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The problem of the ‘best-seller’ in Spanish Golden-Age literature1

1980; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382802000357189

1469-3550

Keith Whinnom,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: LITERACY/READERSHIP — SPAINPRINTING & PUBLISHING — SPAINSPAIN — LITERATURE — GOLDEN AGE/16th–17th CENTURIES — GENERAL Notes 1. What follows is the text of a lecture delivered on 31 March 1978 at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, to the annual conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland. In these endnotes I have supplied some basic bibliographical references and added a few explanatory comments. The lecture was given, of course, before the appearance of the superb article by D.W. Cruickshank, '"Literature" and the book trade in Golden-Age Spain', MLR, LXXIII (1978), 799–824, to which I could not otherwise have failed to refer. 2. One might note in particular Edward M. Wilson. 'Quevedo for the masses', Aliante, III (1955), 151–66; 'Samuel Pepys's Spanish chap-books', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, II, 2 (1955), 127–54; II, 3 (1956), 229–68; II, 4 (1957), 305–22; 'Tradition and change in some late Spanish verse chap-books', HR, XXV (1957), 194–215; and Some Aspects of Spanish Literary History: The Taylorian Lecture, delivered 18 May 1966 (Oxford 1967) ; Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino, 'Construcción crítica y realidad histórica en la poesía española de los siglos XVI y XVII', Literary History and Literary Criticism—Acta of the Ninth Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (New York 1965), 30–49, reprinted separately with a foreword by Marcel Bataillon (Madrid 1965); and Diccionario bibliográfico de pliegos sueltos poéticos (siglo XVI) (Madrid 1970); Julio Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la literatura de cordel (Madrid 1969); M. C. García de Enterría, Sociedad y poesía de cordel en el Barroco (Madrid 1973); Maxime Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid 1976); and Cuenlecillos tradicionales en la España del Siglo de Oro (Madrid 1975); Alan Soons, Hazy envés del cuento risible en el Siglo de Oro (London 1976); Donald McGrady, 'Notes on the Golden Age cucntecillo with special reference to Timoneda and Santa Cruz)', FHP, I (1977), 121–45. 3. Ten years ago. in Spanish Literary Historiography: Three Forms of Distortion (Exeter 1968), I alluded (18) to the histories of literature 'which devote more space to Fray Luis de León—whose private poetry was not even available in print—than to all the romances of chivalry put together'. In his review in BHS, XLVI (1969), 52–54, E. M. Wilson objected to my inferred conclusion, arguing that Fray Luis fully deserved his place, mentioning his importance as a prose-writer, inquiring whether, after Sir Henry Thomas, there was anything left to say about the romances of chivalry, and refusing to concede that literary merit is no concern of the literary historian. It may not be easy to resolve the conflict inherent in our dual rôle as critics and historians, but we have an abundance of histories of literature which consist solely of pieces of literary criticism of selected texts strung together, and I have no doubt that it would be useful to have at least one purely objective history which analysed what was produced, what was read and by whom, what was influential, etc. and spared us value-judgements. That most of us might be reluctant to remove the poetry of Fray Luis from our undergraduate courses seems to me quite a different problem. 4. Frank Pierce, La poesía épica del Siglo del Oro, transl. J. C. Cayol de Bethencourt, 2nd edn (Madrid 1968), 9 and 31–215, passim. 5. A. A. Parker, 'An age of gold: Expansion and scholarship in Spain', The Age of the Renaissance, ed. Denys Hay (London 1967), 235 48, at p. 240. 6. There is a mass of literature on the Inquisition and the iniquities of its system of censorship. For a well-documented but typically hostile account see Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New York-Toronto-London 1968), especially Chapter 5, '"Silence has been imposed"', 74–108. Some relevant texts are conveniently assembled by José Simón Díaz in 'Algunas censuras de libros', La bibliografía: conceptos y aplicaciones (Barcelona 1971), 269–308. F. M. Wilson, 'Inquisitors as censors in seventeenth-century Spain', Expression, Communication and Experience in Literature and Language—Proceedings of the Twelfth Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (s.l, MHRA 1973), 38–56, concludes that (for Góngora) 'greater harm was done by corrupt reprinting by commercially minded printers'. For a detailed exposition of the proposition that the impoverished circumstances of printers produce bad literature, see Cruickshank, art. cit., 818–24. It seems to me impossible to demonstrate that the quantity and quality of profane literature were adversely affected by the censorship of the Inquisition, however much we may deplore in principle the censoring of literature. 7. For the subsequent seventeenth-century decline in Spanish book-production, coinciding with general economic decline, see Cruickshank, art cit., and 'Some aspects of Spanish book-production in the Golden Age', The Library, Fifth Scries, XXXI (1976), 1–19. It can be fairly safely assumed that the under-capitalization from which the industry suffered led to a decrease in the size of editions of books, as well as to an unhealthy increase in the production of ephemera, aimed at the poorer mass audience and geared to rapid turnover of investment. 8. Drama, of course, comes out of this rather badly. For plays, the figure for the total number of performances, if that could be ascertained, would be much more informative than the total number of printed editions which, for anv individual play, turns out to be relatively insignificant. 9. Theodore S. Beardsley, Hispano-classical Translations Printed between 1482 and 1699 (Pittsburg-Louvain 1970). 10. In fact, there may be an error here. While Beardsley says (114) that he relied on Palau, he does not say explicitly that he has applied his own criteria of reliability to the editions listed by Palau. The discrepancy could be explained in another way if he had used the listing under Celestina (III, 1950) and not included the additional items which appear under Rojas (XVII, 1965). 11. J. Homer Herriott, Towards a Critical Edition of the 'Celestina': A filiation of early editions (Madison-Milwaukee 1964), p. vi: 'So far the list in a bibliography that we are preparing contains 187 items dated before 1600. However we have not been able to locate a considerable number of these, and others represent bibliographical errors.' 12. See his Diccionario, 14. 13. Survival-rates, given the variable of the size and cost of the book, must clearly correlate with the sizes of the editions. Cruickshank, ' "Literature" …', 816, makes the interesting point that the age of the book is a factor we need not take into account: against the toll of time we can balance the fact that the older book, precisely because of its age, commands a respect which leads to its better conservation. In other words, the loss of so many incunables and early sixteenth-century editions is due to the small sizes of the editions rather than to their greater age. 14. Antonio Pérez Gómez, 'Un tratadito de urbanidad del siglo XVI: Textos y bibliografía', Homenaje a la memoria de. Don Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino 1910–1970 (Madrid 1975), 517–35. 15. F. Lázaro Carreter, 'Para una revisión del concepto "novela picaresca"', 'Lazarillo de Tormes' en la picaresca (Barcelona 1972), 193–229. 15a. One unexpected best-seller which I overlooked when I prepared this paper is the Marqués de Santillana's Proverbios (or Centiloquio) which appears to have gone through about 30 editions before 1600. 16. Fray Luis de Granada, Guevara, Mateo Alemán, Pérez de Hita, Montemayor, and Garcilaso (in that order). 17. See Fray Justo Cuervo, 'Fray Luis de Granada y la Inquisición', Homenaje a Menéndez y Pelayo (Madrid 1899), I, 733–43. 18. R.O. Jones, The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London-New York 1971), 14–15. 19. Daniel Eisenberg, 'Who read the romances of chivalry?', Kentucky Romance Quarterly, XXII (1973), 209–33. 20. Citing some typical wages and book prices, Cruickshank, ' "Literature"…', 812, n.l, concludes: 'No labourer in seventeenth-century Europe could readily afford a book.' 21. Otis H. Green, 'Se acicalaron los auditorios: An aspect of the Spanish literary Baroque', HR, XXVII (1959), 413–22; repr. in The Literary Mind of Medieval and Renaissance Spain: Essays by Otis H. Green, ed. John E. Keller (Lexington 1970), 124–32. 22. I have allowed this paragraph to stand unmodified—since it is what I said—although I am now half-converted to Cruickshank's view that Caro Baroja is wrong. Caro Baroja's thesis is that no Golden-Age writer catered specifically for the lower classes, since the popular ephemera tend to be extracts from literary works, for instance, speeches from mythological comedies by Calderón (cf. also Wilson's 'Quevedo for the masses', cit. in note 2). Cruickshank maintains (1) that the complaints of writers like Lope and booksellers like Serrano, early in the seventeenth century, indicate that they recognized that there existed (and were afraid of) a distinct lower-class audience, (2) that a revolution in education had created a new literate public, (3) that a mass of sub-literature, such as the relaciones de sucesos, was produced for the vulgar masses, and (4) that the economics of Spanish book production, being geared to satisfy this audience, accounts for the decline of literature in the later seventeenth century. That the classes who bought books cannot be regarded as uniformly discreto or vulgo—which is surely true—might be a safer way of phrasing the point I made at the beginning of the paragraph. 23. The earliest extant edition is Seville 1503, but Rafael Benítez Claros, Libro de las cosas maravillosas de Marco Polo, Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, nueva serie, XX (Madrid 1947), dates Santaella's completion of his translation at 1477. 24. Palau does not record separately any Golden-Age edition of the Secretos maravillosos (it appeared under this title in Paris 1860) but notes: 'Bajo el denominativo de Alberto el Grande, y el Pequeño Alberto, existen multitud de ediciones populares, que el vulgo, a fin de … desentrañar los arcanos del mundo, compra a veces', The case of the Libro de los secretos may well be similar to that of the Documentos de criança. The material in it was certainly widely known, and crops up in, for instance, Covarrubias's dictionary; but this is inconclusive, since the Liber aggregationis seu liber secretorum itself resumes material from a wide variety of sources. See The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus, ed. Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman (Oxford 1973), from which I quote the examples below.