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The most famous and cited poem of Cristóbal de Castillejo, “Reprehensión contra los poetas españoles que escriben en verso italiano”, can be found in six different sources, but none of these sources contain the same version. In addition, in a XVI century manuscript, this poem is attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Surprisingly, no modern editions or studies have addressed this enigma! The textual problems of his Works and its diffusion have been ignored.
This dissertation demonstrates that the Works of Cristóbal de Castillejo need a critical edition as an essential tool both to break new ground for a contextual interpretation and also to establish that his Works genuinely represent a renovation of the Castilian poetry of the Spanish Renaissance.
The first edition of Castillejo's Works was published in Madrid in 1573, twenty-three years after his death. The text of this edition was corrected and organized in three books by Juan López de Velasco (censor and editor also of Propaladia of Bartolomé Torres Naharro and La vida del Lazarillo). Therefore, the text suffered corrections, mutilations, etc. that do not reflect what the author actually wrote. Later editions, until 1792, reprinted the text of 1573, and the modern editions do not offer a complete textual corpus that can be considered definitive and reliable.
Chapter I reviews the biographical studies about the life of Castillejo. Chapters II and III analyze the bibliographical information and content of manuscripts and printed sources of the author's texts before the publication of his Works (Madrid, 1573). Chapter IV offers a bibliographical summary of the different editions of his Works, from 1573 until 1999.
In the Tables, I have transcribed, as examples, the texts of the same poem from different sources (manuscript and printed). I have also annotated the textual variations. After the bibliographical and textual revision and comparison of the sources of a few of his texts, the need for a critical edition of Castillejo's Works is well demonstrated.