The First Performance of Calderòn'sEl sitio de Bredà

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly.AT the expiration of the Twelve Years' Truce in 1621, the renewal jA of hostilities between Spain and the United Provinces opened another phase in the long struggle for mastery of the Low Countries. From the Spanish viewpoint, one of the most heartening events in the years immediately following was the capitulation of the city of Breda, of great strategic importance by reason of its location on the main route to Utrecht and Amsterdam. The Dutch resistance was vigorous, for it was only after a siege lasting many months that the city yielded to Ambrosio Spinola, military commander of the Spanish Netherlands, on June 5, 1625. Ten days later the news reached Madrid.1 Spinola's achievement was commemorated on the stage in Calder6n's El sitio de Breda, one of a number of seventeenth-century Spanish dramas taking as their subject matter episodes in the European power struggle of the 1620's and 1630's, when Philip IV's chief minister the Conde-Duque de Olivares was engaged in the conduct of an aggressive foreign policy. A comedia of this title was in the repertory of Jeronimo de Amella's company in June 1628; while there is no firm evidence of the existence of another comedia on the siege of Breda, we cannot say with certainty that it was Calder6n's play.2 The earliest extant text of Calder6n's Sitio is found in a manuscript signed by the copyist, the bookseller Diego Martinez de Mora, and dated 1632 (MS. * This article is a revision of a paper read at the Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference at Clemson University on October 11, 1974. I would like to express my appreciation to Professor J. H. Elliott, who furnished me with information concerning several members of the palace secretariat during the reign of Philip IV. 1 'A 15 [dejunio] lleg6 la nueva de haberse entregado la ciudad de Breda, en Flandes, fuerza inexpugnable del Conde Mauricio, cuyo cerco dur6 once meses' (Noticias de Madrid, 1621-1627, ed. Angel Gonzalez Palencia [Madrid: Artes Graficas Municipales, 1942], p. 120). 2 Henri Merimee, in 'El ayo de su hijo, comedia de don Guillen de Castro' (Bulletin Hispanique, 8 [1906], 379), shows that a Sitio de Bredd was one of the comedias in Amella's repertory listed in a notarial document signed on June 14, 1628, in Valencia. Merimee republished the Amella list, with corrections, in Spectacles et comediens a Valencia (1580-1630) (Toulouse: Privat, and Paris: Picard, 1913), pp. 174-178. See also Antonio Restori, 'Un elenco di comedias del 1628,' in Scritti varii di erudizione e di critica in onore di Rodolfo Renier (T...

¿Calderón por Velázquez? Una hipótesis amistosa en tres actos dramáticos

“…15. Whicker, 2000. Whitaker (1978 ha sugerido que esta loa de Hurtado de Mendoza fuera prólogo de la obra de Calderón, pero Vosters (1981) lo cree improbable.…”