Bulletin of the Comediantes

Omnia regit tempus

This is the fundamental law of the comedia nueva, in Marc Vitse's enduring formulation of dramaturgy (275).¹ It took on new significance in 2020, a year which the global pandemic that is still raging in too many parts of the world changed our shared sense of time, whether lived as uninterrupted days of home confinement or of frontline work. Though readers today will need no reminder that the past year has challenged us in ways we could scarcely have envisioned, a scholarly journal speaks to the future as well, when the peculiar times of 2020 are memories, points of reference, and storylines. Each reader today will harbor a unique account of time's dominion over 2020. For most, its capricious new rules began just before or right after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020.

We salute colleagues who immersed themselves in online teaching and mentoring, shepherded children of all ages through the new demands of virtual classrooms, labored on dissertation projects without direct access to research libraries, or reinvited their administrative responsibilities to the unfamiliar and shifting dictates of epidemiology. For those who set aside fears of contagion or arrest to protest systemic racism and police brutality, we send our gratitude and admiration. We express heartfelt appreciation to those who cared for loved ones amid the harsh protocols of social distancing. To colleagues who lost loved ones, we extend earnest wishes that the departed may rest in peace and the bereft find consolation. And may those of us who have the opportunity to build better schools and communities find constructive and affirming paths to making them spaces of peace, inclusion, and creativity.

Our mission to apply the methodologies and scholarly practices of our times to better understand Golden Age theater prompted us to invite artist Diane Speight to dialogue once more with a masterpiece from the past, connecting her artistic practice rooted in the use of found materials and hand-sewn papers to reflect on memories and family connections (see figs. 1 and 2). The Needlewoman, believed to date from sometime between 1640 and 1650, is a rare genre scene from Diego de Velázquez's mature period. Its unfinished state—most visible in the woman's hands—provides a special chance to marvel at his artistic practice. Art historian Jonathan Brown draws our attention to the pentimenti or visible corrections—seen in the hands, at the lower left of [End Page 5] the woman's hair, and around the neckline of her dress. Brown notes as well that though such lowcut bodices were prohibited in 1639 by royal decree, the informal nature of the painting and the likelihood that the anonymous sitter was part of the painter's household make it plausible that she wore this costume in casual defiance of the sumptuary law (118).

For those of us ever enthralled by the comedias de capa y espada of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, we can give free reign to our imagination and conjure Velázquez's anonymous sitter from the mid-seventeenth century, in quotidian life, as a flesh-and-blood Doña Ángela, concocting adventures outside the walls of her home. After all, lexicographers remind us there is more to a needlewoman's handiwork than meets the casual observer's eye: aguja, the "instrumento sutil y delgado de acero con que se cosen las ropas" (Covarrubias), invites connections to its Latin root of acus, for a needle or pin, and, from there, to the masculine acer and feminine acris, mobilized to signify a sharp wit or keen mental faculties (Oxford Latin Dictionary). As we continue to marvel at the intricacies and intertextual connections that the early modern Hispanic world presents the readers of this journal, we are grateful for the artists who labor among us to bring joy, beauty, and consolation when we most need it.