At this time, when performers and public alike are increasingly aware of and receptive to the immense diversity of theatre, historically and geographically, when both increasingly value difference, it seems opportune to reexamine, with a view to their translation and presentation today, the distinctive nature of the plays produced by seventeenth-century Spain, comparatively few of which have been seen as yet on the English-speaking stage.

The huge quantity of those plays, and the high quality of many, were determined very largely by the demands of an extremely varied audience drawn from the whole of society, from all but its lowest, least lettered ranks to its loftiest and most cultured. Its royalty, nobility, and clergy, moreover, as well as attending the public theatres and often themselves commissioning plays, saw command performances at court. As with cinema and television today, that audience expected a constant stream of new works, especially three-act comedias, so that all imaginable subjects had to be grist to the playwrights’ mill, including many never thought suitable for dramatization before. It wanted, like all audiences, to be told an engaging story (which meant, broadly, a unified action). But Spaniards expected so far as possible to see a whole one enacted, not merely a crisis whose antecedents and aftermath were narrated or foreseen. In defiance (when need be) of the other unities, this usually meant shifts of place and/or time. By emptying the stage, bringing on other characters and assisting the imagination with references in their lines, such shifts were easily effected, given the minimalist scenic conventions in the corrales.

Those theatres’ structure meant also that the public were close to the performers, involved but never expecting more than momentarily to suspend their disbelief, aware indeed, like the actors, that the play was simply play. Its truthfulness lay rather in the fact that it represented human experience as complex and diverse. The story was usually light-hearted, but sometimes sombre, and often both. In the darkest tragedies, for instance, they (and the specialist actors) expected substantial roles for one or more clowns.