Tres Comedias Modernas / en un acto y en prosa

by Mariano Barranco; Luis Cocat; Heliodoro Criado y Baca; Miguel Ramos Carrión

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1909,

December, 1925

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

• [LA MUELA DEL JUICIO]
  • [ESCENA PRIMERA, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV, ] [XV, ] [XVI, ] [XVII, ] [XVIII, ] [XIX, ] [XX, ] [XXI, ] [XXII, ] [ESCENA ÚLTIMA]
• [LAS SOLTERONAS]
  • [ESCENA PRIMERA, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [ESCENA ÚLTIMA]
    
• [LOS PANTALONES]
  
  • [ESCENA PRIMERA, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV, ] [XV, ] [ESCENA ÚLTIMA, ]
• [NOTES]
  
• [VOCABULARY]
  

PREFACE

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.