In the Library
Celestina Or The Tragic-Comedy Of Calisto And Melibea
Fernando de Rojas, 1499
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 7.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by James Mabbe (1631)
- Chapters
- Chapters 23
- Length
- Length 102k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In this, Melibea, I see heaven's greatness and goodness.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
Young lovers are doomed by a secret garden meeting and a scaled wall, but Shakespeare blames feuding families where Rojas blames desire itself.
£1.99
Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Laclos builds a whole novel out of go-betweens and seduction by proxy, and like Rojas he lets the schemers' cleverness end in ruin and death for nearly everyone it touches.
£1.99
Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper
Francisco de Quevedo
Quevedo's Pablos is the son of a thief and a witch who lies his way through Spain, the picaresque child of Celestina's greedy servants and their gutter wit.
£1.99
About the book
Celestina keeps a shop of small miracles: thread for restringing what men believe was never broken, oils and murmured spells, gossip traded like coin. Fernando de Rojas builds his tragedy from almost nothing, a hawk straying into a garden, a young nobleman named Calisto catching sight of Melibea and deciding at once that his life is unlivable without her. He hires the old woman to make it happen, and she does, with a cunning that outpaces every intention in the book. What her scheming buys is not romance but ruin. Celestina is murdered by her own accomplices, squabbling over the gold chain she was paid; Calisto falls to his death from the ladder that carried him to his beloved's garden; Melibea, rather than outlive him, climbs a tower and jumps, confessing everything to her father as she goes. Pleberio is left alone asking what he built his towers and planted his orchards for. Before the novel existed, this dialogue already knew that desire, once summoned, answers to nobody.