These two volumes, published in the series Comedias completas de Calderón, offer good critical editions of Calderón plays of interest within and beyond the community of scholars of early modern Spanish drama, both for the quality of the dramas and their subject matter. El mayor monstruo del mundo (The world’s greatest monster) is a tragedy constructed on Herod the Great’s obsessive love for his wife Mariene and the jealousy that drove him to decree her death if he were killed. Or rather, two tragedies, since Calderón rewrote his first formulation some three decades after its initial 1637 publication, changing the title in his partially autograph manuscript to El mayor monstruo los celos (Jealousy, the greatest monster). Camaaño’s edition is the first to publish both versions together.

Like other early modern European dramatizations of the Herod-Mariene story by Ludovico Dolce, Tirso de Molina, Alexandre Hardy, and Elizabeth Cary, Calderón’s plays drew on Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, freely modified to his own dramatic purposes. Calderón distances Herod from the historical-biblical figure, calling him Tetrarca (Tetrarch) rather than Herod and silencing most of his crimes, to concentrate on his fatal adoration of Mariene, whom he wishes to see queen of the world. To that end, he supports Anthony against Octavian, hoping both will be destroyed, that he might be crowned emperor with her at his side. Fate plays an ambiguous part in this, as in other Calderón tragedies, and increases dramatic tension as it does so. Striving to disprove the prophecy that Mariene would be killed by the greatest monster in the world, and that the dagger Herod carries would kill what he most loved, he contributes to its fulfillment. A portrait of Mariene—a detail perhaps suggested to Calderón by Tirso de Molina’s very different play La vida y muerte de Herodes, which Calderón approved for publication in 1635—serves to link rival personal passions and political ambitions. Herod, seeing Octavian in possession of a miniature of Mariene and a large copy, hurls a dagger at the emperor that knifes the large portrait instead.

Caamaño, along with most recent critics, defends the existence of Golden Age Spanish tragedy against previous naysayers, and considers various critics’ views of how to classify Mayor monstruo within the genre, concluding reasonably that judging it by rigid classical criteria of tragedy ignores its generative principles. In her textual study, she details Calderón’s changes in the second version: better structured with an added secondary plot, more historical references including one to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, more references to his inferior Idumean origins, and heightened emphasis on the role of fate.

The comedy Amor, honor y poder (Love, honor, and power), dealing with the passion of Eduardo, rey de Inglaterra (Edward III, king of England), for the Countess of Salisbury, was performed in the Palace during the 1623 Madrid visit of Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales, pursuing marriage with the princess María. The play, as its title indicates, features preoccupations Calderón explored throughout his career: the conflicting claims of personal desires, the public exigencies of the honor code, and the demands—and limits—of royal and paternal power. They crisscross here in the relationships of Estela, the countess, her brother Enrico, the king, his sister, the infanta Flérida, and her Hungarian prince suitor Teobaldo, well seasoned throughout by the comic misunderstandings of the appropriately named Tosco (crude), Estela and Enrico’s servant. That the foreigner Teobaldo’s suit fails seems to link the play to prevailing skepticism over another royal English-Spanish marriage.

As Vila Carneiro reports, the story of King Edward and the purported Countess derives from the fourteenth-century Chronicles of Jean Froissart, then developed by Bandello in his Novelle (Part 2, 27) and more directly from its Spanish translation as “Eduardo, rey de Inglaterra” in the Novelas morales of Diego de Agreda y Vargas, published in 1620. Vila also explores an intriguing link with the anonymous history play King Edward III published in London in 1596, which seems to include some contributions or revisions by Shakespeare (Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett, eds., King Edward III, [2017], 49–80). In that play, the king’s secretary is Lodewick; Calderón gave his King Eduardo an adviser named Ludovico, the Spanish equivalent. Moreover, the name Teobaldo echoes the name of King James’s favorite residence, Theobalds, given him by the first earl of Salisbury (Don Cruickshank, “Calderón’s Amor, honor y poder and the Prince of Wales, 1623,” BHS 77 [2000], 83). Calderón could have read King Edward III, or known of its plot, since in 1621 he entered the service of the sixth Duke of Frias, whose father, Don Juan Fernández de Velasco, the fifth Duke, a devoted bibliophile, had built up his collection of English books while in that country as ambassador extraordinary in the early seventeenth century (Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón [2009], 68).

Both El mayor monstruo del mundo and Amor, honor were published in Calderón’s Segunda parte, the second in a twelve-play anthology compiled by his brother José (with publishing rights in Pedro’s name), of which two genuine editions and one false edition were published, dated 1637 and 1641. The Segunda parte was reedited by Juan de Vera Tassis in 1686. Both editors rightly base their editions of Amor, honor and El mayor monstruo del mundo on the QC version of its texts, the initials indicating its publisher, María de Quiñones, and bookseller, Pedro Coello. But they correct its errors judiciously from other early editions. For Amor, honor, the two earliest editions were sueltas (pamphlets) included in anthologies purported to be the Parte 23 (P23) and Parte 28 of Lope de Vega, which give the play the title La industria contra el poder y el honor contra la fuerza (Ingenuity against power and honor against force). The suelta in Parte 28, however, correctly attributed the play to Calderón, as do two other undated suelta editions (SU and SU1) that contain significant variants, including certain verses omitted in QC, as does P23. Vila thus faced the challenge of deciding which of those thirty verses to incorporate and which Calderón might have eliminated had he revised the text for publication, something she thinks more likely than I do.

For El mayor monstruo, Caamaño deals with the contamination of the textual tradition in two Vera Tassis editions, and in two manuscript copies: partially autograph M1, and M2, an early eighteenth-century copy. After publishing his Segunda parte based on the false edition known as Q, Vera Tassis, having found M1, published another edition with a new version of Mayor monstruo, also dated 1686, of which only one copy is presently known. Unfortunately, in doing so, he conflated the two versions of the play. Caamaño observes that Vera followed the first version closely for act 1, but in act 2, in which Calderón made increasing changes, Vera’s text coincides closely with the second version. M2, which derives from M1, is similarly contaminated by passages from the play’s first version. Caamaño’s double edition sorts them out with care and commendable critical intelligence.