Tirso de Molina: two bibliographical Studies

Alan K. G. Paterson

Queen Mary College, London

Two of Tirso de Molina's early publications, Cigarrales de Toledo and the first Parte of his plays, have raised discussions among bibliographers and critics which this article attempts to clarify and perhaps resolve, beginning with the earlier of these works, Cigarrales de Toledo. This miscellany of short stories, poems and plays was the first work by Tirso to be published. Three editions appeared in the seventeenth century, ample evidence of the popularity which the book enjoyed. The earliest of these was printed in Madrid in 1624, followed by a second printed in the same town in 1630, and finally a third produced in Barcelona the next year, 1631; below we have brief bibliographical descriptions of each printing:

In his characteristic style the author couches the prologue of the 1624 edition in the form of a letter written by the book itself and addressed to its prospective readers; it is here that we have the unequivocal statement of the book's priority over Tirso's other publications: «La vanguardia llevo. Haz presa en mí: que como te ocupes tanto en mi censura que dés lugar a los demás, daré por bien empleados mis naufragios, a trueco la prosperidad de mis sucesores»¹. As can be seen from the previous bibliographical description, the date of publication of this edition was 1624, but several investigators have ventured to say that there was an earlier edition belonging to the year 1621. Some of these investigators have put their trust in Salvá's catalogue², while the more recent exponent of the 1621 edition drew her conclusions from a study of the play Antona García³. Let us examine both these arguments in turn.

In all, Salvá possessed three copies of the Cigarrales: a copy of 1624 (number 1442 in his catalogue); a copy of the Margarit (number 1443); and a third copy which was defective, he tells us, in preliminaries (number 1441)⁴. It was the latter which he was fond to believe was published in 1621. The entry in his catalogue for this copy runs as follows:

Two of the copies from Salvá's library passed into the hands of Heredia, namely the defective copy and 1624 (the title-page date of the latter is misprinted as 1642 in Heredia's catalogue). Heredia acknowledges Salvá's hypothesis that the defective copy belongs to the year 1621, and offers a new piece of information on the subject: «Il provient de la bibliothèque Heber et est incomplet de 4 ff. prel. que Salvá a remplacées par 4 ff. de l'édition de 1630»⁶. We learn more about these four leaves which Salvá had had inserted from Bibliografía madrileña; Pérez Pastor was decidedly sceptical about an edition of 1621 and had elicited further information from Sancho Rayón about the replacement of the preliminaries: «...el Sr. Sancho Rayón que hizo estas cuatro hojas me asegura que dicho ejemplar es uno incompleto de la edición de 1630, y que así se lo hizo saber a su dueño»⁷. Thereafter, no reliable bibliographical information has been published on the subject, but an examination of Salvá's incomplete copy, now owned by the British Museum, can clear the matter up once and for all.

One of the first things which one notices on handling this copy is that the preliminaries are printed on paper far fresher than the paper on which the test is printed. It bears clear, well-defined chain and wire lines, while those in the paper used elsewhere-are diffuse. There can be no doubt that these are the facsimile pages which Rayón made from 1630. Furthermore, a comparison between the copy of 1630 owned by the Biblioteca Nacional⁸ and Salvá's shows that they are identical. Whatever proof is adduced for an edition dated 1621, Salvá's evidence must be discarded; he tried to argue that a mutilated 1630 was a rare 1621, with no justification whatsoever⁹.

Pérez Pastor reported the Marquis of Jerez's belief that he too possessed a copy of the early 1621 «ghost» edition. Pastor remained largely unconvinced of this claim, and with reason: there is no indication of such a copy in the catalogue of the Marquis's library, which had two copies of the Cigarrales, one 1630 and a Margarit¹⁰.

The controversy over the date of the Cigarrales de Toledo received its most recent contribution from Miss E. L. Kennedy when she tackled the chronology of Antona García. An allusion by a supposedly autobiographical character in this play to «lo impreso» is interpreted by Miss Kennedy as a reference to the Cigarrales; relating this interpretation to the date which she assigns to the play, 1622-23, Miss Kennedy concludes that a 1621 edition in fact existed. This is not the place to study the chronology of Antona García; suffice to say that Margaret Wilson, in her edition of the play, convincingly advances the date of composition or final revision to 1625¹¹.

However right Miss Wilson may be on this point, we are not much further forward with the answer to whether 1624 is the first or a later edition. The most reliable course of action is to return to the essential testimony of the 1624 edition itself. In the third edition, the Margarit, Fr. Roca wrote in the aprobación that the Cigarrales «se imprimieron seis años ha en Madrid». In order to discredit this strong piece of evidence that 1624 was the princeps, Salvá argued thus: «el observar en la Tasa de la ya citada impresion de 1624, que los señores del consejo habían visio un libro que con su licencia fué impreso, confirma más y más la existencia de la edición de 1621»¹². Now the Tasa would naturally have been calculated after the King's secretary Vallejo or his agent had seen a printed copy of the book; the licencia to which he refers and which was granted by the Council is contained on ¶ 1v; in it Pedro de Contreras acknowledges Tirso's application for a licence and privilege, and says that both had been granted, prefacing the permission with «Lo qual visto por los de nuestro Consejo...» Contrary to Salvá's argument, Vallejo need not be saying that the book had been printed with the Council's consent previous to 1624, but that the licence and privilege granted so far back as 1621 were in order. Furthermore, the presence of the entire official paraphernalia in the preliminaries of 1624 is consistent with its being a first edition. A publisher would rarely have gone so far as to reproduce Murcia de la Llana's errata in a reprint; it would have been contradictory to copy these faithfully and yet leave the errors in the text of the new edition. It would also have been uncommon for the entire text of the royal privilege to be reprinted in a second edition.

The weight of evidence in the 1624 preliminaries, together with Fr. Roca's aprobación, seems to crush any possibility of an early 1621 edition of the Cigarrales, yet the question remains why the book tarried so long on the way between the official granting of permission to print and the actual bookstalls. Turning to the Prologue, we find a passage which offers a coherent explanation of the delay:

This elaborate piece of prosopopeia is built around the metaphor of the book being the author's child; the father is Tirso and the mother is Tirso's imagination. The opening sentence figuratively expresses the common topos of the author's helplessness in the hands of a critical audience. The book/child then draws attention upon its further defects, blaming them on «el alma que me enseñó a hacer pinitos». This is a witty use of the scholastic jargon of the soul seen as the informing agent of matter, but «alma» also refers to the «ser humano» who imparted form to the book, i. e. the compositor¹⁴. This double-entendre is carried forward in the phrase «¡Duelos me hicieron negro, que yo blanco me era!», an image recalling a well-known song¹⁵; the imposition of type upon paper is conceived of as a fall from perfection; what was white is now black with ink, and hence what was once perfect, in the mind of the author, is now imperfect, a child of darkness. The mantillas in which the child was reared were the cloth or vellum sheets fastened to the frisket of a handpress to prevent smudging¹⁶. As printing progressed the book underwent a series of delays, amounting to at least eight months; incorrections were made, and publication was held up by a financial problem, leaving the book half-perfected. To remedy this plight, a new sponsor had to be found, hence the phrase «un padre tengo y dos ayos». It is unlikely that this last comment implies that the book was printed in two different printing houses, for the inevitable change in type, ornaments and general style is not apparent; a change in patronage is more probable, with its ensuing delays¹⁷.

Such is the most likely explanation of the tardy appearance of Cigarrales de Toledo. Together with the nature of the preliminary matter and the aprobación by Fr. Roca, it forms a more trustworthy testimony to the right of 1624 to be considered as the princeps: Hardá, Durán, Salvá, Heredia, Cotarelo and others fail to argue convincingly in favor of an earlier edition.

With regard to 1630, Margarit and its variant, the more accurate is the 1631 text printed in Barcelona. The printer was extremely faithful to the Madrid edition of 1624, and carefully incorporated all Murcia de la Llana's corrections into his text. 1630, on the other hand, is an austerity production, even although it was printed in the same shop as the princeps; of the three editions, it is the least accurate.

Thanks to the observation of A. Restori and Sherman W. Brown¹⁸ we can dispense with a detailed exposition of the relationship between the two earliest printings of Tirso's Primera parte known to us; Restori has pointed out that the first edition described in the following bibliographical summary is composed of sueltas combined into one volume, and Brown has briefly noted that the Valencian copy of 1631 is in fact a re-issue of Lyra's edition, with preliminaries printed by Mey. Since the future may yet reveal further data on Tirso's first venture into the publication of his plays, I have, at the risk of tedium, drawn up rather full bibliographical descriptions of each book:

In the preceding section, the information supplied by Fr. Ambrosio de Hardá was not considered helpful in elucidating the bibliographical problem of Cigarrales de Toledo. Fortunately, when he deals with the Primera parte, this early eighteenth-century bibliophile gave an account of the volume which, in some aspects, tallies with ascertainable knowledge about Tirso's first published volume of plays. He names twelve plays which brought Tirso fame (they are in fact the twelve which comprise the Primera parte as we know it) and proceeds:

Whatever the source of his information, Fr. Ambrosio's researches are highly relevant to the controversial question of whether or not Lyra²⁰ is a first edition. Similarly, despite its wild inaccuracies and speculations, the biographical sketch on Tirso which prefaces the 1765 edition of Deleitar Aprovechando, published by Tirso's own Order, offers some information which, in the light of the ensuing bibliographical study, seems to contain some germs of truth; erroneously believing that Tirso took Holy Orders some time before 1620 and by that date had retired from the world, the biographer next traces Tirso's fortunes as a publisher of his own works:

This account of how Tirso published his plays hobbles into error over various details. For example, Tirso was a novice in the Order of Mercy by 1601 and received full Holy Orders by 1608²². If he ever renounced the siglo in order to dedicate himself more completely to his religious profession all evidence suggests that he did so after 1625. But one phase in this account of Tirso's relations with the publishing world merits our attention: at some time or other, his plays were pirated by unauthorized printers. An extravagant synthesis of Hardá and the 1765 Prologue was made by Javier de Burgos in the BAE edition of Tirso's works (and thereafter any question of mystery concerning the Primera parte has been virtually ignored). Burgos states that the plays first appeared singly, were collected into volumes, and that certain of them were pirated²³. From the evidence at present available, all three statements seem to contain, if not the whole, at least partial truth.

For the moment let us examine the observation common to Fr. Ambrosio and Burgos that the plays first published by Tirso appeared as sueltas. The earliest edition of the Primera parte known to us is certainly made up of suelta plays, printed so as to be distributed individually or in a composite volume. Yet Fr. Ambrosio does not speak about Lyra's edition, but about an edition of sueltas published in Madrid. Was there, then, a Madrid edition previous to Lyra?

The answer to this question is exceedingly complex, and once more we must sift through the work of earlier commentators in the hope that they may have provided the simplest answer to a now difficult conundrum -that they handled such a book themselves. Hartzenbusch was the first to print an extensive, yet inadequate appraisal, of the Primera parte bibliography in the so-called Yenes edition of Tirso's plays²⁴. There he partially described a copy of the parte which contained a privilegio and tasa issued on the 12th March and the 20th November, 1626, respectively, and a title-page dated 1627. This information can be no other than first-hand, since Hartzenbusch could draw on no previous source for it. He seems, however, to have later considered it incorrect, for after a lapse of ten years, he virtually denies having seen an edition of 1626 in the Catálogo razonado which he drew up for volume five of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles²⁵. He had, however, seen the Mey re-issue and records its privilegio, tasa and errata granted in Madrid in 1626. Whatever induced Hartzenbusch to change his mind we shall never know. But we know that the edition described in the Yenes series is none of those to which we have access today; had it been the Lyra which Hartzenbusch saw, then he could not have recorded the tasa and privilegio, which are omitted in the Sevilla edition; had it been the Mey which he saw, then the title-page would have been dated 1631, and not 1627. It is, therefore, to be kept in mind that Hartzenbusch possibly handled, or at least had heard of an early Madrid edition, now lost or unrecorded²⁶.

Before Hartzenbusch had published his second bibliography in the BAE, the German Adolf Schack stated that a Parisian book-seller had shown him a copy of the parte printed in Madrid in 1627, and indicated the format, giving also a list of plays incomplete by one²⁷. This insufficient proof of an early edition was quoted by Hartzenbusch, La Barrera and Cotarelo, though the latter rightly turned it down as untrustworthy evidence: «Lo que, al parecer, vio Schack únicamente fue un ejemplar falto de la edición de Valencia de 1631, o sea la tercera»²⁸. However, both La Barrera and Cotarelo believed in the existence of a Madrid edition of 1626-27. Such is the contribution of the nineteenth century. Now let us recall some aspects of the publication of the first parte.

In the Prologue which Tirso wrote for Cigarrales de Toledo in the Spring of 1624 notice is given of two forthcoming works: «Puedote afirmar que está ya comenzada (the promised second part of the Cigarrales); y en tanto que se perficiona dadas a la emprenta Doze Comedias, primera parte de muchas que quieren ver mundo...»²⁹ This is not the only indication that Tirso was publishing his plays in the middle years of the twenties; in the prologue to the Tercera parte Lucas de Ávila, the supposed collector of Tirso's plays, deplores his uncle's unwillingness to take advantage of the favourable reception given to the Cigarrales and «primera parte de comedias» by having failed to print the other works which had been promised: «Se ha hechado a dormir no menos tiēpo que el de diez años, escarmentado de trampas y mohatras...»³⁰ Lucas de Ávila wrote this in 1634, so that his allusion to Tirso's last effort at publishing plays refers to the year 1624, corroborating the statement made in the Cigarrales. Yet the earliest edition of the Primera parte so far discovered was published in Sevilla three years later, in 1627; a comparison of the list of contents, collation and pagination in the bibliographical description shows that Lyra printed the plays as sueltas, designed to be sold separately or in a composite volume. The sheets of Lyra were re-issued by Pedro Patricio Mey in Valencia in 1631; this printer added a title-page dedicated to Montalbán, a suma del privilegio granted by Diego González de Villaroel in Madrid on the 12th March, 1626, a tasa issued in Madrid on the 20th November, 1626, erratas drawn up by Murcia de la Llana in Madrid on the 12th November, 1626, and a dedication to Montalbán. As Cotarelo observes: «Es muy singular que esta impresión, hecha en Valencia, traiga una fe de erratas suscrita en Madrid cinco años antes. Nótese también que no lleva ninguna de las aprobaciones que debía. Todo esto demuestra la existencia de una edición anterior, correspondiente a dichos documentos, o sea la de Madrid, 1627»³¹. Curious indeed. If we can answer two questions, however, some of the uneasy speculation concerning Tirso's first parte may be resolved. First, did Lyra print the Doze Comedias of Sevilla, 1627? Secondly, is there any bibliographical evidence that a previous parte existed?

It is beyond reasonable doubt that Lyra printed the preliminaries to Doze Comedias. The curious need only compare the types used in Lyra's preliminaries with those found in Joan de Lucena's Historia de la vida del P. Francisco Xavier, printed by Lyra in 1619, to notice the identical types in use in both³². It is more difficult to prove, however, that Lyra printed the text of the plays. Three factors assist us in asserting that Lyra is an edition in its own right, printed in Sevilla, and not a re-issue of a previous printer's work. First, I have been able to identify with reasonable assurance five of the founts within the actual text with founts used in the preliminaries³³. Secondly, within the text one can detect a recurrent watermark consisting of a sword, strongly resembling a cross, set inside an oval frame which tapers towards the extremity of the sword. This same watermark can be seen in the volume in octavo La aurora de Cristo, by Luis Belmonte Bermúdez, printed by Lyra in 1616, the Rimas of Jáuregui, printed by Lyra in 1618, and the Naturaleza... de todos Etiopes, by P. Alonso de Sandoval, printed by Lyra in 1627. Therefore, the paper used to print Lyra was the same as that used for other books printed in Lyra's establishment. Finally, the wood-cut ornament which adorns Dd6v and Gg6v of Doze Comedias is found in the Naturaleza... de todos Etiopes, on E4r. Founts, watermarks and ornament leave little doubt that Lyra did in fact print the Doze Comedias and did not re-issue another printer's sheets. The question of whether this is a first edition or not is far more complex, but there are several indications that a previous edition existed and that it had been used as a copy-text.

The present writer lacks the bibliographical skills necessary to carry out a deep and thorough bibliographical examination of the text of Lyra, although it is in this line of approach that a near definitive answer to our question lies. For example, if it is found that Lyra was set by forme and not by page, then it will follow that in all probability the copy-text was in book form. However, there is sufficient indication of an earlier edition without the need to call in such an arduous method of research. First, the appearance of the book is slovenly; economy was the compositor's aim rather than neatness. Double-column printing is used except where the verse-form makes this impossible; character cues are set within the lines of text; new acts are not distinguished by the use of a fresh page, but follow on immediately after the previous one. We would hardly expect all this of a first edition, especially if this edition contained a set of plays written by a popular dramatist which was reaching the public for the first time in print. Moreover, the composition of the book gives evidence of some underlying preconceived pattern which imposed its rigour on the compositor: despite the cramped style of the lay-out, several plays end with a blank or partially blank page (D2v, P6v, S8v, Gg6v, Qq8v; X8 recto and verso is totally blank). Of course, printing each play as a suelta meant that the first page of each had to be a recto, but even this restriction would have allowed an artistic compositor some room for liberty in his page setting; he could easily have indulged in a more liberal composition in the final pages in order to avoid the monotony of a naked page. If, on the other hand, the compositor were working to the strict discipline of a cast-off copy, he would have been obliged to keep closely to its page divisions; if two compositors were setting up the formes, then the need to follow the cast-off text would have been all the greater.

Naturally, the most persuasive argument in favour of an earlier edition resides in the official preliminaries to Mey. Yet as persuasive is their absence in Lyra. The omission of aprobaciones, tasa and erratas in the latter arouses the suspicion that Lyra pirated the edition in contravention of the copyright which Tirso would have obtained for his volume of plays. Such appendages as these, the outward signs of Inquisitorial censorship, were the guarantees of a book's respectability; their very absence smacks of illegality. But the printers of Sevilla were notorious for their disregard of copyright, or, if that term is anachronistic, of an author's claim to authority over his own work. Lope was one who felt aggrieved over the conduct of the southern printers, as we see in his introduction to La Dorotea in 1632: «También ha obligado a Lope dar a la luz pública esta fábula el ver la libertad con que los libreros de Seuilla, Cádiz y otros lugares del Andaluzia, con la capa de que se imprimen en Zaragoza y Barcelona, y poniendo los nombres de aquellos impresores, sacan diuersos tomos en el suyo, poniendo en ellos comedias de hombres ignorantes que él jamas vió ni imaginó...»³⁴ This accusation is repeated by Lope in the Prologue to El castigo sin venganza in the Parte XXI of 1635, and much later Calderón returns to the same theme in his Quarta parte. It looks as if Lyra lived up to the reputation of the printers of his city.

It is also surprising that an edition printed in Sevilla is dedicated to a relatively obscure Castilian³⁵. Had the author personally supervised the work, one would imagine he would have rededicated it to some southern Maecenas, as happened with the Tercera parte, which has two variant dedications, each designed to appeal to the region in which the book was to be sold. I hesitate to say that the dedication of the Lyra is spurious, for it is written in the recognisable Tirso style, with its self-deprecatory use of prosopopeia and word-play; but its tone belongs to Madrid rather than to Sevilla. An appeal to Salamanca and the Corte to testify to Paz's generosity is not likely to have been made by an author alert to the tastes of southern gentlemen and litterati. So once more we are led to feel that a previous edition existed and that Lyra made an unauthorised copy of this.

So far we have been fishing with elaborate flies and only succeeded in grassing a minnow: in all probability there was a forerunner to Lyra. And there the matter would have to rest had not an unidentifiable seventeenth-century hand dashed down the contents of the Primera parte in the course of its work. If we turn to the manuscript of Privar contra su gusto (B.N.M., Ms. 15.675)³⁶, we find a startling addition to the information so far obtained about the first volume of Tirso's plays. Folio 45 of this manuscript lies between the second and third acts of the play; as in many play manuscripts from the seventeenth century the practice was to separate the acts by pieces of scrap paper or blank pages which were often used as rough scribbling sheets by actors or producers. In this case the nature of the odd jottings on Folio 45 suggests that they were made in a printing house. On 45r, for example, there is an addition sum «44 + 31 = 75», probably made when the number of pliegos in a certain book was totted up. On the verso of the final sheet there are also stage-manager's memoranda, a list of the props required for Privar contra su gusto. But it is 45v which is our present business, for there, in a bold hand, appears a list which provides the key to the Primera parte mystery:

There are twelve plays in this list (i. e., it represents a parte), although the scribe has mistakenly started his numeration with the title of the collection. Entry number seven represents two plays, El castigo del penséque and its sequel, usually known as Quien calla otorga. His other error was to confuse the names of two villages near Madrid, writing Illescas instead of Vallecas. As for the date on which the list was compiled, there seems little reason to suppose that it differs greatly from that of the manuscript, which, if my reading of folio 22r is justified, belongs to 1632³⁷, that is, before the earliest known publication of the last three plays in the list. It would appear, then, that the lost first parte contained nine of the plays printed later by Lyra, in virtually the same order. El árbol del mejor fruto, La gallega Mari-Hernández and Amor por razón de estado did not appear in the early parte; in their stead were printed Privar contra su gusto, Celos con celos se curan and El condenado por desconfiado, the first two of which are printed in that order in the Quarta parte. As regards the final play in the list, its presence there adds force to the case in favour of Tirso's authorship in the much debated paternity argument arising out of the dedication of the Segunda parte. It lies outside the scope of this present essay to explain just why these three plays were later omitted in Lyra's parte; but the nature of their contents, two of them being hard hitting social comedies which centre around court intrigue and folly, and the other treating a theme which to this day can be related to the slippery theology of free-will and predestination, may well suggest why. In the nature of these three works we may also have an explanation of why the first parte described in the manuscript has disappeared so mysteriously and effectively from our libraries. Could it be that the entire volume was suppressed by the Inquisition?

Let us now attempt to trace out the history of the first parte from the promise of publication in the Cigarrales onwards. In 1624 Tirso had twelve plays at the printers, with the intention of publishing his first parte. These are unlikely to have been the works listed in the manuscript of Privar contra su gusto, for there are good reasons for believing that one of these, Celos con celos se curan, had yet to be written. My reason for saying this is to be found in the manuscript of that play in the Biblioteca National³⁸. Prefacing the text there is a long, laudatory aprobación by Pedro de Vargas Machuca, dated December, 1625; on the verso of the cover there is a casting list indicating that the play was performed by Cristóbal de Avendaño's company. Rennert, for no apparent motive, assumed that the list shows Avendaño's company as it was in 1632³⁹, but it might just as well represent the company in 1625, the year of Machuca's aprobación. Avendaño, according to the head-title to Celos con celos se curan printed in the Quarta parte, is credited with the first performance. Setting this information beside the lengthy aprobación (befitting a new play) and the casting list, we have good cause to think that the manuscript was transcribed for first performances by Avendaño in the closing weeks of 1625. Unless we maintain that Tirso kept the play in «cold storage» for more than a year, Celos con celos se curan could not have been in the printer's possession for inclusion among the Doze Comedias mentioned in the Cigarrales. Fray Ambrosio de Hardá offers the best explanation of what befell the works already in the printer's shop in 1624; they were printed as sueltas⁴⁰. Then, in 1626, a composite volume was printed⁴¹, containing those plays which are listed in the crucial manuscript of Privar contra su gusto, some of which may have been the sueltas published previously (I believe that this was the case because Lyra was most likely taken from a copy-text already composed from sueltas). For some cause or other, this volume, though printed, was never published; some copies trickled out to where we would expect to find banned plays, to a group of actors or scribes (hence the list in Privar contra su gusto), and to at least two printers (Lyra and Mey). In 1627, Lyra violated the privilegio which Tirso had presumably obtained (an act of piracy committed with relative impunity since Lyra lived far from the jurisdiction of the Consejo de Castilla), and produced a close reproduction of the Primera parte, altering, however, three plays to print the parte as we know it today. For some reason the sheets were not all sold, and four years later they must have been transferred to Valencia to Mey's workshop. There the printer laid his hands on the 1626 edition, reprinting the preliminary matter, which he appended to the sheets which he was about to reissue.

There is no need to stress that this reconstruction of events is propped up by suggestion rather than conclusive evidence. It may, for example, be that the first primera parte vanished through time and not censorship. Yet I think that the bibliographical history presented here is a more satisfactory explanation of the disappearance of the parte, of Lyra's piracy, and of the intriguing list dotted down in Privar contra su gusto. If we leave the strictly bibliographical problem and turn to the contemporary scene in Madrid, there we find another series of events which help to make the story more credible. As is well known, in March 1625, the Junta de Reformación strongly censured two leading writers of the time, Quevedo for indecency and Tirso for the «comedias que hace profanas y de malos incentivos y ejemplos»⁴². Such was the scandal provoked by Tirso that it was determined to have him removed to a remote monastery and «le imponga excomunión mayor latae sententiae para que no haga comedias ni otro género de versos profanos»⁴³. Clearly, officialdom was feeling uneasy about the works of a dramatist whose wit and scorn considered few classes or professions immune. It is debated whether or not this punishment was actually carried out, but it is certain that the Order itself soon after sent Tirso away from the capital. At the same meeting of the Junta another decision was taken which is relevant to this discussion; the members decided to prevent the printing of plays and novels «ni otros de este género, por el que blandamente hacen a las costumbres de la juventud»⁴⁴. There is nothing to suggest that this decision went beyond the committee stage, but two years later Madrid was alarmed by a decree concerning the printing of books: «Este día salió la pragmática que sin licencia del consejo no se pueda imprimir ningún libro en verso ni en prosa ni otras muchas cosas, de que había gran desorden»⁴⁵. During these years, therefore, both Tirso and the presses seem to have been subjected to a tighter surveillance. It would not be surprising if the plays of such an author were suddenly withdrawn from sale, «en tiempos que tan belicosa anda la embidia contra la pluma, y más con la mía»⁴⁶.