Abstract

This essay presents the main textual problems of Lope de Vega’s plays, an enormous corpus that demands different and complementary methodological approaches. The first part takes into account and evaluates the most important textual typologies of the extant plays (the partes de comedias, printed editions of twelve plays; the autograph manuscripts; other printed and manuscript testimonies, each one of them dealing with their own challenges to the scholar). The second part examines two characteristic questions issued in the edition of Lope’s plays: the instability of the concept of the author’s last wish; the difficulties raised by the critical reconstruction of a non-authorised text whose only testimonies have clear marks of interventions due to the staging of the plays. Last, the essay briefly focuses on the significance and specificity of editing early modern theatrical texts.