This book, edited and with a prologue by Agapita Jurado Santos, brings together nine contributions by Maria Grazia Profeti, presented at conferences or published between 2012 and 2014. The work opens with some interesting autobiographical pages, in which the author reviews her career and explains the different stages of Italian Hispanism from the 1960s to the present day. Some of the studies review the state of research in the field, such as those devoted to dramatic representations of the New World or the role of cultured women in the work of Lope de Vega; others are a first approximation of works that have so far received little attention, like the plays of intrigue by the dramatist Felipe Godínez (1582–1659) or some eighteenth-century texts that initiate debate about the place of Golden Age theater in the history of European literature. The most interesting chapters are undoubtedly those concerned with the dissemination of the theater in printed form: “Comedias en la Vega del Parnaso” (Plays in the Vega del Parnaso) and “El castigo sin venganza: Del manuscrito autógrafo a la edición de Pedro Lacavallería” (El castigo sin venganza: From autograph manuscript to the Pedro Lacavallería edition).

The Vega del Parnaso (1637) is a collection of lyrical and dramatic works by Lope de Vega that was published two years after the writer’s death. Its posthumous publication poses the question of whether the published volume reflected the author’s original plan, particularly with regard to the eight plays included, since Lope’s theater was usually disseminated through collections of twelve plays, the so-called Partes de comedias. Profeti argues that they did form part of the original plan for the Vega del Parnaso, whereas other Lope specialists assert that the editors, José Ortiz de Villena and Luis de Usátegui, added them later. This is not an easy question to resolve and the arguments deployed by Profeti are inconclusive. The fact, as Profeti suggests, that the original plan included the eight plays does not explain the two-year delay before printing, since a 300-folio book usually took about four months to print. This does not mean, however, that the author might not be right. There is a record of a projected Vega del Parnaso with plays just a few days after Lope’s death, on 27 August 1635. José Ortiz de Villena mentions it in a dedication to the readers among the preliminaries to parte 21 of Lope’s plays. Since in this parte the errata and tasa (fixed price mark) — the final editorial procedures before printing the gathering of preliminaries and binding — are dated 4 and 5 September 1635, respectively, Ortiz de Villena’s text must have been written very close to those dates. The testimony is not conclusive, but Profeti could have mentioned it.

In her article about the edition of El castigo sin venganza, published by Lacavallería press in Barcelona (1634), Profeti argues, as she has done elsewhere, that Lope corrected the texts of his plays before taking them to the printers. The Barcelona edition of El castigo presented an ideal opportunity for demonstrating this thesis, since it was Lope who ordered the text to be published and his autograph manuscript has been preserved. Profeti compares four textual variants between the autograph manuscript and the printed edition (lines 301, 2026–30, 2143, and 2582) and concludes that Lope was responsible for the changes in the printed edition (91). The four variants could have been introduced by the author, but they could equally well have been introduced by the Barcelona printer who prepared the original for printing. Such changes are not unusual in editions at the time, because printers and typesetters had the freedom and the necessary linguistic and metrical competence to introduce corrections and modifications of this type. The most important contribution of this article is to show that the autograph manuscript does not necessarily represent the best possible text, which, as the author points out, calls into question one of the fundamental criteria of textual criticism.

Although the studies in this book stress ideas that the author has expressed before, they are recommended reading for anyone interested in Golden Age theater, textual criticism, the history of the book, and the history of Italian Hispanism in the last fifty years.