Spanish Golden Age scholars value the publication of the sixth volume in the collection of Lope de Vega's autos sacramentales, coordinated by GRISO (Grupo de Investigación Siglo de Oro). The volume contains the critical editions of two sacramental plays, Los acreedores del Hombre, edited by Daniele Crivellari and J. Enrique Duarte, and Del pan y del palo, edited by Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo. These two pieces were first printed in a compilation of Lope de Vega's sacramental plays titled Fiestas del Santísimo Sacramento (Saragossa, 1644), which might explain the decision to publish them together in a single volume. They were both accompanied in the princeps by a loa and entremés of uncertain authorship that have not been included in the present edition. As in previous volumes of the series, each play is preceded by a brief introduction and a bibliography, whereas a list of the testimonies and variants follow the edition of the text itself. In the absence of other relevant previous testimonies, the editors have chosen the princeps as the base text for the edition of the autos, using posterior testimonies solely for the correction of errors.

The allegorical construction of Los acreedores del Hombre (ca. 1620) revolves around the metaphor of the inability of mankind to settle the debt of the original sin, aiming to celebrate the dogma of the Redemption more than the Eucharist itself. Aside from a brief state of the question of previous critical approaches to the auto, and a plot summary, the introduction consists mainly of an exemplary formal and textual analysis of the play. The state of the question highlights the unequal appreciation of the piece by former critics, and the debate surrounding the authorship of an auto with the same title (BNE MS 15.168) attributed to Francisco Rojas Zorrilla. Since the auto has received limited critical attention, it would have been desirable to include the editors’ personal interpretation and commentary of the play. The impeccable and meticulously annotated critical edition of this previously neglected sacramental play is the editors’ main contribution to the field. The numerous footnotes attempting to clarify the allegorical significance of the auto's abundant juridical terms were particularly useful.

As other Lopean autos such as Las bodas entre el Alma y el Amor divino, the allegory of Del pan y del palo is based on the biblical metaphor of the wedding between Christ and the soul, an appropriate choice for an auto that was written in 1612 to celebrate the Corpus festivities in Madrid a few months after Spain and France had negotiated the nuptials of the future Felipe IV and Ana of Austria, son and daughter of King Philip III of Spain, to Isabel de Borbón and Louis XIII of France respectively. This connection with current events is confirmed by the indirect allusions to a royal wedding detected in the play by González Pedroso in 1865. Regarding the religious content of the auto, references to the Eucharist can be found not only in the title of the piece, but also in abundant metaphors identifying God with the Lamb and the Bread.

Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo, the editor of this play, starts her introduction dating the piece and providing a summary of its performance history, consisting of three well-documented representations in Madrid (1612), Seville (1614), and Valencia (1616). A textual error detected in the princeps by González Pedroso could indicate the existence of another undocumented performance in 1629. Also included in the introduction are a summary of the action, a brief state of the question, a metrical analysis, and a textual history of the play. Since the princeps is the only surviving testimony from the seventeenth century and all the subsequent printed editions have used it as the base text, the delineation of a stemma is unnecessary, as Ulla Lorenzo indicates. The absence of other old testimonies has rendered it impossible to responsibly correct all the errors found in the princeps, many of which Ulla Lorenzo has maintained with commentaries in the notes of the present edition.

Our compliments to GRISO for another commendable contribution to textual criticism and for providing reliable texts to scholars interested in developing serious secondary scholarship on two sacramental plays that have previously received scarce critical attention.