Although this study of Spanish Golden–Age drama is underpinned by the traditional scholarly values of close reading of play–texts and knowledge of the world into which they were brought, it is buttressed by modern critical theory. Much of this theory, whether it be sociological, psychoanalytical, or feminist in inspiration, has been produced in the last few decades. Applying insights of thinkers who are more or less our contemporaries to plays written 400 or so years ago can and should be seen as raising certain problems, and yet this issue of anachronism is one that is habitually and frustratingly eschewed by many of the scholars who have approached the comedia via modern theory. Hispanic journals are littered with articles that will in time be seen to have reflected the narrow demands of post-structuralist fashion rather than to have shed light upon the ideas and ideologies of the SpanishSiglo de Oro. Several are the influential scholars who have inveighed against the indiscriminate application of modern approaches to Golden-Age literature, with reasoned arguments or appeals to common sense and traditional values. Perhaps the most problematic issue is ‘the attribution of anti–authoritarian attitudes’ to Golden–Age writers (Close, Comic Mind, p. 3). We want the artists we admire from former times to think like we do and we focus sharply on any examples of their likemindedness or modernity while leaving the full picture somewhat blurred.

Literary criticism, of course, has always dated. Anthony Close sees his position as a modern scholar writing on old texts as intrinsically compromised, but asserts positively that there is a purpose still in attempting to understand the culture in which a writer operated. In Parker's words comedia scholars should try to, ’understand a play in the light of the world view prevalent in the dramatist‘s own time’ (Mind and Art, p. 361), but they cannot elude their own epoch, as Parker himself admits. Interpreters do not exist in a vacuum and will judge texts consciously and unconsciously, weaving their own narratives around and through them. If Close's studies on the critical fortunes of Don Quijote have taught us anything, it is that scholars and thinkers appropriate writers’ works willy–nilly to justify their own world view, for broadly political reasons or to satisfy the ethos of their own times. There are trends in criticism as there are in literature.