsible aspects of literature and its historical context. Like Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, I believe that literary work is “the perception of reality through the creative imagination.”15 One rarely studied quality of Celestina is its optimistic, redemptive tendency. The pessimistic side aligns itself with the general catastrophist stream: the “failure” of Spanish culture. Celestina can be positioned within the “redemptive” stream which the new scholarship, in and out of Spain, has begun exploring in the last few decades. Traditionally, scholars have described Celestina as pessimistic, but all agree that it is a complex and pivotal work with many interpretive possibilities, a beacon of literary and cultural precociousness 14  José María Monsalvo Antón, La baja edad media en los siglos XIV–XV. Política y cultura (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2000). 15  Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura, historia, alienación (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1976), p. 16.

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in Western literature. Time and again, academics have placed it second to Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the Spanish literary canon. Dorothy Severin shows that “despite the absence of a third-person narrator, [it] is the first work in world literature which can qualify for the title ‘novel’ rather than ‘romance.’ ”16 So many esteemed scholars in the last sixty years have noted the radical novelty of the work. E. Michael Gerli, like others before him, demonstrates the work’s enormous interpretive scope. Gerli also discloses in fine detail the features of this modernity, indicating a more optimistic side—contradicting what he concludes is the cosmic pessimism of the work—which is the apotheosis of a theme that runs deep in Celestina scholarship.17 I find, among the scholarly streams, two streams that incisively synthesize the views of many who detect the revolutionary, innovative, and psychological aspects of the work’s characters. Alan Deyermond writes that “Celestina has the qualities that we look for in a modern novel: complexity, the solidity of an imagined but real world, psychological penetration, [and] a convincing interaction between plot, theme, and characters.”18 González Echevarría writes that, though “published in 1499, Celestina is as fresh and relevant a work of fiction as if it had been written today.”19 As the plot of Celestina develops, we observe the miseries and hopes of the first phases of modernity expressed in the words and actions of the characters. One major theme is personal fulfillment in the here and now—the earthly paradise. The individual’s main concern, once material needs are met, is his or her human relations in the world and the delights that life offers; death is the end of this terrestrial paradise. In the passage that opens the story, Calisto proclaims his love—however exploiting and rapacious—for Melibea. This worldly focus is true to some degree for all the major characters. “Are you not a Christian?” asks Sempronio, when his master tells him that he is madly in love with Melibea. “I am a Melibean, and I worship and I put my faith in Melibea and I adore Melibea” (10; 115).20 All other characters illustrate and declare the 16   Dorothy S. Severin, Tragicomedy and Novelistic Discourse in Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 5. 17  E. Michael Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 170. 18  Alan Deyermond, A Literary History of Spain. The Middle Ages (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1971), p. 170. 19  Roberto González Echevarría, introduction to Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. XIII. 20  The numbers separated by a semicolon correspond respectively to pages in the following English and Spanish editions: Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) and Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, ed. Julio Rodríguez Puértolas (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1996).

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same attitudes toward the world and human pleasures. For example, near the beginning of the work, Sempronio, fearing he’ll be killed if he goes into his raging master’s bedroom, says, “I want to live in order to see my Elicia, and must guard myself from danger” (8; 113). Later, when Sempronio goes to enlist Celestina’s services, Elicia (who practices her trade in Celestina’s house) upbraids Sempronio for not coming to see her for three days—not adding that she was in bed with a client. Sempronio answers: “Do you believe that distance is powerful enough to quench my deep affection for you, the fire that is in my heart? Where I go you go with me, you are there […].” (20; 121). While these lines have ironic and playful overtones, they nevertheless portray a thirst for human passion and delight. The same positive, worldly, and lustful attitudes are voiced by Celestina throughout the work, by Elicia and Areúsa, and by Pármeno in his rapturous night-long first sexual experience with Areúsa. All characters, including the cold-hearted Calisto, acknowledge the importance of love, and one, Melibea, with a degree of sincerity not always apparent in the others, is particularly eloquent on the subjects of friendship, togetherness, and comradeship, as we shall see below. A second powerful modernity-related theme, class awareness, concerns the power of masters and their treatment of servants as well as the struggle of the servant class against its wealthy and exploitative bosses. Several episodes highlight the masters’ exercise of power over their underlings; the masters’ arrogance, their exploitation of the servants, insults, and rough treatment are denounced by Celestina and other characters. One could view these denunciations as a series of manifestos clearly tied to the quiet infiltration of modernity into early modern Spanish society. For example, in the first Act we see Calisto’s harsh order to Sempronio to shut up “or it may pass that before I am overtaken by raging death my hands will deal you a violent demise” (7; 113). As Calisto’s insults continue, Sempronio—in asides—derides his master and shows his burning contempt. In Act 2, Pármeno endures Calisto’s insults as the latter tries to warn him not to fall for Sempronio’s and Celestina’s evil tricks. As an aside, Calisto says that the “rascal is asking for a beating” (45; 142). Fear is an integral part of their relationship. In Act 6, while Sempronio murmurs against Calisto, Pármeno tells him to keep quiet lest the master hear him and “punish you as soundly as he does me” (84; 173). Servants are treated like slaves and their masters hold over them the threat of death. The denouncing of the masters is present in the characters’ requests for personal freedom and fair treatment. González Echevarría writes that “the desperate economic and social conditions of these characters are due not to their inherent evil and penchant for crime, but to the unjust class structure of the society in which they

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live. Celestina is a work in which there is a bitter and radical critique of class stratification, as well as a ruthless satire of the aristocracy and the clergy.”21 The poverty of the lower classes versus the lavish lifestyle of the masters is among the work’s strongest themes. The grinding poverty of the servants, and all the other characters low on society’s ladder (Elicia, Areúsa, and Celestina), does not allow them to put into practice their sincere and anguished desires for friendship, companionship, love, and the common good; all these are crushed in the struggle to survive. In Act 4, Celestina reflects on her situation, acknowledging the danger in which she is placing herself by working with Sempronio to convince Melibea to give in to Calisto’s sexual desires. She could end up dead, but she must proceed with courage as she needs money to survive. Melibea’s concession is vital to Sempronio’s survival, too. He knows their project is dangerous, but wants everything to be successful—not for his master’s satisfaction, but so that he can make his “way out of penury” (53; 149). Remember that Celestina runs a business, and Sempronio has a job—for both, work is precarious. The text emphasizes the material precariousness of life for the poor vs. the wealthy. Ordered to have the tailor make new garments for Celestina, Calisto’s other servant, Pármeno, moans a familiar complaint: “As for me they leave me to live like a pauper” (90; 177). To meet one’s pressing material demands—let alone enjoy life’s delights of wine, good food, companionship, friendship, and sex—one needs money; the trouble is that money is hard to come by for all but the few. The power that comes with money becomes the supreme value that wrecks all egalitarian relations. Two of the servants in the story, Sempronio and Pármeno, and Celestina undertake a mad dash to get it, to end their humiliation and exploitation. But the dishonest and cruel tactics they resort to wreck any hope of their achieving friendship, love, peace, justice, or the common good. Corruption and contempt flourish at every level. Speaking of Calisto and how his raging and blind carnal desire will benefit them, Celestina exclaims: “Money will flow and may the contest be long-lasting! Money can do everything; it breaks down cliffs and crosses dry through rivers. There is no place so high that an ass laden with gold cannot climb it. Calisto’s stupidity and ardor are enough to ruin him and award us gain” (51; 148). Things do not go well for Celestina, Sempronio, and Pármeno—all are killed and Elicia rushes to Areúsa’s home to tell her what has happened: Celestina had made a deal with Sempronio and Pármeno to share the spoils, but on receiving payment from Calisto, she saw herself as rich and reneged on her promise. “That metal is of such value” exclaims Elicia, that “the more we drink of it, the 21  González Echevarría, introduction to Celestina, p. XXIII.

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greater our thirst becomes, an unholy greed.” The two servants were outraged, continues Elicia, emphasizing the penury of Sempronio and Pármeno, “[…] because they have need, which is far stronger than love […]” and because of “the loss of their greatest hope” (202; 263). The tragedy of Pármeno is more poignant—before joining the plotters he had been uncorrupted by the desire for material gain, a faithful but naive servant who advised his master not to fall for Celestina’s wiles. But ultimately, he succumbs as he comes to understand the world around him. Being honest, he says, does not lead you anywhere; you get insulted and mistreated. So the honest Pármeno ends up joining Celestina’s and Sempronio’s “greed fest.” He sees all his good intentions and exalted ideas of friendship, love, and togetherness trampled underfoot and the greedy every-man-for-himself system (a darker aspect of the creep of economic modernity) prevails most of the time. The characters are not evil by nature, but as in the case of Lazarillo de Tormes half a century later, they have no alternative to solve their penury. Once Celestina realizes that her scheme is succeeding, she gives in to the power of money; she offers Sempronio “a little share of the reward” (78; 168). The power of money—the potential key to social stability, personal peace, and the common good—has hastened her demise. When Sempronio and Pármeno go to demand their share, things escalate to violence. Pármeno, who initially refused to join Celestina’s plot, saying, “[…]I would not be happy living on ill-gotten gains; I hold contented poverty to be the decent thing” (34–35; 133), now assists with the murder of Celestina in order to be rich. Celestina’s main characters constantly indulge in what becomes a principal theme: the duplicity of speech. A character says one thing in conversation, but something quite different in the aside that follows immediately, often denigrating the other person in that conversation. Duplicity does not show only the character’s reprehensible behavior; it also draws attention to the way things should be. Remarks about harmonious human relations and the dream of personal wellbeing, fairness, and social stability could indicate the speaker’s awareness of what he or she sees as right and just. Unfortunately, the way their society is structured does not encourage the practice of such high ideals. Friendship, togetherness, sharing among friends and against masters, positive erotic love (versus raw, non-affective lust), the common good, and human dignity are concepts of modernity expressed early in the work. The need for friendship and trust, even in committing shady deals, is acknowledged. Their plan, at best, transcends mere crooked and immoral behaviors; it is a sort of rough justice in getting money from a cruel master to alleviate their penury and exploitation. In an unjust society, as Celestina reminds Pármeno, the servants use unjust means to survive. As Celestina tries to win Pármeno over to

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their side, we hear the refrain of the theme of friendship, togetherness, and benefit at the expense of the rich. She conveys the servants’ manifesto, a call to arms of the exploited against their masters: Do not trust the vain promises of masters, they drain the substance of their servants with hollow promises the way the leech sucks blood; they offer no thanks, they insult, they forget services, they refuse compensation. […] Each of these señores selfishly uses his servants for selfish interests; his servants, though subordinate should do no less, and live by their masters’ law. […]While in his household, make new friends, for a friend has the greatest value in the world, but do not attempt to be a friend to him. We have an opportunity, as you know, in which we all may profit and in which you may remedy your situation. (34; 133) As Romero points out, the bourgeois system offered new prospects for everyone, and Celestina and others in the story are ready to seize them. Celestina’s most damning suggestion is that the servants should adopt the masters’ ethos of theft and exploitation. In practice, this would mean the complete breakdown of order and justice. But in their pleas, here and elsewhere, for solidarity, togetherness, and friendship, Celestina and the servants adumbrate the idea of a better system of personal and social relations. Sadly, the historical situation and context make this an impossible dream to realize; crookedness is the only means open to them, as the masters have all the material resources and power. We cannot dismiss the characters’ expressed ideal of the common good as mere hypocrisy just because they fight to get their own material gains at the expense of others. While Celestina ultimately betrays Pármeno and Sempronio and throws friendship out the window, she still numbers herself among the poor and participates in their fellowship. Pármeno invites Sempronio to lunch at Celestina’s. Sempronio looks forward to companionship and togetherness; he’ll see everybody there—Celestina, Elicia, Areúsa, and Sempronio will all be making merry. The event elicits several avowals of friendship and unity. Sempronio tells Pármeno that “all my anger for the things you have said in the past you have turned into love. […] I want to embrace you; may we be like brothers and may the Devil be banished to hell!” (121; 200). As they are eating, Sempronio says, “Mother Celestina, it is good eating and talking together” (129; 207). Afterward, he says, they will talk about how things are developing with his master and the “gracious and charming Melibea” (129; 207). This prompts another “manifesto,” this one voiced by Elicia, a prostitute. While bitter, it has an egalitarian tone; she proclaims herself as beautiful as Melibea:

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Her beauty is the kind you can buy in a shop. Actually on the street where she lives, I personally know four damsels on whom God bestowed more grace than He did on Melibea; if she has a hint of beauty it comes from the fine clothing she wears. Put them on a pole, and it will be charming. I do not say this to praise myself, but I believe that I am as beautiful as your fine Melibea. (130; 207–8) Areúsa continues the diatribe against Melibea; Sempronio exalts Areúsa’s beauty, grace, and pedigree. In perhaps the most quoted line of the work, we have a lapidary phrase that we could call an egalitarian manifesto: “Base is he who behaves basely. Actions determine nobility; we are all, after all, children of Adam and Eve. On our own each of us should try to be good and not look for virtue in the nobility of our ancestors” (131; 209). Celestina offers her own manifesto of friendship. Understand that these manifestos are all proclaimed by women and, as if that were not enough, by prostitutes, arguably the lowest strata of society. In Act 3, Celestina tells Sempronio that she has known Pármeno since his birth, as Pármeno’s mother Claudina had been her bosom friend. In her manifesto of friendship, she fondly recalls a good time in the past, when she felt fulfilled as a person through egalitarian, altruistic relations (50; 147). This panegyric lacks the hypocritical tinge of some of her statements— there was no apparent manipulation of the friend to obtain some kind of benefit. Instead, her nostalgia reveals a genuine longing for friendship, tenderness, and sharing. We might extend the sentiment shown here to a longing for a less brutal society. Celestina adds to these sentiments in Act 7 when she talks with Pármeno about friendship and its mutual benefits. Pármeno responds positively to her sentiments of friendship and love. But in her later actions, the poison of greed eventually gets hold of Celestina, and she reneges on her friends, refusing to share the gold. In her death, Celestina even tries to smear over the idyllic picture she had painted of Claudina’s friendship (178; 242). I do not think this angry outburst changes the sincerity of her original pronouncement. Sempronio and Pármeno also share positive and probably sincere thoughts about their friendship and its benefits, Sempronio declaring happily, “O friend Pármeno! How happy and profitable is agreement between two companions!” (164; 233), crediting Celestina for bringing them together. But later, full of rage, as they go to confront her to demand their share, they admit the sad, dominant truth that determines their actions: as Pármeno says, “Friendship has no worth where money is concerned” (174; 239). In Act 15, when Elicia relates the tragic events leading to the deaths of Pármeno, Sempronio, and Celestina, she sadly recalls her love for them and for her great friend, Celestina: “Where will I go, for I lose

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a mother, protector, and shelter; I lose a friend, and one so close I never missed a husband […] O my well-being and earthly pleasure; while we had you we did not value you […]” (203; 263). That yearning for positive personal relations between friends may be seen as a cry for change at the societal level—the larger overriding system that makes individuals betray one another in the most personal of transactions. Such ideals are perceived as noble and good, and the route both to personal fulfillment, security, and well-being, and societal well-being, peace, and stability. However, the desperate need for money and material goods makes such goals unreachable. The dire straits of servants and the working poor leave them to scramble, to fight tooth and nail for the masters’ crumbs to make their impoverished existence bearable. Thus it destroys all human affection and constructive relations. As we have seen above, Pármeno is resentful and denigrates Celestina in an aside when Calisto orders him to have the tailor make Celestina some new clothes—something he needs himself. Depravation and hunger are always hovering like wolves around the poor. However, even in this harassing world, Celestina and her community offer exalted feelings of friendship, love, and common good. They convey a literary message of constructive modernity that will take several centuries to become even a partial reality in some parts of the world. Related to the quest for friendship is the quest for love—both erotic and affective (eros and agape). Pármeno offers a good example in his first sexual encounter, set up by Celestina in her quest to bring him to her side. He describes his experience with elation, his happiness so intense that he must share it with someone. This illustrates a major theme of the work, that good things, be they joy, sex, food, friendship, or wealth, must be shared, otherwise they lose their value and power (117, 120; 197–98, 199). How are we to take Pármeno’s exalted language of his first sexual encounter with Areúsa? Pármeno’s behavior and words, here and throughout, point to a shared, common-good positive experience, not to the commodification of Areúsa. Calisto’s understanding of love and human relations, however, is unlike that of either Pármeno or Melibea, who despite her love for him, questions Calisto’s violence: Your honorable games give me pleasure, your dishonorable hands exhaust me when they surpass what is reasonable. Leave my clothing in place, and if you wish to see if my outer gown is of silk or cotton, why do you touch my shift? You know that I will show you, but do not hurt or mistreat me as you are wont to do. What benefit is it to you to damage my clothing? (230; 287)

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Calisto’s astonishing answer is, “He who wishes to eat the bird must first pluck off the feathers.” When she asks if he is hungry, he replies in the same heartless manner, “there is no collation for me but to have your body and your beauty in my power” (230; 287). Hunting down, plucking off, and feasting on his prey, this is Calisto’s understanding of love and human relations in general. Calisto’s law is the “masters’ law” (34; 133). In Melibea, on the other hand, we see a perfect synthesis of the physical and emotional. The gracious and dignified Melibea is in the throes of passion for Calisto, blind to his flaws. In Act 16, Pleberio and Alisa, her parents, discuss their plans for their daughter: she must marry to produce an heir and preserve her reputation (208; 267). But Melibea rejects their plans and patriarchal marriage altogether. Her love affair has lasted a month already, and nothing or nobody will separate her from her beloved Calisto. Melibea’s description of her relationship with Calisto indicates fulfillment on the erotic, emotional, egalitarian, and humanistic levels, in the here and now—something that Celestina, Areúsa, Elicia, Sempronio, and Pármeno can only wish for. Her generosity of spirit, incorrect and blinded by love, credits Calisto as a good human being who cares for her—not the cold-hearted and brutal master that he is (209–10; 268–69). Melibea’s only regret is the time she “lost not having pleasure of him, of not knowing him after [she] came to know [herself]” (209; 269). She knows now who she is, and in discarding patriarchal marriage, she has cast off the whole social and ideological system that keeps women in perpetual subjugation. Transformed and liberated, she has a new consciousness of herself as an autonomous person of worth able to chart her own path without any constrictions. After Calisto’s death, she continues to do so, planning her suicide calmly. Through her new sensibility she owns her mind and her body. This joyful claiming of her identity, dignity, and responsibility adumbrates a brighter vision for generations of women in centuries to come. Conclusion In Celestina, alongside the radical pessimism that so many scholars have noted, the optimistic aspect I have identified reflects the desires and objectives of the positive cultural stream that is still developing in our times: the evolving process of human rights. Four of the seven major characters that carry the dramatic action forward are women and give the work its ideological strength—what I have called its “manifestos” of freedom, liberation, friendship, togetherness, and love. Male servants Sempronio and Pármeno help in the task, but do not

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have the emancipatory initiative of the women of the story. Calisto is the representative of the exploiting masters, and as such, he presents the force contesting progressive modernity. Today feminism has gone global, battling the powerful forces of misogyny all around the world, but its goals were articulated six hundred years ago. Women’s issues were in the air at the time of the Catholic Monarchs, because it was a woman, Isabel I of Castile, who held the reins of power in her own right. In her time, treatises on women’s “rights” were well known. As portrayed in Celestina, on a far larger canvas, the quest is central to an iconic work, a giant in the pantheon of Spanish and world literature still widely read and studied today. The desires it describes in this literary presentation for sexual equality, justice for the poor, fair distribution of wealth, security, and human worth and dignity irrespective of social status spill over, down the centuries to our time, spreading far from medieval Europe, blending with other cultures’ similar strivings around the world, as global historians maintain. Their enduring reality, integral to modernity, reinforces González Echevarría’s assessment that Celestina is “as fresh and relevant a work of fiction as if it had been written today.”22 The common good and universal human rights are goals even more meaningful today and—despite dramatic developments in the twentieth century—they demand resolution just as urgently. 22  González Echevarría, introduction to Celestina, p. XIII.

CHAPTER 18

Celestina as a Precursor to the Picaresque Ted L. L. Bergman Introduction Picaresque literature, one of Spain’s greatest contributions to world literature, begins with the novel La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities), published anonymously in 1554. The picaresque stands out from all preceding genres in its focus on the lower strata of society—with considerable emphasis on that strata’s criminal or quasi-criminal population. The settings and character types that become commonplace in the picaresque are also substantially represented in Celestina. Their presence has led many critics to see Rojas’s work as a sort of generic precursor, or at least a starting point in the development of the genre. Not surprisingly, Howard Mancing calls Celestina the beginning of “that great arc that [forms] the first significant manifestation of the modern novel.”1 Similarly, Dorothy Severin writes: “After Celestina, the writing of sentimental romances will eventually be abandoned, although they will continue to be read. Celestina opens the way for the picaresque genre.” She adds that the newness of the work can even sweep away the prevalence of formerly dominant prose forms: “Celestina deals a blow to the world of aphorism and wisdom literature, and even Pleberio gives his own gloss on the lament. We also have a fatal clash of two literary worlds, that of the self-styled courtly lover (the fool) and the prototype picaresque world of the Spanish Bawd and her minions (the rogues).”2 Charles F. Fraker explains how the invention of indecorous characters links Celestina to the later picaresque tradition, specifically pointing to examples from the lower strata, and “certain moments in their careers” that form a continuity in novelty when, “between the time of the publication of Celestina and 1  Howard Mancing, “Guzmán de Alfarache and after: The Spanish Picaresque Novel in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Neopicaresque, ed. J. A. Garrido Ardila (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 40–59, p. 56. 2  Dorothy S. Severin, Tragicomedy and Novelistic Discourse in Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 48 and 2.

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the date of the composition of Lazarillo, the great umwelt, the order of accepted values, the shape of humanism and literary culture, had not greatly changed.”3 As each critic chooses to emphasize different stylistic and moralistic links between Celestina and the picaresque, any difference of opinion or focus is often mitigated by a general acknowledgment of a shared real foundation underlying both literary worlds. The historian José Antonio Maravall details this foundation in his own capsule narration of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain’s internal migration from the countryside to the city: Upon approaching this urban belt of misery and inhabiting alongside each other in these zones, in the most subhuman manner, insalubrious and in repugnant promiscuity, it was possible to pass from one irregular state to another. And in this mixed environment, defined by negative characteristics that contaminate one group by another, live habitually the families of pícaros (including those of the hostile servants in Celestina, to Lazarillo, to Buscón, etc.), when these are not those recently arrived from the rural areas.4 Because another chapter in this book will look specifically at prostitution, and also because prostitution is not featured heavily in the seminal Lazarillo and its most direct descendants, this chapter will mainly examine the male criminal and quasi-criminal characters. We take this approach while recognizing that men thrive in the same environment as women, the one described by Maravall as “subhuman,” “insalubrious,” and of “repugnant promiscuity,” and that the non-prostitute’s lives and activities in Celestina are often inseparable from those of Celestina and her female followers. Pármeno Few picaresque novels are without a protagonist who begins young and through a series of adventures, steeped in the dealings of the lower classes, acquires a deep cynicism and world-weariness as he passes into adulthood. In various ways, Pármeno meets several of the important pícaro criteria.5 He is 3  Charles F. Fraker, Celestina: Genre and Rhetoric (London: Tamesis, 1990), p. 65. 4  José Antonio Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI Y XVII) (Madrid: Taurus, 1986), pp. 63–64. Translation is mine. 5  Dorothy S. Severin, “Pármeno, Lazarillo y las novelas ejemplares,” Ínsula, no. 633 (1999): 26, p. 26.

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young, serves multiple masters (Calisto, Sempronio, and indirectly Celestina), and begins as a relatively innocent idealist who turns to a (admittedly very short) life of crime, revealing how his principles have been displaced by a destructive anti-social cynicism. All this said, the prototypical Lazarillo and his indebtedness to Pármeno are not without controversy among Hispanists, as Jacques Joset points out.6 But, as already mentioned, the differences of opinion here revolve around moral questions and worldview, not the environment or social constituents of the characters themselves. From Pármeno’s conversation with Celestina, we learn that his parents left him in her care, much as Lazarillo’s mother left him in the care of the blind man whose skills as a healer and dabbler in magic make him somewhat similar to Celestina in vocation, if we leave aside her role as a bawd. Both Pármeno and the prototypical pícaro are dependent on their lowerclass master while they express ironic admiration that betrays a deep suspicion of their masters. For Lazarillo, the blind man “had endless ways of getting money out of people,” including “prayers for lots of different things,” and would “tell pregnant women if they were going to have a boy or a girl.” Also, “In medical matters [the blind man] said that Galen didn’t know half as much as he did about toothache, fainting fits and morning sickness,” proffering medical advice, such as, “Do this, do that, boil this herb, get that root. As a result everybody followed him around, especially women who believed everything he told them” (8, 15–16).7 Pármeno says of Celestina, “she professed herself a kind of physician, and feigned that she had good skill in curing little children; she would go and fetch flax from one house, and put it forth to spinning to another, that she might thereby have pretense for the freer access unto all” (Hacíase física de niños; tomaba estambre de unas casas y dábalo a hilar en otras, por achaque de entrar en todas) (55; 55–56).8 Compared to each other, both the proto-pícaro and the canonical pícaro gain their world-weariness at an early age by watching their masters engage in lessthan-honorable pursuits, some in search of money, others to satisfy their lust. As witnesses, the youths’ mounting cynicism leads them to amoral or immoral behavior. At the end of his life’s narration, Lazarillo manages to avoid the trap 6  Jacques Joset, “De Pármeno a Lazarillo,” Celestinesca 8, no. 2 (1984): 17–24, pp. 17–18. 7  The quotes of Lazarillo are by page number from Michael Alpert’s translation of Francisco de Quevedo, Lazarillo de Tormes and the Swindler (el Buscón) (London: Penguin, 2003). 8  The English quotes of Celestina are by page number from James Mabbe’s translation of Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1987). The Spanish quotes of Celestina are by page number from Celestina, ed. Francisco J. Lobera et al., Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000).

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of greed, but is still on shaky moral ground because he is content to live cuckolded by his wife and his master the archpriest, all in order to retain his modest job. Pármeno’s ultimate descent into criminality more closely foreshadows the lives of Lazarillo’s literary descendants, specifically Mateo Alemán’s titular character from Guzmán de Alfarache and the protagonist Pablos in Quevedo’s El Buscón. Thus, Guzmán famously writes his story from the galleys where he is imprisoned after being convicted of embezzling his mistress’s household. Quevedo’s Pablos sinks deeper into the underworld and ends his narration (for which he promises a second part) with a planned escape to the Indies, similar to what Guzmán would have done were he not caught beforehand. Pablo’s final transgressions, getting drunk with his gang and stabbing catchpoles (corchetes) to death for entertainment, matches Pármeno and Sempronio’s murder of Celestina in terms of criminal violence, although the underlying motive is different. Critics debate whether a pícaro can be homicidal and remain a true pícaro, but there is little disagreement that the environments featured in the four works cited above breed the general character-type of a young, cynical trickster with multiple masters likely to run afoul of the law. Sempronio Because of his relative seniority, independence, and lack of character development in comparison to Pármeno, Sempronio does not neatly anticipate the pícaro mold established by Lazarillo de Tormes. When Roland Greene writes that “Sempronio is a pícaro, adept in double talk, and already a steady client of Celestina’s brothel when the drama opens,” I believe he is seizing upon the only two elements that strongly link Rojas’s character to the future genre.9 Sempronio is not the only one in Celestina to employ “double talk,” but his adeptness exemplifies what Michael Gerli calls the continuous fluctuation between direct speech and asides, a perpetual shifting between what is said openly and thought privately, between direct looks and oblique glances that permit us to perceive the presence of dangerous thoughts that cannot be expressed in the ordinary flow of social interaction or conversation.10 9  Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), p. 74. 10  E. Michael Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2011), p. 100.

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This technique of asides in Celestina merits the attention of an entire article, while in Lazarillo de Tormes, asides and muttering under one’s breath provide enough material to write an entire MA thesis.11 Patricia Finch explains: Having chosen a genre which excludes narrative commentary, Rojas makes expert use of the aside to reveal to the reader important contrasts between what the characters say and what they think. Thus the device is made to serve here as it would later in the picaresque novel, to reveal hypocrisy and deviousness.12 Among her many examples, Finch cites how, “after Calisto ends his Petrarchan description of Melibea in Act 1, proclaiming ‘no ha más menester para convertir los hombres en piedras, [‘without any other help, she has the power to transform men into stones’] Sempronio answers under his breath, ‘¡Mas en asnos!’ [‘Into asses, rather!’].”13 In Lazarillo, the hypocritical esquire devours the food that his servant has gathered, insisting, “God, it tastes so good that I feel I haven’t eaten anything else today,” causing the protagonist to mutter to himself, “I hope I drop dead right here if you have” (37). In both Sempronio and Lazarillo’s asides, we find a mixture of censure, pity, and resentment, but it is this last element that grows strongest in Sempronio, while subsiding in the fully-formed pícaro of Lazarillo de Tormes. As with Pármeno, Sempronio’s cynicism and world-weariness lead him to violent criminality, while the cumulative lessons of Lazarillo’s adventures lead him into a safer and more survivable state of amoral resignation. As with Pármeno, Sempronio is similar to the protagonists of Guzmán de Alfarache and El Buscón, but he still remains distinct in the unfolding of the narration because he is more entrenched in the underworld from the outset. More than a “steady client of Celestina’s brothel,” and submerged in the world of prostitution, Sempronio implies that he has participated in his share of street fights, complaining to Celestina that he cannot fully offer protection during Calisto’s nocturnal tryst with Melibea:

11  Jean R. Miller, “Self-Creation and Self-Destruction: The Asides in the Lazarillo de Tormes” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1990). 12  Patricia Finch, “The Uses of the Aside in Celestina,” Celestinesca 6, no. 2 (1982): 19–24, p. 22. 13  Finch, “The Uses,” p. 21.

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I have brought hither my arms all broken and battered in pieces, my buckler without its ring of iron, the plates being cut asunder, my sword like a saw, all to be hacked and hewed, my casque strangely bruised, beaten as flat as a cake and dented in with the blows that came hammering on my head (Traigo, señora todas las armas despedazadas: el broquel sin aro, la espada como sierra, el caxquete abollado en la capilla). (295; 295) This admission does not in itself prove him a criminal, but in the picaresque novels that followed after Lazarillo, the lines between destitute servant, mischief-maker, rogue, and killer were often blurred. In Guzmán de Alfarache, the protagonist describes the life of a student in Alcalá, who must pawn his possessions. “So one thing after another, all goes away; not sparing so much as the jacket of mail, that lies between our mattresses; the sword, that is under our bed.”14 Out of Guzmán’s many moralizing examples, one involving the deceptive appearance of religiosity makes rather explicit reference to trickery, thieving, and self-protection: To say, when I see a religious person enter at midnight through a window, into a suspected place, with his sword in his hand, and his buckler at his girdle, that he is going to minister the Sacrament, were a mere madness: for neither God will have it so, nor does his Church permit, that I should be such an errant Ass, as to think that to be good, which is evidently evil.15 From the very beginning of El Buscón, the rogue, Pablos, carries a sword, and his use of the weapon reveals a spectrum of characterization from pacifist to outright murderer. Also informative is the use of the word pícaro, mentioned in the context of this example. At the earliest point in Quevedo’s novel, while still a child, Pablos rides a horse as a sort of Carnival King. That his mount munches on some greengrocer’s wares causes her, the fellow vendors, and a group of pícaros (the modern translation calls them “lowlifes”) to assault poor Pablos with thrown vegetables. He is knocked off his horse and falls into a pile of excrement, after which “The police came, arrested the women and the boys, searched everybody for arms, and took them away because they had drawn fancy-dress daggers they were wearing as well as short swords” (71).

14  Mateo Alemán, The Rogue or the Life of Guzman de Alfarache (London: Constable, 1924), 4:210. 15  Mateo Alemán, The Rogue, 2:46.

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Early on, Pablos sees himself as separate from the pícaros, though for most of the novel he is among them, and finally becomes one of them. Later, and more than once, swordplay is associated more with trickery or the threat of danger—not its actual manifestation. On one occasion, Pablos uses his wits instead of strength to literally disarm the entire night’s watch. In another chapter, sword fighting is brought to a level of abstract absurdity as Pablos mistakes someone studying the diagrams of Libro de las grandeza de la espada (A Book on the Greatness of the Sword) for a sorcerer. By the end of El Buscón, Pablos, like Sempronio, uses the sword for its intended purpose while explicitly distancing himself from pícaros, not in a return to the innocence of his youth, but in the capacity of a bravo or killer. In the final scene of the novel, as a night of eating, drinking, and subsequent catchpole-killing begins, Pablos mentions a detail that gets lost in translation. In English, the detail is: “Supper time came and we were waited on by four great toughs of the type that are called strongarm men” (195). The word for “toughs” in the original is pícaros. Additionally, the translation completely ignores that the cited “strong-arm men” are called so by bravos, who themselves are toughs, if not killers. That toughs or killers call others “toughs” is strange, and it only makes sense if we look at the original Spanish word from which “strong-arm men” was translated, namely cañón. According to early modern dictionary definitions, the criminal slang word cañón means either a snitch or, in Galicia, a lost pícaro who has no job and no home. The translator’s confusion could be attributed to the variability of a pícaro’s violent nature, and does raise the question of whether a pícaro or rogue can retain this status after stabbing somebody to death. If we return to Celestina and look at Sempronio, he seems more disposed toward this violent behavior than Pármeno. At first glance, this comparison makes the younger, inexperienced character look like a good fit as a pícaro precursor, based on his similarity to the relatively pacifistic Lazarillo, whose only violent act was to convince his first master to jump headlong into a post. But this comparison is weakened if we recall what happens during Celestina’s murder. On this fateful occasion, Pármeno is more like Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán, and even more so Quevedo’s Pablos; his life among criminal types has eventually made him one of them. When Sempronio thrusts his sword repeatedly into Celestina, Pármeno cheers him on, and may even join in, as suggested by the fact that both men escape the scene of the crime together and appear equally guilty. Their status as fugitive murderers may complicate the application of the label pícaro or “non-lethal rogue” to either of them, while Celestina’s final words leave little room for ambiguity about the status that she wishes to pin upon them. “Justice, justice! [which can also be translated as “Police,

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police!”] help, neighbors, for here be ruffians, that will murder me in my house. Murder, murder, murder!” (¡Justicia, justicia, señores vecinos! ¡Justicia, que me matan en mi casa estos rufianes!) (295; 260). For Mabbe’s 1631 translation, “ruffian” would have meant the same as today, namely, “a brutal or lawless villain; a violent criminal, a thug,” using the Oxford English Dictionary definition. In Rojas’s Spain, the word might have also implied a violent criminal, but primarily “ruffian” would have meant “pimp.” Antonio de Nebrija’s 1495 Vocabulario español-latino states that “rofián” is synonymous with alcahuete and leno, from the Spanish and Latin, respectively, meaning “pimp,” “panderer,” or “procurer.” To the non-Hispanist, trying to measure the degree to which Sempronio is a true pícaro may seem like an arcane exercise, but I believe that describing this measuring process is important if we are to speak of connections to a genre that is so heavily defined by a single character type. Greene’s assertion that “Sempronio is a pícaro” is perfectly acceptable under some definitions of the genre, especially when the definition of the character-type is generalized to equal almost any denizen making a living in any combination of the environments found within Lazarillo, Guzmán de Alfarache, or El Buscón. Also, Alexander Nava reminds us that the term “picaresque” carries its meanings and associations into the modern world: The picaresque (e.g., Lazarillo de Tormes or Guzmán de Alfarache) would give its readers a glimpse into a deviant underworld of prisoners and prostitutes, thugs and pimps, galley slaves and fugitives, the way the culture of hip-hop would for late twentieth-century North America. The picaresque and the novel became the voices of the other.16 Sempronio is a pimp, thug, fugitive, and eventually prisoner, and while perhaps not a character who meets the strictest definition of pícaro, he is still an important member of a rogue’s gallery, without which the preceding genre would not exist. In sum, as Ernest Mérimée wrote, The Comedia de Calisto y Melibea is a picaresque novel in some of its features. Pármeno, Sempronio, Sosia, Centurio, Lucrecia, Elicia and Areúsa, not to speak of Mother Celestina herself, are the direct ancestors of Lazarillo, Guzmán and Pablo.17 16  Alexander Nava, Wonder and Exile in the New World (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013), p. 86. 17  Ernest Mérimée, A History of Spanish Literature, trans. Sylvanus G. Morley (New York: Holt, 1961), p. 204.

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Centurio Mérimée’s statement above grants us license to study a minor male character whose presence contributes to Celestina as a precursor to the picaresque. Centurio is both pimp and ruffian (in the modern sense), while nobody would claim that he is a pícaro. Most critics primarily characterize Centurio as a miles gloriosus in the classical mold. They qualify this assertion by adding that the type has been re-shaped by Rojas’s immediate social milieu and preexisting contemporary theatrical stock figures that are more fifteenth-century Spanish than Roman.18 Severin calls Centurio “largely a stereotype, unlike the rest of the characters. He therefore fails to fit into the pattern of novelistic discourse in the work.”19 But being a stereotype does not completely separate Centurio from the world of the picaresque. According to George Mariscal, in Lazarillo de Tormes, “traditional materials [along with ‘stories, jokes and anecdotes’] serve to give consistency or continuity to a whole section of the book,” and “these are principally the stereotypical characters, beginning with Lazarillo himself.”20 In the case of Centurio, one can safely say that his hilarity and criminality, however stereotypical, are quite at home in the picaresque genre, if we step away from the debate about whether or not they properly fit into a more abstract category of novelistic discourse. Some have argued that in Lazarillo de Tormes, the protagonist ends up as a pimp, and others, like Anthony Close, have drawn direct parallels with Celestina through Lazarillo’s “motifs of the Celestina tradition,” in which “the barren house of Lazarillo’s third master, the squire, symbol of his moral hollowness, is modeled on that of Rojas’ braggart ruffian Centurio.”21 But to find a good match for the blustering and violent Centurio, we must look beyond Lazarillo and also Guzmán de Alfarache toward El Buscón and later iterations of the picaresque genre.22 Even when himself a 18  “Celestina and Centurio are, of course, products of Fernando de Rojas’s own artistic originality, but it is obvious that artistic originality cannot operate in a vacuum,” wrote Juan B. Avalle-Arce, Dintorno de una época dorada (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1978), p. 39. The translation is mine. “And when the miles gloriosus showed up in the additional acts in the uncharacteristic guise of a pimp, the hilarity must have been considerable,” according to Severin, Tragicomedy and Novelistic, p. 76. 19  Severin, Tragicomedy and Novelistic, p. 76. 20  George Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 33. 21  Anthony J. Close, Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 284. 22  Howard A. Mancing, “The Deceptiveness of Lazarillo de Tormes,” PMLA 90, no. 3 (1975): 426–432, p. 430, 1writes that Lazarillo is “more than a consenting cuckold” when he

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pimp, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán is non-violent in his duties for his master the French ambassador, and at other moments in his life he finds himself in the company of “stout rogues” and “ruffianly fellows” who are more thieves than anything else.23 Pablos from Quevedo’s El Buscón is a closer match to Centurio, but it takes some time in the novel for this match to be made apparent. Pablos meets some cheery and swindling pimps in his first forays into the underworld, and by the end of the novel, he is in much rougher company, as we have explained above. When James Iffland writes of Quevedo and the grotesque, he states, By far the most important aspect of this final episode for the purposes of this study is the special attraction Pablos feels for this latter role as “tough guy” and pimp. […] Thus it would seem that “water has reached its own level,” Pablos having finally reached the level of his origins by becoming the “Rabí de los rufianes.”24 “Rabí de los rufianes” literally means “rabbi of ruffians” or “rabbi of pimps,” but this expression is left as “their gang leader” in the translation that we are using here, betraying a lost connection between Centurio and Pablos. Perhaps the links between Celestina and El Buscón are not strong enough in themselves, and we have to rely on Quevedo’s picaresque poetry, especially the character Escarramán, who condensed “in a grotesque archetype the personality of so many pimps that had appeared before in Spanish literature, at least since the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, with the figure of the pimp Centurio […].”25 Escarramán was made most famous by his appearance in ballads full of criminal jargon known as jácaras. The pieces starring this rufián specifically tell tales of his hardships experienced as a pimp and how he seeks a shoulder to cry on from his girlfriend and prostitute, La Méndez. Today Escarramán is perhaps better known among most Hispanists for his appearance in Cervantes’s comic interlude, El rufián viudo llamado Trampagos (The Widowed Pimp Called Trampagos). In the setting of the sketch, he is not only a great criminal raconteur, but also a legendary dancer, and “he is received by all allows his wife to continue her sexual relations with his master the archpriest. “To exploit another person sexually for the sake of material affluence is the definition of a pimp. This, rather than a potentially comic deceived husband, is what Lázaro has become.” 23  Mateo Alemán, The Rogue, p. 161. 24  James Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, vol. 1 (London: Tamesis, 1978), p. 138. 25  Josep María Sala-Valldaura, Risas y sonrisas en el teatro de los siglos XVIII y XIX (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 1999), p. 53. Translation is mine.

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as the personification of the picaresque spirit of the underworld.”26 Celestina makes no mention of Centurio’s dancing ability, and he is not much of an entertainer to those who surround him in his immediate setting. But he is still similar to Escarramán because Centurio’s characterization, however one-dimensional it may be, is enough to sustain the fictional environment that surrounds him. With good reason, the five new acts added to the original 1499 Comedia de Calisto y Melibea were called the “Treatise of Centurio” in some of the earliest editions, and Criado de Val has declared that this addition of the “Treatise of Centurio” is “the birth of the picaresque.”27 Conclusion When examining Francisco Delicado’s 1528 novel, La Lozana andaluza (The Lusty Andalusian Woman), another precursor to the picaresque genre, the critic Bruno M. Damiani explains, From the point of view of novelistic art and ideological intention, the picaresque novel represents a reaction against courtly literature, principally the chivalric romances and the pastoral and sentimental writings in which idealistic, magic, and supernatural elements abound. Contrary to the idealized nature and elegant models for love in courtly literature, the picaresque novel depicts a wicked and hostile world and the struggle of an individual to survive in it.28 In Spanish literature, Celestina marks a watershed in its strikingly modern and detailed treatment of the criminal classes, and it is perhaps the first work of fiction to successfully bring the criminal underworld to the written page, as much for entertainment as for moralization. Fernando de Rojas discovered a method of blending rhetorical techniques, both lawyerly and literary, and of applying 26  Cory A. Reed, The Novelist as Playwright: Cervantes and the Entremés nuevo (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 98. 27  In Spanish, “el nacimiento de la picaresca.” Manuel Criado de Val, Don Quijote y Cervantes, de ayer a hoy (Guadalajara: AACHE Ediciones, 2005), p. 182. The authorship of the “Treatise of Centurio” remains in dispute, but its appearance so soon after the very first version, and its inclusion thereafter, make it an integral part of what we read as Celestina today. See Severin, Tragicomedy and Novelistic, p. 6. 28  Bruno M. Damiani, “La Lozana andaluza as Precursor to the Spanish Picaresque,” in The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale, ed. Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael O. Zappala (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 57–68, p. 62.

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them in the depiction of characters and actions drawn from his own street knowledge. As a law student, Rojas was also aided in his innovation by his awareness of criminal justice proceedings and general knowledge—shared by anyone living in an urban setting—of criminals for whom violence was both a tool of the trade and a lurking mortal danger. In his discourse on discord from the work’s prologue, Rojas cites from Petrarch in a way that foreshadows the pessimistic tone that makes Tragicomedia a far more appropriate designation than merely Comedia. The prologue contains the phrase “perpetual enmity,” which forms a pair with the expression “world replenished with evil,” uttered by Pleberio in his final speech amidst his anguished laments about his daughter Melibea’s suicide. Taken together, these expressions emphasize that conflict and strife are endemic in Celestina and the world it represents.29 One explanation for this pessimism, among many others proposed, relates to an inescapable and threatening criminal element.30 The prologue’s discourse of predation and fighting does have a broad metaphorical meaning, but it can also directly refer to armed servants, street fighting, ruffian subculture, and the generalized danger found outside the well-to-do’s walls. These phrases, “perpetual enmity” and “world replenished with evil,” also match Damiani’s above-mentioned characterization of the picaresque genre as one that “depicts a wicked and hostile world and the struggle of an individual to survive in it.” The literary exploitation of criminal violence for both pleasure and instruction undoubtedly serves a moralistic purpose, but it also reflects Rojas’s own social and intellectual environments. As a student, he was likely to be both personally and professionally familiar with brothels, inns, taverns, and the city’s plazas. According to historian Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave, places like these were truly a refuge for the dregs of society and “inside these locales, there abounded fights and revenge attacks, and the most attended and traveled places were the areas of greatest conflict.”31 As Francisco Márquez Villanueva points out, Salamanca students in Rojas’s time made constant contact with prostitutes, and with them came “a variety of criminals and parasites.”32 29  Severin, Tragicomedy and Novelistic, pp. 15, 399. 30  The conclusion of this chapter is based on, and mostly contains exact wording from, the introductory pages of Ted L. L. Bergman, “La Celestina and the Popularization of Graphic Criminal Violence,” Celestinesca 36 (2012): 47–70. 31  Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave, “Violencia cotidiana en Castilla a fines de la Edad Media,” in Conflictos sociales, políticos e intelectuales en la España de los siglos XIV y XV: XIV Semana de Estudios Medievales, Nájera, del 4 al 8 de agosto de 2003 (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2004), 394–444, pp. 398–99. Translation is mine. 32  Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Orígenes y sociología del tema celestinesco (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993), p. 126.

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If Rojas’s studies included civil law, he would have spent six years in Salamanca training to meet society’s demand for good justice officials of all stripes, whether they ended up in “courts and tribunals, law offices, councils, courtrooms, districts, assemblies, [or among] aldermen.”33 He would have been especially suited to cataloging and analyzing the words and deeds of underworld types who would later populate and constitute the environment of picaresque novels that followed Celestina. Márquez Villanueva believes that, in creating Celestina, Rojas was the first to make the alcahueta a universal figure, capable of surviving by herself. I believe that Rojas has applied the same universalizing treatment to gangsters such as Centurio, Sempronio, and Sempronio’s protégé, Pármeno. Fernando de Rojas could not have foreseen that his original creation would lead to an equally groundbreaking text a halfcentury later, the first picaresque novel, but he was undoubtedly aware that his written portrayal of “a wicked and hostile world and the struggle of an individual to survive in it,” leavened with humor to make it a tragicomedia, was something quite new. Luckily for us readers, many things that made Celestina new also made it influential, and we can count among its many influences the invention of characters, settings, and situations that are inextricably linked to Lazarillo de Tormes and its descendants.

33  Mariano Peset and María Paz Alonso Romero, “La facultad de leyes,” in Historia de la Universidad de Salamanca, Vol. 3, Saberes y confluencias, ed. Luis Enrique RodríguezSan Pedro Bezares and Enrique Battaner Arias (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2006), p. 42. Translation is mine.

CHAPTER 19

Early Responses to Celestina: Translations and Commentary Kathleen V. Kish After making its publishing debut in Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, also known as Celestina, produced a long chain of spin-offs, many of which were intended to attract readers elsewhere in Europe. Taking the form of translations keyed primarily to local audiences, they sold well enough that they sometimes warranted reprinting or even completely revised editions. Together, along with the rare occurrence of an early commentary on the Spanish archetype, they helped to account for the work’s heralded standing as a bona fide European best seller. The first link in this chain of responses to Fernando de Rojas’s masterpiece, written in Italian, appeared in Rome in 1506, followed closely by a Hebrew version (now lost); the last translation that we shall discuss, in Neo-Latin, appeared in Frankfurt in 1624. In addition there were three different renditions in French; two distinct versions by the same author in German; dual renderings by a single translator in English, not to mention a partial translationadaptation in the form of a theatrical interlude, also in English; and a version in Dutch, popular enough that it was republished three times. This multilingual panoply of reactions to Rojas’s work clamors for attention, not only from Celestina specialists, but also from scholars interested in cultural history, comparative literature, translation studies, and the history of the book. The discussion that follows will touch on these factors while taking notice of some of the most interesting sidelights to be found in the individual cases under scrutiny. Whereas the bulk of this study will deal with the early translations of Celestina, there will also be a brief consideration of the work commonly referred to as Celestina comentada, which, although written in Spanish, is an apt topic here because, like its foreign language cousins, it attests to the broad reception of Celestina early on; also like them, it provides clues to ways the work might have been understood by readers at the time. In Celestina scholarship the Italian translation holds unique importance, and not simply because it came first. It also can lay claim to being “the oldest

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surviving form” of the Tragicomedia.1 Written at the behest of Federico di Montefeltro’s illegitimate daughter Gentile Feltria de Campo Fregoso, it was dedicated to her and published in Rome in 1506.2 Its author, Alfonso Ordóñez (written “Alphonso Hordognez” in the subtitle of this edition), calls himself a “familiare” of Pope Julius II.3 The suggestion is that the translator was attached to the papal household in some capacity. It is plausible that he was the Alphonsus Ordognes who succeeded Alonso de Proaza as Professor of Rhetoric at Valencia.4 Ordóñez might have been in the Spanish retinue of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI and have stayed at the papal court afterward. Scholars attempting to establish the stemma of the Tragicomedia, despite reaching different overall conclusions, generally agree that the Rome 1506 Italian translation belongs toward the top of the work’s family tree.5 This is far from a mere curiosity, given that the translator was intent upon producing a faithful rendition of his model, as he announced in the dedicatory letter 1  This was the conclusion reached by F. J. Norton in Printing in Spain 1501–1520 with a Note on the Early Editions of the Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 155. His scrutiny of printers’ marks and techniques led him to posit that the six extant editions in Spanish bearing the date 1502 were printed after 1510. For his part, Ottavio Di Camillo finds reasons to venture that “the copy that Ordóñez used for his translation may well have been the princeps of the Tragicomedia” (el ejemplar que utilizó Ordóñez para su traducción bien pudo haber sido la princeps de la Tragicomedia). See his “Hacia el origen de la Tragicomedia,” in Actas del Simposio Internacional 1502–2002: Five Hundred Years of Fernando de Rojas’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (18–19 de octubre de 2002, Depart[a]mento de Español y Portugués, Indiana University, Bloomington), ed. Juan Carlos Conde (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2007), 115–45, p. 145. In this same article Di Camillo suggests that the translator might first have produced an Italian version of the Comedia, using an early text in Spanish belonging to an unknown family of the Comedia, one that would have included “la carta prefacio” (pp. 136–37). Then, once the twenty-one act form had appeared in Spanish, he would have updated this first translation, transforming it into the Tragicomedia (p. 137). All English translations throughout are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2  This illustrious lady moved in the most refined cultural circles, among “some of the most spirited individuals of Italian letters” (alcuni tra gli spiriti più vivi delle lettere italiane), according to Emma Scoles, “Note sulla prima traduzione italiana della Celestina,” Studj Romanzi, no. 33 (1961): 155–217, p. 168n3. Hereafter cited in text. 3  See An Edition of the First Italian Translation of the Celestina, ed. Kathleen V. Kish (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), p. 31. Hereafter cited in text. 4  See D. W. McPheeters, El humanista español Alonso de Proaza (Valencia: Editorial Castalia, 1961), pp. 29–30, and Scoles, pp. 169–75. 5  Di Camillo identifies the positions of half a dozen of these researchers (pp. 117–23), concluding that “no one has called into question the privileged location that the Italian version continues to have in the top part of the stemma” (nadie ha puesto en duda el lugar privilegiado que la version [sic] italiana continúa ocupando en la parte alta del stemma”) (p. 123). Hereafter cited in text.

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(with accompanying sonnet) that he wrote for the work, and that, as a humanist, he possessed the linguistic tools necessary to achieve his goal. Accordingly, the Italian translation includes all twenty-one acts (including interpolations), the prologue, and the preliminary and final verses (minus their headings). As Scoles points out, not only did Ordóñez strive to reproduce the structures of the original; he also accepted “the moralistic purpose and the multiplicity of authors” (il fine moralistico e la molteplicità degli autori) (“Note,” p. 188). The closeness between the Spanish and Italian Celestina texts was enhanced by what Di Camillo has called “another example of that literary biculturalism that characterized the papal court and, through it, Roman atmosphere in its entirety” (otro ejemplo de ese biculturalismo literario que cara[c]terizaba la corte papal y a través de ella todo el ambiente romano) (p. 125). Editors, scholars, and translators alike have found reasons to consult the early Italian translation of the Tragicomedia, whose source had derived from the lost Spanish original. A few examples will illustrate the ways that the Italian text has informed the discussion of Rojas’s masterpiece. Let us look first at a passage that has raised questions about what to make of different readings in early editions in Spanish. It comes from Act 9, when Areúsa is listing the ingredients that go into the facial mask that Melibea concocts for herself. Here is how Ordóñez describes Melibea’s beauty routine: “She smears her face with gall and honey, charred grapes and dried figs, and with other filth” (Imbratta suo uiso de fele et mele con uue abrusticate e fighi secchi e con altre brutture) (Kish, ed., p. 156). If the translator was faithfully echoing his source, his Spanish model must have listed the ingredients in the mask as “toasted grapes [i.e., raisins], dried figs, and other things” (uvas tostadas y higos passados y con otras cosas). Many early editions in Spanish make no mention of fruit here, following instead the version found in the Comedia: “With one thing and another” (Con unas y con otras cosas). How might we explain the two variant readings? It seems more than likely that at some point in the work’s transmission “unas,” with the alternative spelling “vnas,” had been printed as “vuas,” with an inverted letter “n.” Voilà: “uvas” (grapes). Recent editors of the Tragicomedia have opted for one reading or the other. Peter E. Russell, for instance, omits the addition, calling it “completely unnecessary” (del todo innecesaria), whereas Francisco J. Lobera et al. choose to include the interpolation, noting that raisins and dried figs, like the gall and honey in Melibea’s beauty concoction, “are ingredients in cosmetics of the period” (entran como ingrediente en cosméticos de la época).6 6  See Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Peter E. Russell, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 2001), p. 422n29; and Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Francisco J. Lobera et al. (Madrid: Real

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Like these modern editors, authors of the early translations of Celestina settled on one direction or the other in the complicated transmission of this passage, sometimes even introducing surprising elements unknown elsewhere. The first French translation (1527) followed the Italian source in this case, not the Spanish one.7 The 1578 version by Jacques de Lavardin is similar, but without any reference to grapes, as is true as well of the 1550 Dutch translation. Both of the translations by the Englishman James Mabbe (the manuscript of c. 1607 and the 1631 printed edition), although different in wording, coincide in including the two fruit ingredients. The German translator Christof Wirsung, working directly from the Italian, resolved the issue differently in his two Celestina versions: in 1520 changing the raisins to fried eggs, but then reverting to dried grapes in 1534. Finally, the German Kaspar Barth in his 1624 Neo-Latin version renders “unas tostadas” as “pane asso” (toasted bread).8 The passage just discussed is of potential use to philologists concerned primarily with reconstructing the earliest version of the Tragicomedia. Moreover, it holds interest for specialists in typography as well as for those studying the history of cosmetic products, particularly natural cosmetics. In addition, it provides clues to researchers who are attempting to decipher the process of Celestina’s transmission in languages other than Castilian. Let us look now at a different passage, one that shares some of these same qualities while presenting an additional attraction—that of perhaps shedding light on the meaning of a curious practice employed by Celestina’s late husband. It occurs in Act 1, near the finale of the so-called “symphony of the old whore.” Out of the blue, Pármeno gleefully exclaims, depending on the text in question, either that the husband had been quite an eater of fried eggs (“come­ dor de huevos asados,” Russell, ed., p. 256), which were believed by some to be an effective aphrodisiac; or that he, a “comendador de huevos asados” (Lobera et al., ed., p. 54), was in the habit of commending such eggs to the supernatural Academia Española, 2011), p. 207n62–63, at note 63. Quotations from these two editions hereafter cited in text. 7  Celestine: A Critical Edition of the First French Translation (1527) of the Spanish Classic La Celestina, ed. Gerard J. Brault (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), pp. 123 and 256n123. About this translation Brault remarks: “[It] reads quite well and preserves to a remarkable degree the style and tone of the Spanish original” (p. 7), adding: “There is a strong possibility that the translator’s native language was Spanish” (p. 11). In his opinion, this version is closer to the original than Lavardin’s translation (p. 7). He considers the 1633 bilingual (Spanish-French) version to be “by far the best of the three” (p. 15). 8  For specific page references to the variants reviewed in this paragraph, see Kathleen V. Kish, “Celestina as Chameleon: The Early Translations,” Celestinesca 33 (2009): 87–98; the Barth reading is on p. 90.

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so that they would not break (a power attributed by popular belief to deceived husbands). In the 1506 Italian translation, however, where Celestina’s husband is referred to as “comandator” (Kish, ed., p. 62), Ordóñez replaces the fried eggs with “boni arrosti” (good roasts) (ibid.). Was Ordóñez purposely obscuring the obscene reference (“huevos” in the sense of testicles), or might his source have said “buenos” instead of “huevos”? Judging from the numerous studies devoted to this passage, there are several possible answers to this question, all leaning toward the salacious.9 Do the early translators who succeeded Ordóñez offer any insights in this regard? The passage is missing from the English Interlude of Calisto and Melebea (c. 1530), the 1527 French translation, and the 1550 Dutch version. All three of the seventeenth-century translators (Mabbe, in both his manuscript rendition and in the published edition; Barth in his Neo-Latin translation; and the anonymous author of the 1633 French version) proclaim that Celestina’s late husband had devoured fried eggs. Jacques de Lavardin, on the other hand, appears to have made use of both a Spanish and an Italian source while omitting any reference to eggs in his 1578 French translation: “Oh, how fond of good roasts, what a devourer of good things to eat her husband was!” (O quel friand de bons rostiz, ô quel aualleur de bons morceaux estoit feu son mary!)10 Besides sometimes providing clues to the meaning of obscure (at least to us) passages of the Tragicomedia, the early translations can be interesting in their own right. Let us look at the case of the dual German renditions by Christof Wirsung, the second written fourteen years after the first. This translator worked from an edition of the Italian translation, which he had encountered while studying in Venice. To judge from his 1520 edition, not only was his 9  For more on this passage, see Joseph E. Gillet, “Comedor de huevos (?), (Celestina, Aucto I),” Hispanic Review 24 (1956): 144–47; Peter B. Goldman, “A New Interpretation of ‘Comedor de Huevos Asados’ (La Celestina, Act 1), Romanische Forschungen 77 (1965): 363–67; Miguel Garci-Gómez, “Huevos asados: afrodisíaco para el marido de Celestina,” Celestinesca 5, no. 1 (May 1981): 23–34; Kathleen Kish and Ursula Ritzenhoff, “On Translating huevos asados: Clues from Christof Wirsung,” Celestinesca 5, no. 2 (Fall 1981): 19–31. Lobera calls this passage “uno de los puntos más discutidos de L[a] C[elestina]” (one of the most discussed points of Celestina), citing examples from several sources, among them Miguel de Marciales, ed., Celestina. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, prepared by B. Dutton and J. T. Snow, 2 vols. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985). See Lobera et al., ed., pp. 599–600n54.1. The note also includes the readings of the passage in Juan Sedeño’s Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, nuevamente trobada y sacada de prosa en metro castellano (Salamanca: Pedro de Castro, 1540) and in the Manuscrito de Palacio. 10  Denis L. Drysdall, ed., La Celestina in the French Translation of 1578 by Jacques de Lavardin (London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1974), p. 61.

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command of Italian at the time unsteady; his written German was awkward. In one way, though, his maiden effort was a triumph. Wirsung’s Ain hipsche Tragedia (A Pleasant Tragedy), the first words of the 1520 title, is an artistic masterpiece: beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Hans Weiditz, it was printed in the typeface that had been designed for the book Theuerdank (the name of the work’s hero), which is attributed to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.11 This luxurious Celestina was the product of the Augsburg firm founded by Christof Wirsung’s father, the pharmacist Markus Wirsung, and one Sigismund Grimm, an immigrant to the city who became one of the official city doctors. In the book’s dedication, addressed to Christof’s cousin Sir Ernest Matheus Lang von Wellenburg (himself a cousin of the Cardinal and Archbishop of Salzburg), the translator states plainly that his purpose in telling the tale of the disastrous outcome of the love affair between a certain young couple was to deter young German-speaking men from falling victim to the wiles of procuresses and dishonest servants. This literary apology also announces the translator’s intention of honoring the author’s purpose, and that is what he does. Indeed, except for penning the aforementioned dedicatory letter and omitting the other materials that surround the twenty-one act text, there is only one place that the translator strays from his model: at the very end. Instead of making the final words of Pleberio’s sorrowful peroration the last ones of the work, the German translator adds a short dialogue between Melibea’s parents, followed by Pleberio’s asking for Lucrecia to help him take Alisa into their bedroom, where the couple can confer about what to do with Melibea’s body. Readers can judge for themselves the literary effectiveness of this interpolation and whether it changes the meaning of the work as a whole. In any case, it is tempting to speculate that Wirsung might have been moved to compose the addendum when he saw the book’s final illustration, which found a perfect fit just below the conclusion of Pleberio’s soliloquy, where he laments that he has been left to suffer in the proverbial vale of tears. If the work had ended 11  For a list of the whereabouts of known extant copies of the 1520 printing, consult the facsimile edition of this work and its successor, the 1534 Wirsung translation, in Die Celestina-Übersetzungen von Christof Wirsung: Ain hipsche Tragedia (Augsburg 1520). Ainn recht liepliches Buechlin (Augsburg 1534), ed. Kathleen V. Kish and Ursula Ritzenhoff (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1984), pp. 16–17. This edition includes one full-page color illustration of Calisto and Melibea in the garden, with her maid Lucrecia in the background and his servants in the foreground (following the English introduction, which ends on p. 123, and before the facsimile of the 1520 title page). This reproduction accompanies the “Argument der Gantzen Tragedia” (Argument of the Whole Tragedy), A3v–A4r.

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here, this layout would have left the next (and last) page of the text, the one before the work’s colophon, empty. Moreover, the content of the woodcut does not match the scene depicted in Pleberio’s planctus. Weiditz drew the event with all three of Melibea’s survivors mourning the girl’s death. Pleberio is in the background, arms raised, wailing; Alisa is kneeling over Melibea, cradling her body; and Lucrecia, sitting nearby, has her face buried in a large handkerchief. Wirsung’s source (following Rojas) implies that Alisa has died from the shock of Melibea’s suicide and makes no mention of Lucrecia after the beginning of Act 20, when the maid summons Pleberio to go to Melibea. Which came first, then: Wirsung’s new conclusion or Weiditz’s Act 21 woodcut? It is impossible to tell, but this dilemma should remind us that much more can be involved in the making of a translation than converting words from one language into another.12 By the time Wirsung decided to try his hand again at translating the Tragicomedia, he was working with improved German language skills. This was thanks largely to the fact that Luther’s New Testament (1522) had appeared in the interval between his two translations. Wirsung had probably gained a better grasp of Italian as well. He had also adopted a different stance vis-à-vis his model. Whereas in 1520 he had focused on the love story, in 1534 he insisted on the work’s didactic content, calling attention to it, for instance, in the marginal notes that he sprinkled throughout. Occasionally the translator’s Protestant leaning is unmistakable, as when he adds a satirical reference to the Catholic practice of selling indulgences.13 The author of the second French translation (1578), Jacques de Lavardin, took a different approach to philosophical belief in his version of Celestina. Rather than leaning on religion (Catholic or Protestant), he advanced a purely practical didacticism. This is seen most obviously at the end of the work, where he gives an important role to a character who was barely mentioned 12  In 1534, where Wirsung abandons the final dialogue between Melibea’s parents, Pleberio states plainly that his wife is dead (Kish and Ritzenhoff, ed., p. 42). In the new layout of the book’s ending, the printer alters the order of the last three woodcuts, destroying the harmony between text and illustrations (ibid., pp. 14–15). Hereafter cited in text. Note that the coloration of the woodcuts in this copy of the 1520 edition (and in some others) was added, probably by painters engaged by well-heeled owners of the volumes. For an extensive, illustrated treatment of Weiditz’s contribution to Celestina iconography, see Fernando Carmona Ruiz, “La cuestión iconográfica de la Celestina y el legado de Hans Weiditz,” eHumanista 19 (2011): 79–112. 13  Besides expanding on the attention to religion in the 1534 text (pp. 48–65), the editors point out passages in which the experienced pharmacist Wirsung manifested his professional knowledge (pp. 35–38).

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in the Spanish Tragicomedia: Alisa’s brother-in-law Cremes, called Ariston in Lavardin’s version, where other name changes are also to be found (Malican for Sempronio, Corneille for Pármeno, and Bezane for Sosia). Here Ariston is tasked with persuading Pleberio to abandon his despair in favor of fatalistic acceptance. Curiously, still another early Celestina version, An Interlude of Calisto and Melebea (1525–30), has a modified ending, this time marked by a didacticism flavored with humanism. In this short adaptation (too partial to be called a translation), the love affair ends before it’s begun and the cast is much reduced. The climax occurs when Melibea interprets a dream her father (called Danio here) has had, rightly inferring that it was about the imminent danger to her chastity. She confesses her guilt and is forgiven, after which her father sums up the moral of the story.14 It should be mentioned that the Interlude contains attacks on Catholicism, which buttress its “Orientación Reformista.”15 At the other end of the theological spectrum is the Dutch translation (first edition 1550), whose anonymous author seems to have been intent on inserting his version into the Catholic context that surrounded him while at the same time participating in the contemporary literary scene, which was “animated by the Chambers of Rhetoric, urban societies whose members wrote and performed plays, all under the leadership of their ‘factor.’ ”16 It is well to recall that the translator would have been aware of the fact that his work would have to pass two screenings: the first by the ecclesiastical censor, the second by the civil authorities.17 Even so, there is reason to conclude that the translator was required to incorporate an addendum at the end of the work to leave no question about the orthodoxy of the last words spoken by Pleberio. Accordingly, below the traditional conclusion of Pleberio’s soliloquy, printed in the form of an inverted triangle, the word “Finis” appears, followed by an original paragraph spoken by the bereft father of Melibea (1550 text, Y2v).18 After blaming 14  See the introduction to the Interludio de Calisto y Melibea: Estudio, traducción y notas, ed. Antonio López Santos and Rubén Tostado González (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2001), pp. 29–30. Note that “Melebea” (the spelling used in the English Interlude) becomes “Melibea” in this Spanish translation. 15  See Interludio, pp. 32–34. 16   Celestina: An Annotated Edition of the First Dutch Translation (Antwerp, 1550), ed. Lieve Behiels and Kathleen V. Kish (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), p. 58. 17  This was standard procedure in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. The printer of the 1550 Dutch translation won the imperial privilege of the Emperor Charles V as well as the approval of the ecclesiastical censor. Ibid., pp. 36–40. 18  The 1574 edition of the Dutch translation follows 1550, but deletes “Finis”; the 1580 and 1616 editions move “Finis” to the end of the new fragment. Ibid., p. 43.

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his own passivity for the tragic death of his only daughter, he prays: “I must and I wish to offer everything up to the Lord: may He be our help and refuge in this miserable vale of tears.”19 The treatment of moral themes and religious motifs by the seventeenthcentury English writer James Mabbe differs markedly in his two Celestina versions. The “moral stance” he takes in the Alnwick manuscript, probably completed between 1603 and 1611, does not stray from the one expressed by Rojas, according to Guadalupe Martínez Lacalle.20 This did not, however, preclude his employing “the amplification of obscene passages and words” (ibid., p. 65). However, approximately a quarter of a century later, when Mabbe published Celestina, The Spanish Bawd, Represented in Celestina: or, The Tragicke-Comedy of Calisto and Melibea (London, 1631), except for an occasional oversight, he removed or changed “all atheistic, blasphemous, profane or obscene language, plus references to the Christian religion” (ibid., p. 26). Some of the modifications that Mabbe introduced could have sprung from religious qualms—he was an Anglican priest. Martínez Lacalle, however, speculates that censorship might have played a role as well.21 In contrast with Mabbe’s 1631 “paganized” translation,22 the Latin version published by Kaspar Barth in 1624 shows barely any traces of expurgation. This is probably because, as Enrique Fernández asserts, “Barth sees Celestina as didactic reading.”23 The “limited censorship” (p. 31) that he did exercise was a far 19  Ibid., p. 43n104. The Dutch version reads as follows: “En moet ende wilt nv den heere op geuen, die welcke moet sijn ons hulper ende toeuerlaet in dit allendich dal del tranen, Amen (Y2v),” ibid., p. 43. 20   Celestine or the Tragick-Comedie of Calisto and Melibea, ed. Guadalupe Martínez Lacalle (London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1972), p. 44. She argues further here that Ordóñez, Lavardin, Barth, and Wirsung also imitated Rojas’s moral views in their Celestina translations, thus demonstrating “the universal acceptability” of these views (ibid.). Hereafter cited in text. 21  See her discussion of Mabbe’s expurgated Celestina in light of the 1606 Act of Abuses (pp. 37–39). 22  This was how Helen H. Houck characterized The Spanish Bawd in “Mabbe’s Paganization of the Celestina,” PMLA 54 (1939): 422–31. 23   Pornoboscodidascalus Latinus (1624): Kaspar Barth’s Neo-Latin Translation of Celestina, ed. Enrique Fernández (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 27. Hereafter cited in text. As Theodore S. Beardsley, Jr., remarks: “He [Barth] has been for the most part underestimated and underutilized”; thanks to Fernández’s edition, this no longer needs to be the case. See “Kaspar von Barth’s Neo-Latin Translation of Celestina (1624),” in Fernando de Rojas and Celestina: Approaching the Fifth Centenary, ed. Ivy A. Corfis and Joseph T. Snow (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993), 237– 50, p. 247.

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cry from that practiced by his compatriot Wirsung, who in 1534 had been careful to avoid offending his Protestant readers. Barth, on the other hand, hoped to attract both Catholic and Protestant readers. In Fernández’s view, he envisioned his translation as both a moral example and a practical lodestar for rich young men, especially German ones who were living abroad (p. 29).24 Barth himself, in the Prologue to his Latin version, indicates that he envisions his audience to be European readers in general.25 Given the emphasis on learning in Barth’s assessment of the value of Celestina, it comes as no surprise that he would extol the virtues of sententiae, sayings that “offer excellent rules for living” (Prologue, p. 379). Some of these find their way into the notes that the translator provides to his Pornoboscodidascalus Latinus.26 Barth’s overarching aim in adding this lengthy set of notes, many of which cite classical sources, is “to give authority to his translation,” Fernández asserts (p. 35). This accounts for Barth’s preference for literary over doctrinal sources, the reverse of the approach taken by the author of Celestina comentada, which for Fernández “explains why Barth’s translation notes and Celestina comentada’s glosses rarely include the same passages in their comments or quote selections of the same author” (p. 29). Of course, this does not mean that Barth’s notes are completely silent on the subject of his views on his Spanish model. In a note to a phrase on the first page of the Prologue, for example, he remarks, “This book only seems to have one problem and it is to neglect the decorum of the characters in its continuous effort to teach useful and generous behaviors” (p. 405, referring to “esse foetam aliquo”). 24  In the dedication to his 1520 translation, Wirsung, too, spoke of his purpose: “Warning inexperienced [German] youth” (Vmb warnung willen der vnerfarnen iugent) (A2v); see Kish and Ritzenhoff, ed., p. 71. In his 1534 translation, where an original dialogue replaces the dedicatory letter, the authoritative speaker Urbanus demonstrates to his shallow interlocutor Amusus that the Spanish “tragicomedy […] has no less usefulness in it than a Terentian or Plautine comedy” (Tragicocomoedi nit minder nutzparkeit in jr dañ ein Terentianische oder Plautinusche Comedi). Ibid., p. 77. 25  Clearly, Barth means educated European readers who could read Latin. English translations of Barth’s Latin are Fernández’s. Quoted passages respect the spelling of characters’ names without the accents used in Spanish. In the Prologue (pp. 377–400), Barth asserts that he “can fulfill [his] duty to the public good by making this Celestina available for the common theater of Europe” (p. 381). About his translation of Celestina, he maintains that “this play has not been produced for any given theater, nor written as entertainment for any given city or nation, but as a spectacle meant to educate all the Christian world” (Prologue, p. 395). 26  The edition by Fernández contains his translation of Barth’s notes (pp. 401–93), a list of the notes (pp. 494–506), and an index of the authors quoted in the notes (pp. 507–9).

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He follows this opinion with a characterization of the two prostitutes in the Act 1 notes. Referring to when Elicia berates Sempronio for daring to say that he would like to lay eyes on another woman, Barth writes: Notice the dishonesty of this harlot, who cannot but recriminate her lover for his misdeeds. You can see this character’s nature in many other scenes, but especially in Act 9 during the banquet. Areusa is presented as more prudent and smarter, as opposed to acting like a common prostitute. Later, when she plots with Elicia and she conspires with Centurio and Sosia, we realize that she is not simple at all. (p. 440, in the note on “Ha furcifer”) Barth’s character analysis of Parmeno is similarly nuanced. After stating that Parmeno sees that Celestina “seeks his ruin with her praises,” he continues: but lest the reader think that Parmeno is pondering everything wisely, the author shows how Parmeno’s hatred towards Sempronio is part of his decision-making process…. Parmeno is faithful to his master only to hinder and wrong Sempronio, whom he knows to be Celestina’s accomplice. He acts according to the wickedness he has inherited from his mother and from his servile condition.” (pp. 447–48, in the comment on “mala haec aegritudo est”) In a final example from the notes to Act 1, Barth remarks on Celestina’s professional expertise and cunning: “Notice how wisely and astutely this very wicked old woman kept this fatal name for the end of her speech. Since she [Celestina] was the organizer of many arrangements of this kind, she knew that Parmeno was dying for Areusa’s love” (p. 453, note on “Areusa[e]”). At this juncture it is worth commenting on two of the other early Celestina translators who annotated their compositions, in both cases prior to the Pornoboscodidascalus. Nearly a century before this work of Barth’s appeared, his countryman Christof Wirsung published Ainn recht liepliches Buechlin (1534). As we have already seen, this second translation of Celestina by the Augsburg pharmacist took a fresh approach. One innovation that he introduces here are the marginal notes that now pepper the text. Some of these are simple explanatory glosses on such things as characters’ names: “Scelestina” (wicked) (Y1v), for example, or “Melibia” (a honeysweet life) (f3r); this was the spelling used throughout in this edition for both of these names. In notes on classical allusions, though, Wirsung seems to exult in his knowledge of mythological figures and stories, embellishing his marginal explanations with

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additional information in the dialogue. This happens, for instance, in the allusion in the text proper to the golden apple and the Judgment of Paris (O1r).27 Other marginal notes either announce the subject of a passage, as in “Praise and usefulness of wine” (Lob vnd nutzbarkayt des weyns) (S1r); or they function as a sort of stage direction, as in “The maid talks to herself” (Die magt redet mit ihr selbst) (T2v). Some notes call attention to proverbs, as in “No love without sorrow” (Kain lieb on layd) (E3v); this proverb is identified as such by Wirsung, who adds it to Celestina’s lecture on love when she is seeking to win Pármeno over in Act 1. Others point out asides, as does this one: [Sempronio, speaking] “Secretly, and exits” (Haimlich vnd geet daruon) (C4v). Finally, a theme of major importance in Wirsung’s 1534 text, the law, shows up in the marginal notes.28 Let us consider now how James Mabbe handled marginal notes in his manuscript Celestine, the English translation that he finished some seventy years after the publication of Wirsung’s second German one. Guadalupe Martínez Lacalle devotes the opening section of her Chapter 4, “Study of the Text,” to the “frequent marginal annotations, which are of great importance”: not only do they show “that Mabbe was a scholarly translator as well as a learned reader”; they also “shed some light upon his attitude towards the work he translated” (p. 45). He was given to providing “erudite” sententiae as well as popular proverbs to emphasize “the main aspects of La Celestina—love, death and fortune” (p. 46). He liked to signal the occurrence in the dialogue of numerous other topics (riches, friendship, wine, etc.) by naming them in the margin; he even included notes in Latin, with or without his personal comments (pp. 49–51).29

27  The marginal note provides a brief synopsis of this whole episode, which was to lead to the Trojan War. For more information about the marginal notes that are discussed above, as well as some others in Wirsung’s second Celestina translation, see Kish and Ritzenhoff, ed., pp. 55–58. 28  Ibid. pp. 58–66. In his comprehensive study “La recepción de La Celestina en Alemania en el siglo XVI” (PhD diss., Université de Fribourg, 2007), Fernando Ruiz Carmona disputes the idea that in 1534 Wirsung might have presented the possibility of Melibea’s marrying Calisto as a call to reform the marriage laws (Kish and Ritzenhoff, ed., p. 69), arguing instead that “it is without a doubt due to Protestantism, but at the same time to promarriage literature bearing a humanist stamp” (se debe sin duda al protestantismo, pero a su vez a la literatura pro-matrimonial de cuño humanista) (p. 402). 29  Martínez Lacalle asserts that “Mabbe consulted the French version by Jacques de Lavardin (1578) and an edition of Ordóñez’s Italian translation, as well as the Spanish original” (p. 33). She does not speculate about possible influence on Mabbe’s translations from other non-Spanish forerunners.

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Notes themselves are the mainstay of the unfinished mid-sixteenthcentury manuscript known as Celestina comentada, called by its editors “the first lengthy commentary that we have of Celestina” (el primer comentario extenso que conservamos de La Celestina).30 Its author remains anonymous, although scholars familiar with the work believe that he must have studied law and that he could have practiced it. To judge from the nearly seven hundred glosses on the Tragicomedia that came from his pen, probably over the course of many years, he was a cultivated intellectual who admired the masterpiece that he chose to annotate.31 Many of the notes adduce auctoritates (authorities), whom the writer cites to help him make the case for the doctrinal correctness of Celestina. These authoritative voices are of three kinds: classical authors, religious sources, and legal works. The study of the third category holds special promise, given that this annotator, like Rojas, was a jurist. The fact that he provided Spanish translations of the quotes he cited in Latin leads us to conclude that he envisioned his audience as comprising more than lawyers and law students, although legal professionals and budding professionals might have been the only readers equipped to decipher some of Rojas’s ironic intentions.32 That he felt free to add evidence from the fields of civil and canon law to that culled from literary sources to his stable of auctoritates, suggests Russell, was because “in the fifteenth century, and even earlier, the study of Roman law was tending more and more to be situated within an intellectual tradition common to jurists and other men of letters” (en el siglo XV, e incluso 30   Celestina comentada, ed. Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernández Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne, with the collaboration of Ivy Corfis, Michel García, and Fabienne Plazolles (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2002), p. xv. These editors believe that most of the work on the commentary was done in the first two or three dec­ ades of the second half of the sixteenth century, reaching the state in which it exists now toward the middle or end of the decade of 1570 (p. xx). For an example of how the commentator structured his work, see the gloss on “su soberbia” in Louise Fothergill-Payne, “ ‘Conséjate con Séneca’: ‘Auctoritas’ in Celestina and Celestina comentada,” in Corfis and Snow, ed., 113–28, p. 122. Here is how she describes her source: “The commentary is an incomplete codex of 221 folios preserved in MS 17631 of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid” (p. 126n1). 31  It should be noted that the edition used by the writer of the commentary was a 22-act version, i.e., one of those with a new Act 19, the so-called “Auto de Traso” (ed. Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernandez Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne) (p. xvi.) The commentator’s secondary sources included “one of the Italian translations” (una de las traducciones al italiano) [of the Tragicomedia] (ibid.) (p. xvii). 32  See Peter E. Russell’s discussion of Calisto’s monologue on the law in Act 14 in “La Celestina y los estudios jurídicos de Fernando de Rojas,” in Temas de La Celestina y otros estudios del Cid al Quijote (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1978), 323–40.

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antes, el estudio del derecho romano tendía cada vez más a situarse dentro de una tradición intelectual común a juristas y a otros hombres de letras).33 Nevertheless, as Ivy A. Corfis asserts, in the corpus of glosses provided by the author of Celestina comentada, we have “a sociological and literary artifact with which to amplify modern understanding of the legal code that the author was manipulating and that was within reach of his public” (un artefacto sociológico y literario con el que se amplía la comprensión moderna del código jurídico que manejaba el autor y que estaba al alcance de su público).34 Before summing up the value of the early translations of and commentaries on Celestina, let us consider one more source in this category: the lost Hebrew version attributed to Joseph ben Samuel Tsarfati. Brought to the attention of Hispanists by D. W. McPheeters some fifty years ago, it continues to elicit responses from scholars.35 How so? Although the translation is no longer extant, the poem that its author wrote as a preface to the work survives. Like Ordóñez, Tsarfati was in service at the papal court. According to Amy Baron and Amaranta Saguar García, this “physician to Pope Julius II, poet, linguist and academic,” wrote his poetic prologue in 1507, probably motivated by the appearance the year before of Ordóñez’s Italian translation, and “not content with the work reaching his non-Jewish Italian contemporaries alone, he saw it as his duty to transfer Celestina to the Jewish community as well.”36 Baron and Saguar García view Tsarfati’s poem as “a defiant defence of his translation of 33  Peter E. Russell, “El primer comentario crítico de La Celestina: cómo un legista del siglo XVI interpretaba la Tragicomedia,” in Temas, 293–322. 34  Ivy A. Corfis, “La Celestina comentada y el código jurídico de Fernando de Rojas,” in The Age of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1516: Literary Studies in Memory of Keith Whinnom, ed. Alan Deyermond and Ian Macpherson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), pp. 19–24. Corfis’s contribution to this Special Issue of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies provides notes replete with bibliographic information. See also Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernandez Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne eds., “Bibliografía,” pp. xxv–xlvii; and, for a selection of more bibliographical entries on Celestina in all areas, see http:// parnaseo.uv.es/Celestinesca/Bibliografía_celestinesca.html. 35  D. W. McPheeters, “Una traducción hebrea de La Celestina en el siglo XVI,” in Estudios humanísticos de La Celestina (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1985), 34–49; the first footnote (p. 34, marked with an asterisk) mentions a preliminary version of this study, delivered at the second Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, Nijmegen, in 1965. 36  “Historical and literary influences on Tsarfati’s Poem composed by the Poet upon his Translation of the Tale of Melibea and Calisto,” Celestinesca 36 (2012): 9–34, pp. 9–10, 30. This article supplies an extensive bibliography (pp. 31–33). See also Amy Baron, “English Translation of A Poem Composed by the Poet upon his Translation of the Tale of Melibea and Calisto, Joseph ben Samuel Tsarfati, 1507,” Celestinesca 36 (2012): 35–46.

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Celestina.”37 In their opinion, Tsarfati’s poem, together with his (lost) adaptation of Rojas’s work, represents “an invaluable testament to the reception of Rojas’ Celestina in non-Christian circles.”38 It is well to recall, too, as Michelle M. Hamilton reminds us, that Tsarfati’s poetic preface is “remarkable in that it not only offers us a glimpse of how Rojas’ Tragicomedia was interpreted by a contemporary, but also how the Tragicomedia […] fits within the context of medieval Judeo-Spanish literature.39 After this dizzying journey around Western Europe lasting fully a century and a quarter (1506–1633), what are we to make of the role of translations in the evolution of the international best seller Celestina? Are there reasons to claim still today that the early translations are of value to celestinistas? Do they have intrinsic worth? Do they suggest areas of future study? What importance, if any, should we accord to glosses of passages in Celestina provided by early commentators, including some of the translators? The fact that all of the early Celestina translations (with one exception: the 1633 bilingual one) have appeared in modern editions attests to their significance for Celestina studies. These works provide useful clues to scholars attempting to reconstruct the lost first edition in Spanish as well as to linguists hoping to decipher erroneous or mysterious passages in the Spanish. The array of early renditions in so many different languages is a boon to specialists in comparative literature and to experts in paremiology. Scholars with interests in a wide variety of historical fields—culture, law, society, religion, publishing, 37  The authors here (p. 22) appear to take Tsarfati at his word, asserting that: “The admonitory tone throughout Tsarfati’s poem represents the didactic purpose of his adaptation of Celestina” (p. 20). María Rosa Lida de Malkiel sounds more skeptical when she states that “el prefacio poético de Sarfatí es la obligatoria defensa de una obra de entretenimiento.” La originalidad artística de La Celestina, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1970), 297n16. Dwayne E. Carpenter also weighs in on the question of Tsarfati’s didactic intent: “It seems that Tsarfati’s purpose is less ‘enseñar deleitando’ than ‘deleitar narrando.” “The Sacred in the Profane: Jewish Scriptures and the First Comedy in Hebrew,” in Corfis and Snow, ed., 229–36, p. 234. 38  Baron and Saguar García, p. 30. 39  Michelle M.Hamilton, “Joseph ben Samuel Sarfati’s ‘Tratado de Melibea y Calisto’: A Sephardic Jew’s Reading of the Celestina in Light of the Medieval Judeo-Spanish Gobetween Tradition,” Sefarad 62, no. 1 (2002): 329–47. UC Irvine: Retrieved March 18, 2016, from http://eprints.cdlib.org/uc/item/5sf444wx. Baron cites a thematically related dissertation (which was finished too late for her to incorporate in her article): Shon David Hopkin, “Joseph ben Samuel Tsarfati and Fernando de Rojas: Celestina and the World of the Go-Between” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011); see Baron, p. 9n1 and p. 32, in the Bibliography, under “Hopkin.”

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art, censorship, commerce, international relations—can find grist for their respective mills in the early Celestina translations. Naturally, so can specialists in translation studies.40 As we have seen, those interested in how the work was received and understood over time and in different climes will be especially drawn to the copious notes in Celestina comentada and in Barth’s NeoLatin version. They should not, however, overlook the attitudes expressed in the original pieces composed by some of the early translators to accompany their works, including dedicatory letters, marginal notes, and such curiosities as the introductory dialogue between Amusus and Urbanus in Wirsung’s second German version or the poem composed in Hebrew by Tsarfati to mark the appearance of his translation in 1507. Celestina is the gift that keeps on giving. With such a rich resource to plumb, there can be no fear that scholars will run out of material. Studies on the early translations and commentaries have contributed much to what is known about the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. There is every reason to believe that researchers will continue to mine this rich vein of Celestina studies.41

40  See, for example, Enrica J. Ardemagni, “Celestina’s Laboratory: A Translator’s Dilemma,” in Corfis and Snow, ed., 383–89. 41  We have already mentioned the 2007 study by Fernando Ruiz Carmona (see above, note 28) and the one by Shon David Hopkin (see above, note 39). Another example is how translations (including some modern editions of early Celestina translations) are used in the recent dissertation by José Antonio Torregrosa Díaz, “Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea: Anotaciones Críticas y Textuales y Versión Modernizada” (PhD diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2015); see at http://hdl.handle.net/10201/44586.

CHAPTER 20

Celestina’s Continuations, Adaptations, and Influences Consolación Baranda The editorial success of Celestina was immediate and long-lasting. As Keith Whinnom has suggested, Celestina was clearly the most successful piece of fiction in the Golden Age, eclipsed only by Amadis and its continuations.1 Soon after its publication, many writers saw in Celestina a model for the exploration of new paths in literature, and they started to imitate its characters, situations, and style. Because Celestina was so influential in sixteenth-century Spanish literature, we must distinguish works that resorted to well-known techniques of adaptation and continuation from those that took from Celestina only discrete features, such as characters, episodes, and scenarios.2 To subsume all these productions under the umbrella term of “imitations of Celestina,” or “celestinesca,” as they are often referred to, misrepresents the subtleties of an interesting phenomenon taking place precisely at a time when the radical and wide-ranging renovation of all literary genres was taking place. To avoid this 1  Keith Whinnom, “The Problem of the ‘Best-Seller’ in Spanish Golden-Age Literature,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 57, no. 3 (1980), 189–98, p. 193. On the sucess of Celestina, see also Maxime Chevalier, “La Celestina según sus lectores,” in Lectura y lectores en la España del siglo XVI y XVII (Madrid: Turner, 1976), 138–66; Joseph T. Snow, “Historia de la recepción de Celestina: 1499–1822. I (1499–1600),” Celestinesca 23, no. 1–2 (1997): 115–172; Joseph T. Snow, “Historia de la recepción de Celestina: 1499–1822. II (1499–1600),” Celestinesca 25, no. 1–2 (2001): 199–282; Emilio Blanco, “Algunas notas sobre la recepción de Celestina en los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Celestina: Recepción y herencia de un mito literario, ed. Gregorio Torres Nebrera (Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 2001), 17–50; and Joseph T. Snow, “Historia de la recepción de Celestina: 1499–1822. III (1601–1800),” Celestinesca 26, no. 1–2 (2002): 53–121. 2  A summary of the extended bibliography of the imitations of Celestina’s characters, situations, and formal aspects can be found in Baranda and Ana Vian Herrero, “El nacimiento crítico del ‘género’ celestinesco: historia y perspectivas,” in Orígenes de la novela: estudios. Ponencias presentadas al congreso I Encuentro Nacional Centenario de Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo celebrado en Santander los días 11 y 12 de diciembre de 2006, ed. Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián and Borja Rodríguez Gutiérrez (Santander: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cantabria, Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2007), 406–81, p. 446n35. For the studies published after 2007, see the bibliographical sections periodically published in the journal Celestinesca.

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trap, this chapter explores first the variegated types of influence that Celestina had on the literature of the first decades of the sixteenth century until the publication of Segunda Celestina (1534). Secondly, it analyzes the characteristics of the Celestina continuations, especially how they depart from this model.3

Early Imitations and Adaptations

The theater of Juan del Encina (1468–1529) and Lucas Fernández (c. 1474–1542) evidences the immediate interest that the character of Celestina aroused soon after Celestina was published. Juan del Encina’s Égloga de Plácido y Vitoriano, staged in Rome c. 1513, includes the procuress Eritrea, who mends the virginity of women and is an expert in the confection of philters. However, Eritrea does not perform these activities before the audience since she plays a minimal role. Her inclusion in the story is basically an homage to Rojas, a sign of the relevance that the character of the procuress had gained after the publication of Celestina a few years earlier.4 Lucas Fernández’s Égloga o farsa del nacimiento de nuestro Señor Jesucristo describes an old woman who lives as an eremite, and whose many abilities make the shepherd Bonifacio exclaim: “She is such an old whore—worse than Celestina” (¡Qué gran puta vieja es ella! / Peor es que Celestina!).5 However, the eremite does not intervene in the action of this text either. Around the same time, Pedro Manuel Ximénez de Urrea was the first to use Celestina as a comprehensive model in his Égloga de la tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea de prosa trobada en verso, included in a Cancionero (Logroño: Arnau de Brocar, 1513).6 The eclogue faithfully renders the beginning of the first Act of Celestina in verse. By transforming the act into an eclogue, the most popular dramatic genre for performance at the time, Ximénez de Urrea made Celestina 3  This work is part of the Project MICINN FFI2012–33903. 4  According to Canavaggio, the presence of Eritrea in Égloga de Plácido y Vitoriano serves exclusively to mark the opposition between the perversion of the urban environment and the innocent pastoral world in which the protagonists meet. Jean Canavaggio, “La Célestine au miroir du théâtre espagnol des XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” Celestinesca 32 (2008): 69–83, p. 71. 5  Lucas Fernández, Farsas y églogas (Salamanca: Lorenzo de Liom Dedei, 1514). The quote is from the online edition of Javier San José Lera, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/ lucas_fernandez. My translation. I will provide my own translation of the Spanish passages unless otherwise noted. 6  A few years later, Juan Sedeño wrote another adaptation in verse, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, nuevamente trobada y sacada de prosa en metro castellano (1540), ed. Lorenzo Blini, Lemir, no. 13 (2009): 29–234.

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accessible to a different audience. Probably, Urrea’s purpose was to adapt the first scenes of Celestina for performance on a private stage, such as the one in the palace of the counts of Aranda.7 Urrea was not “imitating” but “adapting” Celestina. Adaptation was a widespread form of imitatio, altering genre to adjust content to a specific audience: a practice comparable to today’s practice of turning a novel into a movie. In the same year, 1513, the printer, Jacobo Cromberger, who had published several editions of Celestina, issued the anonymous Romance de Calisto y Melibea as a loose sheet in Seville.8 This, too, was an adaptation into a different genre and format. As a consequence of the changes, done to align the piece with conventions of the target genre, the details in the original story were simplified, and the story rewritten in the popular romance stanza—a genre reaching even to the least cultivated readers and audiences. This adaptation was responsible for the growing popularity of Celestina among all social classes, and especially of the procuress Celestina, who even became a part of popular Spanish proverbs and sayings.9 While Urrea rewrote the first Act of Celestina in verse, keeping the dialogued form of the original and aiming it at an audience which had already read Rojas’s masterpiece, the anonymous author of Romance de Calisto y Melibea only summarized the “caso” (event or episode) of Calisto’s and Melibea’s misadventures, eliminating some parts while completely re-working content and form. In spite of their different agendas, Urrea’s Égloga de la tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea and the anonymously authored Romance de Calisto y Melibea both “transformed” the original into a text suitable for a new kind of receiver. The two authors resorted to specific resources and techniques to reach the audience they had in mind: a courtly audience in the case of Urrea’s eclogue, and a popular one in the case of the anonymous romance. However, importantly, the two adapters, even if “rewriting” Rojas’s plot, did not claim to have created a new text, only to have recast the original in a new format.

7  Miguel Ángel Pérez Priego, “La herencia celestinesca en el teatro del siglo XVI,” introduction to Cuatro comedias celestinescas (Valencia: UNED, 1993), 9–23, pp. 15–16. 8  Romance nuevamente hecho de Calisto y Melibea que trata de todos sus amores y las desastradas muertes suyas y de la muerte de sus criados Sempronio y Pármeno y de la muerte de aquella desastrada muger Celestina intercesora en sus amores (Sevilla: Jacobo Cromberger, 1513), ed. Carlos Mota Plasencia, “La Celestina, de la comedia humanística al pliego suelto. Sobre el Romance de Calisto y Melibea,” in “Estaba el jardín en flor…” Homenaje a Stefano Arata, in Criticón, no. 87–88–89 (2003), 519–35. 9  Chévalier, “La Celestina según sus lectores,” pp. 607–8.

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In 1514, one year after Romance de Calisto y Melibea’s publication, Ximénez de Urrea resorted again to Celestina for his Penitencia de amor (Burgos, Fadrique de Basilea). This story of two young lovers is a mixture of the sentimental romance genre with some innovations popularized by Celestina. The first part follows the conventions of the sentimental romance: Darino sees Finoya in a castle window and falls in love with her; he sends her several letters and presents through his faithful servants; and she agrees to meet him. As soon as the lovers meet, the story progresses rapidly, its events recalling Celestina. However, the plot does not include a procuress, unfaithful servants, or dramatic deaths, and the action does not take place in an urban environment. The exemplary ending is the result of the application of the principles of the honor code, not of fortuitous events, as in Celestina: when Finoya’s father discovers the love affair, he sends the two lovers to prison for life. Urrea’s innovations combined the two love story genres, even if those genres relied on very different concepts and techniques.10 In 1517, Torres Naharro published Comedia Himenea in Naples. This text contains several characters and situations taken directly from Celestina. As Pérez Priego pointed out, the lineage of the two lovers, some episodes (such as the nocturnal rendezvous), and the servants’ cowardice when they hear noises on the streets, are clearly of the same origin.11 However, Celestina’s unhappy ending is replaced by the lovers’ secret marriage, which placates the wrath of the young woman’s brother, who was ready to violently restore the family honor. The text differs from Celestina in other important aspects, such as the use of verse, the absence of a procuress, the happy ending, and an overall different dramatic conception. In 1521, a volume with three anonymous comedies appeared in Valencia. It contained Comedia Thebayda, Comedia Seraphina, and Comedia Ypolita, which since the days of Menéndez y Pelayo have been considered imitations of Celestina. Like their model, they narrate how young men, with the help of their servants, achieve the love of women. Unlike the texts so far discussed, Comedia Thebayda and Comedia Seraphina clearly adopt Celestina’s formal features: dialogues in prose, the same use of asides, abundance of comments, monologues, etc. Nevertheless, the happy endings of the stories indicate that the authors had an accurate conception of how a comedy should end. As a 10  Pedro Manuel Ximénez de Urrea, Penitencia de amor, ed. Domingo Ynduráin (Madrid: Akal, 1996). For the influences of Celestina and sentimental romance in the text, see Jesús Gómez, “Las artes de amores, Celestina y el género literario de la Penitencia de amor de Urrea,” Celestinesca 14, no. 1 (1990): 3–16. 11  Pérez Priego, “La herencia celestinesca en el teatro del siglo XVI,” p. 16.

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matter of fact, the lovers do not die in Penitencia de amor either, in spite of the fact that fatal outcomes were common in the sentimental novel. Leaving aside the two versified adaptations mentioned (Égloga de la tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea and Romance de Calisto y Melibea), the early texts inspired by Celestina all omit the important procuress. In all of them, the servants play intermediaries, but are always faithful to their lord, unlike Pármeno and Sempronio in Celestina. The authors’ reasons for leaving out the procuress are difficult to guess. We may speculate that the presence of a procuress did not fit the happy ending of the stories.

Continuations of Celestina

Feliciano de Silva’s La segunda comedia Celestina (1534, with three subsequent editions in years following, until included in the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559) was a milestone in terms of Celestina’s sixteenth-century literary influence. Feliciano de Silva inaugurated what in Spanish is called the “ciclo celestinesco” (celestinsque cycle), to which belonged: Tercera parte de la tragicomedia de Celestina (1536) by Gaspar Gómez, Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia llamada Elicia y por otro nombre cuarta obra y tercera Celestina (1542) by Sancho de Muñón, Tragedia Policiana (1547 and 1548) by Sebastián Fernández, Comedia Selvagia (1554) by Alonso de Villegas, and Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina (c. 1570, never printed).12 To write continuations, or second parts, 12  Although Pierre Heugas included Comedia Florinea as one of the direct descendents of Celestina in his La Célestine et sa descendence directe (Bordeau: Institut d’Études Ibériques et Ibéro-américaines, 1973), the characters of the book do not have any connection—descendants, disciples, etc.—with those in Celestina, a prerequisite for inclusion in the cycle. He did not include Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina in his study because it was found later (Stephano Arata, “Una nueva tragicomedia celestinesca del siglo XVI,” Celestinesca 12, no. 1 [1988]: 45–50). The quotes are from the following editions: Feliciano de Silva, Segunda Comedia de Celestina, ed. Consolación Baranda (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), http://eprints.ucm.es/14727; Tercera parte de la comedia de Celestina, ed. Mac Eugene Barrick (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973); Sancho de Muñón, Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia llamada Elicia y por otro nombre cuarta obra y tercera Celestina, ed. Rosa Navarro Durán (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009); Sebastián Fernández, Tragedia Poliziana, ed. Luis Mariano Esteban Martín (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense, 1992), http://eprints.ucm.es/3294; Alonso de Villegas Selvago, Comedia llamada Selvagia, ed. Marqués de la Fuensanta del Valle, Colección de libros españoles raros o curiosos, vol. 5 (Madrid: Imp. Rivadeneyra, 1873). Another edition, although difficult to access, is Yiling Li Liang, Edición y estudio de la Comedia Selvagia (1554) de Alonso de

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is a form of imitation with its own rules. The continuator extends the story of another author’s book readers know and like.13 The continuator tries to satisfy reader curiosity for events before or after those in the original story. From a commercial point of view, the continuator takes advantage of another writer’s success by offering readers additional episodes for characters they like. The continuators appropriate one or more of the original story’s characters, or create new characters related to them, often sons or daughters of the originals. This form of imitatio was assiduously applied in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to successful titles, especially books of chivalry, which saw many continuations, such as the very popular cycles of Amadís de Gaula and of Palmerín de Oliva.14 Equally, renowned books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as El Lazarillo, Los siete libros de Diana, Guzmán de Alfarache, and Don Quixote, had continuations by other authors. Continuations were a productive literary modality of literature whose success proved there was an appetite for fictional literature during the Renaissance. Continuations were most often published soon after the original appeared in order to take advantage of early success.15 Surprisingly though, the first continuation of Celestina, Silva’s La segunda comedia Celestina (1534), only appeared thirty-four years after the publication of Rojas’s successful original. A possible reason for the delay is that the plot of Celestina made a continuation difficult. Since most continuations use the main characters to connect with the original story, the deaths of Celestina’s central characters—Celestina, Villegas Selvago (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense, 1995), and published in Guangzou: Shijie tushu chuban gongsi, 2014; Tragicomedia de Polidoro y Casandrina (Ms. II-1591 de la Real Biblioteca. Edición y estudio), ed. Pedro Luis Críez Garcés (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense, 2015) (soon available as an e-print through the online repertory of dissertations of the Universidad Complutense). 13  When a story is unfinished, as with the text Rojas found in Salamanca, and a writer composes an ending, as Rojas did, we can speak of a “prolongation.” But when the original story has an ending, we call it a “continuation.” 14  Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp. 198– 201 mentions the many continuations of the Iliad and the Oddyssey that form the Trojan cycle; in the thirteenth century, Jean de Meung continued the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris. 15  The continuation of Cárcel de amor in 1496, four years after the original, as well as the cases of Lazarillo de los atunes (1555), Segunda parte de la Diana (1563), Diana enamorada (1564), Guzmán (1602), Avellaneda’s Quijote (1614), and many other similar titles, demonstrate that sequels were published soon after the originals. On the composition of continuations and cycles in Spanish literature, see La escritura inacabada: continuaciones y creación en España (siglos XIII–XVII), ed. David Álvarez Roblin and Olivier Biaggini (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, in press).

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Calisto, and Melibea, as well as the servants: Pármeno and Sempronio—made continuation of the narrative difficult.16 In spite of the deaths of Celestina’s main characters, Feliciano de Silva, whose ingenuity for writing chivalric books by resorting to sons of heroes was legendary, had no difficulty finding a solution.17 To recover the character of Celestina, he resorted to an ingenuous modification of the original story: Celestina survived Pármeno’s and Sempronio’s blows, and found shelter in the house of a clergyman who owed her many favors. After having recovered from the wounds that Pármeno and Sempronio inflicted upon her, she decides to return to her old house to continue living with Elicia. Publicly, she claims she has come back to life miraculously and repents her previous life. This, however, is only a ruse to continue her previous lifestyle: she immediately returns to her old trade, mediating the love of Polandria and Felides, the offspring of wealthy families. This time, cautious, she hides her activities to keep the lovers’ servants out of the deal. Besides Celestina and Elicia, Feliciano de Silva included in his continuation other characters taken from Rojas’s original: Areúsa, Centurio, Crito, and Sosia. These borrowed characters are the same as in the original, with the same physical features (Celestina’s scar on her face) and the same living spaces (Celestina’s house). Also, some important props of the original reappear, including the notorious gold chain. Most importantly, Celestina’s memory of her previous bad experience is tantamount to explaining her cautious behavior in this and other continuations, in which she avoids the complicity of the servants’ lovers. This precaution seems to work since none of the Celestina characters in the continuations die at the hands of their clients’ servants. In 1536, two years after Silva’s continuation, Gaspar Gómez’ Tercera parte de la tragicomedia de Celestina was published. This new sequel continues where Silva’s book ended: with the secret marriage of the lovers. The book narrates the events between the secret marriage and the public wedding. Celestina, who performs now the role of matchmaker, kills herself when, in a hurry to collect the reward for her good work, she falls down the stairs. As before, the death of the main character could not prevent continuations of the cycle. In 1542, Sancho de Muñón published Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia llamada Elicia y por otro nombre cuarta obra y tercera Celestina. The procuress in the story is Elicia, by then an old woman. Curiously, the characters’ words discredit 16  A good example of how the death of the protagonist makes continuations difficult is the end of Don Quixote’s second part, in which Cervantes makes his hero die to prevent spurious continuations, as had been the case with Avellaneda’s notorious continuation. 17  Feliciano de Silva wrote Lisuarte de Grecia (1514), Amadís de Grecia (1530), Florisel de Niquea (1532), and Rogel de Grecia (1534).

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Feliciano de Silva’s resurrection of the character of Celestina in his continuation. Elicia says that Silva’s procuress was not the real Celestina, but a woman who had usurped her name. As proof, the book adduces that Celestina had clearly died at the hands of Pármeno and Sempronio, as the epitaph on her tombstone in a church reads. This correction of Silva’s story remembers the one Silva applied to Rojas’s original story by making Celestina survive Pármeno’s and Sempronio’s blows. The correction is also a good example of how each continuator had to take into account the plot of previous continuations, not only of Rojas’s original. Every writer of a Celestina sequel had to respect the coherence cycle, although he was entitled to partially modify it. The denouement of Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia is more in line with Rojas’s original than Silva’s: the lovers and the procuress die, though in different, unrelated events. Elicia dies at the hands of the thug Brumandilón, with whom she lives, and the two lovers die in each other’s arms in an ambush planned by Roselia’s brother. This ending owes much to Torres Naharro’s Comedia Himenea, in which the woman’s brother also acts as the guardian of the family honor— Torres Naharro’s story, however, being a comedy, ends happily. Sebastián Fernández’s Tragedia Policiana (1547 and 1548) distinguishes itself among Celestina continuations as the action takes place before the events in Rojas’s original. Tragedia Policiana narrates a love story mediated by the procuress Claudina, who had been Celestina’s master and Pármeno’s mother in Rojas’s original. The sequel mentions the relation between Claudina and Celestina, and some of the two women’s vicissitudes, briefly mentioned in Rojas’s text, are developed in the new plot. When Claudina is about to die, she bequeaths her laboratory to Celestina and entrusts her with the inheritance of her son Pármeno, who she has not seen for seven years. Claudina dies due to blows from the servants of Teofilón, the father of the young woman in whose seduction Claudina intervenes. Since the story takes place before the events of Rojas’s original, Sebastián Fernández cannot make any references to the actions or characters in the Celestina cycle. However, he imitates situations and episodes taken from Segunda and Tercera Celestina, as well as from Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia. Alonso de Villegas Selvago’s Comedia Selvagia (1554) narrates the story of a procuress, Dolosina, the granddaughter of the character of Claudina, as developed in Tragedia Policiana—Dolosina recalls how Teofilón’s servants killed her grandmother. The story is not directly connected to Rojas’s plot, but many characters are descendants of those in the Celestina cycle: the servant Sagredo is Sempronio and Elicia’s son, and Rubino is Pármeno and Areúsa’s; the pimp Escalión is the son of Brumandilón from Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia. Comedia Selvagia has the most complex plot of the cycle, with many secondary

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episodes, two procuresses, and two pairs of lovers. At the end, anagnorisis (recognition of the true identity of a character, generally of noble descent) contributes to the general happy denouement. The last continuation of Celestina is the Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina (c. 1570), whose protagonist is the sordid procuress Corneja. She is a disciple of Elicia, who, as we saw, was a full-fledged procuress in Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia. Also, as in Comedia Selvagia, the servant Salustico is Elicia’s son. The text ends with the death of the young suitor, murdered by his servants, who eventually kill each other. The procuress and her daughter do not die because they previously escaped so as not to share the booty with the servants. This brief summary of the continuations of Celestina shows how each takes into account the preceding ones, alluding to them in direct ways, creating intertextual relations that are explicitly stated for the reader. Although each continuation may be read independently from the rest of the cycle, all together constitute what we can call a macro-text. The interrelationship among the different texts is clearly reinforced through the repetition of idioms and proverbs borrowed from Rojas’s original. These expressions are often reused in exactly the same situations and with the same meanings as in the original, although on some occasions they are used to express new meanings, establishing a critical relationship with the original use. The reusing of sententiae from the original allows readers to enjoy the famous “rivulets of philosophy” (fontezicas de filosophía) (6; 70)18 of Rojas’s text. Readers enjoyed their ability to recognize them in a different context, an important source of pleasure for the readers of continuations. The presence of easily identified borrowed expressions creates a supra-textual net extending across the continuations, unifying the different texts that form the Celestina cycle.

Constants in the Celestina Cycle and Differences from the Original

In their efforts to continue the story of Celestina, the authors included allusions to the previous continuations in their additions to the cycle. Some were absolutely necessary to keep the inner coherence of the cycle; some, however, were meant to correct or criticize the preceding continuations. All the continuations of Celestina narrate stories that elaborate on Rojas’s basic plot of 18  The Spanish quotes from Celestina are by page number from La Celestina, ed. Francisco Lobera et al. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000). The English quotes from Celestina are by page number from Peter Bush’s translation (New York: Penguin, 2009).

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a noble young man in love who can only gain access to his beloved woman with the help of servants and a procuress. The continuations also adopt the main formal features of Rojas’s original, such as the use of prose, dialogue, monologues, asides, and stage directions. Some continuations even imitate the paratexts—prologue, dedications, etc.—that accompany the main text of Celestina. However, they differ from Rojas’s original in many aspects. Feliciano de Siva must be considered the originator of the Celestina cycle, not only because he literally brought Celestina back to life, but also because he introduced innovations taken from the Comedia Thebayda that later continuators followed.19 As Keith Whinnom suggested, the mediation of Silva’s Segunda Celestina explains how all the titles of this cycle work as a unit, with a cohesion among the continuations that is stronger than the one binding them to Rojas’s original.20 I will point out here the innovations that make the continuations in the Celestina cycle a cohesive unit and that separate them from the original, notably through the proliferation of characters.21 While Rojas’s Celestina has only fourteen characters, Segunda Celestina has thirty-seven; Tercera Celestina, thirty-three; Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia, thirty-one; Tragedia Policiana, twenty; and Comedia Selvagia, twenty-three. Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina has only fourteen characters: one of the many peculiarities that sets it apart from the cycle. In general, the number of servants to the protagonist increases, as well as the characters moving in the underworld of crime and prostitution, probably inspired by the reality of the time. Undercover prostitutes, such as Elicia and Areúsa, are joined by women who perform their trade openly in public brothels. The texts include also their pimps, typically cowardly braggadocios, some of whom also work as servants to the protagonists, as Galterio in Comedia Thebayda does. The addition of servants triggers the proliferation of secondary plots, such as love affairs between the pimps and the prostitutes, or between servants—Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina being, again, the exception. Such development often results in the duplication 19   Comedia Thebayda served as an inspiration for the continuations of Celestina, as Heugas pointed out (La Célestine et sa descendance, pp. 175–78). 20  Keith Whinnom, “Heugas, Pierre, La Célestine et sa descendance directe, 1973, book review,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 53 (1976): 139–41; and “El género celestinesco: Origen y desarrollo,” Literatura en la época del Emperador, ed. V. García de la Concha (Salamanca: Academia Literaria Renacentista, 1988), 110–30. 21  I am summarizing here ideas I developed in Consolación Baranda, “De Celestinas: Problemas metodológicos,” Celestinesca 16, no. 2 (1991): 3–32, and in “Análisis crítico del género celestinesco.” In these studies, I did not include Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina, which is the exception to many of these innovations.

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of couples of lovers—upper class and lower class—making the Celestina cycle a clear forerunner of Lope de Vega’s and other Spanish playwrights’ stories with similar double couples. Also, in the Celestina cycle many characters are descendants or relatives not of the noble lovers but of servants, pimps, and procuresses—unlike in the continuations of books of chivalry, which rely on the descendants (especially the sons) of the noble knights. Disagreements and fights between the pimps and their protégées are frequently part of the narratives. So too are scenes of banquets recalling the events of Act 9 of Celestina. But unlike in the original, this underworld becomes nearly autonomous from the main plot. The adventures of these marginal characters are included as interludes that interrupt the main action, as comic interventions or anecdotes that exalt the pleasures of food and sex. Another difference between Celestina and its continuations is that the continuations present servants as loyal to their masters, helping those masters achieve their goals while happily accepting their deserved rewards for that help. Only a few are cowardly and dishonest. Similarly, the continuations do not include Elicia’s and Areúsa’s resentment for Melibea and the wealthy, as in Celestina. The words of the pimp Escalión in Comedia Selvagia are a good example of the social contentment of the subaltern characters: “I swear that I would not exchange my position for the one of the highest caballero of the kingdom, because I live more comfortably and for my own benefit than any of them, whose positions and honors do not allow them to rest, just the opposite of me, always happy and pleased” (Por mi fe, que no trocase mi estado por el del mejor caballero del reino, porque si bien se mira vivo más descansado y más a mi provecho que todos ellos, que sus estados y señoríos no solo no les traen descanso […] por el contrario, yo contino alegre, contino lleno de placer) (pp. 232–33). Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina is the exception since the servants hate their master to the point that they eventually murder him. The continuations indulge also in the inclusion of characters not part of the main plot. The plot of Segunda Celestina adds a couple of black lovers and an enamored shepherd; Tercera Celestina adds a gardener who speaks Basque (the vizcaino character); Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Rosalia adds a brother to the main character, a student, and some learned men; Tragedia Policiana adds two rustic peasants; Comedia Selvagia adds a man coming back from the Americas (the first case of the indiano character, so common in the later theater of the sixteenth century), and a little person; Tragicomedia de Poliodoro and Casandrina adds the mythological characters of Fortune and Parcae. These new characters affect the language of the texts. Unlike Celestina, in which all the characters use a rather formal, standardized tone in their dialogues, the characters of the continuations use different registers aligned with their social

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statuses: the masters use a lofty rhetorical style, different from the servants’ speech. The dialogues reflect the slang characteristic of some social groups, such as the germanía, criminal slang of pimps and thugs, the a-grammatical speech of the black slave, or the rural dialects of shepherds, peasants, and vizcaino characters.22 In this respect, the continuations match the similar deployment of argots and dialects in the dramatic productions of the period as a way to reinforce the decorum (appropriateness of style) of character and social status.23 At the other end of the social spectrum, the masters present with exaggerated displays of erudition, especially when reciting long, moralizing tirades. Rhetorical elevated language also characterizes the elaborate wooing letters the lovers send each other. Whereas in Celestina the only means of communication for lovers is through the old procuress, the continuations exploit the use of missives. The letters permitted the authors to include scenes that narrated the difficulties in making the letters reach the loved ones.24 Letters compete with the procuress’ function as mediator. In some continuations, the reading of the letter is enough to ignite the amourous passion of their readers. Although the inclusion of love letters as part of the narration was commonplace in the sentimental romance, such as in Urrea’s Penitencia de amor, it was Silva’s Segunda Celestina that made them a popular resource for the Celestina cycle. In this first continuation, not only do the protagonists write letters, but so do the servants.

22  Thugs’ and pimps’ germanía and swearwords are not taken from the character of Centurio in Celestina, but from Pandulfo in Comedia Thebayda. 23  Torres Naharro writes in Propalladia (1517): “Decorum in comedies is like the rudder of a ship […] decorum is the just and appropriate continuation of the matter: characters must be given what belongs to them, in proper, legitimate ways, so that the servant does not speak or act as a master” (El decoro en las comedias es como el governalle en la nao […] es decoro una justa y decente continuación de la materia, conviene a saber: dando a cada uno lo suyo, evitar las cosas impropias, usar de todas las legítimas, de manera que el siervo no diga ni haga actos del señor), in Obras Completas, ed. Miguel Ángel Pérez Priego (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 1994), p. 8. 24  Luis Mariano Esteban Martín, “La carta amorosa en la trama de la descendencia directa de Celestina,” Lemir, no. 7 (2003), s/p, http://parnaseo.uv.es/Lemir/Revista/Revista7/ Esteban.pdf.

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Imitation and Originality. Comedies and Tragedies

Between 1500 and 1570, the approximate dates between which the adaptations and continuations of Celestina were published, all literary genres underwent important changes. This affected how the sequels negotiated respect for the original and the desire to be innovative.25 A common change was the modification of structure, conforming to the acts used in the contemporary theater. While Feliciano de Silva divided his Segunda Celestina into forty scenes, Tragedia Policiana is divided into twenty-nine acts, Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia into five acts, subdivided by five scenes each, except the last which has only four. Comedia Selvagia is also divided into five acts of four scenes each, and Traigcomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina has three acts divided into fifteen scenes. The division into five acts was a concession to the norm that Torres Naharro established in his Propalladia—the division into three acts was adopted only after Lope de Vega. The ways in which the titles of continuations clearly differentiate between comedy and tragedy is another adaptation in the context of new tendencies within dramatic literature. As the sixteenth century progressed, authors and readers of the cycle would have understood that comedies needed happy endings, while tragedies and tragicomedies demanded sad ones. Not surprisingly, the titles chosen for the continuations respected this convention, so fulfilling reader expectations. Also, the new literary trends influenced the continuators to make their works respectful of decorum in characters’ speech, unlike Rojas. In the continuations, the masters systematically use an elevated style in their speech, and the servants a lower one. Their speeches reflect also the influence of the theater at the time, in which shepherds, peasants, and other popular types were characterized by their use of slang expressions and peculiar forms of elocution. Comedies The change in genre of the continuations, from tragicomedy to comedy, affected several of the model’s tenets. The happy ending of Segunda Celestina and Comedia Selvagia amends the sad ending of Celestina, which was used as a moralizing example of lovers punished for their acts. Some continuations present passionate love that does not lead to catastrophic ending and death, 25  Genette, Palimpsestes, pp. 214–29 pointed out that many continuations are unfaithful to the original, correcting or betraying the original in some fundamental point.

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as Celestina and the sentimental romances do. Although some characters recite moralizing tirades—especially in Comedia Selvagia—the denouement in secret marriages makes love affairs and respect for social conventions compatible. Especially interesting is how the texts grant happy endings to the procuresses—generously rewarded in the two plays mentioned, though each comedy resorts to different methods of including the procuresses in its happy ending. As we saw, Feliciano de Silva brought the original Celestina back to life in his Segunda Celestina. The text informs readers, however, that hers is not a true resurrection but a subterfuge. In an exchange between Celestina and the lover of the archdeacon in whose house Celestina finds shelter, the supposedly resurrected procuress states: “I came here, to the house of the archdeacon, as if it were the house of my master and father, to hide and plan my revenge against Calisto’s servants, faking my death” (yo vine aquí, a casa del señor Arcidiano viejo, como a casa de señor y padre, a ser encubierta de la vengança que de los criados de Calisto yo quise tomar, fingiendo con mis artes que era muerta) (pp. 167–68). However, in public, Celestina claims to have been resuscitated by a miracle, an otherworldly favor compelling her to abandon her previous evil ways. To make her repentance believable, she modifies her modus operandi. She tells Elicia: “I must act differently from now on […] because my past ways would reveal my deception” (Cumple hacer los hechos de aquí delante de otra manera […] porque de lo pasado tenemos la celada descubierta) (p. 198). She explicitly renounces the use of magic: “I do not need to invoke Pluto because I learnt all his secrets during my stay in his kingdom” (no tengo ya necesidad de invocaciones a Plutón porque de allá traigo sabidos todos sus secretos) (p. 194). The fact that she does not resort to black magic and her solution is for the lovers to marry in secret seems necessary for the happy ending of the story. Though the text shows Celestina’s resurrection to be a charade, Segunda Celestina is the only continuation included in the Index of Forbidden Books (1559), which refers to the book as “Resurrection of Celestina.” The precise reasons for the banning are unknown. The continuation makes clear that the resurrection is false. However, all the characters—except the pimp Pandulfo and the prostitute Palana—consider her return a “miracle” and praise her faked behavior as that of a “saint” and a “preacher.” Furthermore, the “reborn” Celestina peppers her speech with religious allusions, especially to the New Testament. With the faked resurrection, Feliciano de Silva is elaborating on one of the defining features of Rojas’s Celestina: her hypocrisy and sanctimonious façade. The censors might have found unacceptable Celestina’s use of religion as a front, even if she does not practice magic anymore. All the other

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continuations, which were never censored, do not present Celestina’s faked religiosity as a successful strategy to cover her deceptions. As a matter of fact, Tragedia Policiana and Comedia Selvagia explicitly condemn Celestina for putting on airs of being a pious woman.26 Later continuations are even more explicit in this respect, with procuresses dedicated to black magic and invocations. That is, these practices of witchcraft are irrelevant to the happy or sad endings of the stories. For instance, Comedia Selvagia ends happily in spite of the presence of the procuress Dolosina, granddaughter of Claudina, who studied necromancy in Paris and is capable of making herself invisible and turning into different animals. Comedia Selvagia contains situations and motifs unique among Celestina continuations: the testing of friendship, the confusion of identities, premonitory dreams, final anagnorisis, and the characters of a Spaniard returned from the Americas and the indiano mentioned before. The new scenarios, together with the developments of the contemporary dramatic scene and of the novel of the mid-sixteenth century, help turn magic into a motif of amusement, not of conflict as before. The comedy’s complex plot includes two sets of lovers and two procuresses. The first, Dolosina, acts as both a witch and a messenger in the service of Selvago’s quest for Isabela, using one of the letters she has to deliver for an incantation. The second procuress, Valera, is an old servant to whom Isabela resorts because she is secretly in love with Selvago. Valera is not a sorceress, but fakes having magical abilities in order to ask for presents she claims to need for her incantations. After several mishaps, the rendezvous between the two lovers finally takes place thanks to the cooperation between the two procuresses, who are generously rewarded for their good work. Although the characters in the story believe in the efficacy of incantations to elicit love, the readers know that these subterfuges were unnecessary since the two lovers were in love with each other from the beginning, although unaware of their mutual feelings.

26  Claudina in Tragedia Policiana: “My reputation is well known, nobody can complain that I pretended to be a saintly woman to fool them” (Conoscida soy, no se quexará nadie de mí que con fingida sanctidad le engañé), quoted in Vian Herrero, “Transformaciones del pensamiento mágico: el conjuro amatorio en La Celestina y su linaje literario,” in Cinco siglos de Celestina. Aportaciones interpretativas, ed. José Luis Canet and Rafael Beltrán (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 1997), 209–38, pp. 224–25. In Comedia Selvagia, Valera insists that fake piety is to be avoided (ed. cit., pp. 85 and 187), as does Elicia in Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia (ed. cit., pp. 179–81).

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Tragedies Unlike the comedies, the tragedies and tragicomedies of the cycle are faithful to Rojas’s interest in teaching a moral lesson. However, the fact that the stories’ tragic endings are triggered by events different from the original changes the direction of their exemplary lessons. Witchcraft may play an important role in the stories, but the words and acts of the characters implicitly show that it has limited powers. In Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia, the same Elicia of Celestina, now an old woman, declares: “My tricks and my subtle deceptions and my crafted speech have the effect of moving strong women while immediately convincing the week, young ones. […] Their main efficacy resides in the attention of the same women who agree to listen to my words” (Cuanto más que mis buenas artes, mis subtiles engaños y mi artificiosa arenga tienen tal virtud, que a las muy fuertes hacen dar combos, y a las flacas y tiernas de un vaivén derrueca […]. La principal culpa se reduce al consentimiento de la que me da oídos y me quiere escuchar) (p. 252). In a similar sense, in Comedia Policiana, Claudina confesses that magic is impotent against free will: “If I damage anybody with my practice, it is their own fault, because God gave us free will to agree or disagree. I am only doing my job and everybody must take care of themselves. My reputation is well known and nobody can complain that I deceived pretending to be a saint” (si a otros dañare con mi interesal doctrina, cada uno mire por sí, que por esso da Dios libre el alvedrío, para reprobar o aprobar. Yo hago mi oficio, mire cada qual lo que haze. conoscida soy, no se quexará nadie de mí que con fingida sanctidad le engañé) (p. 182). Commenting on these passages, Ana Vian Herrero concludes that the authors, through their characters, show a dismissive view of magic that agrees with the rationalist theology of the period.27 The continuations are then making explicit what in Celestina was subtly implied by the author but ultimately ambiguous. Furthermore, the role of magic in helping to change the mind of the loved one is often accomplished by way of the elaborate letters which the lovers exchange. The last of the continuations, Tragicomedia de Poliodoro y Casandrina, openly pokes fun at magic. Poliodoro, a vain, self-centered man, resorts to the sorceress Corneja, a disciple of Elicia, to reach his beloved woman, who turns out to be Corneja’s daughter, a prostitute. At the end, Poliodoro dies at the hands of his own servants, while Corneja and her daughter deceive the greedy servants and escape with the money foolish Poliodoro gave them. Poliodoro’s sudden infatuation with a prostitute, the loss of his wealth, and his death are 27  Vian Herrero, “Transformaciones del pensamiento,” p. 228.

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attributed to the intervention of two allegorical characters, Death and the Parcae, who, mad about his hybris, take revenge on him without intending to make of it a lesson for foolish lovers of the future. The tragic denouement of Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia and of Tragedia Policiana are, respectively, the works of the loved woman’s father and of a brother, who both act out of concern for the family honor. These male characters, in positions of power, seem mere extrapolations of the character Pleberio in Celestina. But unlike Pleberio, who only appears toward the end to lament his fortune, these characters are noticeably present and actively concerned for their honor from the beginning of the story and through the whole plot. Their violent restitution of the family honor at the end of the stories makes the conflict between love and honor one of the central themes of the plot and of its moral teaching. The advice that lovers distrust servants and procuresses included in Celestina’s paratexts and plot seems now mainly directed to parents, siblings, and other relatives, encouraged to actively guard the reputation of the women of the family. In Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia, Belisano, Roselia’s brother, is a threatening presence from the beginning, staying awake every night to prevent the lovers’ first meeting. When he suspects another attempt against the family honor, he plans an ambush, giving his servants murderous instructions: “Attention, have the crossbows ready because that whore is out on the terrace roof” (Ce, armad las ballestas, que ya sale aquella puta a la azotea) (p. 321). He waits until the two lovers are in each other’s arms to have them killed, thus making sure they will go to hell for dying in a sinful embrace.28 In Tragedia Policiana, the woman’s father is always suspicious and vigilant, showing an inflexible, deathly sense of honor: “The crime of unfaithfulness in a woman must be punished only with death because any other punishment is but a way to encourage her to sin given that the punishment is light” (el crimen de liviandad en la mujer no se ha de castigar sino con la muerte, e cualquier castigo que éste no sea no es sino una licencia para que sea mala con la facilidad de la pena) (p. 47). Informed by the renters of his garden that somebody damaged the plants during the nights, he orders a lion released to prevent the nocturnal intrusions, obscuring his revenge. When the young lover comes to the garden at night, the young man is dismembered by the lion and Teofilón’s daughter kills herself with his sword when she discovers his dead body: an ending evidently inspired by the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. In spite of the apparent fidelity to Celestina, the continuations pay allegiance to the new values and social conventions in vogue during the years in 28  Belisano’s desire to revenge the family honor is so extreme that Navarro named it sadistic in her edition of Sancho de Muñón, Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia, p. 47.

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which they were written. The young lovers, rich and noble as in the original, now live in a society with an imperative to defend the values associated with honor. To save the family honor, the comedies resort to secret marriages as a means of harmonizing sexual desire with social convention. In the tragedies, the lovers die because of revenge acts committed by the woman’s honorzealous family. These endings are very different from Celestina’s, in which the problem of honor does not arise in Pleberio’s lament, and Elicia’s attempt at revenge through a cowardly pimp triggers the fatal denouement by accident. By emphasizing honor, the continuations move the conflict from the public to the private jurisdiction of the family or clan.29 While in Celestina the public justice immediately acts to punish the death of the procuress, in Tragedia Policiana the servants of Philomena’s father murder the procuress without being punished by the law. In Tragicomedia de Lisandro y Roselia, Roselia’s brother and the servants murder the lovers, Roselia’s maidservant, and Lisandro’s servant. After the crime, the brother orders his servants to evade the enforcers of the law by taking shelter within a church, while he does the same in the house of one of his noble relatives. The values of the nobility are shown to be stronger than the laws of the city and accepted by the whole of society. Unless there is a secret marriage before the sexual encounter, the lovers’ transgression is severely punished by the woman’s family, and the lovers’ deaths are considered legitimate, independent of the decrees of public justice. The underlying approval of such ways of acting is far removed from the hostility against the noble classes underlining Celestina, as if the concept of honor of the Spanish theater of the late sixteenth and following century had taken over Celestina’s original plot and intentions.

29  As most critics agree, Celestina does not describe a series of private conflicts but a society in which conflict, chaos, and violence permeate society; see Consolación Baranda, La Celestina y el mundo como conflicto (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2004).

CHAPTER 21

Celestina and Agustín Arrieta’s China Poblana: Mexico’s Female Icon Revisited Beatriz de Alba-Koch And we shall not say, then, that Celestina has resuscitated, instead that she never died, and that from century to century, from age to age, from generation to generation, we see her prolonging her devilled life, renewing her tricks and giving them better dress, at the rhythm of the renewal of customs and uses. Serafín Estébanez Calderón1

Celestina, Spain’s famous bawd, witch, and go-between, is rarely considered alongside the china, “the legitimate and beautiful daughter of Mexico.”2 In the nineteenth century, Celestina became a costumbrista type in her country of origin but was not included in the repertoire of Mexico’s costumbrista national figures. In what follows, I explore how the china, as depicted by the renowned Mexican painter José Agustín Arrieta (1803–74), interplays with the Celestina type. The presence of celestinas—the word used for any go-between or procuress in Spanish beginning in the eighteenth century—in Arrieta’s paintings questions the autonomy that this national icon of femininity and desire was meant to represent. The china appeared as an icon during a turbulent era of political definition for Mexico, when writers and painters actively participated in the construction of national types against a backdrop of foreign invasions and internal strife between liberals and conservatives. As we will see, Arrieta’s

1  “Y no diremos, pues, que Celestina ha resucitado, sino que Celestina nunca murió, y que de siglo en siglo, de edad en edad, de generación en generación, la vemos prolongar su endiablada vida, renovando sus trazas y dándoles otros y mejores aliños, al son y compás que las costumbres y usos se renuevan,” Serafín Estébanez Calderón (El Solitario), “La Celestina,” in Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (Madrid: Ignacio Boix, 1844), p. 169. Unless otherwise noted, the English translations of Spanish texts are mine. 2  “[L]a china es la legítima y hermosa hija de México,” José María Rivera, “La china,” in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos: Tipos y costumbres nacionales (México: Murguia, 1855), p. 90.

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inclusion of the old go-between in his paintings problematizes the independent stance that the china was originally meant to represent. A number of male and female costumbrista figures that would serve to define mexicanidad, or the essence of what Mexico and being Mexican implies, began to emerge from the turmoil of the birth of the Mexican nation. This period of definition began in 1810 with insurgent violence that eventually led to the separation of New Spain from the Spanish Monarchy in 1821. Initially an independent empire under the rule of Agustín de Iturbide, Mexico became a republic in 1824. The following year, the Italian freemason Claudio Linati arrived in Mexico and established the first lithography press in the new republic. His 1828 Costumes civils, militaires et religieux du Mexique (Civil, Military and Religious Costumes of Mexico), published in Brussels, is the first collection of Mexican national types. Focusing mostly on Indigenous women of Chiapas, the Yucatán peninsula, and Michoacán, neither celestinas nor chinas are included in Linati’s collection. Other foreign artists visited Mexico in these early years of the republic. The British painter Daniel Thomas Egerton focused on landscapes, but the German draughtsman Carl Nebel was, like Linati, interested in national types. Nebel’s Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la partie la plus intéressante du Mexique (Picturesque and Archeological Journey to the Most Interesting Part of Mexico), published in Paris in 1836 with a preface by Alexander von Humboldt, contains an engraving entitled Poblanas, considered to be the first depiction of chinas within the costumbrista tradition. At the entrance of a rural dwelling, a ranchero (rancher) removes his spurs and leather chaps while three women dressed as chinas, with their typical skirt, blouse, scarf, and rebozo (shawl), are smoking, a common practice for women in Mexico at the time, but daring from a European perspective (see Fig. 21.1). While liberals and conservatives fought over the basic principles that would govern Mexico, foreign interventions threatened the nation’s autonomy: in 1838, French troops occupied the port of Veracruz for three months during the so-called Pastry War. The following year, Spain for the first time sent an ambassador to Mexico. The letters of his Scottish wife, Frances Erskine Calderón de la Barca, were published in 1843 as a travelogue entitled Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in That Country. The translation into Spanish of these letters to her family had a wide readership in a Mexico anxious to learn how the new country was being depicted abroad. In Life in Mexico we find the first descriptions of chinas.3 Here the china’s bold stance makes her a polemical figure. When the letter writer is given the dress of a china to wear at a costume 3  Frances Erskine Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 57, 146.

Celestina and Agustín Arrieta ’ s China Poblana

Figure 21.1

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Carl Nebel, Poblanas, engraving in Nebel’s Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la partie la plus intéressante du Mexique (Paris, 1836).

ball, the upper crust of Mexico City is stirred.4 While young ladies from Puebla, a city to the southeast of the capital, were very pleased with the willingness of the Spanish ambassador’s wife to don the typical dress of humble women of their hometown, the secretary of state and several ministers of the conservative government of Anastasio Bustamante “adjured” her not to wear the dress of a china poblana. They informed her that “Poblanas generally were femmes de rien, that they wore no stockings.”5 Other ladies and a gentleman also indicate to her that this choice of dress was “objectionable” because “[t]he dress of the Poblana is that of a woman of no character.”6 Dissuaded to appear at the ball as a poblana, she nonetheless expresses her admiration for the china when she describes a variety of popular types strolling in the Zócalo, the main square in Mexico City:

4  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, p. 84. 5  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, p. 88. 6  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, p. 89.

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And above all, here and there a flashing Poblana, with a dress of real value and much taste, and often with a face and figure of extraordinary beauty, especially the figure; large and yet élancée, with a bold coquettish eye, and a beautiful little brown foot, shown off by the white satin shoe; the petticoat of her dress frequently fringed and embroidered in real massive gold, and a reboso either shot with gold, or a bright-colored China crape shawl, coquettishly thrown over her head. We saw several whose dresses could not have cost less than five hundred dollars.7 Calderón de la Barca, however, does not discuss how reactions to the china were also political stances. Liberals would eventually appropriate this figure to anchor their political rhetoric in a popular, national base, in opposition to elitist conservatives, who admired everything European. In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico, which resulted in the new nation losing approximately half of its territory to its northern neighbor; Nebel returned to Mexico to document the Mexican-American War. Four years later, the French painter Edouard Pingret, a student of Jacques-Louis David, came to Mexico. Pingret was to have an impact not only on the depiction of Mexican types, and in particular of the china, but on the overall orientation of painters trained in Mexico City’s School of Fine Arts, whom, when he arrived in Mexico, he considered too academic, too removed from the local and the quotidian.8 Pingret’s chinas are set in typically Mexican kitchen interiors decorated with a profusion of clay pots, at times seen working on a metate or pre-Hispanic grinding stone preparing the dough for tortillas (see Fig. 21.2). Pingret’s paintings are intimate costumbrista depictions of everyday life. His style developed a following amongst Mexican artists. In 1861, France invaded Mexico and in 1863 it supported the establishment of the Second Mexican Empire, with Archduke Maximilian of the House of Habsburg on the throne. The texts that I will examine to better understand Arrieta’s construction of the china’s iconic nature are drawn from the 1854–55 collection of thirty-five illustrated articles entitled Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos (The Mexicans Painted by Themselves), a work that for the first time presented Mexicans to the world in their own terms.9 This collection of articles and Arrieta’s paintings 7  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico, p. 146. 8  Luis Ortiz Macedo, Edouard Pingret: Un pintor romántico francés que retrató el México del mediar del siglo XIX (México: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 1989), pp. 69–94. 9  Ricardo Pérez Escamilla, “Arriba el telón: Mexicanos, vanguardia artística y política del siglo XIX,” in Nación de imágenes: La litografía mexicana del siglo XIX, ed. Rafael Tovar (México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), p. 25.

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Figure 21.2 Edouard Pingret, Cocina poblana (Poblana Kitchen), s-d.

were produced during the period that encompasses the 1854 Revolución de Ayutla, a liberal revolt against the proclamation of Antonio López de Santa Anna as president for life, and Maximilian’s three-year empire, when liberal President Benito Juárez fled the capital, establishing his government in Chihuahua. These representations of mexicanidad, then, appeared in the midst of a civil war between liberals and conservatives fighting for control over their nation and identity. They are also responses to the views of Mexicans offered by foreigners in their written and pictorial reflections on their sojourns in Mexico.10 Nineteenth-century chinas and celestinas are best seen in the context of Hispanic costumbrismo, a style that owes a considerable debt to Golden Age art and literature and found its fullest expression in Romanticism. Interest in providing naturalistic descriptions of local particularities is evident in Spanish Baroque works of desengaño (disenchantment or revelation), as it is in nineteenth-century efforts to document folklore. Picaresque novels, the novellas of Miguel de Cervantes, Diego Vélez de Guevara’s 1641 El diablo cojuelo (The Little Lame Devil), and the descriptions of Juan de Zabaleta’s 1654 Día de fiesta por la mañana (Holiday Morning) and 1659 Día de fiesta por la tarde (Holiday Afternoon) provide early modern examples of how authors strived to delineate spaces, narrate events, and characterize peoples of the Spanish Monarchy that 10  See Beatriz de Alba-Koch, “Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Indigenismo in Altamirano,” Hispanófila, no. 142 (2004): 101–16, pp. 105–6.

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were singular and noteworthy. Because of its descriptions of high and low life in an urban setting, costumbrismo avant-la-lettre has also been mentioned as an ingredient in Fernando de Rojas’s Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better known as Celestina. More importantly, the origin of literary modernity has been traced to this canonical text.11 As mentioned, in popular usage, the name of Rojas’s main character came to designate a type; the word “celestina” became a term to designate any woman—old, witch, bawd, or simply gobetween—who facilitated illicit love relationships. As such, celestinas appeared in a variety of narratives and were also portrayed extensively in the visual arts. Particularly noteworthy celestinas of the early modern Hispanic world are found in the paintings of Murillo, but even Rembrandt produced etchings of celestinas, such as his 1642 Preciosa (The Gypsy).12 The most extensive pictorial treatment of celestinas, however, is found in the late Enlightenment engravings of Francisco de Goya.13 As an integral text of Hispanic culture since its publication, Celestina was popular in many of the Spanish Monarchy’s overseas possessions. That the work was readily available to a New World readership is indicated by its presence in the inventories of the book trade of New Spain and Peru.14 Scenes of gatherings reminiscent of those in Celestina’s house or the use of magic to find remedies for the sexual predicaments of women are found in Colombia’s foundational narrative, Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Conquest and Discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada), written by Juan Rodríguez Freyle between 1636 and 1638 and commonly known as El carnero.15 11  Roberto González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 9. 12  Isadora Rose-de-Viejo and Janie Cohen, Etched on the Memory: The Presence of Rembrandt in the Prints of Goya and Picasso (London: Lund Humphries, 1999), p. 46. 13  For an ample repository of visual culture related to Celestina, consult Enrique Fernández, Celestina visual: 500 años de imágenes de La Celestina, http://celestinavisual.org. For celestinas in the works of Goya, see Rachel Schmidt, “Celestinas y majas en la obra de Goya, Alenza y Lucas Velázquez,” Celestinesca 39 (2015): 275–328. 14  Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of The Sixteenth-Century New World, ed. Rolena Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 98, 222. 15  The events of chapter 9 of Rodríguez Freyle’s chronicle take place in a recently founded Santa Fe de Bogotá, where the morality of the city appears threatened by the resourcefulness of Juana García, a “negra horra” or free black woman, described as “un poco voladora,” a bit of a flyer, suggesting that she is a witch. Rodríguez Freyle, Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada, ed. Jaime Delgado (Madrid: Historia 16, 1986), p. 124. Like Celestina, Juana is also addressed as madre or comadre, a term of familiarity

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Further evidence of the importance of Rojas’s work in Spanish America is the comedia entitled La segunda Celestina (The Second Celestina). Composed in honor of Queen Mariana de Austria, it was intended for staging in Madrid. Scholars agree that in 1676 the poet-nun from New Spain, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, provided an ending for the work that the Spanish playwright Agustín Salazar y Torres left unfinished, having died the previous year. The Hieronymite nun also polished the work in its entirety. La segunda Celestina is a reversal of the original text: instead of the witch’s activities causing multiple deaths, including her own, the second Celestina manages to resolve the conflicts between strayed lovers, enabling the comedia to close with a triple wedding.16 While Roberto González Echevarría has noticed the influence of Celestina on twentieth-century Latin American writers, particularly Carlos Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier, and Gabriel García Márquez, the relevance of Rojas’s text in nineteenth-century Spanish America has remained unexplored. González Echevarría affirms that “a work as salacious as Celestina could not easily become a national literary monument, particularly at the time (Romanticism) when nation-building led to the creation of literary canons.”17 Nonetheless, the protagonist of Celestina was included in Spain’s seminal costumbrista collection, the 1843–44 Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (The Spaniards Painted by Themselves). Here Celestina is identified by Serafín Estébanez Calderón, who writes under the pen name of El Solitario (“The Loner”), as a figure that cannot be circumscribed to national boundaries that here points to the frequent interactions between her and the criolla or white women born in the New World of Spanish parents. A criolla seeks Juana’s help to abort a pregnancy. Through her magic, in a basin full of water, the witch shows the pregnant woman her long absent husband at a tailor’s shop in Santo Domingo, where a dress is being cut for his lover. Juana plucks from the basin one of the sleeves of the dress and predicts that the woman’s husband will not return for a number of years. The woman decides not to have an abortion and raises her illegitimate child as an “adopted” son. When the husband finally returns, she confronts him with his infidelities, presenting the sleeve as evidence. Surprised that that part of the dress could be in his wife’s possession, the husband requests an investigation by the Holy Office. The inquisitors find that many criolla women, including some of the most prominent ones, had at one point or another availed themselves of Juana’s services. Judging that a punishment of all white women involved in Juana’s witchcraft would threaten the stability of the newly established city, only the witch is punished with banishment from Bogotá. The chapter brings to the fore not only issues of class, which are also central to Rojas’s text, but also of race. 16  For an analysis of La segunda Celestina, see Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora, The Three Secular Plays of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: A Critical Study, trans. Shelby Thacker (Lexington: University Press of Ketucky, 2000), pp. 71–98. 17  González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, p. 10.

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because she is a “tipo universal,” a universal type about whom a debate persists regarding whether she should be considered a saint or a witch (170).18 The Celestina of Los españoles, in keeping with the roles assigned to the original fifteenth-century character, here too facilitates the seduction of women. However, “El Solitario” concludes that with the “advancement” of customs, that is, with what he calls the “progress of social mores,” Celestina is no longer needed: amorous encounters, “El Solitario” argues, no longer require the facilitation of an intermediary.19 Following the tradition developed simultaneously in France and England with the collections entitled Les français peint par eux mêmes (The French Painted by Themselves) and Heads of the People or Portraits of the English, both from 1840, other nations and regions would acquire their own collections of types.20 The collections from the Hispanic world that followed Los españoles include the 1852 Los cubanos pintados por sí mismos (The Cubans Painted by Themselves) and the 1859 Los valencianos pintados por sí mismos (The Valencians Painted by Themselves). Many of the Mexican national types as they appear in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos are derived from occupations and/or professions, including figures such as el ranchero, el arriero (the muleteer), el aguador (the water seller), and el pulquero (the pulque maker).21 However, none of these male types rose to the status of national icon, a role reserved for a female figure. Initially, two female types, the china and the chiera, competed for iconic female mexicanidad. The chiera or chia water 18  Estébanez Calderón, “La Celestina,” in Los españoles, p. 170. The Mexican liberal José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, in his 1818 novel dedicated to the education of women, La Quijotita y su prima (The Little Quixote and Her Cousin), was particularly concerned with how fanatically devout women could, like celestinas, lead young women astray. In this case, “celestinas a lo divino” convince them to imitate female saints and martyrs. See de Alba-Koch, “La vieja beata en La Quijotita de Fernández de Lizardi: Una celestina a lo divino,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 32, no. 1 (2007): 123–36. 19  “([F]ortunately, in the current era customs have advanced enough to consider Celestina as a unnecessary pawn, a piece that has no use. Love negotiations tend to be done directly, without need of command or procurement” ([F]elizmente, en los tiempos que alcanzamos, las costumbres han adelantado lo bastante para que la Celestina se considere como un peón que sobra y como pieza que no tiene aplicación. Las negociaciones de amor suelen hacerse directamente y sin necesidad de mandato ó procuraduría). Estébanez Calderón, “La Celestina,” in Los españoles, p. 173. 20  Enrique Rubio Cremades and María Ángeles Ayala, introduction to Antología costumbrista (Barcelona: El Albir, 1985), p. 62. 21  María Esther Pérez Salas considers these male figures, as well as the chiera and the china, as the most eminent national types in Pérez Salas, “Genealogía de Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos,” Historia mexicana 48 (1998): 167–207, p. 192.

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seller was sometimes called agualojera because she could sell aguas frescas or refreshments of assorted flavors. Eventually, the china, the young, independent woman, became the national prototype and rose to become the equivalent of the maja, the popular national type of the Spanish woman.22 The meaning of the word china is complex. In the context of nineteenthcentury Mexican costumbrista painting and literature, it does not denote a woman from China. It could refer to a young woman or to a woman with curly hair. The earliest use of china as an ethnic category is found in the casta or caste denominations used in New Spain since the sixteenth century in legal documents. China as an ethnic category is also found in the eighteenth-century pictorial series of interracial couples and their offspring known as casta paintings. The taxonomic chart developed by María Concepción García Sáiz from her detailed scrutiny of over fifty series of casta paintings indicates not only that china derives from the Quechua word for “servant girl of Indian or Mestizo blood,” but that a chino or china could be the offspring of one of the following combinations: “Lobo and Black woman, Lobo and Indian woman, Mulatto and Indian woman, Coyote and Mulatto woman, Spaniard and Morisco woman [or] Chamicoyote and Indian woman.”23 Indeed, in one painting a chino is presented as the son of a morisco (a Moorish man) and a Spanish woman, and in another painting as the son of an Afro-Hispanic mother and a lobo father, that is, a man whose parents are Afro-Hispanic and Indigenous.24 These references point to the “mixed blood” of the china. Further complicating the meaning of china is the coupling of the word with the term poblana, because this adjective can mean either a woman from Puebla or a woman from the pueblo or people, or both. When poblanas was used to refer to a class, it could designate women from an area encompassing Guadalajara to the northwest, Oaxaca to the southeast, and at the center, Mexico City and Puebla.25 A china poblana, then, could be a young mestizo woman from the popular classes and/or from the city of Puebla.26 22  Rivera, “La china,” in Los mexicanos, p. 13. 23  García Sáiz, Las castas mexicanas: Un género pictórico americano (Milano: Olivetti, 1989), p. 26. As indicated in the taxonomy of García Sáiz, Chamicoyote is another term to denote an ethnic group. He or she is the offspring of a Chamizo and a Coyote. The latter’s parents are mestizo and Indigenous, the former has an Indigenous mother and a Coyote father. 24  García Sáiz, Las castas, pp. 180, 195. 25  Lydia Lavín and Gisela Balassa, Museo del traje mexicano (México: Clio, Libros y Videos, 2001–2), 5:350. 26  For the association in the twentieth century of the china poblana with the devout Catarina de San Juan in seventeenth-century Puebla, see María del Carmen Vázquez

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José María Rivera penned the article covering the china in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, a collective work by prominent liberal writers including Ignacio Ramírez, Juan de Dios Arias, and Hilarión Frías y Soto. Carlos Monsiváis considers this text as the first project of national unity and its inclusiveness of a variety of male and female occupations, many of them humble, as a step forward in a racist and classist society.27 The lithographs of Hesiquio Iriarte and Andrés Campillo adorn the articles, which were initially published in serial form. Rivera describes the china as “the best of the bronze-colored people” (la nata y la espuma de la gente de bronce), that is, of the mestizos, Mexico’s largest ethnic group, resulting from the mixing of Spanish and Indigenous blood.28 The setting for his article is a humble abode in Mexico City, a vecindad, where Rivera presents the china as “that lovely and fresh child from the people” (esa linda y fresca criatura salida del pueblo).29 He announces that the china is his favorite national type because, unlike upper-class women, who adopt European fashions and use cosmetics and corsets, the china is a natural beauty. The cleanliness of her one-room home is considered noteworthy. Rivera describes with some detail the order of the spotless kitchen or the area of her room that serves as such and the care she takes with her clothing and few personal belongings. Iriarte’s illustration for this article sets the china against a kitchen backdrop, similar to the spaces where Pingret set his: the association of chinas with food and kitchens is recurrent. Iriarte, however, shows a coquettish china smoking, who, unlike the poblanas of Nebel, looks the spectator defiantly in the eye (see Fig. 21.3). The trademark of Rivera’s china is that she lives alone and is the head of her household. Rivera’s figure, he recounts, at age twenty-three has already had twenty-eight lovers, a multiplicity of affairs that provides support for claims of loose morals and dissuaded Erskine Calderón de la Barca from donning her china costume. Rivera also shows his national type in a dance or fandango performing the jarabe with great dexterity and seductive movements. Moving from description to narration, he presents the knife fight that ensues between the china’s dance partner and her jealous lover, the arrest of the latter, and the china’s successful efforts to have him released from prison. Rivera concludes his article by surmising that the china will most likely, despite her self-sufficiency, receive a beating from her lover. He also indicates Mantecón, “La china mexicana, mejor conocida como china poblana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77 (2000): 123–50, pp. 131–34. 27  Monsiváis, “ ‘Si el gobierno supiera que así lo vemos’: Política, sociedad y litografía en el México del siglo XIX,” in Tovar, Nación de imágenes, p. 117. 28  Rivera, “La china,” in Los mexicanos, p. 13. 29  Rivera, “La china,” in Los mexicanos, p. 90.

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Figure 21.3 Hesiquio Iriarte and Andrés Campillo, illustration to the article “Chinas” by José María Rivera in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos: Tipos y costumbres nacionales (México: Murguia, 1855), p. 90.

that, sadly, the china is a type in danger of extinction, without elaborating on the reasons that are leading to this disappearance. The main point that Rivera stresses, however, is the modern nature of the china’s demeanor. She not only is economically independent, she also freely establishes and dissolves her relationships with her lovers. Rivera’s china, consequently, has no need for celestinas. The painter Arrieta, however, will complicate this view of the national icon’s autonomy. Born in the small town of Santa Ana Chiautempan, Tlaxcala, Arrieta was raised in nearby Puebla, were he trained and established his workshop. He was of humble origins and remained of modest means all his life, supplementing his meager income as a painter by working as a concierge at the state Congress.30 30  For biographical information on Arrieta, see Francisco Cabrera, Arrieta: Pintor costumbrista (México: Libros de México, 1963), pp. 115–20; Guy Thomson, “Arrieta’s Poblanas,” ARARA (Art and Architecture of the Americas), no. 10 (2009): 4–30, pp. 4–6, 21, and Elisa García Barragán, José Agustín Arrieta: Lúmbres de lo cotidiano (México: Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana, 1998), pp. 17–31. For one of the first critical receptions of Arrieta’s paintings, see Guillermo Prieto, “Las chinas de Agustín Arrieta,” Artes de México, no. 66 (2003): 34–37.

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He painted portraits and obtained church commissions for religious scenes, although he was mostly known for his many bodegones or still lifes. Here, with great realism, he painted fresh native fruits and vegetables alongside fine bottles of wine or packaged edible goods from abroad. His simple clay jugs and baskets contrast with fine china or crystal. This juxtaposition of humble local elements and imported luxury items places mexicanidad on an equal footing with foreignness. Arrieta is equally renowned as a costumbrista painter of popular types. Some of his paintings of chia water sellers and chinas are noteworthy for the quality of the brushstroke and detailed rendition of their dresses, as well as for the freshness and beauty with which he renders their faces. Like seventeenth-century Spanish and Dutch genre painters, Arrieta is also a narrative artist. Unlike Nebel, whose costumbrista rendition of poblanas is in Pablo Diener’s estimation “idealized and unrealistic, utterly lacking in spontaneity,” a variety of stories unfold in Arrieta’s canvases.31 His canvases devoted to the china and the chiera contain narratives, some dramatic, that can be puzzled together through the repetition of figures, scenes, and gestures. This visual intertextuality provides clues for a more complex reading. We modern viewers, despite lacking dates for many of Arrieta’s works and a full catalog of his paintings, can nonetheless move through these proairetic codes toward a hermeneutic resolution. Arrieta captures his beverage sellers in a moment of tension with male customers belonging to a higher economic echelon than the women. The top hats and fancy suits of these customers identify them as catrines or dandies, the male counterparts of upper-class women who adopt foreign fashions. In Vendedoras de horchata (Horchata Sellers), a young woman offers a catrín a glass of a cinnamon-flavored rice and almond water as he pressures her arm, looking intently at her. With a faint smile and lowered eyes, she looks away (see Fig. 21.4). In Agualojera, Arrieta offers a closer and more careful rendition of the same dynamic (see Fig. 21.5). To better understand this tension we need, on the one hand, to review the article on the chiera in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos and, on the other, to focus on Arrieta’s Celestinesque figure. Arrieta’s celestina appears in at least five of his paintings as an old, thin woman who covers her head with a blue rebozo or Mexican long scarf. She is found at the center of Escena de mercado con dama (Market Scene with Lady, see Fig. 21.6). Recognizable because of the fountain and colonial buildings depicted, Arrieta located this painting in a tianguis or market on the main square 31  Pablo Diener, “Itinerary of Exoticism: Picturesque Mexico,” in Carl Nebel, pintor viajero del siglo XIX, ed. Arturo Aguilar, Leonardo Lopez Lujan, Pablo Diener, and Ron Tyler (Mexico: Artes de México, 2006), 74–77, p. 75.

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Figure 21.4 Agustín Arrieta, Vendedoras de horchata (Horchata sellers), s-d.

Figure 21.5 Agustín Arrieta, Aguajolera (Water Seller), s-d.

of Puebla.32 A cross-section of Mexican society populates the busy scene, including Arrieta’s patron in the 1830s, the German merchant and manufacturer Peter Joseph Lang, seen strolling with his wife and their poodle.33 The celestina’s blue rebozo and the blue parasol held by a lady catch the spectators’ gaze. They are both at a fruit seller’s stall; perhaps the celestina has taken advantage of this space and time to approach the lady with a message from a suitor. 32  García Barragán, Lúmbres de lo cotidiano, pp. 72–73. 33  Thomson, “Arrieta’s Poblanas,” pp. 6–8.

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Agustín Arrieta, Escena de mercado con dama (Market Scene with Lady), s-d.

In Escena popular de mercado con soldado (Popular Market Scene with Soldier), the celestina’s role as a go-between is openly presented, although relegated to the margin of the right side of the painting (see Fig. 21.7). While the viewer’s attention is drawn toward the central scene, where a soldier is accosting a poblana, the celestina is receiving money from a catrín for whom she has presumably arranged a more favorable reception by the man’s object of desire. That a similar catrín to the one found paying the go-between in this painting also appears in Agualojera as well as in Vendedoras de horchata, where he is absorbed in receiving fresh water, points to the role that Arrieta designated for his celestina. Arrieta can be understood as intimating that the catrín attempts to purchase more than a beverage through the good works of a celestina. In his article for Los mexicanos entitled “La chiera,” Rivera indicates that her trade is to “refresh” male customers qualified as “thermometer-men.”34 Rivera develops the innuendo of the seller’s call—“C’mon in and refresh yourself!” (¡Pase usté a refrescar!)—by comparing her to a butterfly, a domesticated siren, a female juggler, and a fearsome woman who pretends to offer what she will not give. Indeed, the chiera is not easily seduced: 34  Rivera, “La chiera,” in Los mexicanos, p. 8.

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Figure 21.7

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Agustín Arrieta, Escena popular de mercado con soldado (Popular Market Scene with Soldier), s-d.

The drinker, before drinking, while drinking, and after having drunk does not stop looking at the chiera, and knows that if by the mouth he has been refreshed, through his eyes something similar to hot pitch has been filtered. Exasperated in seeing that the chiera remains indifferent to his gaze, the purchaser, if he is flammable and a man that does not accept defeat, takes advantage of the situation placing half a real in the chiera’s hand, and obtains then […] a disdainful little grin that leaves him with his mouth open!35

35  “El bebedor, antes de beber, bebiendo, y después de haber bebido, no quita la vista a la chiera, y conoce que si por la boca le ha entrado un refrigerante, por los ojos se le ha filtrado una cosa parecida al alquitrán. Exasperado al ver que la chiera permanece indiferente a las miradas, el comprador, si es inflamable y hombre que no se da por derrotado, apro­vecha la ocasión al poner medio real en manos de la chiera, y obtiene entonces … una muequilla desdeñosa que lo deja boquiabierto!” Rivera, “La chiera,” in Los mexicanos, p. 10.

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Figure 21.8 Agustín Arrieta, China con guajolote (China with Turkey), s-d.

Rivera’s presentation of the chiera as a strongly independent woman parallels his description of the china. Arrieta’s paintings of chieras and chinas are clearly in dialogue with their respective articles in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, exemplifying what Rivera has to say about these figures but also nuancing his account. Arrieta’s chinas, as he represents them in portraits and narrative paintings, are for the most part dark-haired mestizas in keeping with Rivera’s physical descriptions and understanding of the nation. In China poblana or China con guajolote (China with Turkey), the national female icon offers the national dish (see Fig. 21.8). The half-length portrait fully occupies the canvas with no background elements to distract the viewer’s gaze from a young woman with carefully coiffed dark hair and coquettish eyes, as described in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos. To further determine the reading of the china as a national symbol, Arrieta has dressed her in a white blouse, green sash, and red skirt, the colors of the Mexican flag, also to be seen in her bead necklace from which hangs a gold coin or perhaps a medallion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. The china presents a turkey, a bird strongly associated with Mexico, cooked in mole,36 a quintessentially Mexican sauce elaborated with chilies, spices, nuts, and chocolate, thus steeping the painting in 36  García Barragán, Lumbres de lo cotidiano, p. 69.

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Figure 21.9 Agustín Arrieta, La sirvienta (The Servant), s-d.

mexicanidad. A dark-haired china similarly well-coiffed can be seen in La sirvienta (The Servant, see Fig. 21.9). The young, demure woman holds a tray with fruits, including a native cherimoya, as well as limas, a banana, and apples. On the sideboard, a pineapple sits on a plate, ready to be cut; a teapot and crystal glasses in the vitrine complete the still life. Arrieta again introduces a still life with New and Old World produce in another portrait of a well-coiffed, darkhaired china. In the foreground of the enigmatic El almuerzo (The Breakfast), fruits, including a prickly pear and a black zapote, bread, a glass of pulque, and a plate of enmoladas on an impeccably clean and ironed napkin are displayed on the floor (see Fig. 21.10). Looking straight in the eye of the viewer, a pensive china hands a section of sugar cane to her lover, a chinaco. He sits on a chair covered by his sarape or blanket, carefully holding an oriole in one hand while gently placing the other hand on the china’s shoulder. An air of intimacy is transmitted by their gestures. According to Fausto Ramírez, “malicious amorous compliments between the chinaco and the china [are] signified through emblematic objects of strong sexual charge.”37 Ramírez, however, does not identify these sexually charged objects. In any case, masterfully composed in 37  “maliciosos requiebros, significados por emblemáticos objetos de fuerte carga sexual entre el chinaco y la china,” Fausto Ramírez, La plástica del siglo de la Independencia (México: Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana, 1985), p. 59.

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Figure 21.10 Agustín Arrieta, El almuerzo (The Breakfast), s-d.

an ascending pyramidal shape, the painting can be read as depicting Mexico’s foundational couple. It pairs the nation’s female icon with a chinaco, a rural, lower class man of similar ancestry to her—many of the liberal guerrillas who fought against the French at the siege of Puebla of 1862 were chinacos. We have here a subdued celebration of Mexican independence. Guy Thomson argues that “Arrieta’s chinas embody hispano-mestizo moral resistance and entreat national regeneration.”38 This claim is particularly true for El requiebro (The Amorous Compliment), in which a soldier accosts a china, and for Intervención, in which the same china as in the previous painting, wearing the same dress, intervenes between the soldier and a ranchero to prevent a knife fight (see Fig. 21.11 and 21.12). Arrieta is providing not only an illustration for the mishap recounted in the entry for “La china” in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, but also, according to Thomson, a commentary about Mexico’s “war weariness.”39 Thomson’s interpretation rests on the soldier’s aggression 38  Thomson, “Arrieta’s Poblanas,” p. 25. 39  Thomson, “Arrieta’s Poblanas,” p. 25.

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Figure 21.11 Agustín Arrieta, El requiebro (The Amorous Compliment), s-d.

Figure 21.12 Agustín Arrieta, Intervención, s-d.

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Figure 21.13 Agustín Arrieta, Vendedora de frutas y vieja (Fruit Seller and Old Woman), s-d.

toward the china and the ranchero’s attempt to defend her. Overall, then, Arrieta’s chinas are morally upright, autonomous, and patriotic. Arrieta, however, also painted two fair chinas with light brown or blonde hair, a representation that departs radically from the iconography of mexicanidad that Arrieta and others had established. Only Arrieta’s fair chinas are presented interacting with his celestina figure, as is evident in Vendedora de frutas y vieja (Fruit Seller and Old Woman) and in the 1865 Cocina poblana (Puebla Kitchen). In Vendedora de frutas, a dreamy-eyed, light-haired china holds close to her heart an open mamey, revealing its fleshy contents. Another open mamey in the fruit seller’s basket is located in front of her pelvis. This is one of the few instances of a china depicted with cut fruit, perhaps suggesting sexual enticement.40 The celestina holds a chicken upside down by its legs, as if offering it to the seller, and partially lifts the rebozo covering her head to better question her (see Fig. 21.13). In Cocina poblana, again we see a fair-skinned china, now with blonde hair (see Fig. 21.14). Arrieta has presented a similar 40  An open mamey, similar to the one in Vendedora de frutas, is also found in La familia o la pensativa (The Family or The Pensive One). Arrieta depicts here a soldier, a ranchero, and three generations of women. The older woman is clearly the same Celestinesque figure seen in other paintings, the two younger women are chinas, and the blonde and fair-skinned little girl eating a fruit seems not to belong here.

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Figure 21.14 Agustín Arrieta, Cocina poblana (Poblana Kitchen), 1865.

woman to the one seen in Vendedora de frutas; they are both wearing the same coral necklace and gold earrings, as Arrieta perhaps intended to portray the same person. The china’s blonde hair is loose; she is the only woman depicted by Arrieta who is not carefully coiffed. Not even the drunk woman in his painting titled La borracha (The Drunkard), whose tattered blouse has slipped off her shoulder to reveal a breast, has uncombed hair. In Cocina poblana, then, Arrieta avails himself of a well-established interpretative code to signal the china’s participation or willingness to participate in sexual relationships. While the celestina surrounds her by the shoulder to whisper in her ear, in an attitude similar to the one that Goya uses to portray celestinas and majas, the kitchen door that divides the scene into two separate spheres is open and a man whose face is not visible can be seen through the window to the left of the door. The man’s shadow is visible on the kitchen floor, where Arrieta has assembled a small still life of vegetables. Also to the left of the door, two dark and wellcombed chinas, one of them barefoot, have their backs turned to the blonde china and the celestina, inattentive to the interactions happening on the other side of the kitchen. They are, however, busy preparing the mole for the guajolote (turkey) that is standing on the kitchen table, restrained by the blonde, better-dressed and shod china, who places a hand over the bird’s back while she holds a string attached to one of its legs. Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama sees the turkey as a phallic symbol and the china’s disposition toward the bird as a sign of conquest and dominion (see Fig. 21.14).41 As in Vendedora de frutas, 41  Velázquez Guadarrama, “Clase y género en la pintura costumbrista, 1865–1899,” in Hacia otra historia del arte en México, ed. Esther Acevedo and Stacie Widdifield (México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2001–4), 2:137–58, reprinted as “La pintura costumbrista mexicana: notas de modernidad y nacionalismo,” Caiana, no. 3 (2013): 1–11.

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in Cocina poblana we know that the fowl will be plucked. The use of “plucked” to signify people who have been robbed or otherwise extorted should not be overlooked, particularly in light of the visual vocabulary surrounding celestinas developed by Goya in Los caprichos. In Capricho 44, Ya van desplumados (There They Go Plucked), fleeced birdmen, one with syphilis, are swept from a brothel by prostitutes. A celestina and a monk oversee the operation. The gender counterpart of Capricho 44 is Capricho 45, ¡Qual la descañonan! (How They Pluck Her Quills!). It shows a Goya aware of the exploitation of prostitutes by authority figures.42 In Vendedora de frutas y vieja, as in Cocina poblana, Arrieta has not painted scenes of seduction of chinas by a celestina. On the contrary, the canvases depict false chinas, readily identifiable as such because they are not mestizo women, who are encouraged by the celestina to seduce and pluck men. These alluring white women, then, risk destabilizing the foundational couple of Mexico, the dyad of china and chinaco as presented by Arrieta in El almuerzo. Who are the blonde chinas and what do they represent? This question can be better answered by focusing on Cocina poblana. In what at first glance appears as a costumbrista scene set in a traditional kitchen of Puebla lies a warning for the nation regarding the danger of exploitation by foreign powers. This warning can be decoded by keeping in mind that Celestina, unlike other types in Los españoles pintados por sí mismos, such as the barber or the housekeeper, is not included as a national figure in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos. The go-between, then, remains “foreign” to mexicanidad as envisioned by Mexican liberals. As seen in Arrieta’s depictions and Rivera’s texts of chieras and dark chinas, these truly Mexican types are autonomous. More importantly, Arrieta’s use of the physical characteristics of light and dark skin and hair color to convey a dichotomy between the national projects of liberals and conservatives is not isolated. Indeed, the association of blondness with the moral corruption of foreigners, particularly Emperor Maximilian, and darkness with President Juárez, a Zapotec, is not without context among liberals. It is also seen in three of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano’s novels, Clemencia of 1869, Julia of 1870, and the 1889 El Zarco, published posthumously in 1901, all set during the French intervention. Altamirano, who was a Nahua, began his political career as a radical member of Congress, joined the Revolución de Ayutla, and fought as a cavalry officer in Juárez’s army. That he would resort to a dark-light dichotomy is not surprising, as there is much projection of himself in his dark-skinned heroes. 42  For a discussion of these Caprichos, see Alfonso Pérez Sánchez and Eleanor Sayre, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989), pp. 96–101.

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However, that his works gained for him the category of founder of Mexico’s national literature speaks to a more widespread acceptance of “la raza de bronce” as Mexico’s true people, even if this vision is presented by criollo artists like Arrieta. From such a perspective, only the mestiza china can be Mexico’s true contemporary national icon, and desire for her will bring harmony and prosperity to the nation.

CHAPTER 22

The Images of Celestina and Its Visual Culture Enrique Fernandez Celestina is exceptional among the classics of Spanish literature in having developed a visual culture in its early days. The reputed first edition (Burgos, 1499) was illustrated with seventeen engravings and provided a model for the publication of other illustrated editions in the sixteenth century.1 These early illustrated editions and others that followed are only part of the graphic legacy of Celestina. As the character of the procuress Celestina became a prototype, etchings and paintings of Celestina and of “Celestinas”—the word having become eponymous for a procuress in Spanish—were produced beginning in the early nineteenth century and up to our day. All these images are interesting, not only as witnesses of the reception of the book across the centuries, but also as an area of study in itself. They truly constitute a graphic tradition that presents continuities and innovations that can be demarcated. Here we will sketch out the main lines of this tradition, leaving out television and cinematic productions, which are covered in another essay in this collection. When the Burgos edition of Celestina was published in 1499, the inclusion of printed images illustrating the text was relatively common. The incipient industry of the printed book resorted to illustration as a way to add value to a product that was unavoidably expensive due to limited runs and primitive machinery. Also, the inclusion of images was justified for reasons of competitiveness. Printed books shared the market with the still active industry of hand-copied books, which often included carefully hand-painted images. These factors explain why not only Celestina, but also many other books were published with illustrations in the first hundred years of the printing press. Over the second part of the sixteenth century, illustrations disappeared gradually as books became cheaper, mass-produced objects, and the industry of hand-copied books faded away. Since most of the canonical titles of Spanish literature were written and commercialized in these later days, they were not illustrated. For instance, images of the adventures of Don Quixote appeared 1  Fernando de Rojas, Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (Burgos: Fadrique de Basilea, 1499). See also Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Two Facsimiles (1499? and 1528) (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1995). The illustrations of the 1499 editions are available at http://www .cervantesvirtual.com/bib/bib_obra/celestina/imagenes.shtml.

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well after its initial publication in 1605; Spanish Golden Age theater was illustrated only beginning in the nineteenth century; the picaresque did not develop a tradition of illustrations until the popularizing editions of the twentieth century. A similar scenario applies to other European literatures of the period. For instance, there are no images of Hamlet until much after the play’s first publication; the portraits of drowned Ophelia started to appear only in the nineteenth century, when it became a popular theme in painting.2 The controversy over whether the 1499 Burgos edition by Fadrique de Basilea is the editio princeps of Celestina does not undermine its importance in the graphic tradition of the book.3 Be it the first or only one of the earliest editions, Fadrique de Basilea’s edition set a trend for illustrations that was continued by other printers in the early sixteenth century and later. The Burgos 1499 edition also established a pattern of illustrating specific episodes that was followed by other editions. For instance, the several editions printed by Cromberger in the early decades of the sixteenth century, as well as those by Juan Jofre (1514) and by Juan de Ayala (1538), included illustrations of most of the same episodes as the Burgos edition, executed in a similar style.4 In all these editions, the technique known as woodcut was used for the reproduction of images. This xylographic method entails cutting out the lines of the drawing on the surface of a plank of hardwood to make them stand out—the opposite of the intaglio technique, in which the areas to be printed are cut into the wood surface. The process of carving the images was costly, but the hardness of the wood assured that the woodcuts could be reused many times. The resulting image in relief was covered with thick ink and pressed, together with the movable type of the text, on a blank sheet of paper.5 2  Anthony G. Lo Ré, “More on the Sadness of Don Quixote: The First Known Quixote Illustration, Paris, 1618,” Cervantes 9, no. 1 (1989): 75–83; Alan R. Young, Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709–1900 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), p. 279. See also Peter Whitfield, Illustrating Shakespeare (London: British Library, 2013). 3  On the problematic date of the 1499 edition of La Celestina, see Clara Louise Penney, The Book Called ‘Celestina’ in the Library of the Hispanic Society of America (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1954), pp. 31–33; and Miguel Marciales, Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Brian Dutton and Joseph T. Snow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 1:19–24. 4  Joseph Snow, “La iconografía de tres Celestinas tempranas (Burgos, 1499; Sevilla, 1518; Valencia, 1514): Unas observaciones,” in Estudios sobre La Celestina, ed. Santiago López-Ríos (Madrid: Istmo, 2001), 58–82, pp. 58–59. 5  Woodcuts had been used before mostly for the printing of religious images, as well as for the so-called “block books,” in which both images and text were cut out in wood, as in the popular Biblia pauperum of the later Middle Ages. See Peter W. Parshall and Rainer Schoch,

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Book illustrations were not expected to be high art, but rather mere complements to the words on the page. Although some exceptional engravers, such as Durer, produced masterpieces with this difficult technique, the average illustration did not reach such quality. Most woodcuts were linear art, images in which the dark ink of the lines contrasted with the white of the paper, without mid-tones. The thickness of the lines could be changed, but only within certain limits because the edges of the images deteriorated fast after pressing if the lines were too thin. The 1499 edition of Celestina contains seventeen woodcuts that represent well the limited possibilities of this method of illustration. We do not know who drew and cut the images, or even if they were one or two different people—anonymity being common to all the engraved books of the period.6 Given the similarity of style, the drawer/engraver was probably the same person who executed the illustrations for Fadrique de Basilea’s 1496 Libro de Ysopo.7 His images reveal a clear German influence, which matches the national origin of the first printers who worked in Spain.8 Specifically, the representation of the characters and the buildings in the 1499 Burgos edition are directly influenced by the illustrated edition of Terence’s comedies published in Strasbourg in 1496 and by the German translation of the Eunuchus published in Olms in 1486.9 This connection to Terence’s illustrated works may simply be Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). A good overview of the process of producing woodcuts is Walter Chamberlain, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Woodcut Printmaking and Related Techniques (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). For Spain, see Antonio Gallego, Historia del grabado en España (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990); and Blanca García Vega, El grabado del libro español: siglos XV–XVI–XVII (aportación a su estudio con los fondos de las bibliotecas de Valladolid) (Valladolid: Institución Cultural Simancas, 1984). 6  Alfred W. Pollard, Early Illustrated Books: A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries (London: K. Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1926), pp. 5–6. 7  Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, “Fue tanto breve quanto muy sutil: Los paratextos de La Celestina,” eHumanista 19 (2011): 20–78, p. 39. 8  Julián Martín Abad and Isabel Moyano Andrés, Estanislao Polono (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, Centro Internacional de Estudios Históricos Cisneros, 2002), p. 18. 9  Publius Terentius Afer, Comoediae (Strassburg: Johannes Grüninger, 1496), http://tudigit .ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/show/inc-iv-77; Publius Terentius Afer, Hernach volget ain maisterliche vnd wolgesetzte Comedia zelesen vnd zehören lüstig vnd kurtzwylig [Eunuchus] (Ulm: Conrad Dinckcmut, 1486). The studies about the connection between these books and Celestina are David Rodríguez-Solás, “A la vanguardia del libro ilustrado: El Terencio de Lyon (1493) y La Celestina de Burgos (1499),” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 86, no. 1 (2009): 1–17; Clive Griffin, “Celestina’s Illustrations,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78 (2001): 59–79, pp. 66–68; John T. Cull, “A Possible Influence on the Burgos 1499 Celestina Illustrations: The German 1486 Translation of Terence’s Eunuchus,” La Corónica 38, no. 2 (2010): 137–60.

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the result of the engraver choosing these models because of his origins or professional connections. However, it is a significant choice given the important role that Terence played in the rebirth of the classical tradition, especially of the Roman theater. The fact that in the prologue to the 1502 edition Rojas refers to the first Act that he is supposedly continuing as “Terentian work” may have influenced the engraver’s choice of a model for the illustrations. Similarly, the connection to the sentimental romance, another genre to which Celestina is related, is confirmed by the woodcut in the Burgos edition that depicts Calisto lying in his bed and pining for Melibea: the same image had been previously used to represent a lovesick Leriano in the Zaragoza 1493 illustrated edition of Cárcel de amor.10 It is also interesting to notice that this image had previously been used to illustrate Louis Cruse’s chivalry book L’histoire d’Olivier de Castille (Basilea, 1492), another genre that clearly left its imprint on Celestina.11 Following the conventions surrounding the role of art in the period, the anonymous engraver of the Burgos edition conceived the images as didactic, moralizing devices to spread the doctrine. For this purpose, it was capital to clearly establish the identity of the characters since their particular facial features could not be rendered accurately within the limitations of the medium. To palliate this deficiency, the engraver hinted at their identity through the inclusion of attributes. This practice was customary in religious imagery as a way to help the illiterate viewers identify the figures and their roles. For instance, Saint Peter was systematically represented with the keys of heaven in his hands or hanging from the belt at his waist. In a similar manner, Celestina is depicted carrying the rosary, the moneybag, or a spool of yarn, even in scenes in which these props are not mentioned in the text. However, this identification seems not to have satisfied the printer, who added the names of the characters as captions above the figures. This precaution was not excessive given that the engravings reveal the underlying tendency toward the use of stock images—generic types such as the old woman, the young woman, the young man. Because of this typification, Pármeno is not easily distinguishable from Sempronio, both of whom are represented by very similar standardized images of the young servant. The two old women in the story, Celestina and Alisa, are represented also by disquietingly similar figures of women with their heads covered who carry rosaries. The interchangeability of characters is especially noticeable in later illustrated editions, especially in those that, instead of 10  Diego de San Pedro, Cárcel de amor (Zaragoza: Pablo Hurus, 1493). 11  Philippe Camus, L’histoire d’Olivier de Castille et Artus d’Algarbe (Geneva: Louis Cruse, 1492). See Enrique Fernández Rivera, “Calisto, Leriano, Oliveros: Tres dolientes y un mismo grabado,” Celestinesca 36 (2012): 119–42.

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illustrating specific scenes, depict only the static figures of the characters present in every act. In these editions, the same images are used for two different characters in different acts. For instance, in Act 18 of the Seville 1518 edition, Areúsa, who is dressed in mourning after Pármeno’s death, is represented by the image of a woman with covered head that had been used before for the character of Melibea’s mother, Alisa. Such practices are not surprising in an incipient industry that aimed at lowering costs by standardizing production. It also explains the reutilization of images from previous books, as we saw with the borrowing of Leriano’s image to represent lovesick Calisto in his bed. An especially far-fetched case is how the engraving originally designed to illustrate the fall of Calisto in the Burgos 1499 edition was repurposed for Alonso de Salaya’s Romance de la reina troyana glosado (1530): the walls of Melibea’s garden are expected to represent those of the city of Troy; falling Calisto and his servants to become warriors; and Melibea and Lucrecia to stand for queen Hecuba and one of her servants or daughters.12 Another convention associated with the didactic role of art that is detectable in the illustrations of the Burgos and later editions is the use of hand gestures to indicate the intentions and tone of the words uttered by the characters. For instance, the image that illustrates Act 13 of the Burgos edition shows Sosia notifying Tristan of Pármeno’s and Sempronio’s executions (see Fig. 22.1). Sosia’s hands are gesticulating, as if he were graphically describing the gruesome event, while Tristan’s hands are held up in a gesture of surprise and horror. Hand gestures are used to not only represent and clarify the text, as here, but also to expand it, as in the execution of Pármeno and Sempronio in Cromberger’s edition (Seville, 1518). The illustration of Act 13 seems to render the complex exchange between Sosia and the two executed servants: They [Pármeno and Sempronio] were already senseless, but one of them stared at me when he heard me crying and raised his hands to the heavens, almost giving thanks to God. It was as if he wondered if I was sorry he was dying. He bowed his head in sad farewell, with tears in his eyes, as if to say he’d see me next on Judgement Day. (146–47)13 12  Alonso de Salaya, Romance dela reina troyana glosado y un romance de Amadís (S.l.: s.n., ca. 1530), Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid R-3665, available at Biblioteca Digital Hispánica: http://bibliotecadigitalhispanica.bne.es:80/. See Pollard, Early, pp. 73–98; Carlos Alvar, “De La Celestina a Amadís: El itinerario de un grabado,” in Filologia dei testi a stampa (area iberica), ed. Patrizia Botta, Aviva Garribba, and Elisabetta Vaccaro (Modena: Mucchi, 2005), 97–109. 13  The quotations from Celestina are by page number from the translation by Peter Bush (New York: Penguin, 2009).

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Figure 22.1 Sosia narrates to Tristán the execution of Pármeno and Sempronio while Calisto daydreams in his bedroom. Woodcut illustrating Act 13 of the Burgos 1499 edition of Celestina.

However, the engraver did not try to faithfully represent this complex interaction, which would have been difficult within the limited means of a woodcut. Instead, he replaced this action with the participation of Sosia in the scene in a way that is not indicated in the text: one of the executioners is depicted pointing an accusing finger to Sosia, as if connecting him to the two executed men, while Sosia raises his hand in a gesture of denial.14 This scene of accusation and denial added by the engraver also exemplifies another practice common in religious art that is detectable in the early illustrated editions of Celestina and other books of the period: the use of preestablished patterns for the treatment of scenes, especially group scenes.15 In the previous case, the exchange of gestures between the executioner and Sosia follows the pattern customarily used to portray Peter the Apostle’s repeated denial of being one of Jesus’s followers. Celestina engravers could not but be familiar with the well-tested artistic patterns used for the Passion of Christ, and they applied them to their work for reasons of expediency. A case of the process through which the engravers came to apply these patterns can be reconstructed by comparing the differences between the illustrations of Calisto’s fall and death in the Burgos and the Seville editions. The act of falling was associated in the period with the Christian imagery of sin and the expulsion from paradise. A Christian interpretation of the fall of Calisto—who is significantly compared to Adam in previous passages of the text—may have influenced the Burgos illustrator to graphically emphasize the ladder from which Calisto is falling and represent it under a cross formed by the panes of a window. This disposition evokes the Crucifixion of Christ, in which a ladder traditionally rests on the cross. Such allusion to the Crucifixion is justified in this case by the equation of the figures of Adam and Christ that was customary in biblical typology—a method of biblical interpretation that sees characters of the 14  Enrique Fernández Rivera, “La caída de Calisto en las primeras ediciones ilustradas de La Celestina,” eHumanista 19 (2011): 137–56. 15  Juan Carrete Parrondo, Fernando Checa Cremades, and Valeriano Bozal, El grabado en España (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1931), p. 48.

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Old Testament as heralding those of the New Testament. This Christianization initiated by the Burgos illustrator was taken a step further by the illustrator of the Seville 1518 edition: he represented not the moment of Calisto’s fall but his dead body being carried away by his servants. Tristán’s words to Sosia, “lift his feet, [l]et’s take our dear master’s body” (185), may have given the illustrator the idea to represent the scene according to a well-known pattern used in the depiction of the deposition of Christ: Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea carrying Christ’s body by his feet and shoulders. As the seventeenth century progressed and the quality of the production of Spanish printers declined, the publication of illustrated editions of Celestina gradually came to a halt. Due to the change in readers’ tastes, Celestina quit being published altogether between 1663 and 1822.16 When new illustrated editions were published in the nineteenth century, the scenes represented and their styles were completely different from previous centuries. We do not know if the nineteenth-century illustrators were not familiar with the imagery of the old editions, or if they simply considered them outdated. In any case, the new engravings did not resemble the old ones at all. The didacticism and simplicity of the early illustrated editions were supplanted by an overtly dramatic style that aimed at enticing and thrilling the reader. Dark backgrounds and strong contrasts of light created mysterious, dramatic scenarios. The illustrator of Gorch’s 1842 edition chose to represent gallant scenes in this style (see Fig. 22.2 and Fig. 22.3).17 Similarly, the 1883 Barcelona edition presented an idealized vision of the past, of a world of castle-like interiors that provided a romantic stage for the encounters of the glamourized young lovers (see Fig. 22.4).18 This romanticizing treatment has been continued in many illustrated editions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although new influences are also detectable. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish between two main groups of illustrated editions in this period. One group consists of books intended for a younger audience that reads them as part of their secondary school curriculum, often in an abbreviated, annotated format. The second group are expensive editions, lavishly illustrated in color and issued in limited runs for bibliophiles. The first group can be exemplified by the editions

16  Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos, “La Celestina, del siglo XVIII a Menéndez Pelayo,” in Celestina: Recepción y herencia, ed. Gregorio Torres Nebrera (Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 2001), 73–96, pp. 88, 93. 17  Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, o Calixto y Melivea (Barcelona: Tomás Gorch, 1842). 18  Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Barcelona: Imp. y lit. de los sucesores de N. Ramírez y Cia., 1883).

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Figure 22.2 Melibea, helped by Lucrecia, quietly leaves her bedroom to meet Calisto. Illustration of Act 12 in La Celestina, ó Calixto y Melivea. Barcelona: Tomás Gorchs, 1842.

Figure 22.3 Calisto and Melibea in the garden, and Lucrecia behind. Illustration of Act 19 in La Celestina, ó Calixto y Melivea. Barcelona: Tomás Gorchs, 1842.

illustrated by Palet and Goñi (1974) and by Liarte (1988).19 Their illustrations recall the style of comics and motion pictures, to which younger audiences are most receptive. Among the second group, most important are the editions 19  Bartolomé Liarte, illustrator, La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, ed. Enrique Ortenbach (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1988); Luis Jover, illustrator, La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, ed. Miguel Reino (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca y Santillana, 1944).

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Calisto scaling the wall to access Melibea’s garden at night. Illustration of Act 19 in La Celestina: Tragi-comedia de Calisto y Melibea … obra famosisima escrita por Rodrigo de Cota. Biblioteca amena é instructiva. Barcelona: Nueva de S. Francisco, 1883.

that include ink drawings by Picasso.20 However, his drawings are not illustrations in the usual meaning of the word since most of them do not correspond to actual events in the book. Picasso uses the text of Celestina as a platform to explore his sexual phantasies. His images enter into a dialogue, even a duel, with Rojas’s text, and they are “not to be read as secondary to the text pages but rather as their able partner.”21 Thus, Picasso does not hesitate to include a portrait of himself in a scene, or figures, such as the Minotaur, that are alien to the story but part of his complex visual universe. Another lavishly illustrated edition is the one with images by Teo Puebla. His systematic mixture of bright red and dark tones results in a demonic, nightmarish world, in which sexuality is crudely depicted. A similar treatment can be seen in the edition illustrated 20  Pablo Picasso, illustrator, La Celestina (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier Crommelynck, 1971). 21  Susan Baker, “A Duel with Fernando de Rojas: Picasso’s Celestina Prints,” Janus Head 11, no. 2 (2009): 219–38, p. 226. See also William J. Nowak, “Picasso’s Celestina Etchings: Portrait of the Artist as Reader of Fernando de Rojas,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 9 (2005): 53–69.

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by Celedonio Perellón, in which a sexualized yet naïve rendering of the scenes and the characters combine to recall the realism traditionally associated with the genre of the picaresque.22

The Pictorial Tradition of Celestina

Next to the illustrated editions, a considerable part of the visual culture of Celestina consists of paintings in which the old procuress Celestina is portrayed alone or in group scenes that do not portray events in Rojas’s text. These images reflect how the character of Celestina took a life of its own and grew apart from the plot and the other characters in the story. Indeed, Celestina became a prototype in Spanish culture to the point that her name turned into an eponym to refer to a procuress. Depictions of prototypical Celestinas thrived in the early nineteenth century, but earlier images of procuresses existed. Dutch painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were especially likely to include them in their genre paintings. The proneness of Dutch painters to portray scenes of taverns and brothels as part of their representations of everyday life may explain the abundance of canvases in which a procuress is present. Although their depictions of go-betweens do not seem to be influenced by Celestina, this source of inspiration cannot be flatly discarded because the Spanish book was well known all over Europe soon after its publication and was translated into Dutch as early as 1550.23 These paintings typically contain the triangle formed by a procuress, a young woman, and a suitor. Good examples are the paintings entitled The Procuress by Baburen (1622) and by Vermeer (1655), as well as Bijlert’s several paintings on prostitution from the same period (see Fig. 22.5 and Fig. 22.6).24 Other less common combinations appear in canvases such as Michiel Sweerts’s Young Man and the Procuress (1660), in which the young woman is absent. Not only the configurations, but also the treatment of the scene varies: while some paintings pretend to be an artistic rendering of real 22  Teo Puebla, illustrator, La Celestina (La Puebla de Montalbán: Ayuntamiento de La Puebla de Montalbán, 2005); Celedonio Perellón, illustrator, La Celestina (Pamplona: Liber, 2004). 23  Lieve Behiels and Kathleen V. Kish, eds., Celestina: An Annotated Edition of the First Dutch Translation (Antwerp, 1550) (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005). 24  Dirck van Baburen, The Procuress, oil on canvas (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, c. 1622); Jan Vermeer, The Procuress, oil on canvas (Dresden: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, 1656); Jan van Bijlert, At the Procuress, oil on canvas (Warsaw: National Museum, c. 1632), and The Procuress, oil on canvas (Braunschweig: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, c. 1620).

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De koppelaarster (The Procuress), by Dirck van Baburen (1622). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

life, some aim at conveying a moralizing message, and some are a combination of these two approaches. Many canvases emphasize the monetary aspect behind the sexual transaction through the prominent inclusion of coins or a bag of money in the scene. Next to the emphasis on the commercial aspect of the deal, some paintings represent the deception of the purchaser by including hints of how the procuress, her protégée, and sometimes a pimp are in cahoots. Their surreptitious gestures, glances, and maneuvers show how the suitor is about to be bilked out of his money, as in the engravings The School of the Procuress by Schon Erhard (1531) and by Heinrich Vogtherr (1537). Similar scenes of procuresses conducting their trade were painted in Spain during the same centuries. Especially famous are Murillo’s Mujeres en la ventana (Women at a Window) (1670) and Cuatro figuras en un escalón (Four Figures on

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Figure 22.6 De koppelaarster (The Procuress), by Jan Vermeer (1656). Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

a Step) (1660).25 These canvases show Murillo’s fondness for portraying characters of the picaresque world, in which prostitution often took shelter. Unlike in the Dutch paintings, which are snapshots of daily life, Murillo’s figures are aware that they are posing for a portrait, and defiantly stare back at the viewer, as if looking for a potential client or for complicity in their illegal trade. The procuresses depicted in these paintings do not seem to have direct connections with Rojas’s Celestina, except for the use of a veil over their heads.26 Even if Murillo’s paintings do not depict any specific scene that can be identified with the text of Celestina, they portray the same underworld that continued to exist unaltered since Rojas’s day, as well as its suitability as an artistic subject. Nearly a hundred and fifty years after Murillo’s Mujeres en la ventana, Goya’s Maja y Celestina al balcón (Maja and Celestina on a Balcony) (1808) depicted the same scene in which a procuress and her protégée are trying to 25  Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, Mujeres en la ventana (Women at the Window, also known as A Girl and Her Duenna), oil on canvas (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1670); Cuatro figuras en un escalón (Four Figures on a Step), oil on canvas (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1660). 26  E. Michael Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 132–34.

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Figure 22.7 Maja y Celestina al balcón (Maja and Celestina on a Balcony), by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1808). Private collection.

attract clients from a window (see Fig. 22.7).27 Although this practice had not changed, Goya’s treatment was very different from his predecessor. In Goya’s case, the connection to the literary Celestina is clearly stated in the title, even if the name of Celestina had become an eponym for a procuress by then. The old woman holding a rosary in her hands is a direct descendant of the literary Celestina. Her exaggerated ugliness, her bent back, crooked nose, and decrepitude contrast with the beauty and youth of the maja—a low-class popular type of Madrid. By this disparity, Goya conveys graphically the contradictory memento mori and carpe diem themes that underline the plot of Celestina. The contrasting couple of the ugly Celestina and the beautiful maja reappears in many of Goya’s paintings and especially in his engravings. Earlier in his life, he had depicted them in Maja y vieja (Maja and Old Woman) (c. 1780), which represents a gallant scene in a garden but emphasizes the old woman’s 27  Francisco de Goya, Maja y Celestina al balcón (Maja and Celestina on a Balcony), oil on canvas (private collection, 1808).

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ugliness.28 Most famously, he executed as many as thirty prints that included Celestinas, some of which are part of his famous Caprichos. Because of this repeated use of her figure and the loaded scenarios in which he places her, Goya must be recognized as the initiator of the use of Celestina as a means to express complex, deep meaning through painting.29 Goya’s nightmarish renderings of scenes with Celestinas are masterpieces in which real life literary influences and his somber thoughts coalesce into a criticism of the backward society of the Spain of the time. Next to witches, bodies mutilated during the war against the occupying Napoleonic troops, Goya’s Celestinas are some of the first inhabitants of the “España negra.” The influence of Goya is evident in other painters of the nineteenth century, such as Leonardo Alenza, Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, and Eugenio Lucas Villamil, who also resorted to Celestina for paintings that criticized the society of their times. However, next to this critical and pessimistic use of the image of Celestina, a lighter vision of her character coexisted. The humorous treatment of her figure is best expressed in Hartzenbusch’s very popular comedy Los polvos de la madre Celestina (1840), which includes a quaint sorceress called mother Celestina, who we are told is Rojas’s very Celestina, who has survived over the centuries thanks to her own magic. Also with her magic, she helps a young couple to surmount the impediments to their marriage.30 A graphic version of this endearing vision of Celestina are the illustrations of Estébanez Calderón’s short article “Celestina,” which were part of his collection Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (The Spaniards Painted by Themselves) (1843).31 In this costumbrista piece, Estébanez Calderón celebrated Rojas’s Celestina, as well as recognized the existence of women who exerted similar functions in his own times. The two engravings accompanying the text portray the life of one such contemporary Celestina. There is nothing sordid implied in the article or the illustrations. The first engraving depicts her as a benign old woman, carrying a letter that she has received from two distinguished men in chimney hats. The second engraving shows her delivering the missive to a young woman, dressed 28  Francisco de Goya, Maja y vieja (Maja and Old Woman), oil on canvas (private collection, c. 1780). 29  José López Rey, Goya’s Caprichos: Beauty, Reason, and Caricature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, l953), pp. 15–20; Manuel B. López Vázquez, “Prostitución y celestinaje en tres caprichos de Goya: El engaño y la mentira como las enfermedades más viejas del reino,” Semata, Ciencias Sociais e Humanidades 21 (2009): 201–24. 30  Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Los polvos de la madre Celestina (Madrid: Yenes, 1840). 31  Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (Madrid: Ignacio Boix, 1843–44).

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Figure 22.8 A modern Celestina, by Lameyer and Alenza, in Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos. Madrid: Ignacio Boix, 1843–44.

according to the fashion of the time, in her private room (see Fig. 22.8 and Fig. 22.9). A similarly gentle treatment of Celestina is the costumbrista painting La cocina poblana (Puebla Kitchen) (1863) by the Mexican Agustín Arrieta.32 The canvas depicts a kitchen in which several women work at their domestic duties. Among them, a young woman, dressed as a china—the Mexican equivalent of the Spanish maja—is holding a turkey on a leash, which is one of the ironic references to her control of male desire. She is approached by an old woman on behalf of a suitor, who is impatiently waiting outside. In spite of the unequivocally Mexican scenario, it is easy to recognize a descendant of the literary Celestina in this old woman dressed in dark colors and with her head covered.33 This amiable treatment of the figure of Celestina has 32  Agustín Arrieta, La cocina poblana (Puebla Kitchen), oil on canvas (Mexico: Museo Nacional de Historia, INAH, 1863). 33  Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama, “La pintura costumbrista mexicana: Notas de modernidad y nacionalismo,” Caiana, Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte (CAIA) 3 (2013): n. pag., http://caiana.caia.org.ar/template/caiana.php?pag=articles/article_2.php&obj=113&vol=3.

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Figure 22.9 A modern Celestina handing in a letter, by Lameyer and Alenza, in Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos. Madrid: Ignacio Boix, 1843–44.

continued to our day. When in 1998 the Spanish postal system issued stamps to commemorate masterpieces of Spanish literature, they chose for Rojas’s book a quaint caricature of Celestina. Portrayed with exaggerated features, surrounded by flasks and other utensils for her sorceries, she recalls the witch of a fairy tale. An equally endearing treatment characterizes the only statue of Celestina standing in a public space, which is a bronze bust by Agustín Casillas in the Jardín de Calisto y Melibea (Garden of Calisto and Melibea) in Salamanca. In spite of the existence of this mild, even endearing vision of the figure of Celestina, Goya’s harsher approach of enlisting her figure to castigate or explore the darkest aspects of human nature has been the predominant one. Picasso is the most notable exponent of this line in the twentieth century. His mentioned illustrations for the book are perfect examples of this approach, but they are only a part of his engagement with Celestina. Since his youth, he was an admirer of Rojas’s book, of which he owned several editions. He drew sketches of Celestina in a Goya style, but his most famous work is the canvas Celestina (1903).34 It is in reality the portrait of a contemporary procuress, Carlota Valdivia, who owned a house in the red light district of Barcelona. Picasso significantly chose to depict this woman dressed in a way that connects her to the engravings in the early editions of Rojas’s book. By portraying her wearing a mantilla, he is referring to the fake religiosity of Rojas’s Celestina. The blind eye of the woman in Picasso’s painting, even if based on a real feature of her model, elaborates on the literary Celestina’s scarred face and the

34  Pablo Picasso, Celestina, oil on canvas (Paris: Musée National Picasso, 1903).

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Lozana Andaluza’s syphilitic mark on her forehead.35 The somber palette, characteristic of Picasso’s Blue Period, and an angular treatment of the figure that evokes El Greco give the figure an ominous tone that recalls the tragic fate of the main characters of Rojas’s masterpiece.36 A similarly dark vision of the figure of Celestina is present in Las chicas de la Claudia (Claudia Girls) (1929) by Gutiérrez Solana.37 This expressionist painter and declared follower of Goya’s style depicted a brothel scene that includes a Celestina character covered with a mantilla. In this case, the religious overtones of the garment extend to the premonitions of death associated with bullfights, to which women also wore mantillas. The clothes of an absent picador, which are ominously hanging on a chair that resembles a skull, contribute to the gloomy atmosphere. The Celestina-like character donning the mantilla seems to have returned from, or to be ready to attend, the fatal bullfight in which the picador died or is going to die. Her eyes make contact with the spectator, who is invited into a scene in which allurement and threat, sex and death, are intermixed. The combination of sex and death associated with Rojas’s book is also developed by other painters from the late nineteenth century up to our day. Thus, in the tradition of the vanitas, Romero de Torres’s El pecado (Sin) (1915) depicts a naked young woman and a group of old Celestina-like women offering her a mirror in which she can admire herself. The transiency of beauty is represented by the mirror and by the contrast between the beautiful naked body and the heavily clad, ugly old women.38 A similar symbolic use of the figure of Celestina as a memento mori was enlisted in a propagandistic poster of the campaign against syphilis in 1927.39 Manchón’s poster entitled La oferta peligrosa (The Dangerous Offer) shows an enticing young woman offering the viewer a rose. A snake surrounds her body as a reference to the disease inside her body and as an allusion to Eve tempting Adam. Behind her, a skeleton 35  On Picasso’s expressive use of eyes in his paintings, see Memory Jockisch Holloway, Making Time: Picasso’s Suite 347 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 119. 36  Francisco Rico, “Las primeras Celestinas de Picasso,” Bulletin Hispanique 92 (1990): 609– 26; Carol Salus, “Picasso’s Version of Celestina and Related Issues,” Celestinesca 15, no. 2 (1991): 3–17. 37  José Gutiérrez Solana, Las chicas de la Claudia (Claudia Girls), oil on canvas (Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1929). 38  Julio Romero de Torres, El pecado (Sin), oil and tempera on canvas (Cordoba: Museo Julio Romero de Torres, 1913). 39  Ramón Castejón Bolea, “¡Peligro! El cartel sanitario en la lucha antivenérea,” in Las imágenes de la salud: Cartelismo sanitario en España (1910–1950), ed. Ramón Castejón Bolea, Enrique Perdiguero Gil, and José Luis Piqueras Fernández (Alicante: Instituto Alicantino de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2012).

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Figure 22.10 Trata de blancas (White Slave Trade) by Joaquín Sorolla Madrid (1894/95). Museo Sorolla, Madrid.

covered with a cloak in Celestina-like fashion waits in the dark. From a compositional point of view, this image follows the same pattern as Goya’s maja and Celestina paintings, in which the alluring young woman is depicted at the front, while, at the back, the ugly procuress lurks waiting for prey. Next to similar symbolic arrangements to convey eschatological meanings, the figure of Celestina has been enlisted by painters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to denounce social injustice, specifically the exploitation of sex trade workers and of women in general. A good example is Sorolla’s Trata de blancas (White Slave Trade) (1894) (see Fig. 22.10).40 Although this canvas had won an award at the Paris Salon, when it was exhibited in the 1897 Exposición Nacional in Spain, it was much criticized in the Catholic press because of its risqué theme.41 The canvas was, however, intended to be a snapshot 40  Joaquín Sorolla, Trata de blancas (White Slave Trade), oil on canvas (Madrid: Museo Sorolla, 1894–1895). 41  María Dolores Caparrós Masegosa and Esperanza Guillén Marcos, “Prensa católica y pintura española en el último cuarto del siglo XIX: Aproximaciones a una crítica integrista (segunda parte),” Cuadernos de Arte de la Universidad de Granada 39 (2008): 113–29, p. 125; Reyes Carrasco Garrido, “Arte, moral y prostitución: Un asunto escabroso en la Nacional de 1897,” Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte 9–10 (1997–98): 379–86.

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Figure 22.11 Celestina, by Ignacio Zuloaga (1909). Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.

of the reality of the times and a denunciation of how young women of humble origins were lured to serve in city brothels in awful conditions. The painting captures a scene in which a Celestina-like old woman, dressed in the usual outfit of the character, is minding a group of young women on a train. They are being transported like animals, destined to serve as prostitutes in a brothel. The young women, dressed in colorful clothes, sleep, while their guardian, in a black cloak, stays awake. There is, however, a hint of sympathy in Sorolla’s treatment of this tired old woman, who can be seen as a forced partner in this cruel trading of which she was probably a victim in her distant youth. Many other Celestinas appear in paintings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Zuloaga’s Celestina (1906) (see Fig. 22.11), Botero’s several paintings by this title (1998–2006), and Rego’s A casa de Celestina (Celestina’s House) (2000).42 Although diverse in style and treatment, these paintings 42  Ignacio Zuloaga, Celestina, oil on canvas (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 1909); Paula Rego, A casa de Celestina (Celestina’s House), oil on canvas (private collection, 2000); Fernando

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elaborate on the traditional character of Celestina. Zuloaga’s painting uses her name to justify as moralizing scene the alluring image of a naked young woman. Botero’s use of the figure of Celestina is more complex. He positions his characteristic bloated figures in the traditional scenario of a young woman offered to a client by an older woman in dark clothes. A mirror, discretely placed in the background, evokes the vanitas tradition. The intentional naiveté of Botero’s treatment contrasts with Paula Rego’s dramatic elaboration of the theme into a complex scenario in her A casa de Celestina. The many figures in the painting, none of which correspond to the traditional image of the procuress, include events that seem to be illustrating specific episodes of the book, such as Melibea’s suicidal fall. Others, however, are more difficult to interpret since, as the painter declared, they represent events in her own life. Additionally, Rego stated that the painting was intended as a contribution to the embattled right to abortion in Catholic Portugal. A feminist denunciation of the sexual exploitation of women is especially conveyed by one of the possible Celestina characters, an older woman fixing the virginity of lifeless dolllike young woman.43 We can conclude this overview of the graphic history of Celestina by emphasizing how continuity and evolution are simultaneously present. A tradition of representing specific scenes and characters developed soon after the first publication of the book. However, new illustrations had to be created after the large hiatus in the transmission of the book between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new illustrations responded to fresh readings of the old book in which didacticism was deemphasized, giving way to images of a romanticized medieval world of doomed young lovers. Also, as Celestina became a classic of Spanish literature, it had to be adapted for newer audiences, some of them young readers who grew up among comics and motion pictures. In spite of the popularity of the book and the abundance of illustrated editions, the scenes of the book never became a pictorial theme, as was the case with Don Quixote’s adventures, which provided the subject for many canvases. However, the character of Celestina took on a life of its own outside the story to become a well-established pictorial theme. Her character was flexible enough to convey meanings pertinent to new circumstances and artistic tendencies. For that purpose, features taken from Rojas’s Celestina were combined with

Botero, Celestina, oil on canvas, Bogotá (Colección de Arte del Banco de la Republica: Bogotá, 1998). 43  Barbara F. Weissberger, “The Genesis of Paula Rego’s A casa de Celestina,” in La pluma es lengua del alma: Ensayos en honor de E. Michael Gerli, ed. José Manuel Hidalgo (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2011), 407–32.

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those from contemporary procuresses. Especially productive was the contrast of the old, ugly procuress and the young woman she was selling. They encapsulated the contrast, central to Rojas’s text, of sex and death, pleasure and punishment. The resulting figures were often positioned in genre and costumbrista paintings. Set in morally loaded scenarios, these Celestinas and their entourages were repurposed to convey messages ranging from social criticism to existential anxieties.

CHAPTER 23

Celestina in Film and Television Yolanda Iglesias The objective of the present study is to examine important issues regarding the adaptation of Celestina for cinema and television. This work considers why this masterpiece only recently reached the screen, while other classical Spanish literary texts were adapted in the early years of cinematography.1 It also examines why critics argue that none of the adaptations have, to date, been satisfactory. In particular, we will consider why directors omitted essential components in their adaptations of Celestina, as well as how those omissions altered the original. We will pay special attention to the effects of censorship on two adaptations in particular. Finally, we will compare Rojas’s intended readers with today’s audiences, emphasizing how the directors of the cinematographic and television adaptations neglected the fact that modern audiences lack the necessary cultural baggage to understand important subtexts of Celestina, and how this neglect burdens their versions. Celestina was not made into a screen version until 1965, while many other Spanish classics, such as Don Quixote or Don Juan, were repeatedly adapted for the screen as early as the early twentieth century. Utrera Macías questioned whether this neglect was due to the length of the book, the abundance of dialogues, or the distant past in which the book was written.2 He discarded these reasons, noting that in 1898 the French director Léon Gaumont shot a brief silent scene of the equally long, rich in dialogue, and remote in time Don Quixote, of which longer versions soon followed. The length and complexity of Celestina’s text, and its remoteness in time, further delayed its adaptation for the screen.3 Utrera Macías concluded that the difficulties that caused the 1  Presently, only six adaptations of Celestina exist. For a detailed description of these adaptations, see appendix A. 2   Rafael Utrera Macías, “Representación cinematográfica de mitos literarios. Carmen y Celestina, don Quijote y don Juan según el cine español,” Versants, no. 37 (2000): 197–230, p. 201. 3  See Lucio Blanco Mallada, “Don Quijote en el cine de ficción español,” in Con los pies en la tierra. Don Quijote, en su marco geográfico e histórico: XII Coloquio Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas (XII–CIAC), Argamasilla de Alba, 6–8 mayo de 2005, ed. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez and Rafael González Cañal (Ciudad Real: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, 2008), 473–90, pp. 473–74.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004349322_024

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cinematographic neglect of Celestina must lie within the text itself.4 As Cabello Pino wrote, one of the main problems in adapting a classic text for the screen is its high-quality narrative. The director has to confront the difficult choice of whether to remain faithful to the literary work or not; he or she must examine if the material can be adjusted to the big screen without losing its true meaning.5 These could be some of the reasons why Rojas’s work did not attract any director until 1967; but as we will see, there are additional intrinsic literary characteristics that make Celestina’s adaptation for the screen very difficult. According to Boyum, until 1957, “nobody loves an adaptation. Not literary enough in that it proceeds through pictures, not cinematic enough in that it has its origins in words, it finds itself in a no man’s land, caught somewhere between a series of conflicting aesthetic claims and rivalries.”6 Frago Pérez agreed with this theory and argued that during the early years of film adaptations, plagiarism of literary texts and other abuses resulted in movies of inferior quality being punished with negative reviews between 1920 and 1960, when specialized magazines lambasted them for their omissions, simplifications, and changes discrediting the original.7 Only in 1957 did the milestone study by George Bluestone begin a conciliatory approach to the cinematic adaptation of literary texts. Leaving behind older prejudices, he considered that literal fidelity to the text should not be the objective of an adaptation. Critics should instead focus on the role of the adapter—a figure who must find inspiring materials in the text to create something new that cannot be compared in its characteristics to the original.8 This approach opened the door to a new, wider conception of how to adapt classic texts into films. The new idea that the final result is not to be compared directly against the text may explain why the fears of adapting such a rich text as Celestina were lessened when the book was finally adapted to the screen in the following decade. Before this date there was an attempt to bring Celestina to the big screen that never materialized. Its existence was documented exclusively in the 1955 4  Utrera Macías, “Representación,” p. 201. 5  Manuel Cabello Pino, “¿Se deben llevar las grandes novelas al cine? Algunas consideraciones sobre una cuestión polémica,” Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios, no. 31 (2005): s/p, http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero31/adaptac.html. 6  Joy Gould Boyum, Double Exposure: Fiction into Films, Plume (New York: New American Library, 1985), p. 15. 7  Marta Frago Pérez, “Reflexiones sobre la adaptación cinematográfica desde una perspectiva iconológica,” Comunicación y Sociedad 18, no. 2 (2005): 49–82, pp. 50–51. 8  Ibid., p. 54.

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correspondence between the Spanish filmmaker José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, the most emblematic director of the national-Catholic ideology behind Francoism, and the general director of film production at the time, Manuel Torres López. In his letter, Sáenz de Heredia expressed his intent to shoot a version of Celestina. He explained that he wanted to avoid wasting time, knowing that writing this type of script would be time-consuming. Therefore, he wanted to know, in advance, whether a film adaptation of such a lurid story would be approved by the official censors. He added that a cinematographic version of Celestina was urgent because rumors of a Franco-Italian production meant that the essence of this landmark of Spanish literature could be butchered in a foreign county. Sáenz de Heredia was probably referring to Carlo Lizzani, an Italian Marxist director, who was talking about a film inspired by Celestina. Lizzani’s ideology meant that a neorealist version, loaded with social criticism of sexual exploitation and poverty, was expected. A month later, the general director of film production answered that he did not see anything inconvenient in proceeding with the project. However, he suggested that Sáenz de Heredia write a draft sketching details of the argument to send to the censors. Unfortunately, no other documents of this first attempt survived and the movie was never made. A possible reason for this could be that the general director of film production was replaced and the successor was perhaps less sympathetic to the idea of bringing Celestina to the prudish audiences of Spanish cinema.9 Another explanation for why the film was never shot could be that Sáenz de Heredia did not feel the same sense of urgency when he learned that this Italian director’s film was only loosely inspired by Rojas’s work. In effect, far from being an adaptation of Celestina, Lizzani’s movie, entitled La Celestina P … R … (1965), was an Italian comedy that criticized some behaviors of contemporary Italian society (see Fig. 23.1). The character, Celestina, is a hyperactive Milanese businesswoman who engages in peculiar public relations. She is a madam who uses a business façade to attract women and make them work as call girls. Their services afford her a comfortable lifestyle and valuable connections within the highest echelons of Italian society. When she is reported to police, she receives protection from politicians who are part of her distinguished clients. Mateo Contin argued that the film, whose action follows the frantic rhythm and parodic style of commedia dell’arte, constituted a critique of social hypocrisy in the Italy of the 1950s. Curiously, Contin notes that the

9  Santiago López-Ríos, “La Celestina en el franquismo: En torno a una frustrada película de José Luis Sáenz de Heredia,” Acta literaria, no. 49 (2014): 139–57, pp. 141, 142, 148, 149, and 151.

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Figure 23.1 Movie poster of Celestina P … R…, directed by Carlo Lizzani (Italy, 1965), with Daniela (Daliah Lavi), Luisella (Beba Loncar), two images of Loredana (Mirella Sannoner), Celestina (Assia Noris), and Anna (Mirella Maravidi).

Italian matchmaker is presented in ways such that the spectators cannot but empathize with her.10 The first true film adaptation of Celestina did not appear until 1967, when Eduardo Teuller made a version for Televisión Española (TVE, the national public broadcasting company in Spain) to be aired as an episode of the literary television series, Teatro de siempre (1966–72). In accordance with the goals of the series, this version of Celestina was envisioned as a theatrical play suitable for all audiences and presented within a didactic frame. The episode starts with the voiceover of a narrator explaining the significance of this masterpiece in the history of Spanish literature, presenting it as second only to Don Quijote. The narrator clarifies that both the language and the scenarios have been modified to avoid offending the sensitivities of the general audiences for which the series is intended. Unfortunately, those cuts which mitigated inappropriateness also removed paragraphs and whole scenes integral to Rojas’s text. For example, Teuller omitted important passages depicting the work of Celestina as a procuress central to Rojas’s text. These scenes included those where Sempronio goes to Celestina’s house to request her services for Calisto, or where Elicia is forced by Celestina to accept Pármeno into her bed. The banquet in Celestina’s house in which Pármeno, Sempronio, Elicia, and Areúsa eat, 10  Matteo Contin, “La Celestina P … R…,” Rapporto Confidenziale, no. 34 (2011): 30–31, http:// www.rapportoconfidenziale.org/?p=14812.

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Figure 23.2 Movie poster of La Celestina, directed by César Ardavín Fernández (Spain, 1969), with Calisto and Melibea ( Julián Mateos and Elisa Ramírez), and Celestina (Amelia de la Torre).

drink, and grope was omitted, and with it the monologue in which Celestina reminisces about her good old days as a prestigious madam. Graphic violence was also systematically eliminated, including the viciousness with which Pármeno and Sempronio kill Celestina, their ensuing execution, Calisto’s violent sexual possession of Melibea, etc. The story of the love between Calisto and Melibea, narrated in a tragic, elevated tone, became the core of the story. The resulting product is a shallow and rhetorical short film, to say the least. Two years later, in 1969, the first Spanish adaptation for the big screen was directed by César Ardavín de la Torre, with the advice of Manuel Criado de Val, a reputed Celestina scholar (see Fig. 23.2). The film received the award of the official Sindicato Nacional del Espectáculo; it also garnered critical acclaim and an amazing popularity, ranking among the eighteen highest-grossing films in Spain between 1965 and 1992.11 Nevertheless, as Franco Anchelergues points

11  Vicente Franco Anchelergues, “La Celestina y el cine,” in La Celestina, V centenario (1499–1999): Actas del congreso internacional de Salamanca, Talavera de la Reina, Toledo, la Puebla de Montalbán, 27 de septiembre–1 de octubre de 1999, ed. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez,

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out, later evaluations were not as positive as the initial ones.12 According to Vázquez Medel, the director intended to faithfully follow Rojas’s work, but his financial problems meant he had to reevaluate his goals. To save the production and stay within budget, he shot inside a studio and followed theatrical conventions. Partially as a result of these conditions, the action was slow and fragmented, but this was also due to the clumsy divisioning—rudimentary title cards with act numbers were intrusively shown before each respective act—into seventeen acts without any real correspondence to plot structure.13 Agreeing with Vázquez Medel, Utrera Macías thought that even if the arbitrary division into acts did not help, the material chosen was good and followed the original narrative. He noted as well some mistakes, such as the mismatch of some titles with the stage or the inappropriate continuation of the music that unnecessarily marked the beginning and the end of a sequence. Overall, he considered that the final product resembles more a recorded play than a film.14 To do justice to this adaptation, we must understand the peculiar context of the pre-transition to democracy that began in late-Francoism. This attitude corresponded to the contradictory years of the end of Francoism in which a modern economy and new liberal mores, imported from Europe, overwhelmed an obsolete regime whose members knew change was imminent. Vázquez Medel highlights that the director took advantage of the timid attempts at liberalization made by the regime and incorporated the erotic aspect, knowing that he could capture the audience.15 Utrera Macías observed that the release occurred when censorship, although strict in political and religious aspects, became more flexible regarding sexual matters.16 In this ambience of mild tolerance, the director of this version of Celestina took advantage of love in the book to portray such erotic aspects on the screen. Indeed, spectators saw the lead actress’s breast at a short unfocused distance in a take considered a milestone in the history of Spanish cinema. The film’s success was due largely to the erotic content in a period when Spanish spectators, eager to see the slightest erotic content, did not hesitate to travel to France to see movies banned Gemma Gómez Rubio, and Rafael González Cañal (Ciudad Real: Universidad Castilla la Mancha, 1999), 531–38, pp. 531–32. 12  Franco Anchelergues, “La Celestina y el cine,” p. 532. 13  Miguel Ángel Vázquez Medel, “La Celestina de la literatura al cine,” in Celestina: Recepción y herencia de un mito literario, ed. Gregorio Torres Nebrera (Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 2001), 125–41, p. 135. 14  Utrera Macías, “Representación,” p. 212. 15  Vázquez Medel, “La Celestina,” p. 136. 16  Utrera Macías, “Representación,” pp. 212–13.

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in Spain. In spite of the relative tolerance that permitted some erotic scenes, Ardavín’s Celestina had to undergo some changes in the wording of the script before it was given the salvo by the censors. Vázquez Medel noted and approved the condensed dialogue which kept scenes within the film industry’s acceptable time limits. He also approved of the treatment of Calisto’s death, of Melibea’s speech before committing suicide—metaphorically represented by a white gauze falling instead of her body—and of the license of placing her mother, Alisa, as a witness to Melibea’s suicide (only Pleberio is present in the original). However, Vázquez Medel considered inappropriate the addition, at the end of the movie, of a shot showing the combined tomb of the two lovers, represented by held hands.17 Regarding the exteriors, Utrera Macías emphasized that the director was more interested in avoiding blunders than in providing accurate historical information about the times: the columns and the architecture befitted the period, but the same floor styles were inappropriately used in houses of different social status.18 The casting was appropriate, and the characterization of the actors was correct. In particular, Celestina was properly made up, with a prominent scar on her face, an important feature other productions neglect. Utrera Macías approved of the initial scene, in particular the manner in which Calisto and Melibea meet and fall in love. He also approved of the use of popular religious devotion as the background to express the veneration that Calisto felt for Melibea. Finally, he thought that the end of the film matched the dramatic explanation that Melibea offers her mother regarding her resolution to commit suicide, even if Pleberio’s important lament is excluded from the movie.19 Five years later, in 1974, Jesús Fernández Santos produced a new version of Celestina for Televisión Española, which was still under the control of the Francoist regime. He enlisted Professor Alonso Zamora Vicente to appear between the acts and give information about the book, its authorship, the status of women in the period, and the personality of Celestina. In spite of this inclusion, the result was disappointing. According to the critic Franco Anchelergues, it looked more like a documentary than a movie or a literary adaptation. Given that it was produced by the government-owned television, which had some 17  Vázquez Medel, “La Celestina,” pp. 134–36. 18  Contrarily, Antonio de Obregón wrote in the newspaper that the furniture, architecture, and customs were carefully designed. Additionally, he stressed the director’s success in using Spanish and Italian paintings, Berruguete’s ceilings, and the doors and other details of the wealthy homes of the time (Antonio de Obregón, “Estrenos cinematográficos,” ABC, April 6, 1969, morning edition, p. 62). 19  Utrera Macías, “Representación,” pp. 212–13.

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freedom from commercial pressure, it should have explored and represented Rojas’s work in detail. However, limited by the format conventions of television, the adaptation was reduced to less than an hour. To constrict the story so much, the director resorted to dividing the action into nine acts, separated by Zamora Vicente’s comments preparing viewers for the following sequence. However, the result was a simplistic rendering of the original. For instance, the script omitted most of the machinations of the servants, and, without this information, the causes of Calisto’s death were not understood. Equally, the important initial conversation in which Calisto declares his love to Melibea was completely omitted.20 Other relevant subjects, such as prostitution, Celestina’s spell, or the role of Melibea’s parents were equally ignored. Next to these structural elisions, Rojas’s text was also censored. Scenes and conversations expressing inappropriate behavior, blasphemies, or criticisms of religion were systematically eliminated; Elicia appeared completely dressed, despite being in bed with Crito, and the film did not include the reference to the lover of a monk who is supposedly kept in Celestina’s house. Although (these cases aside) the dialogue followed the original, it was often meaningless for being presented out of context. Another major shortcoming was the scenography, the costumes, and the poor interpretations of some of the characters, particularly Calisto and Pármeno.21 Overall, the story was idealized and romanticized. The narrator explained that Calisto represented ideal love. Not surprisingly, the end of the story was completely changed in order to present him as a perfect lover and a hero. He was made to leave Melibea’s company in order to help his servants, who were shown in real danger. When he was coming down the ladder to help them, a group of thugs made him fall to his death, which was different from the anti-heroic death described by Rojas.22 Only two years later, in 1976, Miguel Sabido directed a film production for the company Televisa in Mexico (see Fig. 23.3). It was premiered at the XII Film Festival of Guadalajara (Mexico), and won numerous and important awards. Despite this success, the adaptation by Miguel Sabido did not generate much interest among Celestina scholars. The disinterest was likely due to the fact that this film was notorious for its near-pornographic treatment of some scenes in ways that do not represent the behaviors described in the text. Mary-Anne Vetterling encapsulated the raunchiness of the film when she wrote that a 20  For the relevance of the beginning of the text to the rest of the argument, see Yolanda Iglesias, Una nueva mirada a la parodia de la novela sentimental en La Celestina (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2009), pp. 77–91. 21  Franco Anchelergues, “La Celestina,” p. 533. 22  See Iglesias, Una nueva mirada, pp. 98–100.

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Figure 23.3

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Movie poster of La Celestina (los placeres del sexo), directed by Miguel Sabido (Mexico, 1976), with Calisto (Luigi Montefiori) and Melibea (Isela Vega).

better tittle than the actual Celestina, los placeres del sexo (Celestina or the Pleasure of Sex) would have been “Celestina, perversiones sexuales” (Celestina, or Sexual Perversions).23 Vetterling argued that, in an attempt to modernize Rojas’s text, the director focused on and exaggerated all sexual possibilities implied by Rojas’s characters. In a surreal and bloody dream sequence, the nude Calisto is castrated; Celestina’s lesbian dispositions are extrapolated to include her fondling and caressing Melibea while talking to her about Calisto; and Pármeno and Sempronio spend much time at Celestina’s house, a center for sex orgies. According to Vetterling, other inaccuracies and poor decisions abounded in this version: Calisto incessantly complains, sounding more like a paranoid schizophrenic than a man in love; the actress who played Melibea was too old for the role; she was a redhead, not a blonde as the text pointed out, and not an appropriate partner for Calisto, both physically and temperamentally. On the other hand, the actress playing Celestina was good but too young. Vetterling considered “the whole movie […] over-acted and teeming with unnecessary violence.” There was so much “shouting, violence, street language, and perverted sex in this movie that one gives a sigh of relief at Calisto’s death.” Nevertheless, Vetterling considered that, technically, “the movie is well-done, but the director has simply gone too far in trying to make Celestina appealing 23  Mary-Ann Vetterling, “Celestina (cine),” Celestinesca 4, no. 2 (1980): 40.

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to a twentieth century audience.” More than the excessive inclusion of sex scenes, the suppression of all of the main literary virtues of the original text weighed down this adaptation. The critic concluded: “The finer qualities and artistic merit of the original have all been eliminated. The characters parade across the screen in medieval garb shouting modern insults at one another.”24 Back in Spain, in 1981 Televisión Española hired the professional services of Juan Guerrero Zamora to prepare, adapt, direct, and edit Celestina in three chapters of fifty-seven minutes each. The production process became notorious for delays, enormous cost (more than double the original budget), and doubtful financial practices.25 The production was expected to be finished by August of 1981 but not even one-third of the job was completed by this date. Only in October 1983 did the first episode finally show on Spanish television, two years later than expected. In addition to the financial problems, which were repeatedly denounced by the press, shortly after its release Eduardo Haro Tecglen wrote about the poor quality of the work. He underlined the many mistakes, particularly in the narration, as well as the use of smooth language, an actress too old for the role of Melibea, and the invention that Celestina dies because of her own potions.26 José Barcia, a Professor at the University of California vacationing in Spain at the time, watched one of Guerrero Zamora’s chapters and wrote a comment on what he considered to be the premeditated slaughtering of a classic and blamed it on the director’s bad choices. He argued that Guerrero Zamora did not research the subject enough, as was proven, for instance, by the mispronunciation of character names. In addition, the director did not perceive the humanity of Rojas’s work: everything sounded and looked artificial in this adaptation. Furthermore, the director disrupted the continuity of the original without good reason, adding unnecessary and absurd sequences, such as the extraction of a hanged man’s teeth. The critic noted 24  Vetterling, “Celestina (cine),” p. 40. 25  Gabriela Cañas explains that the production of the series was very controversial because it cost approximately two hundred million pesetas instead of the seventy million original assigned. “Los tres episodios de la serie han costado 200 millones de pesetas,” El País (Madrid), Oct. 4th, 1983, http://elpais.com/diario/1983/10/04/radiotv/434070003_850215. html.  See also the unsigned article “La estafa de La Celestina,” Diario 16, Nov. 15th, 1982, s-p, http://www.march.es/ceacs/biblioteca/proyectos/linz/Documento.asp?Reg=r-8566. 26  Eduardo Haro Tecglen, “Celestina: La ambientación, protagonista,” El País (Madrid), Oct. 15th, 1983, s-p, http://elpais.com/diario/1983/10/15/radiotv/435020404_850215. html. See also Juan García Garzón, “Juan Guerrero Zamora defiende su Celestina,” ABC (Madrid), Oct. 18th, 1983, s-p, http://hemeroteca.abc.es/nav/Navigate.exe/hemeroteca/ madrid/abc/1983/10/18/091.html.

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other mistakes, such as the absence of the scar on Celestina’s face. The actress who played Melibea was thirty years old; Pleberio and Alisa were presented as feeble parents; the sex scene between Pármeno and Areúsa was completely wasted, etc. Barcia concluded that this disappointing version of Celestina was another example of the low cultural and artistic levels of Spanish television at the time.27 To this day, the most recent adaptation to the screen of Celestina is Gerardo Vera’s 1996 full feature film. Franco Anchelergues explained that this movie seemed to have all the ingredients of success from the beginning: the script was by Rafael Azcona, the most prestigious scriptwriter in Spain, the reputed Celestina scholar Francisco Rico was in charge of the supervision of the dialogue, and the cast and budget were good. In spite of this favorable combination, it turned out to be not what was expected. Franco Anchelergues explained that Gerardo Vera’s objective was a faithful adaptation of Celestina. However, to stay within the time limits of commercial cinema, he divided the movie into three sections lasting 20, 45, and 25 minutes respectively, thus reducing the eight hours the text takes to read. He achieved this reduction by compressing the long speeches into one or two sentences, practically eliminating the monologues and the asides, and adding nearly no new elements. The critic pointed out that the director decided to make Areúsa the leading character because Celestina dies half way through the story. In the movie, Areúsa becomes a young version of Celestina after the death of the old procuress. This was a wise choice, according to the critic, because certain events difficult to understand in the original text became clearer in Vera’s film. The main problem with the film, argued Franco Anchelergues, lay in the unequal treatment of the servants and their masters: the servants were characterized by sexual impulses, ambition, or lust, whereas Calisto and Melibea did not enact the unbridled passions eventually destroying them.28 The critic Utrera Macías highlighted also the lack of credibility of some actors in this version, especially Penélope Cruz and 27  José R. Barcia, “La Celestina en televisión española,” El País (Madrid), Oct. 20th, 1983, s-p, http://elpais.com/diario/1983/10/20/opinion/435452404_850215.html. Five days later, the director of the series, Juan Guerrero Zamora, wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper to express his disapproval of José Barcia’s comments. The director did not take the criticism well and rallied against Barcia. Juan Guerrero Zamora, “Réplica sobre La Celestina,” El País (Madrid), Oct. 25th, 1983, s-p, http://elpais.com/diario/1983/10/25/ opinion/435884410_850215.html. Julio Rodríguez Puértolas echoed this correspondence between his colleague and the director and also wrote to the editor in “La Celestina y Guerrero Zamora,” El País (Madrid), Nov 6th, 1983, s-p, http://elpais.com/diario/1983/11/06/ opinion/436921208_850215.html. 28  Franco Anchelergues, “La Celestina,” pp. 533–37.

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Juan Diego Botto, who were cast in the roles Melibea and Calisto. Furthermore, their parts seemed to be written precisely for the sake of displaying these two famous actors. Celestina, played by Terele Pávez, dressed with flashy earrings and rings, looking more like a flirtatious old prostitute than a sorceress. Utrera Macías considered that the Tratado de Centurio unduly presented as a modern story of revenge, sex, and death. He disapproved of the shortened treatment of the dialogue in which Melibea complains about her loss of virginity, as well as the suppression of Pleberio’s lament. He also disapproved of the sets for being functional and lacking important symbolism. He concluded that, in spite of the director’s initial interest in producing a faithful film adaptation of Rojas’s text, the final product was negatively affected by commercial interests.29 Agreeing with his colleagues, the critic Vázquez Medel argued that Vera’s general approach to the script was correct but that the interpretation, particularly of the main characters, as well as the sets, was inadequate. The adaptation failed because it was reduced to a superficial story in which sex occupied center stage. Vázquez Medel agreed that the movie was affected by being executed mostly as a commercial enterprise. He concluded that, due to the poor adaptions of Celestina, the challenge remained to show audiences the nuances and richness of the Tragicomedia. What directors have offered to date is merely a narration of the relationship between Calisto and Melibea, ignoring the rich world of servants, procuresses, and witchcraft that underlies the story.30 Hitherto, we have seen a review of Celestina filmography, the main issues surrounding the productions, and the most relevant critiques. Next, we will focus our attention briefly on the elements that were edited out in all the adaptations, the removal of which distorts the essence of the masterpiece. As we saw, there was an agreement among critics that the films did not achieve an adequate representation of the most significant features of Rojas’s work. To begin with, a common weakness of these adaptations was the absence of humor, including the total exclusion of parody so important in the text of Celestina. Another problem was the information lost due to censorship in some of the versions. Finally, the adaptations did not take into account the fact that today’s audiences are not familiar with the literary context of Celestina. This knowledge is essential for understanding the story. Let us begin by considering what is referred to as “fidelity to the spirit” of the text in the adaptations. The expression “fidelity to the spirit” is ambiguous and requires explanation. According to Frago Pérez, for most of the authors and critics, this type of fidelity can be understood as what is called “similar 29  Utrera Macías, “Representación,” pp. 213–16. 30  Vázquez Medel, “La Celestina,” pp. 138–140.

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effect” (efecto análogo), which is achieved when the adaptor uses audiovisual equivalents to those in the literary discourse, therefore causing an effect on the audience similar to that felt by the readers of the original text. Following Boyun, Frago Pérez noted that the job of an adaptor is similar to that of a translator: both must show loyalty to their originals in the creation of a new product expressed in a different language or medium. Following Francis Vanoye, Frago Pérez explained that an adaptation can also be understood as textual appropriation. In this paradigm, fidelity to the spirit is associated with the “quality” of the interpretation.31 Vázquez Medel highlighted that, although film and literature are two different languages, we can compare their products. Nevertheless, when comparing the two media, the problem lies in that those who know one of them well most often are not experts in the other. To bridge this gap, he added, directors have sought to collaborate with scholars and writers. Because of these experts’ significant input in the production of the movie, we must conclude that the unsatisfactory results did not necessarily stem from a lack of literary fidelity but from the aspects selected from the text, which did not work in a filmic production.32 The selection of the dialogues from the original was perhaps the most difficult choice because any omission can misrepresent relevant content.33 In other cases, the problem arose from the difficulties in the inner rhythm and syntax of the film, from the actors’ interpretive capabilities, or from the director’s inability to capture the essence of a distant historical period, all shortcomings that affect the adaptations of Celestina. A significant problem in these adaptations was the omission of one of the main literary values of Celestina: its parodic component.34 This omission was important because several of its fundamental literary characteristics were represented only through a parodic lens. This was the case with Calisto’s shortcomings as a courtly lover and his unheroic death, as well as the false bravery of servants and thugs.35 By eliminating the humorous treatment of these basic themes of the story, both the television and cinematic adaptations undermined 31  Frago Pérez, “Reflexiones,” pp. 66–68. 32  Vázquez Medel, “La Celestina,” p. 130. 33  Joseph T. Snow, “Un texto dramático no cerrado: Notas sobre la Tragicomedia en el siglo XX,” in Cinco siglos de Celestina: Aportaciones interpretativas, ed. José Luis Canet Vallés and Rafael Beltrán Llavador (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 1997), 199–208, p. 205. 34  Modern readers commonly fail to perceive the humor in Celestina because some situations in Rojas’s work now seem tragic and cruel, even though they were not seen as such when they were written. See Dorothy Severin, “El humor en La Celestina,” in Estudios sobre La Celestina, ed. Santiago López Ríos (Madrid: Clásicos y Críticos, 2001), 327–54, p. 331. 35  Yolanda Iglesias, “Los grandes ausentes en la adaptación cinematográfica de La Celestina de Gerardo Vera: El humor, la parodia y el público,” Lemir, no. 17 (2013): 9–22.

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some fundamental aspects of Celestina’s literary values. They clearly ignored Rojas’s words in the prologue concerning the importance of the comic element in the book: But they for whose true pleasure it is wholly framed reject the story itself, as a vain and idle subject, and gather out the pitch and marrow of the matter for their own good and benefit, and laugh at those things that savor only of wit and pleasant conceit, […] [O]thers have contended about the name, saying that it ought not to be called a comedy, because it ends in sorrow and mourning, but rather termed a tragedy. The author himself would have it take its denomination from its beginning, which treats of pleasure, and therefore called it a comedy. So that I, seeing these differences, between their extremes have parted this quarrel by dividing it in the midst, and call it a tragi-comedy.36 Unwisely, the adapters centered their production on the tragic component, ignoring the other half of Celestina. As we said, the adaptations to date have omitted Rojas’s parody of courtly love in Celestina, despite the structural importance of this theme in the book.37 By editing out of the parodic treatment of courtly love, the adaptations failed to reflect that the relationship of love between Calisto and Melibea was a parody of the popular genre of the novela sentimental. These films were as if one read Don Quixote without realizing the parody of the chivalry novels that underpins the story. The audiences of the screen adaptations will never notice that the book was poking fun at the inflated ennoblement that the courtly lover undergoes when he falls in love, his inflated idealization of the loved woman, the near-fetishistic desire to own an object touched by her, or the writing of convoluted letters requesting a saving word from the lady.38

36  Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, trans. James Mabbe (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1998), p. 19, emphasis added. 37  On the importance of the parody of courtly love in Celestina, see John Devlin, The Celestina: A Parody of Courtly Love. Towards a Realistic Interpretation of the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Madrid: Anaya, 1971); Iglesias, Una nueva mirada; María Eugenia Lacarra, Cómo leer La Celestina (Madrid: Júcar, 1990); Lacarra “La parodia de la ficción sentimental en La Celestina,” Celestinesca 13 (1989): 11–30; and Dorothy Severin, “La parodia del amor cortés en La Celestina,” Edad de Oro 3 (1984): 275–79. 38  Iglesias, Una nueva mirada, pp. 77–107.

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A perfect example of how the adaptations missed the parodic nature of Celestina was the on-screen treatment of Calisto’s death. In the original, the death of Calisto is tragic but also unheroic, even ridiculous. He dies because of his clumsy haste while descending the ladder he uses to access Melibea’s garden. Although Calisto leaves Melibea’s company with the altruistic intention of helping his servants, the readers know from the beginning that his servants are not in any real danger, that Elicia and Areúsa have asked Centurio to kill him, but that this thug is a braggadocio who sends two cowardly associates to make noise near the garden at night. The servants, Tristán and Sosia, collect the pieces of Calisto’s brain scattered on the ground, presenting him as a scatterbrained man. Even Melibea’s suicide has a touch of humor when, moments before jumping to her death, she complains of not having enjoyed her lover longer. In the screen adaptions, the directors ignored these parodic, even comical touches and represented these events exclusively as tragic, even heroic scenes. In the case of the first two television adaptations, some weaknesses could be attributed to the strong censorship to which they were subjected. Indeed, Spanish national television was at that time under the ferrous control of the prudish ideology of Francoism. Censoring Celestina for moral reasons was especially ridiculous if we think that for centuries the book had no serious problems with censorship or the Inquisition. In 1523, Fray Antonio de Guevara requested to prohibit some books, including Celestina, but the petition to the Crown was denied. A similar attempt failed in 1547. In 1599, Inquisitor General Valdés’s notorious Index of Forbidden Books did not include Celestina. It was not until 1632 that Celestina was censored for the first time. Nevertheless, the censorship was limited to minor expurgations from seven passages that amounted to barely some fifty lines, most of them in Act 1, such as when Calisto wishes he did not have a soul to avoid the fire of purgatory, which he compares to his lovesickness, or his rhetorical declaration of not being Christian but “Melibean.” Only in 1792 was Celestina banned due to the strong pressure exerted by some theologians, but this decree was inconsequential in a period in which Celestina had fallen out of fashion due to the predominance of Neoclassic tastes.39

39  Donatella Gagliardi, “La Celestina en el Índice: Argumentos de una censura,” Celestinesca 31 (2007): 59–84, pp. 59–80.

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Another significant weakness of the screen adaptations was their failure to take into account the fact that contemporary audiences have only a shallow familiarity with the world in which the action of Celestina takes place. Furthermore, modern audiences are unacquainted with many important conventions of medieval literature central to Rojas’s work. Jesús Fernández Santos, the director of the 1974 television version, attempted to address this limitation by including, as we saw, professor Alonso Zamora Vicente’s erudite mini-lectures between the acts. This solution did not work well and made the film adaptation resemble a documentary. The two other adaptations that resorted to experts did not manage to close the gap opened by the audience’s lack of pertinent background. Even if the final products did not look like documentaries—experts did not appear on screen to lecture the audience, as in the case of Fernández Santos’s adaptation—Celestina’s medieval roots were not properly conveyed to the audience. The result in all cases was that the majority of the spectators, unaware of the subtleties of this literary masterpiece from such a distant past, ended up watching only an interpretation of the text by the director. If we accept that an adaptation should be the result of the director’s faithful translation of the original, then the main ingredients of the original must be included. The translator should use the appropriate tools to transfer the information to the new format, without omitting elements that are essential to the original. Furthermore, directors must be cautious because the classic text could be misunderstood by modern audiences if appropriate aids to guide their interpretation are not offered.40 This risk existed in the case of Celestina because Rojas’s text was pure dialogue and did not include a narrator to explain its meaning. He did not need to include an authorial voice because he counted on readers being appropriately equipped to interpret his text. Contrarily, today’s cinematic directors must find ways to convey these ideas to audiences (as is done in many modern editions of the book, which include footnotes and other devices to help to bridge the gap of five centuries). In other words, fidelity to the ideas is more important than the literality of the words. This principle must be followed to achieve a successful adaptation for the screen.

40  Iglesias, “Los grandes ausentes,” p. 18.

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Appendix A: Screen Adaptations of Celestina in Chronological Order Title: La Celestina P … R … Year of Production: 1965

Director: Carlo Lizzani Country: Italy Production: Aston Film Academic Advisor: N/A Script by: Sandro De Feo, Massimo Franciosa, Carlo Lizzani, Luigi Magni, Assia Noris, Girogio Stegani Duration: 105 mins. Format: Film Genre: Comedy Music: Piero Umiliani Cast: Assia Norris (Celestina), Venantino Venantini (Carlo), Beb Loncar (Luisella), Raffaella Carrà (Bruna), Marilù Tolo (Silvana), Daliah Lavi (Daniela), Goffredo Alessandrimi (Montesti)

Title: La Celestina Year of Production: 1967

Director: Eduardo Fuller Country: Spain Production: TVE (Teatro de siempre) Academic Advisor: N/A Script by: Fernando Rojas Duration: 122 mins. Format: Theatre for T.V. Genre: Drama Music: Period music directed by Alejandro Masso Cast: Francisco Guijar (Calixto), Lolita Herrera (Melibea), Julio Muñoz (Sempronio), Lola Gaos (Celestina), Gloria Lafuente (Elicia), Francisco Portes (Pármeno), Asunción Villamil (Lucrecia), Marta Rus (Alisa), Manuel Peña (Tristanico), Rafael Díaz (Sosia), Paz Yáñez (Areúsa), Mario Moreno (Pleberio)

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Title: La Celestina Year of Production: 1969

Director: César Ardavín de la Torre Country: Spain/ West Germany Production: Aro Films/ Berlin Television System Academic Advisor: N/A Script by: César Fernández Ardavín, Fernando Rojas Duration: 123 mins. Format: Film Genre: Drama/ Romance Music: Ángel Arteaga Cast: Julian Mateos (Calisto), Elisa Ramírez (Melibea), Amelia de la Torre (Celestina), Heidelotte Diehl (Areúsa), Eva Guerr (Lucrecia), Eva Lissa (Alisa)

Title: La Celestina Year of Production: 1974

Director: Jesús Fernández Santos Country: Spain Production: TVE Academic Advisor: Alonso Zamora Vicente Script by: Jesús Fernández Santos, Fernando de Rojas Duration: 60 mins. Format: Theatre for T.V. Genre: Drama/ Romance Music: N/A Cast: Alonso Zamora Vicente (himself/ presenter), María Luisa Ponte (Celestina), Tony Isbert (Calisto), Carmen Maura (Melibea), José Yepes (Sempronio), Luis Gaspar (Pármeno), Sagrario Sala (Lucrecia), Maribel Hidalgo (Elicia)

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Title: La Celestina Year of Production: 1976 Director: Miguel Sabido

Country: Mexico Production: Ludens Films Academic Advisor: N/A Script by: Miguel Sabido, Margarita Villaseñor, Fernando de Rojas Duration: 88 mins. Format: Film Genre: Tragicomedy Music: Marcos Lifshitz, José Antonio Alcaraz, Henry West Cast: Isela Vega (Melibea), Ofelia Guilmáin (Celestina), Marcela López Rey (Elicia), Ana de Sade (Lucrecia), Martha Zabaleta (Areúsa), Rosa Fuman (Alisa), George Eastman (Calisto), Manuel Ojeda (Pleberio)

Title: La Celestina Year of Production: 1983

Director: Juan Guerrero Zamora Country: Spain Production: TVE Academic Advisor: N/A Script by: Fernando de Rojas Duration: 50 mins. Format: TV Mini Series Genre: Drama Music: N/A Cast: Miguel Ayones (Calisto), José Caride (Sempronio), Gemma Cuervo (Elicia), José Lara (Pármeno), Cándida Losada (Alisa), Lorenzo Ramírez (Centurio), José Segura (Traso), Tony Solder (Celestina), Tina Sainz (Areúsa), Nuria Torray (Melibea), Luis Prendes (Pleberio), Lola Santoyo (Lucrecia)

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Title: La Celestina Year of Production: 1996

Director: Gerardo Vera Country: Spain Production: Angélica Huete Academic Advisor: Raimundo García, Yuyi Beringola Script by: Rafael Azcona Duration: 92 mins. Format: Film Genre: Drama Music: Gerardo Vera (musical selection) Cast: Penélope Cruz (Melibea), Terele Pávez (Celestina), Juan Diego Botto (Calisto), Maribel Verdú (Areúsa), Jordi Mollà (Pármeno), Nacho Novo (Sempronio), Nathalie Seseña (Lucrecia), Carlos Fuentes (Sosia), Candela Peña (Elicia), Ana Lizaran (Alisa), Sergio Villanueva (Tristán), Ángel de Andrés López (Centurio), Lluís Homae (Pleberio)

Electronic Resources, Editions, and Select Bibliography

Electronic Resources

The most complete and up-to-date bibliography of Celestina is the series of annotated bibliographic entries periodically published as a separate section in Celestinesca starting 1978, initially by Joseph Snow and now by Devid E. Paolini. Presently, the entries can be found online in the past issues of the journal, and are being turned into a searchable database by Amaranta Saguar García. http://parnaseo.uv.es/celestinesca.htm. http://parnaseo.uv.es/RefBase/index.php. Robert Lauer is the author of an online bibliography that covers entries up to 2003. http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/A-Robert.R.Lauer-1/BibCelestina.html. Lillian von der Walde Moheno maintains a concise bibliography by themes online. http://www.waldemoheno.net/Medioevo/Cel.html. The electronic portal Biblioteca de Obra in Cervantes Virtual dedicated to Celestina includes some bibliographical information and other resources. http://www .cervantesvirtual.com/bib/bib_obra/celestina/index.shtml. Celestina Visual is an online database of five hundred years of images of the visual culture of Celestina. http://celestinavisual.org. The blog Por treze, tres, maintained by Amaranta Saguar García, includes many up-todate links to pertinent resources. https://portrezetres.wordpress.com/. The scholarly mailing list dedicated to the study of Celestina, la-celestina@lists .umanitoba.ca, is moderated by Enrique Fernandez and Joseph Snow. http://lists .umanitoba.ca/mailman/listinfo/la-celestina.



Electronic Editions of Celestina Freely Available Online

Electronic critical edition of Celestina by Miguel Garci-Gómez. http://mgarci.aas.duke .edu/cibertextos/ROJAS-FD/CELESTINA/. Electronic critical edition of Celestina by Patrizia Botta. http://rmcisadu.let.uniroma1 .it/celestina/celest.htm. Free English version and adaptation by José María Ruano de la Haza based on Mabbe’s English translation. http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~jmruano/celestinaeng.pdf.

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Electronic Resources, Editions, and Select Bibliography

Transcription of James Mabbe’s 1631 translation of Celestina as the Spanish Bawd, made available by Early English Books/The Text Creation Partnership. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A18331.0001.001?view=toc. A bilingual edition by Miguel Garci-Gómez. http://mgarci.aas.duke.edu/celestina/ CELESTINA/ED-BILINGUES/SUAREZ/ACTO-01.HTM.



Recent Printed Editions of Celestina in English (some available in ebook format)

La Celestina (Bilingual Edition). Translated and edited by Robert S. Rudder. Minneapolis: Svenson Publisher, 2015. Celestina. Translated by Peter Bush and introduction by Juan Goytisolo. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Celestina. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and introduction by Roberto González Echevarría. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Celestina. Translated by James Mabbe (1631). Introduction and notes by Dorothy Sherman Severin. Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris & Phillips, 1987. Celestina. Translated by James Mabbe (1631) and edited by Eric Bentley. New York: Applause Theater Books, 1986.



Most Commonly Cited Critical Celestina Editions in Spanish

Comedia de Calisto y Melibea. Edited by José Luis Canet Vallés. Valencia: Prensa de la Universidad de Valencia, 2011. La Celestina, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Edited by Guillermo Serés, Francisco J. Lobera, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Carlos Mota, Iñigo Ruiz Arzalluz, and Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Crítica, 2000. Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Edited by Miguel Marciales and supervised by Brian Dutton and Joseph T. Snow. 2 vols. Illinois Medieval Monographs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. La Celestina. Edited by Dorothy S. Severin and prologue by Stephen Gilman. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1969. Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea. Libro también llamado La Celestina. Edited by M. Criado de Val and G. D. Trotter. Madrid: CSIC, 1958. La Celestina. Edited by Julio Cejador y Frauca. Madrid: Ediciones de La Lectura, 1913.

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405

Books, Chapters and Articles

Abad, Manuel. “La ilustración de portadas de La Celestina, en siete ediciones del siglo XVI.” Revista de Ideas Estéticas 139 (1977): 47–53. Abrams, Fred. “The Name ‘Celestina’: Why Did Fernando de Rojas Choose It?” Romance Notes 14 (1972): 165–67. Alba-Koch, Beatriz de. “La vieja beata en La Quijotita de Fernández de Lizardi: Una celestina a lo divino.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 32 (2007): 123–35. Alcalá, Ángel. “Rojas y el neoepicureísmo: Notas sobre la intención de La Celestina y el silencio posterior de su autor.” In La Celestina y su contorno social: Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre La Celestina, edited by Manuel Criado de Val, 35–50. Barcelona: Borras, 1977. Alvar, Carlos. “De La Celestina a Amadís: El itinerario de un grabado.” In Filologia dei Testi a Stampa, edited by Patrizia Botta, 97–107. Modena: Mucchi Editore, 2005. Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín. “La Celestina, del siglo XVIII a Menéndez Pelayo.” In Celestina: Recepción y herencia, edited by Gregorio Torres Nebrera, 73–96. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 2001. Álvarez-Moreno, Raúl. “Casa, torre, árbol, muro: Hacia una morfología del escenario urbano en las ediciones antiguas de Celestina.” Celestinesca 39 (2015): 113–36. Álvarez-Moreno, Raúl. “Spatial Practices in Medieval Spain: The Production of Space and Its Processes in Celestina.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 35, no. 3 (2011): 447–66. Amasuno, Marcelino. Sobre la aegritudo amoris y otras cuestiones fisiátricas en La Celestina. Madrid: CSIC, 2005. Ardila, John G. “Una traducción políticamente correcta: Celestina en la Inglaterra puritana.” Celestinesca 22, no. 2 (1998): 33–48. Armas, Frederick A. de. “La Celestina: An Example of Love Melancholy.” Romanic Review 66 (1975): 288–95. Armistead, Samuel G., and J. H. Silverman. “A Neglected Source of the Prolog to La Celestina.” MLN 93 (1978): 310–12. Artiles, Jenaro. “La Celestina y Romeo y Julieta.” In La Celestina y su contorno social: Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre La Celestina, edited by Manuel Criado de Val, 325–38. Barcelona: Borras, 1977. Asensio, Manuel J. “El tiempo en La Celestina.” Hispanic Review 20, no. 1 (1952): 28–43. Ayllón, Cándido. “La ironía de La Celestina.” Romanische Forschungen 82 (1970): 37–55. Bagby, A. I., Jr. and W. M. Carroll. “The Falcon as a Symbol of Destiny: Rojas and Shakespeare.” Romanische Forschungen 83 (1971): 306–10.

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Baranda, Consolación. “Cambio social en La Celestina y las ideas jurídico-políticas en la Universidad de Salamanca.” In El mundo social y cultural de La Celestina, edited by Ignacio Arellano and Jesús M. Usunáriz, 9–26. Madrid/Frankfurt: IberoamericanaVervuert, 2003. Barbera, Raymond E. “Medieval Iconography in the Celestina.” Romanic Review 61 (1969–70): 5–13. Barrick, Mac E. “Celestina’s Black Mass.” Celestinesca 1, no. 2 (1983): 11–14. Barth, Kaspar von. Pornoboscodidascalus Latinus (1624): Kaspar Barth’s Neo-Latin Translation of Celestina. Edited by Enrique Fernández. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Bataillon, Marcel. “L’Originalité de la Celestine d’apres un ouvrage recent.” Revue de Litterature Comparée 39 (1965): 109–23. Bataillon, Marcel. La Célestine selon Fernando de Rojas. Didier, Paris, 1961. Beardsley, Theodore. “Celestina Act I: ‘Ubi sunt?’ ” Hispanic Review 52 (1982): 335–41. Beltrán, Rafael. “Entre la parodia de la oración y el equívoco religioso: Nuevas intertextualidades de La Celestina con la novela catalana.” In El mundo social y cultural de La Celestina, edited by Ignacio Arellano and Jesús M. Usunáriz, 27–44. Madrid/ Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2003. Beltrán, Rafael. “Las ‘bodas sordas’ en Tirant lo blanc y La Celestina.” Revista de Filología Española 70, nos. 1–2 (1990): 91–117. Bergman, Ted L. L. “La Celestina and the Popularization of Graphic Criminal Violence.” Celestinesca 36 (2012): 47–70. Berndt, Erna Ruth. Amor, muerte y fortuna en La Celestina. Madrid: Gredos, 1963. Botta, Patrizia. “ ‘… y nuevamente añadido el Auto de Traso y sus compañeros’.” Ínsula 633 (1999): 9–11. Botta, Patrizia. “La edición de La Celestina actualmente en prensa.” Incipit 16 (1996): 127–42. Botta, Patrizia. “La magia en La Celestina.” Dicenda 12 (1994): 37–67. Brown, Kenneth. “A Seventeenth Century Sephardic Reader’s Negative Evaluation of Celestina.” Celestinesca 18, no. 2 (1994): 151–54. Burke, James F. Vision, the Gaze, and the Function of the Senses in Celestina. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Burke, James F. “The mal de la madre and the Failure of Maternal Influence in Celestina.” Celestinesca 17, no. 2 (1993): 111–28. Canet Vallés, José Luis. “Género y dramaturgia en La Celestina.” Theatralia 10 (2008): 27–42. Canet Vallés, José Luis. “La filosofía moral y la Celestina.” Ínsula 633 (1999): 22–24.

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407

Canet Vallés, José Luis. “La Celestina y el mundo cultural de su época.” In Cinco siglos de Celestina: Aportaciones interpretativas, edited by Rafael Beltrán and José Luis Canet. Valencia: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 1997. Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, Fernando. “Fue tanto breve quanto muy sutil: Los paratextos de La Celestina.” eHumanista 19 (2011): 79–112. Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, Fernando. “Sentencias petrarquistas y adiciones a la TragiComedia de Calisto y Melibea.” In Tras los pasos de Celestina, edited by Patrizia Botta, Fernando Cantalapiedra, Kurt Reichenberger, and Joseph Snow, 55–154. Kassel: Editions Reichenberger, 2001. Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, Fernando. “El refranero celestinesco.” Celestinesca 19, nos. 1–2 (1995): 31–56. Cárdenas, Anthony J. “Rojas’s Celestina as an Intertext for Cervantes’s Witch Episode in the Coloquio de los perros: From Sorceress to Witch.” Crítica Hispánica 15, no. 1 (1993): 47–62. Carmona Ruiz, Fernando. “La cuestión iconográfica de La Celestina y el legado de Hans Weiditz.” eHumanista 19 (2011): 79–112. Carroll, William, and Laber I. Bagby. “A Note on Shakespeare and the Celestina.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 5 (1971): 79–93. Casalduero, Joaquín. “El mundo de La Celestina.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 40, no. 1 (1992): 99–116. Castells, Ricardo. Fernando de Rojas and the Renaissance Vision: Phantasm, Melancholy, and Didactism in Celestina. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Castells, Ricardo. “Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholia: A Seventeenth Century View of Celestina.” Celestinesca 20, nos. 1–2 (1996): 57–73. Castells, Ricardo. “El mal de amores de Calisto y el diagnóstico de Eras y Crato, médicos.” Hispania 76, no. 1 (1993): 55–60. Castro Guisasola, Florentino. Observaciones sobre las fuentes literarias de La Celestina. Madrid: Jiménez y Molina, Impresores, 1924. Castro, Américo. La Celestina como contienda literaria (castas y casticismos). Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1965. Castro, Américo. “El problema histórico de La Celestina.” In Santa Teresa y otros ensayos, 192–215. Santander: Historia Nueva, 1929. Cátedra, Pedro. Amor y pedagogía en la Edad Media. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989. Celestina comentada. Edited by Louise Fothergill-Payne †, Enrique Fernández Rivera, and Peter Fothergill-Payne. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2002.

408

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Clarke, Dorothy C. Allegory, Decalogue, and Deadly Sins in La Celestina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Corfis, Ivy A. “Celestina and the Conflict of Ovidian and Courtly Love.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 73, no. 4 (1996): 395–417. Corfis, Ivy A. “Celestina as Drama: Commentary by a 16th Century Reader.” Romance Philology 48, no. 1 (1993): 33–45. Corfis, Ivy A. “Legal Obligation and Intention in Celestina.” Journal of Hispanic Philology 16, no. 1 (1991): 11–21. Corfis, Ivy A. “Fernando de Rojas and Albrecht von Eyb’s Margarita Poetica.” Neophilologus 68, no. 2 (1984): 206–13. Costa Fontes, Manuel da. The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Delicado. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005. Costa Fontes, Manuel da. “Celestina’s hilado and Related Symbols.” Celestinesca 8, no. 1 (1984): 3–13. Cull, John T. “A Possible Influence on the Burgos 1499 Celestina Illustrations: The German 1486 Translation of Terence’s Eunuchus.” La Corónica 38, no. 2 (2010): 137–60. Devlin, John. The Celestina: A Parody of Courtly Love. Towards a Realistic Interpretation of the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. New York: Anaya-Las Américas, 1971. Deyermond, Alan. “ ‘¡Muerto soy! ¡Confesión!’ Celestina y el arrepentimiento a última hora.” In De los romances a la poesía de Claudio Rodríguez: 22 ensayos sobre las literaturas española e hispanoamericana en homenaje a Gustav Siebenmann, edited by José Manuel López de Abiada and Augusta López Bernasocchi, 129–39. Madrid: J. Esteban, 1984. Deyermond, Alan. “Hilado, cordón, cadena: Symbolic Equivalence in La Celestina.” Celestinesca 1, no. 1 (1977): 6–12. Deyermond, Alan. The Petrarchan Sources of La Celestina. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975. Deyermond, Alan. “The Text-Book Mishandled: Andreas Capellanus and the Opening Scene of La Celestina.” Neophilologus 45 (1961): 218–21. Di Camillo, Ottavio. “Algunas consideraciones sobre La Celestina italiana.” In Rumbos del hispanismo en el umbral del cincuentenario de la AIH, edited by Patrizia Botta, 216–26. Roma: Bagatto, 2012. Di Camillo, Ottavio. “When and Where Was the First Act of La Celestina Composed? A Reconsideration.” In vol. 1 of ‘De ninguna cosa es alegre posesión sin compañía’. Estudios celestinescos y medievales en honor del profesor Joseph Thomas Snow, edited by Devid Paolini, 91–157. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2010. Dunn, Peter. “Pleberio’s World.” PMLA 91 (1976): 406–19. Dunn, Peter. Fernando de Rojas. New York & Boston: Twayne, 1975.

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Ellis, Deborah. “ ‘¡Adiós paredes!’: The Image of the Home in Celestina.” Celestinesca 5, no. 2 (1981): 1–17. Faulhaber, Charles B. “Celestina de Palacio: Rojas’s Holograph Manuscript?” Celestinesca 15, no. 1 (1991): 3–52. Faulhaber, Charles B. “The Hawk in Melibea’s Garden.” Hispanic Review 45 (1977): 435–50. Fernández-Rivera, Enrique. “Influencias de la iconografía cristiana en las ilustraciones tempranas de La Celestina.” In Two Spanish Masterpieces. A Celebration of the Life and Work of María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, edited by P. Ancos and I. A. Corfis, 175–95. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2013. Fernández-Rivera, Enrique. “La caída de Calisto en las primeras ediciones ilustradas de La Celestina.” eHumanista 19 (2011): 137–56. Finch, Patricia S. “Rojas’ Celestina and Cervantes’ Cañizares.” Cervantes 9, no. 1 (1989): 55–62. Folger, Robert. “Passion and Persuasion: Philocaptio in La Celestina.” La Corónica 34 (2005): 5–29. Fothergill Payne, Louise. Seneca and Celestina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Fradejas Lebrero, José. “Las pícaras menores: Elena, Teresa, Rufina.” Ínsula 503 (1988): 12–13. Fraker, Charles F. Celestina: Genre and Rhetoric. London: Tamesis Books, 1990. Fraker, Charles F. “The Importance of Pleberio’s Soliloquy.” Romanische Forschungen 78 (1966): 515–29. García, Michel. “Apostillas a ‘Consideraciones sobre Celestina de Palacio’.” Celestinesca 18, no. 2 (1994): 145–49. Garci-Gómez, Miguel. “Un tercer autor para la Celestina: Adenda I: Dios.” In Studies in Honor of Gilberto Paolini, edited by Mercedes Vidal Tibbits, 25–39. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1996. Garci-Gómez, Miguel. “Ascendencia y trascendencia del neblí de Calisto.” Revista de Literatura 49 (1987): 5–21. Gascón Vera, Elena. “Celestina: Dama filosofía.” Celestinesca 7, no. 2 (1983): 3–10. Gastañaga Ponce de León, José Luis. “Silencio o blasón. Escribir entre dos extremos.” Celestinesca 36 (2012): 143–60. Gerli, E. Michael. Celestina and the Ends of Desire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Gerli, E. Michael. “Complicitous Laughter: Hilarity and Seduction in Celestina.” Hispanic Review 63 (1995): 19–38. Gerli, E. Michael. “Calisto’s Hawk and the Images of a Medieval Tradition.” Romania 104, no. 403 (1983): 83–101.

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Gerli, E. Michael. “ ‘Mira a Bernardo’: Alusión sin sospecha.” Celestinesca 1, no. 2 (1977): 7–10. Giles, Ryan D. The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Gilman, Stephen. The Spain of Fernando de Rojas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Gómez Moreno, Ángel, and Teresa Jiménez Calvente. “A vueltas con Celestina-bruja y el cordón de Melibea.” Revista de Filología Española 75 (1995): 85–104. Green, Otis H. “Did the ‘World’ ‘Create’ Pleberio?” Romanische Forschungen 77 (1965): 108–10. Green, Otis H. “The Celestina and the Inquisition.” Hispanic Review 15 (1947): 211–16. Griffin, Clive. “Celestina’s Illustrations.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78 (2001): 59–79. Guerra Bosch, Teresa. “Some Analogies in La Celestina and Troilus and Cressida.” SEDERI: Journal of the Spanish Society for English Renaissance Studies 4 (1993): 77–86. Gurza, Esperanza. Lectura existencialista de La Celestina. Madrid: Gredos, 1977. Hamilton, Michelle M. “Celestina and the Daughters of Lilith.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 75, no. 1 (1998): 153–72. Hermenegildo, Alfredo. “El arte celestinesco y las marcas de teatralidad.” Incipit 11 (1991): 127–51. Herrero, Javier. “Celestina’s Craft: The Devil in the Skein.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61, no. 3 (1984): 343–51. Heugas, Pierre. La Celestine et sa descedance directe. Bordeaux: Institut d’Etudes Iberiques et Ibero-Americaines de L’Université de Bordeaux, 1973. Hook, David. “Pármeno’s ‘falso boezuelo’ Again.” Celestinesca 9, no. 1 (1985): 39–42. Iglesias, Yolanda. “Los grandes ausentes en la adaptación cinematográfica de La Celestina de Gerardo Vera: El humor, la parodia y el público.” Lemir 17 (2013): 9–22. Illades Aguiar, Gustavo. La Celestina en el taller salmantino. Mexico: UNAM, 1999. Illades Aguiar, Gustavo. “La voz como diálogo o contienda en La Celestina.” In Palabra e imagen en la Edad Media. Actas de las IV Jornadas Medievales, edited by Aurelio González, Lillian von der Walde Moheno, and Concepción Company, 327–37. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995. Infantes, Víctor. La trama impresa de Celestina. Ediciones, libros y autógrafos de Fernando de Rojas. Madrid: Visor, 2010. Infantes, Víctor. “Los libros ‘traydos y viejos y algunos rotos’ que tuvo el bachiller Fernando de Rojas nombrado autor de la obra llamada Celestina.” Bulletin Hispanique 100 (1998): 7–51. Johnson, Carroll B. “Cervantes as a Reader of La Celestina.” Far Western Forum: A Review of Ancient and Modern Letters 1 (1974): 233–47.

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Johnson, Julie Greer. “Three Celestina Figures of Colonial Spanish American Literature.” Celestinesca 5, no. 1 (1981): 41–46. Joset, Jacques. “De Pármeno a Lazarillo.” Celestinesca 8, no. 2 (1984): 17–24. Kasten, Lloyd August, Jean Anderson, and Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Concordance to the Celestina (1499), Spanish Series. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1976. Kelley, Erna Berndt. “Mute Commentaries on a Text: The Illustrations of the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea.” In Fernando de Rojas and Celestina: Approaching the Fifth Centenary, edited by Ivy A. Corfis and Joseph T. Snow, 193–227. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993. Kish, Kathleen V. “Celestina según Christof Wirsung, autor de las traducciones alemanas de 1520 y 1534.” In Actas del VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, edited by David E. Kossoff et al., 97–104. Madrid: Istmo, 1986. Kish, Kathleen V. and Ursula Ritzenhoff. “The Celestina Phenomenon in SixteenthCentury Germany.” Celestinesca 4, no. 2 (1980): 9–16. Kish, Kathleen V. and Ursula Ritzenhoff. An Edition of the First Italian Translation of the Celestina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973. Lacarra, Eugenia. “Alcahueterías en las ciudades bajomedievales y su representación en la literatura coetánea: Libro de buen amor y Celestina.” In Two Spanish Masterpieces. A Celebration of the Life and Work of María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, edited by P. Ancos and Ivy. A. Corfis, 225–44. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2013. Lacarra, Eugenia. “La evolución de la prostitución en la Castilla del siglo XV y la mancebía de Salamanca en tiempos de Fernando de Rojas.” In Approaching the Fifth Centenary, edited by Ivy A. Corfis and Joseph T. Snow, 33–78. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993. Lapesa, Rafael. “La originalidad artística de La Celestina.” Romance Philology 17 (1963): 55–74. Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. “El género literario de La Celestina.” In Estudios sobre La Celestina, edited by Santiago López-Ríos, 137–68. Madrid: Istmo, 2001. Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. La originalidad artística de La Celestina. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1962. Lobera Serrano, Francisco J. “Fernando de Rojas ‘Que escribió Melibea’.” Ínsula 633 (1999): 6–7. López-Ríos, Santiago. “ ‘Señor, por holgar con el cordón no querrás gozar de Melibea’: La parodia del culto a las reliquias en La Celestina.” MLN 127 (2012): 190–207. López-Ríos, Santiago. Estudios sobre La Celestina. Madrid: Istmo, 2001. Maestro, Jesús G. “Tragedia, comedia y canon desde la teoría literaria moderna: El personaje nihilista en La Celestina.” In Theatralia, III: Tragedia, comedia y canon.

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III Congreso Internacional de Teoría del Teatro, edited by Jesús G. Maestro, 15–96. Vigo: Universidad de Vigo, 2000. Maeztu, Ramiro de. Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina: Ensayos en simpatía. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1972. Mancing, Howard. “Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, and Lazarillo de Tormes.” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 23 (1976): 47–61. Maravall, José Antonio. El mundo social de La Celestina. Madrid: Gredos, 1964. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. Orígenes y sociología del tema celestinesco. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993. Martin, June H. Love’s Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the Courtly Lover. London: Tamesis, 1972. Maurizi, Françoise. “ ‘Dize el modo que se ha de tener leyendo esta (Tragi)Comedia’: Breve aproximación al paratexto de La Celestina.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 74 (1997): 151–57. McGrady, Donald. “Gerarda, la más distinguida descendiente de Celestina.” In El mundo social y cultural de La Celestina, edited by Ignacio Arellano and Jesús M. Usunáriz, 237–52. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2003. McGrady, Donald. “ ‘Entrando Calisto una huerta’ and Other Textual Problems in the Celestina.” Hispanic Review 63 (1995): 433–40. McGrady, Donald. “The Problematic Beginning of Celestina.” Celestinesca 18, no. 2 (1994): 31–52. McPheeters, D. W. El humanista español Alonso de Proaza. Madrid: Castalia, 1961. Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. “La Celestina.” In Orígenes de la novela. Vol. 3. Madrid: Bailly, Baillière e Hijos, 1910. Miguel, Nicasio Salvador. “ ‘De una ave llamada rocho’: Para la historia literaria del ruj.” In Fernando de Rojas and Celestina: Approaching the Fifth Centenary, edited by Ivy A. Corfis and Joseph T. Snow, 393–411. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993. Montero, Ana Isabel. “A Penetrable Text? Illustration and Transgression in the 1499(?) Edition of Celestina.” Word & Image 21, no. 1 (2005): 41–55. Morales, José Ricardo. “¿Tres Celestinas en el Museo del Prado?” Celestinesca 9, no. 1 (1985): 3–9. Morón Arroyo, Ciriaco. Sentido y forma de La Celestina. Madrid: Cátedra, 1984. Morros Mestres, Bienvenido. “La Celestina como remedium amoris.” Hispanic Review 72 (2004): 77–99. Paolini, Devid. “Sobre un tópico equivocado (las representaciones de las comedias de Plauto y Terencio en España a finales del siglo XV y Celestina.” Celestinesca 35 (2011): 67–84. Parr, James A. “Correspondencias formales entre La Celestina y la pintura contemporánea.” In Estudios sobre el Siglo de Oro en homenaje a Raymond R. MacCurdy,

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edited by Ángel González, Tamara Holzapfel, and Alfred Rodríguez, 313–26. Albuquerque / Madrid: University of New Mexico, Department of Modern & Classical Languages / Cátedra, 1983. Pérez-Romero, Antonio. The Subversive Tradition in Spanish Renaissance. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. Puértolas, Soledad. “Fascinante Celestina.” Hispania 95, no. 1 (2012): 3–4. Richthofen, Erich von. “Lo de la ‘abuela con el ximio’: Otra expresión humanística y caballeresca (de La Celestina)?” Cuadernos para Investigación de la Literatura Hispánica 5 (1983): 133–34. Riquer, Martín de. “Fernando de Rojas y el primer acto de La Celestina.” Revista de Filología Española 41 (1957): 373–95. Rivera, Isidro J. “Performance and Prelection in the Early Printed Editions of Celestina.” Celestinesca 22, no. 2 (1998): 3–20. Rodríguez-Solás, David. “A la vanguardia del libro ilustrado: El Terencio de Lyón (1493) y La Celestina de Burgos (1499).” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 86, no. 1 (2009): 1–17. Rosenbach, A. S. W. The Influence of the Celestina in the Early English Drama. Berlin: s.n., 1903. Ruiz Arzalluz, Íñigo. “El mundo intelectual del ‘antiguo autor’: Las Auctoritates Aristotelis en la Celestina primitiva.” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 76, no. 269 (1996): 265–84. Ruiz Ramón, Francisco. “Nota sobre la autoría del acto I de La Celestina.” Hispanic Review 42 (1974): 431–35. Russell, Peter. “Discordia universal: La Celestina como ‘floresta de philosophos.” Ínsula 497 (1988): 1, 3. Russell, Peter. Temas de La Celestina y otros estudios. Del Cid a Quijote. Barcelona: Ariel, 1978. Saguar García, Amaranta. Intertextualidades bíblicas en Celestina: Devotio moderna y humanismo cristiano. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2015. Salus, Carol. Picasso and Celestina: The Artist’s Vision of the Procuress. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2015. Salvador Miguel, Nicasio. “La Celestina.” In Historia del teatro español, edited by Javier Huerta, 137–67. Madrid: Gredos, 2003. Sánchez Sánchez-Serrano, Antonio, and Remedios Prieto de la Iglesia. “ ‘Auctor,’ ‘autor’ y otros problemas semánticos concernientes a la autoría, gestación y ediciones de La Celestina.” Celestinesca 35 (2011): 85–136. Scarborough, Connie L. “Celestina: The Power of Old Age.” In Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, edited by Albrecht Classen, 343–56. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Schmidt, Rachel. “Celestinas y majas en la obra de Goya, Alenza y Lucas Velázquez.” Celestinesca 39 (2015): 275–328.

414

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Index Abatte, Gay 126n6 Abelard and Heloise 235, 236n31 Abril Sánchez, Jorge 173n Acantis 207 Adam 67, 252–255, 288, 367, 378 Aetheria 84 Aguirre, J. M. 126, 126n5 Alba-Koch, Beatriz de 339, 343n10, 346n18 Albarracín Navarro, Joaquina 208n10 Albarrategui, García de 175, 176 Alberti, Leon Battista 76n5, 83, 91–93 Alcyone, see Ceyx and Alcyone Alemán, Mateo  295–300, 297n14, 301n23, 326 Alenza, Leonardo 344n13, 375–377 Alexander the Great 113, 116 Alexander VI, Pope 306 Alfonso X, King 151, 155, 183, 183n26 Allaigre, Claude 184n28 Allegri, Luigi 75, 75n2, 75n3, 76n4, 76n6 Alonso Hernández, José Luis 176n9 Alonso Romero, María Paz 304n Altamirano, Manuel 261n52, 343n10, 360 Alvar, Carlos 21n1, 366n12 Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín 368n16 Álvarez Roblin, David 326n15 Álvarez-Moreno, Raúl 17, 188, 190n8 Alzieu, Pierre 245n Amadís de Gaula, see Rodrigues de Montalvo, Garci amor hereos, see also lovesickness 127, 163, 201, 235–236 Ancos, Pablo 124n Appolonia, St. 11, 245 Apuleius 207 Ardavín de la Torre, César 387, 389–400 Ardemagni, Enrica J. 320n40 Aretino, Rinuccio 84 Aribau, Buenaventura Carlos 78, 78n12 Ariosto, Francesco 81n18, 84 Aristotle 34n37, 60n11, 63, 78, 98, 99n17, 100, 102, 120–121, 169–171, 170n28, 197–198, 201n34 Armas, Frederick A. de 135n29, 212n18 Armijo, Carmen E. 203n49, 221

Armistead, Samuel G. 114n Arrieta, José Agustín 10, 339, 342, 349, 349n, 350–361, 376, 376n32 Asensio, Manuel 229, 229n13, 229n15, 232 Astigarraga, Jesús 277, 277n5 auctoritates 40, 40n47, 61–71, 73, 109, 109n16, 317 Augustine of Hippo, St. 178, 179 Auto de Traso 27, 317n31 Avalle-Arce, Juan B. 300n18 Avellaneda, author of spurious Don Quixote  326n15, 327n16 Ayala, María Ángeles 346n20 Ayerbe-Chaux, Reynaldo 253n19 Baburen, Dirck van 371, 371n24, 372 Badia, Lola 156n19 Baker, Susan 370n21 Bakhtin, Mikhail 58, 58n2, 161–162, 162n2 Balassa, Gisela 347n25 Baltanás, Enrique 128n8 Barahona, Renato 180, 180n Baranda, Consolación 7, 176, 176n8, 176n10, 182, 183n25, 202n38, 231n21, 321, 321n2, 325n12, 330n21, 338n29 Baranda, Nieves 34–35, 35n38, 61n12 Barbera, Raymond E. 127n, 253n17 Barcia, José R. 392–393, 393n27 Barrick, Mac E. 216n23, 217n29, 252n12, 325n12 Barth, Kaspar 9, 9n15, 42, 42n4, 308, 308n8, 309, 313, 313n20, 313n23, 314, 314n25, 314n26, 315, 320 Barthes, Roland 58, 68n3 Barzizza, Antonio 83, 85 Basilea, Fadrique de 25, 195n23, 225, 236, 324, 362n, 363, 364 Bastianes, María 16n25 Bataillon, Marcel 45n14, 221 Bautista, Francisco 202n38 Bayly, A. C. 275, 275n Beardsley, Theodore S. 313n23 Béhar, Roland 141n4 Behiels, Lieve 312n16, 371n23 Beinart, Haim 259n39

Index Beltrán Llavador, Rafael 21n1, 110n11, 119n33, 173n2, 189n4, 221, 335n, 395n33 Benítez Rodríguez, Enrique 116n23 Beresford, Andrew 166, 166n18 Bergamín, José 212n18, 218n36 Berger, Philippe 30n24 Bergman, Ted L. L. 12, 292, 303n30 Bernaldo de Quirós, José Antonio 110, 110n7 Bernaschina, Vicente 200, 200n32 Berndt-Kelley, Erna 74n1 Bershas, Henry N. 119n31 Bertini, Ferruccio 78n10 Berzunza, Julius 212n18, 215n20 Biaggini, Olivier 326n15 Bijlert, Jan van 371, 371n24 Biondo, Flavio 82 Black, Antony 200n31 Blanco Mallada, Lucio 383n3 Blanco, Emilio 321n1 Blecua, Alberto 115, 117n26, 192n18 Blini, Lorenzo 322n6 Bluestone, George 384 Bobes, María del Carmen 201, 201n35 Boccaccio 72, 80, 104, 138n35, 154, 236 Bonilla y San Martín, Adolfo 206n Botero, Fernando 380–381, 381n42 Botta, Patrizia 5n, 11, 21n1, 22, 23n4, 23n6, 24n8, 24n9, 26n15, 86n28, 109n6, 111n12, 190n9, 205, 366n12 Botto, Juan Diego 394 Bottoni, Luciano 81n Bourdieu, Pierre 191n10 Boyum, Joy Gould 384, 384n6 Bozal, Valeriano 367n15 Brault, Gerard J. 308n7 Brown, Kenneth 250n Buero Vallejo, Antonio 261, 261n52 Burgos, Diego de 95 Burton, David 264n5 Burton, Robert 235, 235n30 Bussell Thompson, B. 115 Bynum, Caroline Walker 168, 168n23 Cabello Pino, Manuel 384, 384n5 Cabrera, Francisco 349n30 Calderón de la Barca, Franes Erskin 340, 340n, 341n, 342, 342n7, 348 Cammisa, Antonella 208n8, 220n41 Campillo, Andrés 348–349

417 Camus, Philippe  236, 365, 365n11 Cañas, Gabriela 392n25 Canavaggio, Jean 322n4 cancioneros 50, 70, 71, 71n45, 72, 73, 138n35, 259n35, 281–282, 322 Canet Vallés, José Luis 7, 21, 21n1, 23n6, 25n13, 31n27, 37n42, 39n45, 44–45, 45n13, 83n21, 84n22, 88, 88n40, 89, 92n49, 92n51, 92n53, 110, 110n10, 110n11, 173n2, 221, 225, 225n1, 228n10, 229, 335n, 395n33 Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, Fernando 7, 15, 23, 24n8, 27n17, 64n25, 108, 108n, 109n6, 111n15, 364n7 Canterbury Tales 281 Caparrós Masegosa, María Dolores 379n41 Capellanus, Andreas 126n6, 129n14, 132–139, 162–163, 234 Capelli, Guido M. 95n3, 106n31 Carajicomedia 259, 259n37 Carboneres, Manuel 174n4, 177n13 Cárceles Laborde, Concepción 202n37 Cárdenas-Rotunno, Anthony 127, 221 carnivalesque 15, 84 Caro Baroja, Julio 207, 207n5, 208, 212n18 carpe diem 266, 374 Carpenter, Dwayne E. 319n37 Carpentier, Alejo 149n12, 345 Carrasco Garrido, Reyes 379n41 Carrete Parrondo, Juan 367n15 Cartagena, Alonso de 95–97, 99, 102n25, 105–106, 169 Casalduero, Joaquín 212n18 Casariego Córdoba, Martín 158n Casillas, Agustín 377 Casona, Alejandro 261 casta paintings 347 Castejón Bolea, Ramón 378n39 Castells, Ricardo 14, 109n3, 126n6, 127, 127n, 128n8, 225, 234n28, 235n29 Castillo, Manuel 179n18 Castro Guisasola, Florentino 86, 86n31, 109, 109n5, 125n3, 149n12, 157n, 207n4 Catalán, Diego 260n4 Cátedra, Pedro 33, 33n33, 34, 34n34, 34n35, 72n51, 212n18 Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabela  96, 106, 174–176, 178, 189, 198, 204, 291 Cecchini, Enzo 31n28

418 Cejador y Frauca, Julio 113, 113n20, 206n4, 216n25 Celestina comentada 16n24, 35n39, 61, 61n14, 98, 98n14, 112, 113n19, 305, 314, 317, 317n30, 318, 318n34, 320 Celestina de Palacio 3n1, 21, 21n1, 22n2, 80n17, 110, 110n11, 111, 111n12, 112, 113, 114, 119, 120, 120n34, 121, 227, 228n10, 238n34, 239, 239n35, 309n18 censorship 7, 40, 120, 164, 261, 312, 312n17, 313, 320, 334–335, 383, 385, 388–390, 394, 397 Cerda, Juan de la 178, 179n17 Cerro González, Rafael 209n13, 210n15 Cervantes, Miguel de (see also Don Quixote) 161, 222–223, 283, 301, 302n26, 327n16, 343 Ceyx and Alcyone 142, 150–152, 154, 157, 158 Chamberlain, Walter 364n5 Charles V, Emperor 8n11, 208, 237, 312n17 Chartier, Roger 48–49, 49n27, 49n28, 54, 59n9, 62n17 Checa Cremades, Fernando 367n14 Chevalier, Jean-Frédéric 83n20 Chevalier, Maxime 321n1, 323n9 chivalry, books of 180, 326, 331, 365, 396 Chorpenning, Joseph F. 138n35 Chrysologus, Peter 67n34 Cicero, M. Tullius 46–47, 53, 97, 104 Circe 207 Ciruelo, Pedro 207 Cisneros, Cardinal 37–39 Close, Anthony J. 300 Coci, Jorge 26, 26n15 Cohen, Janie 344n12 Collar de la paloma, El 207 Comedia de Calisto y Melibea 3, 21n1, 21n2, 23, 25n12, 25n13, 31, 32, 32n29, 38, 74, 88n40, 102n25, 225n1, 227, 299, 302, 362n1 comedia humanística (humanistic comedy)  3n2, 50, 31n27, 43–44, 45n13, 50, 52–53, 74, 77–78, 78n11, 81, 82, 8320, 83n21, 84n22, 85–86, 86n28, 87, 87n32, 88, 88n41, 88n49, 90n43, 91, 93, 108, 140, 234, 264, 323, 340 Conde, Juan Carlos 21n1, 24n9, 35n38, 61n12, 110n11, 306n1 Conde, Luis 221

Index Contin, Mateo 385, 386n converso(s) 6n6, 11, 12, 27n16, 40, 95, 106, 114, 166, 198, 258, 259n38 Corbacho 207 Córdoba de la Llave, Ricardo 178n16, 303, 303n31 Corella, Joan Roís de 142, 142n6, 152–156 Correas, Gonzalo 118, 188n27, 173, 173n1, 185n30 Corry, Jennifer 221 Costa Fontes, Manuel da 12, 165–168, 217n29, 218n32, 242, 244n3, 252n14, 255n22, 256n24, 258n33 costumbrismo 339–340, 342–343, 345–347, 349–350, 359n, 360, 375–376, 382 courtly love 14, 71, 100, 103, 124, 126, 126n6, 128n11, 130, 130n19, 135n28, 139–140, 162, 164, 171, 201, 259, 270n, 292, 395–396, 396n37 Covarrubias, Sebastián de 239–240, 248n6, 249n8 Crane, Mary T. 62n15 Crescas, Hasdai 261n48 Criado de Val, Manuel 108n, 302, 302n27, 387 Críez Garcés, Pedro Luis 326n12 Crispo, Domenico 91 Cromberger, printers 26, 37, 323, 323n8, 363, 366 Cruciani, Fabrizio 82n19 Cruz, Anne J. 179n18, 181n23 Cull, John T. 364n9 Curial e Güelfa 156n19 Czarnocka, Halina 194, 194n20, 195n22 Damiani, Bruno M. 209n12, 302, 302n28, 303 Dante 79n15, 80, 153n, 236 De Amore, see Capellanus, Andreas De Certeau, Michel 189, 189n7, 190, 191n10, 191n12, 192, 192n17 De secretis mulierum 177, 177n12, 210n14 Decameron 85, 281 Delgado, Jaime 344n15 Delicado, Francisco 184n28, 302, 378 Demades 116 Demosthenes 116 Devlin, John 126n6, 396n37 Devoto, Daniel 209n11, 212n18, 213n19

Index Deyermond, Alan D. 15, 15n23, 23n5, 40n47, 45n14, 62n18, 68n39, 68n40, 74, 74n1, 79, 79n14, 102, 102n23, 125n3, 126, 126n6, 129, 129n13, 131n21, 138n35, 140n45, 166n20, 184n28, 192, 192n16, 200, 200n32, 212n18, 217, 217n28, 223, 270n17, 283, 283n18, 318n34 Di Camillo, Ottavio 13, 12n120, 22n2, 24n10, 38n44, 80n17, 94, 94n, 95n2, 95n4, 97, 97n7, 98n13, 99n16, 99n18, 100n19, 106n30, 169, 169n25, 306n1, 306n5, 307 Diana enamorada 326n15 Diana, Segunda parte de la 326n15 Diana, Siete libros de 326 Díaz de Toledo, Pero 62, 62n21 Diccionario de autoridades 230, 230n19, 239–241 didacticism 76, 81, 99–104, 107, 127n, 203, 259, 261n47, 311–313, 319n37, 365–366, 368, 381, 386 didascaliae 43, 57 Diego de Valera, Mosén 106, 179n18, 184n28 Diener, Pablo 350, 3509n31 Dios Arias, Juan de 348 Dioscorides 208 Dipsas 207 discordia universalis 59n9, 192, 199 Dismas and Gestas, thieves 167 Dolos 83 Dolotechne 85, 90–91 Domizi del Comandatore, Pietro 84n2 Don Juan  383, 383n2 Don Quixote (title and character) 104, 161, 175, 283, 326, 327n16, 362, 381, 383, 396 Donatus, Aelius 81 Doyle, Arthur Conan 7 Drumbl, Johann 75, 75n2 Drysdall, Denis L. 309n10 Earle, Peter G. 124n elegiac comedy 3n2, 74–75, 78, 78n10, 85, 87 Encina, Juan del 35, 169n26, 322 England, John  129n12 Enlightenment 164, 276–280, 344 Epicurean tradition 170–171, 200 epistolary genre 101 Erasistratus 112–113 Erasmus, Desiderius 65, 68n38 Erhard, Schon 372

419 Erskine, Frances 340, 340n3, 348 Escalante, Justo María 222 Escudero, Juan M. 122n35 Esteban Martín, Luis Mariano 222, 325n12 332n24 Estébanez Calderón, Serafín 339, 339n1, 345, 346n18, 375, 375n31, 376–377 Estopañán, Cirac 207, 207n6 exemplarity 22, 65, 99, 101, 103–104, 203, 324, 336 Eyb, Albrecht von 60, 62 Fathers of the Church 75, 166n16, 178 Faulhaber, Charles B. 3n1, 21n1, 80n17, 110, 110n11, 228, 228n10, 239, 239n35 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín 346n18 Fernández de Moratín, Leandro 78, 78n12 Fernández Rivera, Enrique, see Fernández, Enrique Fernández Santos, Jesús 389, 398, 400 Fernández, Enrique 9n15, 16n24, 17, 35n39, 49, 50n31, 59n9, 61n14, 98n14, 113n19, 113n20, 122n35, 176n11, 177n12, 189n3, 210n14, 210n15, 222, 236, 236n32, 258n34, 313, 313n23, 317n30, 344n13, 362, 365n11, 367n14 Fernández, Lucas 322, 322n5 Fernández, Sebastián 231, 325, 325n, 328 Fernández, Sergio 203n40 Ferrand, Jacques 235 Ferré, Rosario 217n19, 218n34 Ferreira de Vasconcelos, Jorge 93n54 Finch, Patricia 209n12, 212n18, 215n20, 216n25, 218n37, 219n39, 296, 296n12, 296n13 Florinea, Comedia 325n Folger, Robert 222 Fothergill-Payne, Louise 16n24, 35n39, 61n14, 63n22, 98n14, 102n23, 113n19, 169, 170, 170n27, 171n29, 317n30, 318n34 Fothergill-Payne, Peter 16n24, 35n39, 61n14, 98n14, 113n19, 317n30, 317n30 Frago Pérez, Marta 384, 384n7, 394–395, 396n31 Fraker, Charles F. 43, 43n7, 46, 46n21, 127n, 292, 293n3 Franco Anchelergues, Vicente 387, 387n, 388n12, 389, 390n21, 393, 393n28 Francoism 261, 385, 388, 397

420 Frenk, Margit 54, 54n40 Frías y Soto, Hilarión 348 friendship 69, 169–171, 200, 200n31, 268, 282, 284–290, 316, 335 Fuchs, Barbara 164, 164n12 Fuensanta del Valle, Marqués de la 325n12 Fuentes de Aymat, J. M. 209n13 Fuentes, Carlos 345 Funes, Leonardo 138n35 Furies 211n7 Gagliardi, Donatella 397n39 Galen 111, 112n16, 294 Gallego, Antonio 51n35, 223, 364n5 García Barragán, Elisa 349n, 351n32, 354n García de la Concha, Víctor 330n20 García Garzón, Juan 392n26 García Herrero, María del Carmen 177n13 García Márquez, Gabriel 345 García Sáiz, María Concepción 347, 347n23 García Soormally, Mina 222 García Valdecasas, José Guillermo 110n8 García Vega, Blanca 364n5 Garci-Gómez, Miguel 109n3, 113, 113n20, 119n30, 122n38, 126n6, 228n11, 231, 231n20, 232, 234, 234n26, 234n27, 238, 241, 309n9 Gaumont, Léon 383 Geanakopolos, Deno John 141n4 Genette, Gérard 58, 58n4, 58n5, 59, 59n6, 59n8, 161–162, 162n3, 326n14, 333n Gerli, Michael 128n8, 138n35, 168, 168n24, 192n15, 194n20, 197, 197n, 198n27, 199, 199n30, 203n39, 222, 228, 228n10, 256n26, 283n17, 295n10, 373n26 germanía 332, 332n22 Gernert, Folke 259, 259n36 Gifford, D. J. 50–51, 51n34 Giglioli, Gigliolo 84 Giles, Ryan D. 15, 161, 165n15, 168n22 Gilman, Stephen 45, 45n16, 52, 52n, 79, 79n14, 166, 190–191, 191n13, 193n, 226, 226n4, 226n5, 229n15, 232 Giraldi, Cinthio 90 Gitlitz, David M. 260n43 Goldman, Peter B. 122n36, 309n9 goliardic farces 57, 81–82, 84 Gómez de Tejada, Cosme 27n16

Index Gómez de Toledo, Gaspar 6n7, 231, 233, 325n, 327–328, 330–331 Gómez Moreno, Ángel 87, 88n36, 191n11, 222 Gómez, Jesús 324n10 González Echevarría, Roberto 283, 283n19, 284, 285n21, 291, 291n, 344n11, 345, 345n17 González Rolán, T. 148n10, 207n4 Goya, Francisco de 17, 277, 278n6, 344, 344n13, 359–360, 360n42, 373, 374, 374n, 375, 375n28, 375n29, 377–379 Grafton, Anthony T. 59n9 Green, Otis H. 27, 114n21, 115, 221n Greene, Roland 295, 295n9, 299 Griffin, Clive 364n9 Guarino, Raimondo 82n Guerrero Zamora, Juan 392, 393n27 Guevara, Fray Antonio de 8n11, 397 Guillén Marcos, Esperanza 379n41 Guillén, Jorge 379n29 Gurza, Esperanza 50, 50n32 Gutiérrez Solana, José 378, 378n37 Guzmán de Alfarache, see Alemán, Mateo Haebler, Konrad 91n46 Hagenbach, Pedro 25–26, 30 Halsey, Martha T. 261n52 Hamesse, Jacqueline 62n17, 102n25 Hamilton, Michelle M. 319, 319n39 Haro Tecglen, Eduardo 392, 392n26 Hartzenbusch, Juan Eugenio 222, 375, 375nn30 Hathaway, Neil 62n16 Hecate 207 Hermenegildo, Alfredo 43, 44, 44n9 Hernández, Rosilie 179n18 Hero and Leander 15, 141–158 Herrero Llorente, J. 116n23 Herrero, Javier 137n, 216n24, 217n29, 217n30, 218n32, 218n25, 219n39 Heugas, Pierre 325n12, 330n19, 330n20 Heusch, Carlos 139n38 Histoire d’Olivier de Castille et d’Artus d’Algarbe, see Camus, Philippe Historia de dos amantes, Euríalo y Lucrecia  34 Holloway, Memory Jockisch 378n35 Holy Office, see Inquisition

Index honor 4, 119, 125n3, 130, 132–135, 135n28, 136, 138, 146–147, 150, 178, 182, 324, 328, 337–338, 338n Hopkin, Shon David 319n39, 320n41 Horace 206 Horozco, Sebastián 55n42, 176, 176n9 hortus conclusus 228n9, 253–254 Houck, Helen H. 313n22 Howe, Elizabeth Teresa 130n19, 133, 133n23, 134n26, 135n29, 140, 140n46 humanism 12–13, 13n20, 31n27, 71n48, 80n16, 83n20, 88n40, 94–99, 101–103, 105n28, 202n37, 293, 312 humanistic comedy, see comedia humanística Hutcheon, Linda 161–162, 162n4 Iffland, James 301, 301n24 Iglesias, Yolanda 17, 71n45, 124n, 126, 136n32, 139n38, 139n39, 162–163, 163n10, 173n2, 183n25, 383, 390n20, 3909n22, 395n35, 396n37, 396n38, 398n40 Iliad 326n14 Ilie, Paul 261n51 Illades Aguiar, Gustavo 13, 41, 54n41 Index of Forbidden Books 221, 325, 334, 397 Inquisition 6n6, 7, 8, 8n14, 12, 15, 40, 214, 220, 221n44, 259–261, 345, 397 intertextuality 15, 58–59, 70, 72–73, 162, 350 Iriarte, Hesiquio 348–349 Isidore of Seville 80, 80n16, 189, 189n6 Israel, Jonathan  277, 277n4 Jacobs, Joseph 258n30 Jamirez, Jaime 44n9 Jammes, Robert 245n4 Janer, Jaime 38–39 Janus sacerdos 84n3, 85 Jardin, Jean-Pierre 222 Jiménez Calvente, Teresa 222 Jiménez Monteserín, Miguel 177n13 Joffre, Juan 56n43 Joseph of Arimathea 368 Joset, Jacques 219n38, 294, 294n6 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor 345, 345n16 jugglers 76, 352 Julius II, Pope 306, 318 Juvenal 80

421 Kalaga, Tomasz 262n1 Kassier, Theodore L. 71n45, 259n35 Kessler, Brad 262, 262n2, 272, 272n Kish, Kathleen V. 4, 10, 122, 164, 264–265, 268, 305, 306n3, 307, 308n8, 309, 309n9, 310n, 311n12, 312n16, 314n24, 316n27, 316n28, 371n23 Kline, Anthony S. 152n15 Kristeva, Julia 58, 58n2 La pícara Justina 175 Lacarra Lanz, Eukene 45n15, 71n47, 126n6, 127n, 130n16, 140n44, 162, 163, 163n9, 173n2, 174n4, 175, 182n24, 189, 189n4, 248n7, 249n9, 396n37 Lactantius 75 Laguna, Andrés 208 Lana, Jacopo della 153n17 Langbehn, Rohland de 119n33, 126n6, 130, 130n6 Lara Alberola, Eva 222 Latin comedy, see Roman theater Lavardin, Jacques de 308, 308n7, 309, 309n10, 311–312, 313n20, 316n29 Lavín, Lydia 347n25 Lawrance, Jeremy N. H. 97, 98n10 Laza Palacios, Modesto 185, 208n8, 209n11, 212n16, 219 Lazarillo de los atunes 326n15 Lazarillo de Tormes 55n, 281, 286, 292–300, 304, 326 Lázaro Carreter, Fernando 261, 261n50 Le Goff, Jacques 188n3, 278, 278n7 Leander, see Hero and Leander Leaños, Jaime 222 Lefebvre, Henry 188, 188n2, 189, 189n7, 191n10 Leto, Pomponio 77 Liang, Yiling Li 325n Liarte, Bartolomé 369, 369n Libro de Buen Amor, see Talavera, Arcipreste de Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa 42n4, 43, 43n6, 48n26, 77–78, 78n9, 78n11, 80, 87, 87n33, 89, 93n54, 125n2, 127n, 139n40, 190, 191, 191n11, 192n14, 212, 212n16, 228, 228n10, 229, 229n16, 234, 319n37 lieu 191

422 Linati, Claudio 340 Linde, Carmen de la 138n35, 197n26 Lippi, Emilio 143n8 Lissorgues, Yvan 245n Livius, Titus 76 Livy of Frulovisi, Titus 84 Lizzani, Carlo 385–386, 399 Lloret, Albert 47, 47n24 Llull, Ramón 37–38 Lobera, Francisco J. 22n2, 63n25, 74n, 117, 117n25, 119n29, 189n5, 226n3, 238n34, 294n8, 307, 307n, 308, 309n9, 329n18 López Beltrán, María Teresa 177n13 López de Villalobos, Francisco 237, 238, 238n33 López Rey, José 375n29 López Ríos, Santiago 32n30, 56n30, 166, 166n17, 200n31, 228, 228n10, 363n4, 385n, 395n34 López Santos, Antonio 312n14 López Vázquez, Manuel B. 375n29 Lorris, Guillaume de 326n14 lovesickness 14, 70–72, 113, 115, 126–127, 127n, 137, 146, 162–163, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233–237, 239–241, 265–266, 397 Lozana andaluza, see Delicado, Francisco Lozano-Renieblas, Isabel 33n32, 115, 223 Lucan 95, 207, 211 Lucas Velázquez, Eugenio 344n13, 375 Lucas Villamil, Eugenio 375 Lucena, Juan de 95n3, 98, 98n12, 100, 100n20, 102n25, 103n, 106 Lucía Megías, José Manuel 21n1, 180, 180n21 Luna, Álvaro de 17918 Lusitano, Amato 208 Mabbe, James 294n8, 299, 308–309, 313, 313n21, 316, 316n29, 396n1 Macer floridus, de virtutibus herbarum 208 MacPheeters, D. W. 38, 38n43 MacPherson, I. 125n3, 184n28, 218n32, 318n34 Madrigal, Alfonso de, el Tostado 102n25, 201n34 Maeztu, Ramiro de 212n16 Malleus maleficarum 207 Mancing, Howard A. 79, 292, 292n1, 300n22 Manrique, Jorge 154

Index Manteros, Manuel 16n29 Manuscrito de Palacio, see Celestina de Palacio Maras, Guillermo 141 Maravall, José Antonio 12, 12n19, 173, 173n2, 200n33, 212n18, 230, 293, 293n4 Marciales, Miguel 109, 109n3, 109n4, 111n14, 115, 119n28, 122n39, 239, 309n9, 363n3 Mariana, Juan de 175n7, 183, 184n27 Marín Padilla, Encarnación 260n42 Marín Pina, María del Carmen 180, 180n21 Mariscal, George 300, 300n20 Maritornes, character 175 Marqués de Santillana  79, 95, 98, 103n26, 119n33 Márquez Villanueva, Francisco 55, 303, 303n32, 304 Marti-Ibáñez, Félix 209, 209n11, 209n12, 210n14, 212n18, 219 Martín Abad, Julián 25n12, 26n15, 29, 91, 364n8 Martín Rodríguez, José Luis 198n28 Martín, José Luis 143n8, 152n16 Martín-Aragón Adrada, Julián 209, 209n11 Martínez Lacalle, Guadalupe 313, 313n20, 316, 316n29 Martínez Ruiz, Juan 51, 51n35, 208n10, 223 Mártir de Anglería, Pedro 38, 40 Martos, Josep Lluís 152n16 Maurizi, Françoise 42n2, 44n9, 49, 52n37, 253n17 Mazo Karras, Ruth 180, 180n19 McCash, June Hall Martin 162–163, 163n26 McGrady, Donald 21n2, 112, 112n18 Medea 155, 207 Mediavilla, Fidel S. 63n24 memento mori 374, 378 Mena, Juan de 79n15, 96, 101n, 102n25, 207, 211, 223 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino 28n17, 43, 43n5, 79, 79n13, 86, 86n29, 86n30, 88, 125n2, 141, 141n1, 206n4, 212, 212n16, 216n26, 234, 321n2, 324, 368n16 Menjot, Denis 174, 174n3, 177n13 Mérimée, Ernest 299, 299n17, 300 Meung, Jean de 326n14 Miguel Martínez, Emilio de 27n17, 44, 44n12 Miguel, Jerónimo  98n12, 103n miles gloriosus 185, 300, 300n18

Index Miller, Jean R. 296n11 Minerva 7, 15, 108, 113–116, 116n24, 119 Minotaur 370 Molinera, character 175 Molinos Tejada, María Teresa 223 Moll, Jaime 29, 30n23 Moner, Michel 44, 44n10, 195, 195n24 Monsalvo Antón, José María 198n28, 281–282, 282n14 Monsiváis, Carlos 348, 348n27 Moon, Harold K. 261n53 moral philosophy 23, 40, 97–98, 104n, 201, 204 Morales, Ana María 99n18, 223 Moreno Mengíbar, Andrés 174, 174n5, 177n13 Morgan, Erica 46, 46n20 morisco(s) 214, 347 Morón Arroyo, Ciriaco 247, 247n5, 251, 251n11, 253, 253n15 Morros Mestres, Bienvenido 15, 112n17, 127, 140, 140n44, 141, 141n1, 142n5, 143n7, 151n14, 157n Mota Plasencia, Carlos 226n3, 323n8 Moyano Andrés, Isabel 364n8 Muñón, Sancho de 231, 233, 325, 325n, 327–328, 337n6, 330–331 Muñoz Llamosas, Virginia 116n24 Murillo, Ana María 164, 164n13 Murillo, Bartolomé Estebán 17, 344, 372–373, 373n25 Musaeus 141, 141n3, 142, 150–151, 153, 155–156 Musuro, Marcos 141 Nabokov, Vladimir 161, 161n Nadal, Giovanni Girolamo 142–143, 148–158 Nava, Alexander 299, 299n16 Navarro Durán, Rosa 325n12, 337n Nebel, Carl 340–342, 348, 350n Nebrija, Antonio de 38, 40, 95–96, 100, 100n20, 100n21, 102n25, 106, 126, 126n6, 299 Nepaulsingh, Colbert 46, 46n18 Nicodemus 368 Nimrod 113, 116–117 Nin Culmell, Joaquín 16n27 Nonni, Giorgio 31n28 novela sentimental, genre 70, 71, 71n46, 71n47, 72–73, 79n14, 101, 124, 124n1, 126n6, 130n16, 130n19, 131n20, 134n27,

423 138n37, 140n45, 163, 163n9, 163n10, 390, 292, 302, 324, 324n10, 325, 332, 334, 365, 396, 396n37 Nowak, William J. 370n21 Obregón, Antonio de 389n18 Ong, Walter 54, 54n40 Ordóñez, Alonso (Ordognes, Alphonsus)  24, 24n10, 37, 37n41, 306, 306n1, 307, 309, 313n20, 316n29, 318 Orpheus 128 Ortiz Macedo, Luis 342n8 Osma, Pedro de 204n Osuna, Fray Francisco de 8n12 Ovid 15, 22, 34, 98, 126n6, 131, 131n22, 141–142, 148–152, 155–157, 207 Pacheco López, Miriam 223 Padoan, Giorgio 82n19, 83n20 Paedia 84 Palafox, Eloisa 50, 50n33, 262, 262n3, 264, 264n7, 264n8, 266, 266n12 Palencia, Alfonso de 102n25, 112n17 Palmerín de Oliva 326 Pamphilus de amore 85, 146, 148, 148n Parrilla, María del Carmen 24n9, 67n36 Patre, Patrizia Di 47, 47n23 Paulo, Amílcar 258n31 Pavia, Mario N. 212n18, 219n38 Pax, Nicolás 37–39 Peden, Margaret Sayers 283n19 Pedrell, Felipe 16n27 Pedrosa, José Manuel 149n12 Peláez Benítez, María Dolores 127n Pelikan, Jaroslav 254n, 255n21, 256n25 Peña Díez, Manuel 33n31 Penney, Clara Louise 28, 28n19, 363n3 Perellón, Celedonio 371, 371n22 Pérez de León, Vicente 223 Pérez Escamilla, Ricardo 342n9 Pérez López, José Luis 259 Pérez Priego, Miguel Ángel 39n45, 79n15, 223, 323n7, 324, 324n11, 332n23 Pérez Salas, María Esther 346n21 Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso 360n Pérez-Romero, Antonio 17, 275 performance 13, 16n28, 41–43, 47–50, 53–54, 57n44, 76–77, 81, 104, 106, 162, 226, 322–323

424 Peris, Carmen 174n4 Perosa, Alessandro 83n20 Persius 80, 80n16 Peset, Mariano 304n33 Petrarch 15, 40, 62–63, 65, 68–69, 83, 97, 102, 109n6, 113, 168, 200, 236, 296, 303 philocaptio 217, 222–223 Philodoxeos fabula 83, 91–92 picaresque 12, 45, 104, 292–304, 343, 363, 371, 373 Picasso, Pablo 17, 344n12, 370, 370n20, 370n21, 377, 377n34, 378, 378n35, 378n36 Piccolomini, Eneas Silvio 31n28, 34, 84–85 Pieri, Marzia 82n19 Pimenta, Maria José 258n32 Pingret, Edouard 342, 342n8, 343, 348 Pisani, Ugolino 83, 84n3, 86 Pistoia, Rannusio de 91 Pittaluga, Stefano 83n20 Plato 98 Plautus 74–75, 90, 80–85, 87, 91n45 Plinius 208 Plutarch 112, 116, 116n22 Pluto 10–11, 206, 211, 215, 222, 334 Polenton, Sicco 84 Policiana, Tragedia 219n38, 231, 233, 325, 328, 330–331, 333, 335–338 Poliodoro y Casandrina, Tragicomedia de  325, 325n, 329–331, 333, 336 Poliscena, Comedia 31–32, 83–86, 90–91 Pollard, Alfred W. 364n6, 366n12 Ponferrada, Gustavo E. 178n15 prayer 11–12, 15, 67n34, 165–166, 242–245, 257, 260–261, 264, 294 Prieto de la Iglesia, María Remedios 21n1, 22n2, 22n3, 25n12, 32n29, 110n7 Prieto, Guillermo 349n30 Primaleón 8 Proaza, Alonso de 27–28, 37–40, 42, 47, 49, 52–53, 221, 306, 306n4 Profeti, Maria Grazia 77n7 Propertius 207 proverbs 50, 53, 63–64, 67, 111n14, 117, 118n, 173n1, 176, 176n9, 185, 185n30, 271, 316, 323, 329 Puebla, Teo 370, 371n22 Pujol, Josep 142, 142n6, 153n Pulgar, Fernando del 102n25

Index Pyramus and Thisbe 112–113, 153–154, 156–158, 337 Quem quaeritis 76 Quevedo, Francisco de 294–295, 297–298, 300–301 Quintilian 46, 55, 95 Quirós, Francisco de 91–92 Ramírez, Fausto 355, 355n37 Ramírez, Ignacio 348 Ramón de Moncada, Guillén 37, 39 Rank, Jerry R. 127, 127n, 128n8, 242n2 Ratcliffe, Marjorie 177n13 Rauhut, Franz 212n18 Read, Malcolm K. 51, 51n36 Rebhorn, Wayne A. 181, 181n23 Reconquista 106 Reed, Cory A. 302n26 Rego, Paula 380–381 Rembrandt 344, 344n12 Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías 207 Rico, Francisco 74, 117, 212n18, 219n40, 226n3, 378n36, 393 Riffaterre, Michael 59, 59n7, 59n8 Riquer, Martín de 109, 109n2, 109n5, 212n18, 226–228, 231, 240, 240n37 Riss, Barbara 62n21 Ritzenhoff, Ursula 122n38, 309n9, 310n11, 311n12, 314n24, 316n27, 316n28 Rivera, Isidro 49, 49n29 Rivera, José María 339n2, 348–349 Robbins, Jeremy 276–277 Rodrigues de Montalvo, Garci 8, 26, 37, 180, 326 Rodríguez Cuadros, Evangelina 47–48, 48n25 Rodríguez Freyle, Juan 344, 344n15 Rodríguez-Puértolas, Julio 126n7, 195–196, 196n25, 198, 199n29, 282–283, 393n27 Rodríguez-Solás, David 364n9 Rohland de Langbehn, Regula 119n33, 126n6, 130, 130n16 Roman de la rose 162–163, 326n14 Roman theater 44–45, 52, 80, 81, 84, 87, 89–90, 195, 234, 365 Romance de Calisto y Melibea 323–325 Romancero 260n40, 281

425

Index Romero de Torres, Julio 378, 378n38 Romero, José Luis 278, 279n9 Rose, Margaret 161–162 Rose-de-Viejo, Isadora 344n12 Round, Nicholas G. 130, 130n16 Rubio Cremades, Enrique 346n20 Rubio, L. 148 Ruggiero, M. J. 212n18, 215n20, 219–220 Ruggio, Luca 83n20, 91n25 Ruiz Arzalluz, Iñigo 40n47, 62n19, 80, 88, 109, 109n6, 117n25, 226n3 Ruiz, Teófilo 278, 278n8, 281 Russell, Peter 5n4, 23, 23n7, 41n, 43, 43n8, 51n34, 59n9, 88n38, 124n, 130n16, 163n8, 184n28, 207n5, 212, 212n17, 212n18, 216–217, 220n42, 228, 228n10, 263–264, 267n, 270n, 307–308, 317–318 Sabido, Miguel 390–391 Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis 385, 385n9 Sáez Guillén, José Francisco 92n48 Saguar García, Amaranta 15, 58, 63n23, 71n48, 318–319 Sala-Valldaura, Josep María 301n25 Salaya, Alonso de 366, 366n12 Salazar y Torres, Agustín 345 Salutati, Coluccio 97 Salvador Miguel, Nicasio 27n17, 56n43, 66n33 Samonà, Carmelo 46n17, 205n3, 208n8 Samuel Tsarfati, Joseph ben 318–319 San Pedro, Diego de 8, 15, 63n23, 71n48, 124–125, 130n17, 131n22, 134–136, 139–140, 236, 326n15, 365n10 Sánchez Sánchez-Serrano, Antonio 22n2, 22n3, 25n12, 32n29, 109, 110n7 Sánchez y Sánchez, Samuel 201, 201n36 Sánchez, Elizabeth 212n18 Sanmartín Bastida, Rebeca 156n19 Sarduy, Severo 345 Sauve, Michel 223 Saward, John 166n16 Sayre, Eleanor 360n Scaligero, Giulio Cesare 90 Scarborough, Connie 14n22, 127–128, 188, 188n1, 192, 192n14, 262, 264n5 Schmidhuber de la Mora, Guillermo 345n16 Schmidt, Rachel 344n13

Scoles, Emma 306–307 Sedeño, Juan 7, 309n9, 322n6 Seneca 46, 62–64, 80, 95, 100–102, 120–121, 155–156, 169–171 sententiae 59–60, 67, 98–99, 102, 314, 316, 329 Seragnoli, Diego 82n Seraphina, Comedia 324 Serrano y Sanz, Manuel 27n16 Serrata, Leonardo de la 31, 84 Servius 142, 153, 155 servus fallax 22 Severin, Dorothy 22n2, 34n36, 45n14, 71n44, 71n48, 79, 79n14, 98n15, 124–126, 128n9, 130–131, 134n25, 136n30, 138–140, 162–163, 178n14, 205n2, 223–224, 229n16, 242n1, 283, 283n16, 292–294, 300, 300n18, 302–303, 395–396 Sicherl, Martin 141n3 Sicroff, Albert A. 261n49 Silva, Feliciano de 6n7, 108, 231, 231n21, 325–328, 330, 332–334 Silverman, Joseph H. 114n Snow, Joseph T. 3, 7n8, 10n17, 16n27, 24n8, 26n14, 28–29, 109–110, 127–128, 138n37, 140n45, 173n2, 184n28, 210n15, 224, 309, 313n23, 317n30, 319–321, 363n3, 363n4, 395n33 Solomon, Michael 127n, 224, 228n10 Sorolla, Joaquín 379–380 Spells of Solomon 51 Stamm, James R. 196, 196n25, 229, 229n14 Stäuble, Antonio 76n4, 83–87, 90n44 Stephanium, Comedia 84–85, 90 Stoicism 40, 47, 169, 200, 200n31 Strauss, Leo 261n50 Summers, Montague 208n7 Suz Ruiz, María Ángeles 179n18 Sweerts, Michiel 371 Talavera, Arcipreste de 127, 207 Tasso, Bernardo 142n4 Tavares, Ferro 258n32, 260n41 Teijeiro Fuentes, Miguel Ángel 224 Teixidor y Trilles, José 30n25 Terence 42–43, 45, 74–75, 80–84, 87, 98, 104n27, 108, 364–365 Tertulian 75

426 Teuller, Eduardo 386 Thebayda, Comedia 31n27, 45n13, 231, 324, 330, 330n19, 332n22 Thisbe, see Pyramus and Thisbe Thomson, Guy 349n30, 351n33, 356, 356n38, 356n39 Tibullus 206 Timoneda, Juan de 48 Todorov, Tzvetan 277–278 Toro Garland, Fernando 206–207, 212n16, 215n21 Torregrosa Díaz, José Antonio 122n39, 228, 228n10, 234, 234n25, 320n41 Torres López, Manuel 385 Torres Naharro, Bartolomé 324, 328, 332–333 Torres Nebrera, Gregorio 321n1 Tostado González, Rubén 312n14 Tostado, Alonso de 102n25, 201n34 Traso, see Auto de Traso Trisler, B. J. 219n38 Tristán de Leonís 8 Truesdell, William D. 66n31, 227–228 Turró, Jaume 156n19 Utrera Macías, Rafael 383–384, 383n2, 388–389, 393–394 Valera, Diego de 106–107, 179n18, 184n28 Vallata, Johannes de 78n11, 84, 87n32 Valle Lersundi, Fernando del 27n16, 125n4, 163n7 Valverde Azuela, Inés 6n7 Varo, Carlos 259n37 Vázquez García, Francisco 174, 174n5, 177n13 Vázquez Medel, Miguel Ángel 388–389, 394–395 Vega, Lope de 42–43, 114n, 231, 331, 333 Velázquez Guadarrama, Angélica 359, 359n41, 376n33 Vélez de Guevara, Diego 343 Ventrone, Paola 82n19 Vera, Gerardo 393–395 Verardi, Carlo 84, 91 Vergerio, Pietro Paolo 83, 85 Vermeer, Jan 371, 371n24, 373 Vetterling, Mary-Anne 390–392

Index Vian Herrero, Ana 209–210, 212n18, 220n42, 220n43, 224, 321n2, 335–336 Vicente, Luis M. 71n49, 125n3 Vida y costumbres de la madre Andrea 181 Vigier, Françoise 119n32 Villegas Selvago, Alonso de 231–233, 325–326, 328 Villena, Enrique de 97–98, 102n25 Villoresi, Marco 82n Virgil 98, 142, 169 Virgin Mary 15, 165, 247, 249–250, 253–257 Visitatio sepulchri 76 Vitruvius 76, 76n5 Vives, Juan Luis 8n10, 96, 180–181 vizcaino, character 331–332 Vogtherr, Heinrich 372 Waley, Pamela 134n26, 138, 138n36 Walsh, John K. 62n21 Walsh, P. G. 129n14 Wardropper, Bruce W. 230, 230n17, 230n18 Webber, Edwin J. 124n1 Weinberg, F. M. 252–253 Weissberger, Barbara F. 381n43 West, Geoffrey 137n, 217n29 Whetnall, Jane 16n26 Whinnom, Keith 40n46, 44n9, 74n, 88–89, 124–125, 130n17, 133–135, 138–140, 318, 321, 321n1, n20330 Whitehead, Barbara 179n18 Willis-Altamirano, Susan 261n52 Wirsung, Christof 122n38, 308–311, 313–316, 320 Wolf, Lucien 260n44 Ximénez de Urrea, Pedro Manuel 42, 322–324, 324n10, 332 Ynduráin, Domingo 138n35, 324n10 Ypolita, Comedia 324 Zabaleta, Juan de 343 Zafra, Enriqueta 12, 173, 175n6, 181n23 Zamora Vicente, Alonso 389–390, 398 Zimmerman, Marie-Claire 51, 51n37 Zimmerman, Susan 49n27 Zuloaga, Ignacio 380–381 Zumthor, Paul 53–54, 189, 189n7