Bulletin of the Comediantes

Siento una gran soledadde hablar, y tratar con gente.Allégome a la ventana,y aunque mucha gente veo,no está allí lo que deseo,y quítaseme la gana.Aquí sobre el corazón,se me ponen unas cosas,que me quitan enfadosasla vital respiración.

Lope de Vega,El acero de Madrid

IN THE LATER WINTER OF 2020, our daily lives came into uncanny alignment with a central motif in one of our most cherished art forms. As scholars of the comedia nueva, we have long reveled in the poetry and ingenious plot twists that follow when a spirited heroine decides to break free from the home confinement expected of unmarried women of high social rank, as we see above in Belisa’s list of the symptoms of her feigned anemia. Readers who leaf through this journal’s pages in early 2021 or connect to it online will, sadly, need no reminder of how COVID-19—the respiratory illness caused by a novel strain of coronavirus—spread illness, death, and fear around the world, culminating in the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020. But as an academic journal now in its eighth decade of publication, our duty is also to connect scholars today to those from the past and future. Founded in 1947, the Bulletin of the Comediantes has weathered cultural ferment and political turmoil, but never have we been so united in so unwelcome a chain of events. Just as spring daffodils and orange blossoms burst forth last spring in the Mediterranean region that is our shared literary-cultural patria, we found ourselves involuntarily immersed in lockdowns.

Our cover image is meant to capture this unsettling moment and remind ourselves to celebrate and support artists of today even as we honor and study those from the past. We commissioned the cover from Diane Donaldson Speight, a collage artist based in Winder, Georgia, who uses found materials and hand-sewn papers to create images that often center on themes surrounding family ties and memory (see dianespeight.com). In this case, we asked her to visualize confinamiento, connecting both a favorite comedia motif [End Page 5] and the communal experience of 2020. Our point of departure is an intriguing historical painting from the Musée d’Orsay (Paris): Edgar Degas’s Sémiramis construisant Babylone (1861) depicts a female attendant to the Assyrian queen, who kneels, seemingly lost in her own reverie about the city taking shape below (www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=1071). For our cover, we reconceive this young woman as if before a window, evoking the longing of so many heroines in the comedia urbana who imagine the city beyond their confinement, concocting ingenious schemes to explore its streets, plazas, palace grounds, or nearby pasture lands. So too, Speight’s collage gestures towards a shared feeling of 2020: so many of us found ourselves watching the unfolding spring from a window, ticking off days and weeks that blended into one another.

Of course, many more toiled and continue to toil outside safe confines. We of the editorial team at the Comediantes salute the health care professionals who have put their lives at risk to save those of countless others, the essential workers who have kept food and crucial supplies available, and the librarians who have toiled to reopen the book repositories and reading rooms we need to do our work, while tirelessly updating their online portals. So, too, we thank the organizers of scholarly gatherings who have ingeniously marshalled online platforms to keep conversations alive in new virtual spaces. Last but not least, we gratefully acknowledge Editorial Board members for continuing to provide detailed and rigorous article evaluations within the requested time frame, authors at all career stages for their submissions of exciting new work, and book reviewers for keeping our readers abreast of current scholarship in comedia studies and beyond.

We send heartfelt condolences to those of you who have lost family members or friends these past many months. Beyond the devastation of the coronavirus, 2020 has already deprived us of five giants who helped us...