Note 719 — Chapter XXV

The habit of using too freely the works of their predecessors was common on the Spanish stage from an early period. Cervantes says, in 1617, (Persiles, Lib. III. c. 2), that some companies kept poets expressly to new-vamp old plays; and so many had done it before him, that Cañizares seems to have escaped censure, though nobody, certainly, had gone so far.