WHAT IS AUTHORIAL PHILOLOGY?

A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and distinction of this work lies in its clear systematization of a discipline whose autonomous status has only recently been recognised.


Lope de Vega's La Dama Boba Marco Presotto and Sònia Boadas
Lope de Vega's vast theatrical oeuvre is one of the most expansive bodies of texts from early modernity in Spain, and, for some time now, his more than four hundred plays have been the focus of the methodical analysis of philologists attempting to create a complete critical edition.The PROLOPE Project was founded by Alberto Blecua in 1989 to tackle this monumental undertaking, along with numerous efforts to improve the philological understanding of his literary legacy (http://prolope.uab.cat/).The textual tradition consists of forty-four autograph comedies, many editions authorized by the playwright as part of his own project to publish his work, and also a wide selection of single editions and copies of all types, which drastically complicate the task of the editor.In addition to this, any plan to provide a critical edition must also consider the peculiarity of theatrical works of the Spanish Golden Age, intended primarily to be performed rather than read.
According to the conventions of the time, the playwright, called poeta or ingenio, sold his original to the owner of the theatre company, who bought all rights to its use and could change the text at will to suit a performance in a given context.Once the theatrical run was over, the play's manuscript could be sold to an editor to be printed, inevitably including all the changes implemented that the text had undergone 'on stage' during its life, including corrections by the theatre company manager, censor or others connected to the performing arts.The increased popularity of theatre and the rise in demand for plays made it necessary to develop an organized theatrical text editing system, especially for an acclaimed writer such as Lope de Vega, so that manuscripts could be produced quickly and according to the needs of the moment.Even if the documentation in this regard is unfortunately scarce, given the ephemeral nature of the intermediary steps, we can assume that the author generally composed his dramatic works with the following step-by-step writing method: 1. script in prose, which tended to already be divided into acts; 2. draft in verse, in which Lope de Vega transported the contents of the prose version, developed the poetic compositions (at least partially), and organized the polymetric structure of the work; 3. clean copy destined for sale.
However, this method resulted in numerous variants, especially because of the incessant changes brought about by the author, who was never satisfied with his results and always ready to update his texts, regardless of whether they were drafts or 'final' versions.
The autograph manuscript of La Dama Boba, dated 28 April 1613 and now in the collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid) with shelfmark Vitr/7/5 (http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000051826), is an interesting example of the playwright's creative process.Despite being a carefully drafted copy, destined for a prestigious theatre company very close to Lope, many of its pages show the corrections and changes of the author.These markings often make it possible to reconstruct different phases of his writing process, even if they were added mainly while revising the final text.Lope perhaps had a script in prose, or more likely a draft in verse, and, in the act of making a clean copy, he re-wrote entire sequences from a structural and chiefly poetic and stylistic point of view, testifying to the author's tireless creativity and constant perfectionism.In other words, Lope did not stop at copying what presumably appeared in the draft, but spent time improving and building upon the text even while transcribing it into a version fit for sale.It is thus interesting to reconstruct those changes in an attempt to retrace the steps taken in creating the text.
The play came to be known over the following centuries exclusively via the text published by Lope de Vega himself in 1617, which is quite different from the autograph version because the author, by his own admission, could not use it while preparing the edition, having to fall back on a copy that evidently was flawed.Rudolph Schevill can be credited with publishing the first edition of the autograph manuscript.Schevill provided a diplomatic transcription in his The Dramatic Art of Lope de Vega, together with 'La Dama Boba ' (1918) with an apparatus of variants and ample room dedicated to the changes made by the author.To do so, he included the 'deleted' fragments in the autograph that represent different creative phases, inserting them in parentheses in the edition.Starting from this publication, the autograph manuscript has always been used as a base-text for subsequent editions.A focus on the creative process is also seen in the text edited by Eduardo Juliá Martínez in 1935 (Lope De Vega 1935: 283-449), which includes a diplomatic transcription of crossed-out verses, without comments.Recent editions destined for the general public within popular series of Spanish classics often refer to this peculiarity of the textual tradition, even if it is a secondary aspect of the editorial project.
The most up-to-date modern printed edition in terms of textual criticism is that by Marco Presotto, published as part of the PROLOPE Project (in Lope de Vega 2007: 1293-466).In the criteria of selection, Presotto has included a description of the characteristics of the manuscripts if considered important for the textual tradition.The system adopted is a symbolic one that refers to François Masai's model (Masai 1950: 177-93), albeit with a few minor changes.Similar to previous academic editions, this criterion only makes it possible to report that which appears in the manuscript, and does not offer indications on the genesis of the corrections and the various writing phases.Although the diplomatic transcription of the corrections based on Masai's system is reliable in that it leaves little room for interpretive errors, offering a direct description of what appears in the document, it ends up being an approach that is too cautious and out of tune with the work of a textual critic.After all, the job of a textual critic is to create a working hypothesis that connects all the information, as Gianfranco Contini's definition reminds us.To overcome these limits and propose various hypotheses about the writing process, the same research group published a digital edition of the play in 2015 (http://damaboba.unibo.it/), as part of the creation of a digital archive for the textual tradition of the work.The transcription of the autograph manuscript includes an attempt to represent the corrections through different colours, the chronological numbering of individual phases and, where possible, interactive annotations that display the times the text was edited, listing them chronologically according to the editors' hypothesis.In the end, the digital edition is undoubtedly an improvement compared to static printed texts, and XML-TEI encoding is a solid base for further developments.However, as the time of writing, it should be considered only partially adequate in terms of the way complex sequences are displayed.Indeed, the changes and corrections are not always easy to read or understand due to overlapping colours and a lack of uniformity in the display across different browsers, producing undesired issues even in the graphic layout.In this sense, Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni's filologia d'autore model offers a rather interesting tool due to its greater stability.
The example included here comes from the second act of La Dama Boba (Fig. 8), containing comic dialogue between the two main leading ladies.
Only the hand of Lope de Vega appears and the ink is always the same, demonstrating that the text was largely conceived in its final version directly on the pages of the definitive copy.For comparison, the modernized version and the diplomatic notation apparatus using the system included in the PROLOPE edition appear below (for the digital edition: http://damaboba.unibo.it/aplicacion.html#).The same apparatus, but this time relating the genesis of the text according to the filologia d'autore model comes next, offering a detailed account of the creative process just as it appears in the manuscript.Given the complexity of the corrections described, however, philological notes are still necessary to provide readers with more information about the textual critic's hypothesis.The result is quite satisfactory and undoubtedly innovative compared to previous models.1433 The change creates a new rhyme for the strophe, and thus was presumably implemented when the main text was written.The correction was placed on the line below, causing the verses to be farther apart than usual. 1435 The deletion may be to correct a copying error (a skipped verse), or, most likely, it may reflect the creative process of organizing the phrase.
The author may have at first thought to write the octosyllabic phrase a mujer dificultosa but then changed it to simplify the syntax of the two verses.

1437-1440
The author re-wrote the entire strophe in the left margin, after various corrections around v. 1437; the following strophes are all in the same column, until the next in itinere correction in v. 1450.

1437
Note, in the deletion, the blank space separated quite clearly by two diagonal lines, left by the author around the abbreviated name of the character who will say the line.This may reflect a writing practice that involved inserting the name after the verse had been written.

1441
In the first draft, the author wrote De este nació la mujer but then decided to change it to En fin nació la mujer, with a correction placed in the line below, making it necessary to increase the spacing between lines.Not satisfied by this second solution, the author decided to change once again the verse to Pues si nació la mujer, a concessive phrase that he coherently connected with the following verse.

1450
The changes once again demonstrate the phases of verse creation that determined the following ones within the strophe.At first the author wanted to reinforce the aside that began in the previous verse and, in particular, the meaning of asilla ('occasion', 'opportunity', 1 and 2 ) until developing a relative completed phrase that created the rhyme ( 3 ).He then changed his mind and went directly to the reference to Adam's rib in the three verses available in the strophe, in which he concluded the concept and the words of Finea, reducing the size of the text to be able to use the little space available on the page without having to start a new one.