Editor's Note

Several years ago, I wrote an essay on the relation of trends in scholarship and on their influence on Comedia studies, specifically on approaches to El burlador de Sevilla. One of my main points was that Comedia scholarship has always been enhanced by the work of critics, academics from, among other places, Spain, Latin America, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the United States. I recall that, as a beginning graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1970s, I was struck by the richness of early modern Spanish drama and by the breadth and engaging quality of the criticism on the plays. Harry Sieber, himself a student of Bruce W. Wardropper, helped to introduce me to what might be called a metacritical strain in the study of literature and theater. I loved studying both the plays and their critical reception, which, logically, became inseparable. My studies with Elias Rivers allowed me to focus on language and on language as an implicit, if not explicit, ideology. As we moved into the new millennium, the impact of theory was ever increasing, and criticism often seemed to take on a life of its own. This is a fittingly baroque analogue, in which the already complex aesthetic object fosters theoretical responses that are as intricate, or more so, than the texts under scrutiny. In my ten years as editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, I have relished the variety and range of essays submitted to the journal, by scholars of many persuasions and at radically different stages of their careers. We encourage our readers to submit their work, and we look forward to the sharing of new ideas and new perspectives.

I will end with two notes, one happy and one quite sad. Our colleague and board member Frank P. Casa was recently honored by the University of Michigan and by an international group of colleagues for his many brilliant contributions to the field. We congratulate Frank on his fine work and his splendid example of professionalism. Enrique García Santo-Tomás has written a brief description of the celebration, and we have asked him for permission to include his introductory remarks in this number of the journal. Anyone who has studied Spanish literature will note, with sorrow, the passing of the renowned British scholar Alan Deyermond, a great medievalist who was so much more. No one who worked with him could fail to see his exceptional intelligence and generous spirit. We send our condolences to his family and friends.

Thanks, as always, to the members of the editorial board and to the contributors.