Celestina E-Book

Fernando de Rojas

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 246

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Celestina, madam of the local brothel, is commissioned by a nobleman to help him seduce a beautiful young woman. Using all her wiles and with the help of two greedy servants she goes about weaving her spells... with tragic results. Fernando de Rojas' play Celestina has been a pivotal work of European culture since 1499, when it was first performed, and the character of the ever resourceful procuress Celestina has inspired artists from Goya to Picasso. This version of Celestina, translated by John Clifford, was first performed at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2004, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. This edition of the play, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, includes an introduction by John Clifford.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

CELESTINA

by

Fernando de Rojas

translated and introduced by John Clifford

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

De Rojas: Key Dates

Characters

Celestina

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

The Celestina and its Authors

The original title of the work that we now call the Celestina was ‘The Comedy of Calisto and Melibea: which contains, apart from its sweet and agreeable style, many philosophical sayings and much very necessary advice for young men, showing them the deceits locked up inside servants and procuresses’. It was published anonymously, by a German publisher, in Burgos in 1499.

It was an immediate success and reprinted several times in the years immediately following its first publication. The later editions contained an acrostic verse in a preliminary poem which tells us, when the first letter of each of its lines is strung together, that ‘the Bachelor [of Arts] Fernando de Rojas finished the Comedy of Calisto and Melibea and was born in Puebla de Montalván’. They also contain a letter entitled ‘The Author to One of His Friends’ in which de Rojas explains that he came across a manuscript containing the first part of this story (the first ‘act’):

and I was amazed at its subtle artifice and skill... the way in which it had been worked, something never before seen or heard in our Castillian language. I read it three or four times, and the more I read it, the more I wanted to read and re-read it again, the more it pleased me, and the more new meanings I found in it.

He goes on to say that it was the pleasure he took from it, and the admiration he felt for its unknown author, that drove him on to complete it.

He did the work in fifteen days, he claims, somewhat implausibly, while he was a student at Salamanca and his fellow students were away on their vacations. He helpfully tells us that he’s marked the place in the margin with a cross where the original author’s work ends and his work begins (the end of Act One). We can safely assume that the work circulated in manuscript form for a while before being taken up by a printer just before the turn of the century. At this stage, the work was called a comedy and consisted of sixteen acts of differing length. In this version, Calisto and Melibea have only one night of physical contact together before Calisto gets killed.

Its success was immediate. In a preface to a later edition, de Rojas describes with evident pride the effect it had on its first readers:

This present work has been an instrument of war among its readers and a bone of contention among them, each one passing judgement on it according to the humour of their own will. Some said it was too long, others too short; some said it was agreeable, others that it was disagreeable and dark; so that to cut the final work to the measure of so many different views and opinions is a labour open only to God.

On one thing, though, his first readers all agreed: they wanted the lovers to have more time together. And so, he says, he acceded to their requests. He added five more acts, which expanded the roles of Areusa and Elicia and introduced an entirely new character called Centurio. In doing so, he has given rise to endless new arguments among present-day scholars concerning the authorship of both the very beginning of the work, its continuation as a ‘comedy’ and the additions which transformed it into a ‘tragicomedy’.

Most authorities agree that it makes sense to take de Rojas at his word and see his work as the continuation of something already begun by an author whose identity will, most probably, never be discovered.

De Rojas

Not a great deal is known about Fernando de Rojas. The Puebla de Montalván, which he claims as his birthplace, is a small but in its day significant town in the province of Toledo. Most likely he was born there between 1473 and 1476. What is known for certain is that both his parents were Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity following the pogroms of 1449 and 1467 in Toledo and the surrounding district. What is also known for certain is that de Rojas was born at, and lived his whole adult life in a time of great racial tension between Jews and non-Jews. It also seems clear that his status as an outsider in a society increasingly hostile to his race and heritage was crucial both to the writing and the tone of the Celestina. Perhaps around 1494 he left his home town and made the journey to the university of Salamanca, where he went to study law. That was where he wrote the Celestina, probably around 1497/8. On graduating round about 1501, he left Salamanca and returned to his home town to work as a lawyer. Racial tensions there led him to move to Talavera where he was to marry, settle for the rest of his life, prosper and become mayor.

Meantime, his Celestina was enjoying unparalleled success. There were three editions in 1500 alone; by 1506 it had been translated into Italian; in 1540, apart from the dozens of other editions that had already been published, a version appeared in which the text had been versified. It has been calculated that between 1499 and 1634 there were at least 109 editions of the work in Castillian, some published in Italy, the Netherlands and France. Besides which, there were 24 editions of the French translation, 19 of the Italian, 4 in German, 5 in Dutch, one in Latin, and even one in Hebrew. Meanwhile in England, a partial translation appeared in 1530, written in verse and adapted for the stage, before Mabbe’s celebrated, and often still used, translation appeared in 1631. No fewer than six sequels were published in the 1500s. All this adds up to the book being the very first European best seller, a precursor to the kind of global culture we now inhabit.

None of this would have made any material difference to de Rojas himself. He had no right of copyright; he received no royalties. The booksellers and printers made their profits, while he quietly went about his business of surviving and prospering in a dangerous world. When he died, a copy of the book was found among his possessions. It was offered to his eldest son, but he didn’t want it. And so it passed onto the next. It was valued at 10 maravedís: the price of half a chicken.

What happens in the Celestina

Calisto, a rich young man, has a hawk that escapes. He chases after it, and bursts into Melibea’s garden. Melibea is a rich woman, the only daughter of a successful merchant. She is very beautiful, and Calisto falls in love with her. She, however, utterly rejects him.

He returns home in despair; his servant Sempronio at first is astonished at the change in him. Once he understands that Calisto’s problem is that he is in love, he first tries to dissuade him by telling him of the shortcomings of women. That fails to change Calisto’s mind, so Sempronio tells him of an astute old woman he knows called Celestina, who can act as go-between and obtain Melibea’s consent. Calisto agrees; and Sempronio goes off to find her. His arrival at Celestina’s house causes some consternation, because his lover Elicia works as a prostitute there and she has a client upstairs. The client is bundled off to the broom cupboard, Elicia upbraids Sempronio for his faithlessness and lack of concern for her, and Sempronio sets off with Celestina for Calisto’s house, explaining on the way that Calisto is in love with Melibea and he sees great opportunities for profit for both of them.

When they knock on the door, Calisto is with another servant, Pármeno. He recognises Celestina at once because it turns out his mother left him to work in Celestina’s house as a boy. He describes her multiple nefarious activities. At that time he conceived a real hatred for her that now makes him sure she is out to cheat Calisto of as much of his property as she can obtain. He tries to warn him of this; but fundamentally Calisto is not interested. He orders Pármeno to open the door and let her in.

Calisto greets Celestina effusively and goes off with Sempronio to fetch an appropriately extravagant gift for her. Celestina has sensed Pármeno’s hostility and takes advantage of the time alone with him to try to win him over. She uses all her amazing persuasive skills, reminding him of his dead mother, but the only thing that partially wins him over is her promise to obtain for him Areusa, Elicia’s cousin. Calisto returns with a hundred pieces of gold to give Celestina, and sends her on her way with Sempronio following on to make sure she does what she has promised. Pármeno, still caught up in divided loyalties, makes one last attempt to persuade Calisto that he will be cheated by Celestina. This angers him; and Pármeno concludes that, since he suffers in his attempts to be loyal, the only sensible thing is to become as corrupt and self-interested as everyone else. Meanwhile, Sempronio has caught up with Celestina, who very beautifully describes her observations of the psychology of lovers and her confidence that she will win Melibea over to love Calisto.

Once they reach Celestina’s house, Sempronio goes up to make love with Areusa, and Celestina conjures the devil to cast a love spell over Melibea. Then she sets out on her way to Melibea’s house. She is afraid. But she consoles herself that the omens are good: Lucrecia, Melibea’s servant, is at the door and she is Areusa’s cousin. With Lucrecia’s help, and a strange, perhaps diabolically inspired lack of alertness on the part of Alisa (Melibea’s mother), Celestina gains entrance to the house on the pretext of having thread to sell. She is left alone with Melibea, and in spite of the young girl’s fierce hostility at any mention of Calisto, persuades her to give her the belt she wears round her waist and to allow Celestina to return in order to say a prayer against toothache, which is how she accounts for Calisto’s suffering.

When she tells Calisto of her partial success, and shows him Melibea’s belt, Calisto goes into ecstasies and rewards her with a promise of a new cloak which provokes a new outbreak of angry discontent in Pármeno. Pármeno accompanies Celestina home, reminding her of her promise about Areusa. They stop off at Areusa’s house, and Celestina persuades her to be unfaithful to her soldier lover and let Pármeno into bed with her.

Next morning, Pármeno wakes late, full of joy at his discovery of the delight of sexual love. He hurries back to his master’s house, hatches a plan with Sempronio to steal food from Calisto’s larder for a meal he plans to have at Celestina’s house. Celestina, Areusa, Sempronio, Pármeno and Alicia all eat together. Celestina is overwhelmed by memories of prosperity in the past. Lucrecia comes to tell her that Melibea is in great distress and is asking for her help.

While the others make love, the two of them set off to see her. Melibea, alone, reveals that she is possessed with desire for Calisto, and greatly afflicted in her struggle between sexual feelings and shame. Celestina arrives and teases the secret out of the initially reluctant Melibea. She sets up a meeting between the two lovers at the gates of the girl’s house that night. Calisto is at first overwhelmed by the news; and then he rewards Celestina with a chain of gold which excites greed and envy in both Sempronio and Pármeno.

Towards midnight, Calisto sets off to Melibea’s house accompanied by his frightened servants. While he engages in ecstatic conversation with Melibea, the servants prepare to run at the slightest opportunity. But the night passes without incident. Melibea agrees to see Calisto in her garden the following night; Sempronio and Pármeno set off to see Celestina and obtain their share of the gold chain from her. She refuses to give it to them; in their rage, they kill her. To escape justice, they jump out of high windows in her house.

Meantime, Calisto is sleeping a luxurious sleep. His idyllic rest is interrupted by the grief of Sosia and Tristán, two of his other servants, who tell him that Sempronio and Pármeno, battered and half-dead as they were after their fall, have been beheaded in the public square. His love affair with Melibea is now public knowledge. This does not deter him from going to her house that night, with Sosia and Tristán and ladders, to climb over the high garden walls. He meets Melibea, and, in spite of her resistance, makes love to her. When dawn rises, he climbs back over the walls and returns to his house.

Now follow the five extra acts intercalated in the newer version of the book, the ‘tragicomedy’. Areusa is having an argument with a ruffian called Centurio when Elicia comes to see her. They are both angry at the death of their lovers, Sempronio and Pármeno, and angrier still that Calisto and Melibea, the cause of their two deaths, are alive and enjoying their love affair.

Areusa asks Elicia to try to induce Sosia to come and see her, so she can worm out of him the secret and when and where Calisto and Melibea are meeting. Then she will ask Centurio to kill Calisto. That way, they will have revenge. She also offers to have Elicia move in with her; but Elicia says she will stay where she is, in Celestina’s old house, partly out of respect for her old protectress, and partly because the rent’s already been paid. Elicia comes to regret her decision. No one is coming to see her. Business is very bad. She decides to throw off her mourning and take Areusa up on her offer.

Areusa, meanwhile, charms the secret out of Sosia, and then makes Centurio promise to kill Calisto that very night. Centurio, on his own, reveals himself a braggart and a coward who would actually much prefer a quiet night at home. He decides to get a friend of his to make a noise in the street instead.

That night, Calisto and Melibea make love again in the garden, which has now been transformed into the image of a sensual paradise. Someone makes a noise in the street outside, Calisto thinks his servants are being attacked, rushes up the ladder to help them, falls down into the street and dashes his brains out. Melibea is distraught and inconsolable. Her father tries to help her; she contrives to have herself left alone in a high tower of their house. She locks the door; and tells him, as he stands distraught and helpless at the foot of the tower, all about her love for Calisto, her desperation at his death, her determination to rejoin him. She regrets the pain her loss will cause her parents; but she feels she has no other choice but to jump off the tower, and kill herself. Her father is left weeping with her body at his feet. He laments the destructive power of love and the meaninglessness of human achievement in the face of his terrible grief.

De Rojas and his times

The times de Rojas lived in were both very distant from, and yet strangely familiar to, the times we live in now. Like us, he lived through a period of profound and often very frightening change. The first printed books were beginning to circulate; and this represented as profound a challenge to established ways of thinking as the internet does today. Columbus had recently returned from having discovered America, and other voyagers were beginning to circumnavigate the world. This revolutionised people’s understanding of the shape of the world; just as Galileo’s discoveries were transforming the understanding of the world in relation to the cosmos.

The marriage of King Fernando of Aragón to Queen Isabela of Castilla marked the beginning of Spain as a nation state. Their conquest of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492 marked the end of a long and fruitful period of cultural and racial integration in the Iberian peninsula. This is conventionally thought of as a process of ‘driving out the Muslim invaders’. It is nonsense to think of it that way. Muslims had been settled in Spain for centuries, along with Jews. What Fernando and Isabela instituted was more akin to a process of racial ‘cleansing’. They established a whole series of vicious discriminatory measures against Muslims, Jews, and their descendants which were in the long term to have the most profoundly damaging effect on Spanish society and culture.

Social and economic relations were in a period of rapid change also: the old feudal ties of obligation and social cohesion were breaking down; a new middle class was emerging (to which de Rojas belonged) the main focus of whose activity was not agriculture or warfare but administration and finance.

In the context of all these rapid changes and discoveries in the outer world, it is feasible to see the Celestina as an amazing act of discovery of the inner world of human feelings, intellect and imagination. Like the epic journeys of Columbus, like the journey in our time to land on the surface of the moon, the equally pioneering journey within the human spirit was a dangerous one. It is important to bear in mind the risks that were involved.

One way to understand them is to look at an incident in de Rojas’ own family history, that although it happened some years after the composition of the Celestina, perhaps gives some measure of the times. In 1525, de Rojas’ father-in-law, Alvaro de Montalván, was arrested by the Inquisition and imprisoned in Toledo. It was the custom of the Inquisition never to tell suspects why they had been imprisoned; and, to judge from the transcript of his interrogation and trial, at first the old man had the greatest difficulty remembering or understanding what he was supposed to have done. He confessed that when he was a young man, some fifty years previously, he had been friendly with Jews. He had purchased meat from the Jewish butcher, he had on occasions eaten unleavened bread, he had sometimes eaten bread and cheese and eggs and milk during Lent.

Many people were condemned and punished by the Inquisition for breaking such dietary rules, just as many were denounced for showing reluctance to eat pork, or apparently not displaying an appropriate degree of devotion during their obligatory attendance at mass. But these were not the crimes the Inquisition was concerned about. Instead, it turned out that some months previously, in a picnic one weekend just outside Madrid, when he was a little bit drunk, he had let slip a remark to the effect that he wasn’t altogether sure there was a life after this one. One of the people present at the party, a relative by marriage called Yñigo de Monçón, had heard him say this and denounced him to the Inquisition for it. As a result, after a year in prison, he was fined, condemned to perpetual house arrest, and forced to attend mass wearing a penitential garment of shame.

What we catch a glimpse of in this apparently trivial incident is a society in which one needed to be continually on one’s guard, both in what one said and what one did. A society in which relatives and friends were encouraged to inform on and denounce each other; a society which laid great store on the proper observance of outward forms; a society in which the slightest deviation from the norm could lead to the most horrendous consequences, and where non-conformity was punished by profoundest shame. In such a world, it is no wonder that the author of the first act of Celestina chose to remain anonymous. To circulate the book first in manuscript, and then in print, was an act of considerable courage. We can surmise that in doing so, de Rojas was risking his life.

The intellectual and cultural world of the Celestina

This is a work of quite incredible richness, staggering both for its range of intellectual and cultural reference and its grounding in human experience. Many volumes have been devoted to the sources of its inspiration. Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that the names of the characters, like the book’s basic form, are all derived from the Latin comedies of Terence. These were plays of middle-class life, generally written about love affairs, deceitful servants and go-betweens; plays that were read aloud in university circles, such as Salamanca, and were used as a teaching tool to improve students’ grounding in the Latin language.

We can assume that both de Rojas and his first audience would have been aware of these comedies as the book’s model; just as they would have been aware of, and no doubt delighted by, the staggering range of reference in the dialogue. These include references to Seneca, Petrarch, an infinite number of sententiae, proverbs, references to the Gospels, almost invariably used to subversive or ironic effect. It is very clear that de Rojas was aware of many of the conventions of courtly love, and that he also wished to mock and parody them. The long, beautifully constructed speeches are written according to the classic rules of rhetoric and are replete with figures of speech and oratorical devices; the contrast between the respectability of form and content and the utterly disreputable context in which they were being used must have been a source of the greatest delight.

How the Celestina was first performed

It is important to understand that the Celestina is not a play as we understand it. It could not be written for a theatre, because at the time there were no public theatres in Spain. At the same time, it was not written primarily to be read silently, in private, like a modern novel, because neither mass literacy nor the habit of solitary reading had established themselves. Instead, it was intended to be read aloud. Some verses in the epilogue indicate the best way to set about this:

If when you read this you want to move your audience and gain their close attention, you need to know how to mutter, when appropriate, know how to speak sometimes to convey pleasure, sometimes hope and passion; sometimes rage, and sometimes great distress. Pretend as you read in a thousand different ways; ask and answer the questions in everyone’s mouth, laughing and crying as the words demand.

It is very clear from this that one speaker took all the parts, reading them from the book to a small audience; and presumably breaking off to argue, dispute and take refreshment when needed, resuming the performance at a later time. This means that de Rojas was writing under none of the practical restrictions of the modern playwright. He had no need to limit the length of the work, for instance; and although it overflows with the most amazing super-abundance of verbal energy, this energy is not essentially theatrical.

For my part, I would love to prepare a full-length translation of the work, which I would perform with and for my friends over (approximately) a fortnight. The result would be an astonishingly rich dramatic experience: but not one that current conditions allow us to undertake.

A personal response

A work of such generosity and scope allows its audience to adopt a multiplicity of interpretations. Many commentators have laid stress on the bleak pessimism of the final speech of Pleberio, and assumed that this represents de Rojas’ own view of the world. They note the anger that lies behind much of the humour; and tend to characterise the work as a bitter act of literary revenge designed to expose the corruption of a hypocritical and morally vacuous society and culture.

There was a time when I first read the work, many years ago, that I might have been inclined to agree – largely because such pessimism reflected my own. But now I would not be so certain. There is a palpable excitement and joy in the freshly minted Castillian language, and in using dialogue to express utterly subversive and shocking sentiments that would not have been possible in ordinary prose. The work claims to reprehend sensual love; but I have a sneaking suspicion that de Rojas may have been using so respectable a cloak of morality secretly to affirm the opposite. For surely never can sensual love have been reprehended in so utterly sensual a way. And although de Rojas is careful to ensure that almost all the characters express hatred of Celestina and most strongly condemn her supposed wickedness, what she actually says is often eloquent, full of good sense, and replete with the most inspiring affirmation of life and the delight of living it.

‘Delight’ is rather a weak word, I suspect, to use for ‘gozo’, which for me is the key word to understand the spirit of this text. This is a text which derives glory and joy and pleasure from life lived in the moment, life all the brighter for being lived in the constant shadow of death: life which is to be treasured in its moments of sadness as much as its moments of pleasure: ‘all,’ as Celestina says, ‘for the joy of living.’

This version

Because the work is not a play, any attempt to stage it in a theatre necessarily involves adaptation as well as translation. This is my second attempt at the task. The first was commissioned by the National Theatre in 1989, for a production that was to be directed by Nuria Espert and to feature Joan Plowright in the leading role. The death of Plowright’s husband, Laurence Olivier, led first to the postponement and then the shelving of the production. Although it was further adapted and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 some years later, this particular version has neither been published nor performed on stage. In it, I tried as it were to tame the original’s strangeness. I modernised many of its expressions, I considerably shortened all the long speeches, and I tidied up its structure to make it into something more closely approximating a well-made play.

For the version published here, after consulting with the director, Calixto Bieito, I took the opposite approach. Adaptation has not meant rewriting: it has meant selection and cutting. Where the long speeches have been kept, they have been largely kept intact. I have retained the book’s original structure, for all its dramatic strangeness (the main character gets killed about two thirds of the way through the plot), and I have tried to discover a form of words that both retains the archaic feel of the original without sacrificing clarity or speakability. The result, I hope, does justice to the amazing eloquence of the original, and also communicates its often astonishing modernity. It is important to stress that in this version I have invented nothing: the words and sentiments do not belong to me. They belong to de Rojas and the amazing characters he has created.

I regret in many ways that what follows is not a complete text. Calixto and I cut approximately one half of the original, and this formed the basis of the first draft. On my reading aloud this first draft to Calixto, it became clear that any performance of it would last approximately four-and-a-half hours. It also became clear that this would be no pleasure to prepare in the rehearsal time available. So I cut the text again, and presented the actors with a script that in the first readthrough lasted two-and-three-quarter hours. It was abundantly clear that this, too, was overwritten, and even as I write this, in the midst of rehearsal, we are further cutting the script: with the intention of creating a theatrical event which alternates bursts of short dialogue and furious action with as many of de Rojas’ beautiful full-length speeches as our circumstances allow. This performance script cannot be published here, because it did not exist when this volume went to press. And even if it had, I would be reluctant to publish so necessarily truncated a version of this amazing work. For publication, at least, offers the opportunity of presenting it in something approaching its proper length. So what follows is based on the four-and-a-half-hour version.

I would not, however, recommend that anyone try to perform this long version in a conventional theatre. Cutting the work is necessary, but painful: directors as a rule cannot bear to do it. As a result, every staged version of it I have so far seen has been excruciatingly dull. But not, I imagine, this one…

For Further Reading

There is a huge academic industry of books and articles related to the Celestina. They can be found in: Snow, Joseph T. Celestina by Fernando de Rojas: An Annotated Bibliography of World Interest 1930-1985 (Madison 1985).

The most recent edition in Spanish is by Peter E. Russell (Castalia 2001).