The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain PDF
Preview The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain
Verso Running Head i THE STAGES OF PROPERTY: COPYRIGHTING THEATRE IN SPAIN TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk Verso Running Head iii The Stages of Property Copyrighting Theatre in Spain LISA SURWILLO UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London iv Verso Running Head www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9246-5 Printed on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Surwillo, Lisa The stages of property : copyrighting theatre in Spain / Lisa Surwillo. (Studies in book and print culture) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9246-5 (bound) 1. Copyright – Drama – Spain – History – 19th century. 2. Intellectual property – Spain – History – 19th century. 3. Theater – Law and legislation – Spain – History – 19th century. I. Title. II. Series. KKT1186.S87 2007 346.4604′8209034 C2007-903098-X University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Verso Running Head v Contents Preface vii Introduction: Law, Theatre, and the Republic of Letters 3 Stage I: Literary Property and Modern Spain 21 1 Cultivating Property:Desamortización and the Culture of Authors’ Rights 25 2 Performative Appeal: FromEl trovadorto the Royal Decree 41 Stage II: Poets and Publishers 63 3 Authors between Stage and Page 67 4 Editoresand Owners 83 Stage III: National Literary Galleries 107 5 Textual Museums 111 6 Paratextual Performances in the ‘Galerías dramáticas’ 124 Conclusion 147 Appendix 151 Notes 161 Sources Cited and Consulted 193 Illustration Credits 207 Index 209 Illustrations follow p. 86 TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk Verso Running Head vii Preface Literary scholars rarely have the opportunity to study books from the viewpoint of the collection or the archive. This book is the result of an unusual and fortuitous cross-pollination of literary criticism and librari- anship. My academic training in Romance languages and literatures provided me with the tools of textual analysis and a strong background in literary history. Three years in the rare books division of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, gave me first-hand knowledge of the ways in which the particulars of the physical format of books and the perseverance of Romantic ideas on authorship affect the accessibility of nineteenth-century literature for scholars today. When I began to survey and catalogue what is one of the largest collections of Spanish theatre in North America, I optimistically imagined that I might have the opportunity to read the five thousand plays owned by Bancroft. Theatre is society’s mask, a representation that conceals and reveals a given culture’s preoccupations. Because the Spanish stage was where nearly every issue important to nineteenth-century Spanish culture and society was presented, debated, represented, and, some- times, resolved, I was certain that my work with the collection would provide me with unique insight into the relationship between Spanish theatre and culture at mid-century. I was surprised to find answers to my questions about nineteenth-century Spanish culture in the format, rather than in the content, of the plays. Although I did manage to read a significant number of plays, my assigned task was to transpose – or translate– information on the book’s title page regarding the author, title, place of publication, date, and genre into a catalogue format prescribed by the U.S. Library of Con- gress. I quickly became frustrated that these uniform items were viii Preface grounded in a presentism that did not allow for a literary reality in which authorship was unclear, nineteenth-century genres were untrans- latable into contemporary American terms, and the heavy hand of the editor (publisher) was as important as that of the ‘author.’ It was out of this gap between the triumph of Romantic theories of authorship and present expectations of book production, at one extreme, and the real- ities of nineteenth-century Spanish dramatic literature, at the other, that our academic assumptions about dramatic authorship became patently unsatisfactory. The process of cataloguing requires substantial analysis of the intro- ductory pages that most scholars of literature hastily – and erroneously – bypass in an attempt to arrive immediately at the ‘real’ text. Each time I opened these modest paperbacks (most were octavo in format with thirty-two pages) and noted the author, title and publication informa- tion, I also considered the way that these plays were presented to me, the reader, as property. Elaborate copyright declarations that became more complex and stringent in each decade (often including entire reprintings of the current law) separated the reader from the verses of the play. These were not simply obscure © symbols in the corner of a page, but rather prominently displayed declarations of ownership and elaborate directions regarding the reader’s responsibilities with respect to the text in his or her hands. As I read nineteenth-century editions, I was obliged to behave like a nineteenth-century reader and receive these plays first as property and secondly as literature. Because these copyright statements constituted a significant part of the introductory pages, I reconsidered how copyright came to have such prominence in these play editions. Did intellectual property for dramatic literature develop in a different way than it had for lyric poetry or novels? Did it change? And how did copyright affect the later performances of these plays? Stepping back into my role as literary scholar, I decided to ask exactly when Spanish dramatists began to be treated as authors (as the Library of Congress cataloguing rules required) and how copyrighted authorship changed the way that plays were received by the public (as either readers or members of an audience). Equally important, as I catalogued the theatre collection, I encoun- tered hundreds of authors’ names and thousands of titles, but only a handful of names of editores. They were the agents who served as ‘con- tractors’ in the creation of Spanish play editions: similar to today’s pub- lishers, editoresowned the copyright of a piece and brought together the various agents (printers, dramatists, booksellers) necessary to create a Preface ix printed copy. Very early in the cataloguing project, it became possible to recognize the editorof a given play and then anticipate the theatre in which the play had been premiered, the quality of the typeface, and the name of the printer. The publisher, not the author, began to be the uni- fying element in the huge corpus of nineteenth-century theatre. Yet the overwhelming textual presence of the editorstood in stark contrast to his absence in literary histories. Certainly, Cotarelo y Mori, Cervera, Botrel, Simón Palmer, and Martínez Martín, among others, had noted the pub- lisher’s role in nineteenth-century literature. However, given that fewer than ten families owned and controlled nearly every play published in nineteenth-century Spain, it was surprising that most scholars of Spanish literature had largely overlooked their impact on theatre. Studies of literary ownership and authorship have tended to focus on narrative works from the Anglo-American tradition. The aim of this book is to broaden the ongoing discussion in terms of both genre and geography. In the most recent phase of this project, I have considered the question of authorship in light of modern treatments of Spain’s sup- posed marginality to European trends (or, as the Fascist dictator Fran- cisco Franco put it, of the view that ‘España es diferente’). But theatre is certainly different. Theatre is a temporary composition of the textual and the spectacular, with aspects such as staging, costume, and actors’ skill of equal if not greater importance than the literary quality of the text. This, in turn, is necessarily unstable, dependent upon actors’ memory or prompters’ aptitude. In this book, I argue that a thorough understanding of the relationship between literature and copyright requires an examination of the impact of property on theatre. The dual nature (page and stage) of dramatic literature demonstrates the com- plexities of authorship and reception more than does the printed word alone. Moreover, Spanish concepts and practices of authorship and copyright varied from those of their European neighbours. For example, not only were Spanish dramatists surprisingly ambivalent about the ‘birth’ of authorship, but also the legal and economic value of author’s copyright rested upon its definition as an ‘alienable right’ to be bought and sold an infinite number of times. As a result, nine- teenth-century Spain produced a variety of plural and simultaneous authorships. Although the possibility for multiple authorships of a work written by one person disappeared in the twentieth century, the con- temporary definition of authorship was not the only, or necessarily the best, model to emerge from the modern era. Moreover, because of Spain’s important theatre tradition dating from the seventeenth
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