In the absence of textual variants suited to entice Pinotti’s philological talent, he still gifts us a useful “Nota al testo” [Note on the Text] of approximately fifty pages, where he revisits the troubled composition of the novel, beginning with the 1945 Roman crime news that inspired Gadda to pen the novel, up until the present edition.
As Pinotti unravels the textual history for us (a sort of novel within the novel, one might say) in an impeccable chronological...
]]>The edition is based on the only known manuscript witness, ms. 15067 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. As the title of the work makes clear (“comedia segunda”), there would have been a previous comedy of the same title, which is now lost but attributed to Luis Vélez de Guevara in the manuscript of this “second comedy”.
In a study preceding the work, Peale offers a practical summary of the convoluted plot (pp. 1-4) of the text: a classical palatine comedy with characters from the nobility and wi...
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