Lists of Calderon's plays can be found amongst the digital resources that have been and are being created to support study of his life and works, notably, for his fulllength comedias, Fausta Antonucci's Calderón Digital (http://calderondigital.unibo. it). This resource provides reliable and useful information about the plays listed to date. For the autos sacramentales, the GRISO team at the Universidad de Navarra have been publishing the eighty or so extant texts since the early 1990s, along with useful complementary volumes that elucidate the Corpus Christi drama (https://www.unav.edu/web/griso/proyectos/autos-sacramentales-completos-de-calderon-de-la-barca). Isabel Hernando Morata, of the GIC team at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, provides a focal point for digital resources on her site, Calderón en red (https://calderonenred.wordpress.com/author/calderonenred/). This site is very useful for discovering where Calderon's plays – comedias and autos – were first published and for expediting access to early manuscripts and editions that are available for consultation on other sites. In print, the most up-to-date general bibliography of the comedias is Cruickshank's entry for Calderon in Pablo Jauralde Pou, Delia Gavela and Pedro C. Rojo Alique (eds), Diccionario filológico de la literatura española (siglo XVII), 2 vols (Madrid: Castalia, 2010), I, pp. 172–232.

The plays that are extant were mainly published in a series of partes, twelve plays to a volume, as Garcia-Reidy explains in Chapter 3, this volume. See also Cruickshank, Chapter 1 (this volume) and his full listing of the Calderon partes, as well as the ‘Diferentes’ and ‘Escogidas’ partes that contain plays by Calderon and his elucidation of their complex publishing history, in the above-cited Diccionario (pp. 172–6).

Here we include a list of the works written by Calderon that are mentioned in this Companion. This comprises comedias, autos and other dramatic or occasional writings but it is not a complete list of his works. (Contributors have mentioned nearly 100 comedias of the 140 or so that we know of – including lost plays and those written in collaboration – while fewer than half of the extant autos are listed.)

The fact that Golden Age drama is written in verse is the first thing that a student will notice when beginning to read a play from the period. However, versification is the least discussed of the important aspects of the comedia nueva. Poetic drama has not been in fashion for some time and can seem daunting to a new reader, especially when it is polymetric (i.e. using a variety of verse forms) and clearly lacks the uniformity of appearance of French classical and Shakespearean drama. Its polymetry has probably acted as an obstacle to the performance of Golden Age theatre both in Spain, where uncertainty about how to speak the verse has been evident, and in other countries, where verse acts as an impediment to translators.

In fact, once the few rules outlined below have been digested, it is not difficult, even for an inexperienced reader, to tell verse forms apart on the page. What is harder to recover is the Golden Age audience's apparent ability to hear changes in metre and form and thus be sensitive to the shifts of mood and other subtleties that came with them. Verse forms often changed with the end of a salida or ‘scene’, that is after the stage had briefly emptied, or with a change in the status or objective of the speaker, or in the mood of the dialogue. They do not always have the same functions, and as fashions and personal predilections changed so different dramatists favoured different forms at different times, to the extent that many of Lope de Vega's plays have been fairly reliably dated by the preponderance of certain types of verse within them. Calderon had his own preferences and habits when composing the verses of his plays, some shared with the other playwrights of the generation that followed Lope.

Inevitably, the starting place for the discussion of this issue is Lope's poetic ‘defence’ of his new kind of theatre, the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo of 1609, in which the following lines of advice occur: