The Comedy a noticia and the Comedy a fantasia

Abstract

The early renaissance Spanish writer of comedies Bartolomé de Torres Naharro (c. 1465–c. 1525), who spent most of his life working for church dignitaries in Rome and Naples, went down in the history of the theatre for his original theoretical reflections on comedy and rules of playwriting rather than for the sake of his comedies, which – with few exceptions – do not exceed the literary value of the works of his contemporaries. The preface (“Prohemio”) accompanying the first publication of his collected works Propalladia (1517) is regarded as the first independent theory of drama in the Spanish language. While on the surface at least he looks to classical authorities, he goes beyond rigid traditionalist conventions and, almost a century before the triumphant advance of Lope, confidently defines comedy as an independent type of drama, introduces his view of the five-act (jornadas) division, deliberates on the number of performers and the aptness of a production, classifies comedies according to the level of mimeticism into a noticia and a fantasía, and concludes with a somewhat vague internal subdivision of comedy into introíto and argumento. In principal, Naharro the theoretician followed most of the rules in his plays, although he sometimes got “carried away” and adapted them as necessary. He is mainly inconsistent with regard to the division into a noticia and a fantasía. According to Naharro, the former depict events that really happen, and the latter, events that are, while fabricated, still credible. The author had no problems in a noticia comedies, whereas the comedies a fantasía (e.g. Serafini, Himenei and Aquilani) on several occasions relax the second part of the requirement prescribing verism to the point of becoming unconvincing.