Jorge Manrique’s Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Nancy

F. Marino (review)

María Morrás

La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and

Cultures, Volume 42, Number 2, Spring 2014, pp. 207-211 (Review)

Published by La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures,

and Cultures
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cor.2014.0017

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549282

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El romance del juego de ajedrez and El romance de la conquista de Antequera”

(273-291) , examines how the use of games in the romancero inspire and even
motivate the cultural exchange between Christians and Muslims of the fifteenth
century.
This special volume would not be complete as a worthy tribute to Alan Deyermond,
colleague and mentor to each of the twelve contributors, without the inclusion
by David Hook of rescued page proofs which were the working notes to three
lectures given by Deyermond between 2003 and 2004. Hook entitles it “’Está
tan triste partida’ (Conde Dirlos, v. 28a): maridos y padres ausentes”(293-302).
Additional clarification of the notes has been emended. The inclusion of this
article is especially significant to this volume since it demonstrates the evolution
of the research process that Deyermond practiced, modeled and demanded
of his students and colleagues. Each of these contributions is well conceived,
meticulously documented with copious bibliography, and of great interest to its
readers. It is often difficult to critique an homage volume since the quality of its
contributions is frequently inconsistent. This is not the case. Thus, this splendid
tome in and of itself is a worthy tribute to the great scholar whose influence
fomented its creation.

Michèle S. de Cruz-Sáenz, Ph.D.

Delaware County Community College, Media, PA

Marino, Nancy F. Jorge Manrique’s Coplas por la muerte de

su padre. A history of the poem and its reception. Colección
Támesis. Serie A: Monografías 298. Woodbridge: Tamesis,
2011. xi+214 pp.

It is not a small task to confront the mass of erudition accumulated in the

literary and historical criticism over five centuries of interest on Manrique’s
Coplas in a slim volume of hardly more than two hundreds pages. It is even more
remarkable to succeed in this tour de force in two main aspects: by conveying

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huge quantities of material in a tight and structured manner, and by framing

the mass of information into an interpretative context. The result allows Marino
not only to make a balanced presentation on the extant bibliography, but also
to reveal new dimensions and overlooked aspects of the Coplas. In analyzing
Manrique’s master poem, the author not only has rendered an invaluable service
to students and scholars alike by presenting and contrasting their ideas, but she
has added to them also valuable new material.
The author’s selective procedure and her simultaneous reluctance to decide in
favor of a line of interpretation are clearly stated at the introduction: “In the
impossibility of absolute knowledge of the meaning of the Coplas, this book
will explore instead the ways in which successive generations of readers –and
individual reader within them– engage with the text” (IX). The point of view,
which follows loosely the history of the reception approach, shows to be an aptly
way of tackling the thorny issue of how and why the poem dedicated to Rodrigo
Manrique became canonical, or as Marino puts it “the most recognizable poem
in the Spanish language” (X). As a thorough analysis of every published item
on the subject may have turned into a tedious and endless review, Marino
prefers to focus on “some long-living critical discussions” and selected literary
recreations, including the famous glosas. Thus the perils of exhaustiveness are
avoided: omissions, on the one side, are since the beginning begged for, and, on
the other, the reading does not fall into a sort of annotated bibliography or a
mere repertoire, piling up chunk over chunk of other’s works, as easily happens
in this sort of compilation.
Although divided into four chapters, three distinct parts can be discerned in
this study. Chapter 1 provides the basics about Manrique and his poem, with
especial attention to the historical setting and the early dissemination of the
text. Next chapters 2 and 3 survey in chronological order literary, musical, visual
and critical reactions to the Coplas. The space devoted to the Renaissance and
Baroque eras are noticeable longer than the pages that deal with the Eighteenth
Century onwards, even though the latter outline the critical reactions among
literary critics and historians who have shaped our actual understanding of the
poem. The reason seems more to lie in the fact that the latter are the object of
the final part rather than that the former’s opinions being less known. Indeed,
Chapter 4 “Shifting literary perceptions” wraps up the study as it contrasts the
critical views of contemporary scholars regarding the most controversial issues

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such as its genre, meter, structure, sources, the ubi sunt topic, and the rewritings
that it originated.
The study opens with a straightforward presentation of Manrique’s life, the
circumstances and date of the composition of his Coplas and the doubtful
attribution of the two stanzas póstumas, with reference to the major primary
and secondary sources. In these pages the main questions concerning the
Coplas are set out, such as the culture of the poet and his education in letters,
and the ideology of the poem in relation to the age and his lineage politics,
to which Marino does not offer any satisfactory answer. This part ends with a
summary of V. Beltran’s 1993 conclusions on the manuscripts and early printed
editions. To them are added some very interesting suggestions on the probable
dissemination of the Coplas orally and in pliegos sueltos. However, as Marino
herself makes clear, the almost simultaneity between its composition and the
introduction of printing was a major agent in the Coplas success, both for the
number of editions and for its geographical dissemination. At this point, some
data on pliegos sueltos editions are considered together with other references
seldom taken into account: sixteenth-century inventories, lists of shipping goods
to the New World, and others of a different nature, such as the existence of a
copy in aljamiado or the allusion in Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera
de la conquista de Nueva España. Solid foundations for the author’s thesis on the
extraordinary history of the Coplas, beyond the usual remarks on the glosses,
are thus laid out.
Sheer quantity, however, does not explain the rapid resonance attained by
Manrique’s poem. As Chapters 2 and 3 show, literary, ideological and critical
reception went hand in hand. Commentaries in glosses, both in verse and in
prose, partial recreations and more or less clear echoes in literary works in
Spanish, Portuguese or English, contributed greatly to its fame. But it was not only
that. The ambiguity of the Coplas themselves, their duality, prompted inevitably
diverse readings, and made it possible up to this day to put the emphasis on
one aspect or another. From the very beginning there was a dilemma: to stress
its universal values or locate them in a firm historical context. In the first case,
the poem reads as a moral reflection on death and life; in the latter, it is the
elegy for an outstanding figure from the nobility, either an eulogy that justifies
its feudal anachronism or recasts his deeds in a idealized and distorted image
that mirrors the new values of the nobleza de servicio promoted by the Catholic
Kings, the feudal model represented by the real Rodrigo. Interestingly enough,

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the first glosses and re-elaborations (or rather imitations) of Manrique’s poem
in his father’s memory took it as “an accepted vehicle for the lamentations of the
death of contemporary figures” (35). Still, it was not any kind of figure, as we
are speaking about Leonor, sister of Charles V, or María of Portugal, first wife
of Phillip II; besides, other glosses were related to the patronage of the Zúñiga
lineage (Cervantes’, Barahona’s). Along with it, the frequency with which the
Coplas were printed with Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna and the Proverbios
by the Marquis de Santillana may hint at its reading as a sort of regimiento de
nobles. In fact, the first strictly moralizing interpretation did not appear till El
Cartujo’s gloss, in 1535-1540, and it was not until Gonzalo de Figueroa’s 1550
version that there appeared an explicitly religious one. It is no wonder then that
Camões, who alluded extensively but freely to Manrique’s poem, used it as a call
to wake up Portuguese nobility facing the temptation of decadency –represented
by Rodrigo! (90-94; on other Portuguese works with a satirical twist, see 85-
90). Perhaps due to the effort of presenting a strictly impartial outlook, Marino
does not point out this connection, nor follow it up into the discussion about its
structure or genre in the final chapter.
Chapter 3 includes also a summary list of musical adaptations (78-80), and some
very interesting observations on the images that accompanied the Coplas (80-
85), an aspect overlooked so far. The dual character of the work is recognized at
first sight as the coats of arms of the dedicatees, which figure prominently with
engravings that personify death, although no explicit link is established between
both aspects.
The history of the critical reception of the Coplas is the object of the two next
chapters. It starts with the Enlightenment, when aesthetic reasons prevailed
over its political significance or its moral reflections as literary historians
turned to the poem for the “simplicity of its language”, opposed to the much
detested excesses of the preceding Baroque era. Here Marino provides a lot of
information on its inclusion in the pioneer histories of Juan Andrés Velázquez,
Sarmiento, Boutwerk or Ticknor and its claim as excellent poetry in artes de la
elocuencia, artes poéticas and the like. Marino rightly points out that it was under
this assumption that Cerdá’s important first modern edition was undertaken.
The natural consequence was its introduction into anthologies, and it was in
this way that the Coplas became institutionalized both as a canonical text for
students (and future writers) and as an object of study for following generations
of scholars. A wider theoretical frame on canonicity, the role played by the

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ilustrados in the revival of medieval literature, and a comparison contrasting

the reception of Manrique’s work with that of Mena’s, could have enriched these
instructive pages. On the other side, the chronological review of twentieth-
century criticism will be useful only for students, as much of it is taken upon
again in the final Chapter.
In effect, the last chapter abandons strictly chronological order, and after
some remarks, takes as its starting point the first modern edition, that of A.
Cortina (1929), prevalent among students and scholars till the several editions
by V. Beltran, (1981, 1993, 1988, 1991) culminated in 1993 and replaced
definitively Cortina’s text. The issues treated all belong to formal aspects: genre,
meter, structure, sources and the use of the ubi sunt theme. This chapter can
be read in itself together with the first one as an introduction to the Coplas.
However, it shows the difficulty of organizing this kind of study, as it overlaps
somewhat with the preceding chapter. Maybe it would have helped to make a
more clear distinction between literary recreations and critical reception from
the eighteenth century onwards. For instance, it is a little bit out of order to
dedicate the final 26 pages to Longfellow’s 1826 translation, when its expected
place would have been in Chapter 3.
All in all, Nancy Marino’s study goes much beyond what is to be expected from
an état de la question. Although perhaps too indecisive on controversial issues,
it is certainly a critical review, which faces the not small challenge of organizing
the relevant bibliography on well known issues surrounding the Coplas. Perhaps
some authors have been given too much attention and some of us–not with
a totally detached view—would have liked Marino to have taken more into
account the studies preceding modern editions. As the editor responsible for one
of the editions mentioned (Madrid, 2003) I feel a small frustration in not finding
a clearer standpoint on the poetics and politics of the Coplas, about which there
are very rich hints in Marino’s pages. One must admire, notwithstanding, her
generous and nuanced use of the materials, and it is only fair to value her book
as she has done with others: inside the limits of her purpose and the boundaries
of the genre. This book opens new paths for future research, with new views and
innovative approaches on a subject about which almost everything seemed to be
already said.
María Morrás
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

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