The ending of a play almost invariably provides a decisive indicator of its overall meaning, and in consequence eighteenth-century European theatrical practice laid stress on the outcome of dramatic works in terms of their agreement with prevailing conceptions of moral justice. Revivals of works from earlier periods, as is notorious in England in the case of Shakespeare’s King Lear, might have tragic endings re-written to prevent an apparent injustice being visited on a basically good character. Although Spanish theatrical theory from the mid-eighteenth century emphasized the classical division between comedy and tragedy, theoretical orthodoxy was often countered in practice by classicizing comedy assuming some of the moral seriousness and technical features of tragedy in works portraying the mores of the increasingly significant middle orders of society.

El viejo y la niña (1790), the first play by Spain’s leading neoclassical comic dramatist, Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760–1828), was perceived by contemporary audiences and readers to have a particularly sombre ending for a play labelled a ‘comedia’, in that the nineteen-year-old female protagonist Isabel only manages to escape from her intolerable marriage to the seventyyear- old, thrice widowed Roque by insisting on entering a convent. Fifteen years after the work’s publication the Italian translation by Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815), a dramatist and literary theorist well acquainted with Spanish literature as well as a friend of Moratín, upset the author by modifying the ending. Instead of refuge in a convent Isabel agrees to a compromise proposed by her husband’s widowed sister Beatriz, whereby Roque has to promise to amend his behaviour in an arrangement to be enforced by Beatriz taking up residence in her brother’s house. The present chapter proposes to explore some of the issues surrounding the controversial endings to Moratín’s play.

Moratín’s attitude to literary culture, as conveyed in statements published in his lifetime and since, portrays a seriousness and sense of purpose indicative of a reverence for his chosen vocation. His five original plays went through multiple versions before and between performance, initial printings and definitive text, a process continued even after the authoritative Paris edition of his Obras dramáticas y líricas (1825) was seen into print by their author, then aged sixty-five.