After its first known edition in 1499, La Celestina immediately became an international bestseller. The tragicomic love affair of Calisto and Melibea-brought about by the old bawd Celestina and the squalid underworld over which she presides-conjures up a social landscape dominated by anomie and change. The moral ambiguity that emanates from its realistic dialogues and urban prose style also constitutes one of its most remarkable achievements. The purpose of this edition is to facilitate access to Mabbe's translation in a modernized text. The introduction provides a succinct account of its Castilian origins and English reception as part of international networks of exchange. These networks included cultural agents engaged in the establishment of vernacular canons through the appropriation of alien literary capital. As they did so, these national traditions also sought to homogenize their respective linguistic communities into a commonwealth of speakers that could be used for the establishment of a comprehensive polity upon a common body of laws and social norms. As a forerunner of the picaresque-which also addresses the language and values that regulate the relations between self and society-The Spanish Bawd exposes the paradoxes of self-interest as the keystone for a life in common. José María Pérez Fernández is senior lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Translation at the University of Granada
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Front Matter Front Matter (pp. i-vi) -
Table of Contents Table of Contents (pp. vii-vii) -
GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD GENERAL EDITORS’ FOREWORD (pp. viii-viii)Andrew Hadfield and Neil RhodesThe aim of theMHRA Tudor & Stuart Translationsis to create a representative library of works translated into English during the early modern period for the use of scholars, students and the wider public. The series will include both substantial single works and selections of texts from major authors, with the emphasis being on the works that were most familiar to early modern readers. The texts themselves will be newly edited with substantial introductions, notes, and glossaries, and will be published both in print and online.
The series aims to restore to view a major part of English Renaissance literature...
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (pp. ix-x) -
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION (pp. 1-66)This poem features as an afterword to the 1631 edition ofThe Spanish Bawd, James Mabbe’s translation ofLa Celestinainto English. The sonnet conveys the combination of moral disgust and fascination which this text had for decades elicited from its readers, and which had turned it into asuccès d’escandalesince it first appeared in late fifteenth-century Castile. Mabbe had translated this poem, which was never part of the Spanish original, from the Italian version by Alfonso Ordóñez, the first among many renderings ofLa Celestinainto a foreign language. Published only seven years after its first known Spanish...
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THE SPANISH BAWD THE SPANISH BAWD (pp. 67-364)To my worthy and much esteemed friend, Sir Thomas Richardson, Knight.¹⁰²
Sir, I now send you your long since promisedCelestina, put into English clothes. I shall entreat you to give her a friendly welcome, because she is a stranger and come purposely out of Spain into these parts, to see you, and kiss your hands. I would not accompany her with my letters of recommendation, whereby she might find the better reception. For, I must ingeniously confess, that this your Celestina is notsine scelere; yet must I tell you withal, that she cannot be harboured with you,sine...
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GLOSSARY GLOSSARY (pp. 365-369) -
BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 370-395) -
INDEX INDEX (pp. 396-402)