Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Nicholas G. Round

Reviewed work(s):
Cartas by Diego Rodríguez de Almela ; David Mackenzie
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Jul., 1983), pp. 732-733
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3730298
Accessed: 25/02/2009 16:42

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732 Reviews
Cartas. By DIEGO RODRIGUEZ DE ALMELA. Edited by DAVID MACKENZIE. (Exeter
Hispanic Texts, 25) Exeter: Exeter University Press. I980. xxii + III pp.
?1.50.
Diego Rodriguez de Almela, Canon of Murcia and sometime retainer of Bishop
Alonso de Cartagena, was a diligent rather than a brilliant writer. He abridged
chronicles, he collected edifying and exemplary stories, he studied royal genealogies;
he was also a modest but fervent propagandist for the Catholic Monarchs. These
eight short pieces, written between 1478 and 1484, are mostly related to his efforts on
their behalf. Only two bear the title letra; tractadois used twice, and escripturathree
times. Indeed these are not personal documents; there is nothing here of the self-
revelation of Pulgar's Letras. The public and didactic tone rather recalls Diego de
Valera, but Almela's range is narrower. His usual aim is to prove by precedent some
concrete historical proposition: that there is a Castilian claim to Portugal, or to
Navarre and Gascony; that Peninsular custom has favoured female succession, or
intermarriage with the French royal line; that division of the realm brings trouble;
that the Muslims have invaded Italy before. Sometimes he offers a pretext: the topic
has arisen in conversation, or in someone's reading. But several of these items are
avowedly briefing papers for local officials, and most seem designed to influence
public opinion in some fashion. Letters 7 and 8 might be exceptions, but their
subject-matter - in the one case, Archbishop Carrillo's belated desire to go
crusading, in the other, virtuous women in the history of Spain - still seems to
connect with Almela's political concerns.
The view of Spanish history associated with these concerns was a thing of
relatively recent growth. Almela's rendering of that view, though plodding and
derivative, appears remarkably complete. All the key elements are in place: the
noblesreyesgodos, a never-failing source of precedent; reconquest as a continuing and
divinely-favoured mission; Castile's hegemony as the nucleus of an immanent reino
de Espana, to be realized now in the conquest of Granada, now in the absorption of
other Christian kingdoms. National destiny, ethical imperatives, and political
programmes all reinforce one another: virtue promotes peace; peace and unity equip
Castile for her mission. The immediate source for this rich overlapping of ethics and
ideology is, of course, Alonso de Cartagena, but the phenomenon is too complex,
even in Almela's rather naive presentation, to be explained in terms of a single
influence. Precisely because Almela and his correspondents were men of no very
striking creativity and of no very exalted position, their involvement with this
ideological view of history deserves close and thoughtful study.
Dr Mackenzie's text of the letters - competently transcribed from a British
Library copy, with occasional readings from other MSS - is welcome, therefore.
But the introduction is cursory, and the notes wholly inadequate. This is not simply
a question of kindness to readers - though readers might well need guidance over
early Muslim raids on Italy (Letter I), orJuan I's plan to partition Castile (Letter
5), or the intricacies of royal succession. Nor is the trouble merely a failure to pick up
significant details: a Pulgar-like reference to civil strife (p. 32); an emphasis,
following Cartagena, on Seneca's Spanish origins (p. 90). Even on so major a feature
of Almela's historical writing as his extreme incompetence in chronology Dr
Mackenzie still offers no comment at all. His observations on Almela's sources are
only slightly less meagre. He also neglects some of the most obvious and essential of
textual comparisons. He does not observe the general closeness of the MS copies to
the 1487 printing of Letters 4 and 5, or the important differences towards the end of
Letter 4. Here (pp. 43-44 of this edition) the I487 text omits all reference to the
crimes and subsequent murder of Pedro the Cruel - still, it would seem, politically
sensitive topics. Again, Dr Mackenzie does not compare the stories from Castilian
history in these letters with those in Almela's Valerio de las historias. In Letter 8,
 Reviews 733
certainly, he would have found this instructive; there are examples of abridgement,
amplification, and direct transcription, but it is quite clear that Almela did work
from a copy of his own compilation. The interpretative part of editing, then, is
largely excluded; what we are offered has the limited virtues of a plain text, but not
much more. The Exeter series has, on the whole, led us to expect more.
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW NICHOLAS G. ROUND

Discurso retoricoy mundo pastoral en la 'Egloga segunda' de Garcilaso. By INES AZAR.

(Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, 5) Amsterdam:John
BenjaminsB.V. I98I. I72pp. fl. 45.
Garcilaso's Second Eclogue is a great work to which Hispanists have usually felt
uneasy about paying either scant or incompetent attention. His only polymetric
piece and the only one with real dialogue - as distinct from amcebaeanexchange
as well as monologue, it has heroic and dramatic passages neither obviously related
to each other nor immediately propitious to expectations of unity in a pastoral
narrative. Such apparent anomalies should surely be tackled by garcilasistas,since
this tourdeforce - nearly five times the length of his next longest work, the First
Eclogue - unless dismissible as a hotchpotch, must be presumed to make sense as a
composition. Ines Azar's monograph is the first serious study of the whole poem, the
first detailed account to be based on valid criteria. Her reading, informed by
exemplary scholarship, shows not only that the eclogue, though complex, is
perfectly coherent, but that it surpasses its models in its exploration of the bucolic
paradox. Moreover, by elucidating Garcilaso's most difficult work, this volume
provides the 'fringe benefit' of a lesson on how to read a Renaissance literary text. It
is a lesson which - O tempora - even some specialists these days evidently need to
learn.
For instance, one of the things that the eclogue is not is a play. The notion that it
might be originates in a misunderstanding of Herrera's description of it in 1580 as a
poemadramdtico. By this Herrera did not mean anything stageable but the mixture of
representation and narration that was Plato's third category of lexis. It is, in any
case, a little odd that a poem almost 2,000 lines long with no more than a few
hundred lines of dramatic action should be deemed a drama. In6s Azar has not yet
come across a play of which four-fifthsis not a play at all. Neither has this reviewer.
Ditto with the deferred denouement: 'No existe, que yo sepa, drama alguno cuyo
desenlace tenga lugar fuera del tiempo ficcional del texto mismo' (p. I5). Precisely.
But the assertion persists, repeated in this century by such eminent Hispanists as
Keniston, Lapesa, Mele, and Margot Arce - and, more recently, in thisjournal, by
Pamela Waley (MLR, 72 (1977), 585-96). Azar rejects Waley's case in an end-note
(p. I45): very little of the Second Ecologue is drama and narrative exposition
lengthier than the action invalidates comparison with the comedia.The eclogues of
Minturno and Encina, cited by Waley as models for Garcilaso's poem, are much too
short, while the panegyric of the House of Alba is too long to be an interlude. Almost
as long as Encina's Eglogadetrespastores,its length, 675 lines, greatly exceeds that of
all the other eclogues mentioned, and it stops only fifty-six lines short of the end of
the work.
In6s Azar argues that only 312 lines of Garcilaso's eclogue (720-IO3I) are
dramatic. We need not quibble: there are only 426 lines of dialogue altogether and
the I459 lines of monologue comprise 77.4% of the poem.
The remaining questions are mostly structural, rhetorical, and generic. In the
end, the unity that Azar finds is (after all the schemata) ideal, RoyJones's article on
the idea of love making sense of the whole work. The structuralist analysis of the