Excerpt from The Staging of Lope De Vega's Comedias With the establishment of the first two permanent play-houses or corrales in Madrid, that in the Calle de la Cruz, in 1579, and the one in the Calle del Principe, in 1582, we may readily imagine that things were somewhat improved. Here, at all events, was a fixed stage, with seats for the auditors, which was a great step forward. Now, as nearly as we can determine, Spain's greatest dramatist, Lope de Vega, began to write for the public stage about 1585, or very shortly after the establishment of the Corral del Principe, to which theatre we also know that Lope, prior to 1588, was a very frequent visitor. In the absence of any definite information upon the point, it has seemed to me that an examination of the plays of Lope de Vega might throw some light upon the manner in which the comedia was put upon the stage in the latter part of the sixteenth, and the early years of the seventeenth centuries. 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.