Abstract

The verses 208-224 of the comedy Amar después de la muerte have raised some textual controversies among Calderon’s scholars concerning the emendations of alcañomias and alcamonios and buxetas de perro, a collocation whose meaning is being disputed. This paper argues that buxetas de perro is not an error, but a linguistic variant inherited from the archetype: on one side, corpus evidence supports that its meaning was really ‘a strip of dog leather’ (an agujeta); on the other side, it is claimed that encodes /∫/, the well-known xexeo morisco. Conversely, an examination of alcamonios and alcañomias leads to their rejection, since they are probably misprints for alcamonías. Calderon’s scholars should be acquainted with linguistic variation in order not to slip unnecessary emendations, such as those discussed in this paper