My professional activity as a teacher covered the literature of the Spanish Golden Age and was spread over forty-five years from 1933 until my retirement in 1978. Calderon figured more prominently than any other Golden Age writer in my publications, beginning with my first book in 1943. Never my exclusive interest, he always remained the dominant one. It was my intention to dedicate the leisure that retirement would bring me to rounding off my critical interpretation of his drama by completing my study of his comedias, or plays for the public and palace theatres.

Rapidly deteriorating eyesight, however, left me within three years unable to read or write. Shortly before my retirement I announced my intention of writing a book with the title that the present one bears, and was granted a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation of New York for the furtherance of this project. Overtaken by partial blindness, I thought this could never be fulfilled, but when I found that I could complete another unfinished book that I had on the stocks by means of dictation and the help of readers, I realised that I had perhaps been too pessimistic. Nonetheless, the project I had had in mind seemed too vast to attempt in that way.

I saw a possible way out of my difficulty when the Cambridge University Press offered to publish my collected papers on Calderón, if I could find a suitable editor.