Eight Dramas of Calderón

Choosing such less famous plays as still seemed to me suited to English taste, and to that form of verse in which our dramatic passion prefers to run, I have, while faithfully trying to retain what was fine and efficient, sunk, reduced, altered, and replaced, much that seemed not; simplified some perplexities; and curtailed or omitted scenes that seemed to mar the breadth of general effect, supplying such omissions by some lines of after-narrative; and in some measure have tried to compensate for the fulness of sonorous Spanish, which Saxon English at least must forgo, by a compression which has its own charm to Saxon ears. - Advertisement.