El encanto es la hermosura y el hechizo sin hechizo. La segunda Celestina.

At his death in 1675, the Hispano-Mexican playwright Agustin de Salazar y Torres left behind the first two acts of a comedy, En encanto es la hermosura. Salazar's unfinished play in turn inspired two conclusions: one written by Juan de Vera Tassis, Salazar's editor; another (entitled La segunda Celestina) has been attributed to the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Thomas O'Connor's edition for the Medieval and Renaissance Texts series makes Salazar's original text and the two conclusions accessible in a single volume, supplemented by a critical introduction, list of variants, and bibliography.

Salazar's play is in many respects a typical example of la comedia de capa y espada (the cape and sword comedy), a subgenre of the Baroque stage that revolves around the courtship intrigues of young noblemen and women who, after overcoming jealousy, amorous disdain, and paternal opposition, sort themselves out into marriageable couples. In his introduction O'Connor places the play within the context of contemporary debates over the morality of the theatre. By defending the younger generation's right to select marriage partners according to their amorous predilections, O'Connor argues, the Baroque cape and sword plays are representative of a slow but progressively secularizing trend that can be traced throughout the seventeenth century.

Salazar's major innovation, as O'Connor points out, lies in his incorporation and adaptation of motifs from Fernando de Rojas's fifteenth-century dialogue-narrative, Celestina. This work had offered a devastating portrait of a society enslaved by erotic passions and greed, presided over by the eponymous sorceress and bawd. The original Celestina ends with five deaths - one murder, two executions, a fatal fall, and a suicide; El encanto ends with a triple marriage (in both versions). The fifteenth-century Celestina is a witch who hastens the fall of an already corrupt humankind through diabolical pacts; her late seventeenth-century sister is a relatively innocuous charlatan. Although Celestina's demonic qualities had often been treated with a degree of skepticism in earlier adaptations (most notably in Lope de Vega's tragedy El caballero de 01medo), she nonetheless retained a certain stature as a symbol of the uncontrollable power of Eros. El encanto, in contrast, provides an example of the figure's complete demystification. In Salazar's play, the bawd's powers of enchantment are nothing more than mirror tricks and coincidences, which are pointedly exposed in the finale. Her victims' credulity is itself a motive for laughter and the occasion for a lesson in good sense. In the eighteenth century, the trickster magician would become the antihero of a new popular genre, the comedia de magla. Salazar's Celestina anticipates this figure as much as she recalls Rojas's sorceress.

O'Connor is inclined to accept the attribution of the conclusion entitled La segunda Celestina to Sor Juana (a judgment shared by Georgina Sabat de Rivers and Octavio Paz, among others). As far as the relative merits of the two conclusions are concerned, O'Connor argues that Vera's is more consistent with the original and ultimately more successful. In Sor Juana's version the female protagonists have a diminished role, which is surprising considering the proto-feminist tone of her later plays.

This edition, to sum up, will obviously be of interest to Sor Juana specialists concerned with tracing her development as a dramatist. But this play also suggests that some revisions of our concept of the late Baroque are in order. For those who tend to think of this period in terms of theocentric autos sacramentales and the ascetic lessons of desengano, Salazar's comedy points to another tradition, one characterized by a moderate anti-authoritarianism and an acceptance of a more relaxed lay morality. The play also reminds us of another tradition well established in the seventeenth-century Spanish empire: rational skepticism toward magic and astrology. Almost thirty years before the Salem witchcraft trials, Salazar, Vera, and Sor Juana were confidently debunking sorcery.

ALISON P. WEBER University of Virginia