THE text of San Diego de Alcalá has not come down to us
in its original or authentic state. It was first published in 1653, eighteen
years after the death of its author, in Parte tercera de los mejores ingenios
de España, probably from a copy used for stage production.
Seventeenth-century Spanish dramatists did not customarily retain a copy of
their plays and the stage directors they sold them to altered the texts,
sometimes considerably, for their presentation on the stage. Lope de Vega is the
most prolific playwright of all time, the number of his full-length plays
totaling somewhere between the nearly 400 we have today and a possible legendary
figure of 1500. Some 240 were published during his lifetime in parte
collections, 144 of these under his personal direction, but even these were not
in their original form. Lope laments, in one of his prologues, that his old
plays came home to him "like old soldiers from the wars with a wooden leg, half
an arm, and an eye missing." It should be no wonder, then, that the text of
San Diego de Alcalá is full of inconsistencies.
Lope never mentioned San Diego de Alcalá in his other
writings and letters, but the work is undoubtedly his. It is not known when he
composed it. Some critics have believed that it is one of his early works. They
point to Alí, a Moor and character in the play, as one reason, believing that
Lope would not have used him after the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609.
This, however, is a weak argument. The proximity of certain events is also
adduced as evidence of an early date. One is the illness of Prince Carlos,
referred to toward the end of the third act, who was reportedly cured in 1562 by
contact with the saint's remains. Carlos's father, Philip II urged canonization
for San Diego and it was granted in 1588. Menéndez y Pelayo, Spain's eminent
nineteenth-century scholar, also believed that the style of the play belonged to
Lope's early period. More recently, however, Morley and Bruerton convincingly
date the play 1613 through a careful analysis of its versification patterns and
because that year marked the 150th anniversary of the saint's death (he died in
Alcalá in 1463) and the 25th of his canonization.
Both modern editions of San Diego de Alcalá are based
on the seventeenth-century parte version. Hartzenbusch included it in
volume four of Lope de Vega's plays in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles
(no. 52), which appeared in 1860 but is still being reissued. Menéndez y
Pelayo published the same text with minor variants in volume five of Obras de
Lope de Vega publicadas por la Real Academia Española series (1890-1913),
for which he wrote an interesting commentary.
