Introduction Juan Isidro Fajardo’s Índice de todas las comedias impresas hasta el año de 1716 (1717) An Annotated Edition

Abstract

Fajardo’s Índice de todas las comedias impresas hasta el año de 1716 has long been regarded as an indispensable source of information about the print, textual and cultural history of many thousands of plays written during Spain’s Golden Age. For centuries Fajardo’s Índice could only be consulted through the single manuscript copy (dated 1717) preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. At last Fajardo’s Índice, edited, with an Introduction, ample annotations and bibliographies, by Don Cruickshank and Ann Mackenzie, with Ceri Byrne, is now permanently available online and in print through the Bulletin of Spanish Studies to interested scholars worldwide.

Notes

1 Emilio Bomant, ‘Juan Isidro Fajardo Monroy Marrón’, in Real Academia de la Historia, Diccionario biográfico electrónico, <https://dbe.rah.es/biografias/19578/juan-isidro-fajardo-monroy-marron> (accessed 23 November 2018).

2 Volume I of the Diccionario de la lengua castellana lists him as elected on 27 May 1723. See Diccionario de la lengua castellana en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces …  [Diccionario de Autoridades], 6 vols (Madrid: en la Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, impresor de la Real Academia Española, 1726–1739), I (1726), xxxii. Like most Hispanists, I have availed myself of this indispensable reference work by way of the edition published in facsimile through the auspices of the Real Academia Española under the title Diccionario de Autoridades, 3 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1990).

3 See Blanca Oteiza & Mª Carmen Pinillos, ‘Un documento sobre los autos sacramentales de Calderón: la Disertación de Juan Isidro Fajardo’ [includes the text], in Unum et diversum: estudios en honor de Ángel-Raimundo Fernández González (Pamplona: EUNSA, 1997), 429–47.

4 See Agustín Durán, Catálogo de Fx [i.e., Fajardo], comparado con el Índice general [i.e., presumably ‘de Medel’], BNE, Ms. 21419/6. On Durán’s first page, for example, appears ‘Acertar errando = Embajador fingido St Lope’. Sure enough, these titles appear in Francisco Medel [del Castillo]’s Índice general alfabético de todos los títulos de comedias, que se han escrito por varios autores, antiguos y modernos (Madrid: Alfonso de Mora, 1735), 3 & 37; Medel’s Índice was reprinted, without any critical apparatus being added (e.g., no textual notes), by John M. Hill, in Revue Hispanique, LXXV (1929), 144–369; Medel’s Índice, like that of Fajardo, has been digitized by the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. The second title (Embajador fingido) is not listed by Fajardo, and Durán’s evidence for concluding that Acertar errando and El embajador fingido are the same play is not provided. However, the closing lines of the suelta in the British Library give both titles: Durán’s ‘St’ could refer to a copy of this suelta, which the BL catalogue dates as ‘1650?’. See also note 436 to the entry for La desdicha venturosa in Fajardo’s Índice.

5 See Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, Junta de libros la mayor que ha visto España en su lengua hasta el año de 1624, ed. Belén Álvarez García (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2007), 509–10.

6 Nicolás Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana sive Hispanorum, 2 vols (Roma: Nicolò Angelo Tinassi, 1672), II, 105: ‘D. Thomas Tamajus Esquivias oppido agri Toletani eum adjudicat’ (‘Don Tomás Tamayo judges Cervantes to be from the town of Esquivias in the campo de Toledo’; my translation). Neither he nor Fajardo nor Tamayo knew that Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares; his baptismal certificate had yet to be discovered.

7 Calderón’s lists are to be found in his Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, ed. Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles VII, IX, XII, XIV, 4 vols (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1848–1850), I, xli–xlii (the list sent to the Duque de Veragua) and in E. M. Wilson, ‘An Early List of Calderón’s comedias’, Modern Philology, 60:2 (1962), 95–102 (the Marañón list). Vera Tassis’ first list is in his edition of Calderón’s Verdadera quinta parte, fols 5¶7^r–8^v; his last is in the Novena parte, 565–66. In the Novena parte he did not list incorrect attributions to Calderón.

8 See Henry W. Sullivan, ‘The Wallenstein Play of Calderón and Coello, Las proezas de Frislán, y muerte del Rey de Suecia [?] (1634): Conjectural Reconstruction’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 52:2 (2000), 93–111; Germán Vega García-Luengos, ‘Calderón y la política internacional: las comedias sobre el héroe y traidor Wallenstein’, in Calderón de la Barca y la España del Barroco, coord. José Alcalá-Zamora & Ernest Belenguer, 2 vols (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales/Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio, 2001), II, 793–827.

9 Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado, Catálogo bibliográfico y biográfico del teatro antiguo español desde sus orígenes hasta mediados del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1860; ed. facsímil, Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1969), 10.

10 Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana, II, 94, lists the volume Navidad de Zaragoza as of 1634 (which may explain the date given by La Barrera), but says it is by Aguirre del Pozo y Felizes. Matías de Aguirre père does not figure in the 1672 edition of the Bibliotheca Hispana, but the edition of 1783–1788 (II, 113) attributes Consuelo de pobres (Huesca, 1664) to him. The title-page of this item gives only one surname, Aguirre, but, bearing in mind that he was archdeacon of Huesca cathedral, this would be the son. The BNE catalogues the volume in question accordingly.

11 La Barrera, Catálogo bibliográfico y biográfico, 686–87.

12 La Barrera, Catálogo bibliográfico y biográfico, 389, 430 & 451.

13 Fernando Bouza, ‘Política del libro del Consejo Real en el tiempo de Olivares’, in Poder y saber: bibliotecas y bibliofilia en la época del conde-duque de Olivares, dir. Oliver Noble Wood, Jeremy Roe & Jeremy Lawrance, con un ensayo introductorio de John Elliott (Madrid: CEEH, 2011), 339–62 (pp. 352–55).

14 José María Ruano de la Haza, ‘La publicación de los autos de Calderón, 1655–1717’, in Theatre, Culture and History in Spain: Studies and Researches in Honour of Ann L. Mackenzie, ed. James Whiston & Ceri Byrne, with guest editor Jeremy Robbins, BSS, XCII:8–10 (2015), 283–309 (pp. 296–98).

15 Fajardo probably got this information from his contacts in the book trade, rather than from an ability to identify Madrid printing.

16 D. W. Cruickshank, ‘Chipped Old Blocks and Battered Old Type: Piracy in Golden-Age Spain’, in Illustration and Ornamentation in the Iberian Book World, 1450–1800, ed. Alexander S. Wilkinson (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 187–208.

17 La Barrera, Catálogo bibliográfico y biográfico, 514.

18 See, for instance, Germán Vega García-Luengos, ‘Treinta comedias desconocidas de Ruiz de Alarcón, Mira de Amescua, Vélez de Guevara, Rojas Zorrilla y otros de los mejores ingenios de Espana’, Criticón, 62 (1994), 57–98.

19 The Biblioteca Nacional has digitized the manuscript. So it is now readily available to scholars at <http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000012920&page=1> (last accessed 22 March 2023). But, until now the Índice of Fajardo has never been edited and critically annotated.

20 Lope de Vega, El peregrino en su patria (Sevilla: Clemente Hidalgo, 1604; Madrid: Viuda de Alonso Martín de Balboa, 1618).

21 For Calderón’s lists, see above, note 7.

22 Héctor Urzáiz Tortajada, Catálogo de autores teatrales del siglo XVII, 2 vols (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2002). I had the privilege of reviewing this book for the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, LXXXII:5 (2005), 693–94.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.