El médico de su honra (review)

Abstract

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro. El medico de su honra. Ed. Donald McGrady. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2007. 291 pp.In an informai poll asking colleagues to name the comedia they most enjoy teaching, the title that came up consistently and enthusiastically was Calderon de la Barca's El medico de su honra. This complex and controversial work continues to hold tremendous sway over students- both graduate and undergraduateand scholars, to judge from the articles and editions that continue to appear with some regularity. The edition by Donald McGrady, reviewed here, is one of the most thorough and student-friendly of the many already available, including D. W. Cruickshank's 1981 edition, the bilingual edition by Dian Fox and Donald Hindley (2007), and the Edicion Critica by Ana Armendariz Aramendia (2007).Once one gets beyond the generic cover with its incongruous Romantic landscape, McGrady's is indeed an attractive edition. The text is nicely laid out and easy to read, and the notes appear after the text of the play rather than as footnotes, so as to not clutter the page and distract from the pleasure of reading. The unencumbered layout of the text helps to bring certain scenes and passages into sharper focus. The notes themselves are extensive, even exhaustive, explaining everything from idioms to grammatical usage to cultural allusions. One could argue that certain terms do not, in fact, need to be explained. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not understand that frivolo means vano, or that en mi vida means nunca. Nevertheless, undergraduates should benefit from the meticulous clarifications. There are, in fact, two sets of annotations, and Notas suplementarias, the latter consisting of more in-depth commentary, including references to critical articles. There are also two separate bibliographies, one on the scholarship of the play and the other referencing the works cited in the notes. While this duplication attests to the editor's thoroughness, the effect is somewhat redundant, since many works appear in both.The introduction includes a general account of the date of composition, a helpful description of the staging, and an examination of the sources for El medico, including the work by the same name that has been wrongly attributed to Lope (an appendix includes a summary of the plot of the earlier play). The longest part of the introduction is dedicated to tracing the critical fortunes of the play and to a discussion of the character and themes, and it is here that the introduction comes up short, in my opinion. Although the bibliography is comprehensive and up-to-date, the overview of critical approaches to the play seems limited and even dated. For one thing, McGrady completely ignores in his discussion some of the more interesting approaches to the play, including the feminist and political readings by critics such as Ruth El Saffar, Georgina Dopico Black, and Dian Fox. …