The «theater before Lope de Vega»: from Don Marcelino to the Boletín

Abstract

This work presents a journey through the contributions of different scholars of 16th Century Spanish Theater from the Boletín de la Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo, throughout the first hundred years of its history. The importance of Menéndez Pelayo’s studies of the first Castilian theater is well known. Scholars need to take his works as a starting point for any review of the different aspects involved in the subject; it is not surprising, then, that they almost feel the obligation to render him tribute from the pages of the magazine that bears his name and spreads his legacy. This journey allows us to describe a network of relationship and to draw a map of the research interests around 16th Century Spanish Theater along these years. An so, we can verify the prevalence of an approach to Theater Studies that privileges the theatrical text over other circumstances related to aspects of the performance or the complexity of the theatrical event.