ABSTRACT
One of the earliest known references to the presence of Fernando de Rojas’s Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea on an English stage appears in Anthony Munday’s Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580), where he complains about the pernicious effects of playgoing on “the chastitie of vnmarried maides and widowes.” Female audiences, he claimed, were exposed to the “wanton wiues fables” and “pastorical songes of loue” used by playwrights in “their comical discourses,” which turned “al chastity vpside downe” and corrupted “the good disposition & manners of youth.” Munday singled out “the tragical Comedie of Calistus” as a parti - cularly pernicious case “where the bawdresse Scelestina inflamed the maiden Melibeia with her sorceries” (99-101). Concerns about the impact of the stage upon private and public morals naturally intensified in England as its theaters became an ever more prosperous business. So large was the demand for plays that authors and producers had to search far and wide for new plots. In 1599 Edward Topsell ranted against the proliferation on the stage of those “Italian follies, Spanish inuentions, or French-fayned-wantonvolumes” whose characters were “taught to speak English” by many “histrionicall plaiers, whereby,” he concluded, “many good soules are endangered” (63-64). As Munday demonstrates, Melibea and Celestina were among those alien characters who had been taught to speak English on the Elizabethan stage.
