Taken as a whole, the essays in this volume represent a preliminary step in exploring Hispanic drama of the early modern period, mindful of the fact that theater on both sides of the Atlantic was "stimulated by the abundance and wonder of the Americas, and cannot be understood without the gold, silver, chocolate, pineapple, birds, colors, and flavors of the laboratory of the New World" (Ortega 2002, 9). This volume successfully encompasses and reflects critically relevant, actual issues of memory, identity, ceremony, and power in an ebb-and-flow effect from shore to shore, and demonstrates how both the New and Old Worlds were performed, imagined, codified, and allegorized as they were empirically understood.