La creación del mundo on the Seventeenth-century Street and Stage Available to Purchase

By 1629 there were two comedias entitled La creación del mundo in the repertoires of Golden Age acting troupes, one by Lope de Vega and the other by Luis Vélez de Guevara. From the texts of the plays, one a printed edition and the other a manuscript, and perhaps especially from the stage directions included in these playtexts, it is possible to make some tentative deductions about how and where these works—dramatizing the early chapters of the Old Testament Book of Genesis—were performed. Analysis of archival documentation from Badajoz together with these two playtexts and an awareness of performance norms of the period may help solve the riddle of which Creación came first, Lope’s or Vélez’s.