"El pleberico corazon" and the Authorship of Act I of Celestina

IN the context of Celestina scholarship, Francisco Ruiz Ramon's Nota sobre la autoria del Acto i de La Celestina, HR, 42 (1974), 431-33, will appear to many as retrograde. It offers support, even though the argument employed ultimately lacks validity, to a hypothesis which should have been abandoned many years ago.1 Fernando de Rojas states unequivocally in the preliminary matter which he added to the 1500 Toledo edition of the Comedia, in the prefatory letter and acrostic verses, that he found Act i, written by another hand, in Salamanca. The thesis of dual authorship is, therefore, more than a teoria, and any burden of disproof should rest on the unitarians. The hypothesis of single authorship, the unfortunate brain-child of Blanco White,2 rested, until now, solely on the untenable proposition that Act I was stylistically and conceptually indistinguishable from Acts II to xvI, and hence could not be the work of two authors. Let it be emphasized that all other arguments deployed in the unitarian theory have been either attempts to discredit the testimony (particularly the linguistic and statistical evidence) which goes to support Rojas's assertion, or speculations about Rojas's motives in attributing Act I to another author.3 But over the years a series of schol

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