This Companion is intended to be an up-to-date and reliable guide to the extraordinary flowering of Spanish theatre between the late sixteenth century and about 1680. It provides an account of the nature and development of this theatre from the time when the first permanent playhouses were created in Spain until the death of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the last major playwright of the time – a hundred-year period which Spaniards justifiably call their artistic Siglo de Oro.

Although Golden Age theatre is studied as part of university Spanish courses and tends to be admired and highly valued by those who have read or seen plays from the period, it is not a well-known area of European culture beyond the academy. The reasons for this are several: in Spain, the drama, which became known as the comedia nueva (or simply the comedia), has been successively, although never universally, mistrusted, rejected as formally inept, re-written, abused for political purposes, and misunderstood. It is not possible to talk of a performance tradition for the comedia the way it is for English or French drama of the same period. Abroad, despite the attentions of pockets of admirers in different parts and in different periods, it has tended to suffer because of its foreignness: the polymetric poetry in which it was written (in which verse forms change, often to suit different speakers or circumstances) is an obstacle to successful translation, and the concerns of the plots have seemed to some to be rather particular to Spain. In recent years, however, both within and outside Spain, there is some evidence of a renaissance in Golden Age theatre, and the more consistent testing of these plays on the stage, and the renewed interest which accompanies it, should begin to erode the misconceptions and ignorance that so often surround them.

A Companion is not strictly a history and this one is no exception. Fine literary histories of Spanish Golden Age drama already exist as single volumes or parts of a larger series. A good Companion should be simultaneously authoritative and individual. This may at first seem a contradictory notion but a guide must have a foundation built on a body of knowledge and analysis that is already there and has played a central part in past thinking about its subject. A simple example should demonstrate this point: it is true that a small number of plays from the Spanish Golden Age have come to represent – some would say misrepresent – the whole of the period's drama, and it would be a perverse guide which ignored these fundamental works.