News & Updates
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A Broadside Announcing the Publication of a Play
DateFebruary 6, 2025CategoryNew discovery
This broadside from 1822 came to light among bookdealers’ archival materials being catalogued in the collections of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. It is unusual, because it is not advertising the performance of the play; it is advertising the sale of the printed play. Ada M. Coe the foremost scholar on the subject of carteleras teatrales compiled two comprehensive volumes that announced performances, but so far no other cartel has been found to advertise the printed play for sale. Unfortunately, we have not been able to locate a copy of this title to date; the BNE lists one other work by Carlos Bosch y Mata.
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Smith College’s “Teatro Antiguo Español” Collection Is Now Digitized and Accessible
DateJanuary 29, 2025CategoryUpdatesWith the exception of one play, Smith College’s Spanish plays in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection are digitized and accessible through the Compass Digital Repository.
Description of the Collection:
The Teatro Antiguo Español collection consists of 900 plays (or sueltas) dating from 1732 to 1867. It primarily includes Comedias nuevas and Comedias famosas, as well as a significant number of sainetes, one- or two-act plays, piezas, bailes, autos, escenas unipersonales, entremeses, and soliloquios.Source: Arizpe, Víctor. The “Teatro antiguo español” collection at Smith College Library: A Descriptive Catalogue (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1996)
Many thanks to Metadata & Technical Services Archivist Michelle Paquette for her role in making the digitization of these plays possible.
So far, the completely digitized Smith College and University of North Carolina collections represent an invaluable asset to the study of Spanish literature and will support Hispanists across the field.
Other institutions are working towards digitizing their early and unique items to enhance the digital collection, making it an even more valuable research resource.
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Two New Resources for Researchers: Websites of Interest for Researchers of Comedias Sueltas & Glossary of Terms for Describing Comedias Sueltas
DateApril 17, 2023CategoryUpdatesSome weeks ago, we made an announcement via our newsletter about two new resources for researchers. We are happy to share that these significant new pages can be found under RESOURCES.
The first of these is a Glossary of terms related to the bibliographic description of comedias sueltas. It is the aim of this project to consider comedias sueltas as physical objects—the vessels that carry the literary content. Much of the website is designed to study these material objects through the prism of printing history. Printing history, like most other disciplines and professions, has a specialized vocabulary, and we want to provide scholars of literature with the terminology that accurately describes the physical aspects of these publications.
There are several general dictionaries, in both English and Spanish, which are dedicated to library terminology and to some extent to the subject of printing history. This Glossary, however, focuses narrowly on words and phrases that specifically describe comedias sueltas or the printing practices related to them. This bilingual resource has parallel entries in English and Spanish; users can easily toggle between the two languages. We hope that the terms defined in the Glossary will make communication about these works more precise and professional.
The second page that we have added under RESOURCES contains links to Websites of Interest that are related to the larger field of Spanish golden age drama. We believe that these websites will be useful to scholars researching certain aspects of comedias sueltas. If you know of a website that would complement this list, feel free to contact us!
We hope you will join our mailing list for future announcements. The totality of this website is work in progress and we welcome feedback.
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University of North Carolina
DateFebruary 7, 2021CategoryCollection updateAmong academic libraries, the University of North Carolina has the largest holdings of comedias sueltas: more than 2,000 items. UNC’s collection of comedias sueltas was acquired over several decades with the last major addition occurring in 1949. These comedias sueltas are part of a larger grouping of Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan drama that includes the Teatro Español collection and the Tomás Borrás collection. In 1965, McKnight and Jones published A Catalogue of Comedias Sueltas in the Library of the University of North Carolina reflecting the pre-1834 holdings. This carefully prepared catalog, one of the first in the field, has served as a basic resource and a model for subsequent catalogs for many scholars and librarians.
The first iteration of our database listed just under 1,400 items, but in the last two years UNC has made a concerted effort to catalog their previously uncatalogued volumes, thereby adding circa 600 items. The collection is being digitized in its entirety and made available to Hispanists due to the many requests Wilson Library receives from scholars around the world.
Claudia Funke, former Curator of Rare Books at the Wilson Library, was first to arrange for the export of the original collection to us. Elizabeth Ott, her successor, continued to have a keen interest in this collection. During the summer of 2018, cataloguer Sarah Hoover, with the assistance of Mack Zalin, who was working towards his MLS degree at UNC and had a part-time position at Duke University, remediated many of the records to bring them up to current standards. We appreciate their invaluable support.Two other collections that first appeared as printed catalogs are University of Texas at Austin and Smith College. We are grateful that the libraries saw to it that the paper volumes were converted to online versions. Both libraries exported XML reports to us that we were able to convert to Excel spreadsheets and upload with some modifications to our database.
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Search Strategy
DateFebruary 6, 2021CategoryBuilding the databaseThe briefest explanation of how we found comedias sueltas in academic libraries and independent research libraries around the country is that we executed FirstSearch searches in WorldCat. To expand on that a little more fully: Wikipedia defines WorldCat as “a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 17,900 libraries in 123 countries and territories.”
We took advantage of its FirstSearch function that allows for combining keywords (found in the caption titles of these plays—such as comedia, auto, loa, entremés, etc.), limited searches to Spanish language works, sought publications within the time period 1650 to 1833, and added the unique OCLC symbol of the library in question. -
Bibliography
DateFebruary 6, 2021CategoryBibliography updateThe aim of the Bibliography within RESOURCES is to include all references pertinent to the larger subject of the website. These comprise the disciplines of literature and history of books and printing as they relate to comedias sueltas. Barbara Fuchs and Rhonda Sharrah of UCLA helped us enormously in gathering and preparing entries.
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Cervantes Virtual
DateFebruary 6, 2021CategoryBibliography updateThe Catalogue of Comedias Sueltas in The New York Public Library, published by Bergman and Szmuk in 1980/81 (listed in Bibliography) has been fully digitized and is available on Cervantes Virtual:
Comedias Sueltas in The New York Public Library: Volume 1
Comedias Sueltas in The New York Public Library: Volume 2 -
A Fascinating Find at Biblioteca Nacional de España!
DateFebruary 2, 2021CategoryScholars at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Universidad de Salamanca and Universidad de Valladolid have discovered a hitherto unknown pirated edition of Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza. What makes this one-of-a-kind so interesting is the ending, a first draft that was discarded by Lope de Vega in his manuscript of the work.
Click the link below for more information on this amazing find!
(In Spanish) Hallada una edición ilegal con un texto temprano de El castigo sin venganza
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Boston Athenaeum
DateOctober 10, 2020CategoryCollection updateDiscovering that the Boston Athenaeum library has a collection, among which is a factitious Moreto volume of previously uncatalogued sueltas, was a pleasant surprise. Special Collections head John Buchtel asked Will Evans, Chief Technical Services Librarian, to lead us on this project. Under COVID conditions, Will has made several trips to the library to photograph sueltas for our database. This is another case where we can be sure that the record accurately describes the object and there can be no confusing different editions.
One suelta in particular grabbed our attention: Primero es la honra by Agustín Moreto; although several editions of this play exists, this is the only example of a Francisco Diego de Torres imprint we have seen. -
Duke University
DateApril 14, 2020CategoryCollection updateDuke University library history sheds no light on the acquisition of the modest collection of comedias sueltas. These 100+ plays were most likely acquired over some decades and by various means and catalogued by different generations of librarians. It is likely that the bound volumes were originally bound by the previous owners, booksellers, or perhaps library.
Mack Zalin of our team was employed at Duke at the time and he personally photographed the sueltas, converted and remediated the records for uploading to our database. Nothing beats having an inside man!