Tres Comedias Modernas / en un acto y en prosa

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Chuck Greif, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Transcriber's note: The accentuation of the Spanish words has not been modernized.
EDITED WITH NOTES AND VOCABULARY
United States Naval Academy
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1909,
December, 1925
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
It is hoped that this collection of modern Spanish comedies may be found useful as a contrast to the heavier reading material provided by the Spanish novel and short story. The novel should be studied in our courses as the great literary achievement of Nineteenth Century Spain; the short story, because it possesses the virtue of concentration. But Spanish prose, whether of the novel or the short story, offers peculiar difficulties to the English-speaking student. The periodic sentence, a surfeit of qualifying epithets, inversion, rhetorical and sententious monologues (cf. Galdos's novels), and, in the longer novels, complication and elaboration of plot, are obstacles in the way of the student's appreciation of the real beauties of this literature.
The language of these prose comedies, slightly embellished as all literary expression must be, is that used in conversation by the Spaniard of to-day, and on that account should prove valuable in furnishing the student with those living idioms and constructions that are rarely found in the longer novels.
In deference to American propriety, an occasional word or two, and in two cases entire scenes, have been omitted. In La Muela del Juicio one scene has been omitted and another shortened on account of the presence of dialect; elsewhere, with a few exceptions, dialect forms have been given their Castilian equivalents. These changes have in no wise affected the plot or general interest of the plays.