Excerpt from The Dramatic Art of Lope De Vega: Together With La Dama Boba As regards a careful selection of his best plays, this is feasible and highly desirable since it clears away much dead weight. After reading available plays and forming an opinion of Lope 's art, no new play which I have been able to find and read, has modified my conclusion. This must also be the experience of others, and means that the large number of Lope 's plays is no drawback to printing an edition of his best comedies. Perhaps the suggestions of those who know Lope may aid in making out an admirable list of plays. At all events, would not thirty or forty small volumes, each containing at the most three plays, care fully reprinted, and, if need be, without notes or introduction, be a greater monument to Lope than any other that critics could devise? In connection with the manner Of reprinting his works, it must be remembered that no arbitrary procedure can ever again make Lope a modern, that the body of readers who will study him intelligently and sympathetically must ever remain small - no unusual fate for the greatest of our writers - and that a depend able reprint of the best available texts, not modernized, is all that can be asked. Finally, the format of the edition may be easily determined, if its main purpose be never lost from view, namely, to place a scholarly selection within reach of any student of Spanish letters the world over. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.