News & Updates
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Queens College Digitization of Early Spanish Plays
DateFebruary 28, 2025CategoryCollection update, UpdatesQueens College, CUNY, has digitized 15 early and unique editions of plays from its collection. Links to the electronic copies of each play have been added to the corresponding database records.
- Aníbal
- Despreciar lo que se quiere
- El animal propheta, y dichoso parricida, San Julián
- El asombro de la Francia, Marta la Romarantina (4a pte.)
- El casamiento en la muerte, y hechos de Bernardo del Carpio
- El celoso don Lesmes
- El muerto resucitado
- Herodes Ascalonita y la hermosa Mariana
- La cena del rey Baltasar
- Las cárceles de Lemberg
- Los áspides de Cleopatra
- Obligados, y ofendidos, y gorrón de Salamanca
- San Julián penitente en el desierto
- Un bobo hace ciento
- Victorioso Josué
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Stanford University Sueltas Added to the Database
DateFebruary 26, 2025CategoryCollection update, UpdatesStanford University’s Special Collections’ small number of comedias sueltas has been added to the database, complete with images of the first and last pages.
Below is a list of the newly added titles along with their access link. Unique/early plays are indicated with an asterisk.
- Antes que te cases mira lo que haces, y examen de maridos*
En Barcelona: Por Sebastian de Cormellas, 1634. - La Celmira*
Sevilla: Imprenta Real, 1828. - Cuauhtémoc*
París: En la imprenta y fundición de J. Pinard, [1827]. - Elena y Malvina
Madrid: Imprenta de I. Sancha, 1829. - Rafael del Riego*
Filadelfia: En la Imprenta de Stavely & Bringhurst, No. 70, South Third Street, 1824. - El Tancredo
Madrid: Imprenta de la Minerva Española, 1822
Notably, three of the plays marked with asterisks are in editions that were previously unrecorded in our database. Cuauhtémoc is included for the first time, further enhancing our growing collection of ejemplares.
- Antes que te cases mira lo que haces, y examen de maridos*
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Now on Internet Archive: Comedias Collector
DateFebruary 20, 2025CategoryUpdates
More than 55 early, unique, or bilingual sueltas have been uploaded to Internet Archive by Comedias Collector. -
University of Chicago Digitization of Early Spanish plays
DateFebruary 11, 2025CategoryCollection update, UpdatesThe University of Chicago Special Collections Library has digitized 10 of its early or unique plays, which may differ from other editions. These plays have been added to our database records, and for your convenience, a list is provided below:
- Entremés el alcalde Pedro Cucho.
- El arco de paz del cielo, Sta. Barbara. Comedia famosa.
- Clelia triumfante en Roma : comedia heroica.
- Auto al nacimiento de Christo nuestro señor, intitulado: El sol a media noche, y Estrellas a medio día
- El lego del carmen San Franco de Sena. : Comedia famosa.
- Entremes del Niño de la Rollona
- Entremes de trvllo añadido.
- Entremes de los Muertos vivos.
- Entremes de la campanilla.
- Entremes del maestro de niños.
A special thanks to Special Collections Metadata Librarian Rebecca Flore for helping make the digitization of these plays possible.
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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.