SOURCE: A review of La doble historia del Doctor Valmy, in Hispania, Vol. 80, No. 4, December, 1997, pp. 807–08.

In the following essay, Halsey lauds Barry Jordan's analysis of Buero Vallejo's La doble historia del Doctor Valmy.

Jordan's edition [of Buero Vallejo's La doble historia del Doctor Valmy] forms part of Manchester's Hispanic Texts series, which aims to select works that “contribute to a fuller understanding of the societies in which they were written.” The text continues the tradition of text-book editions of contemporary plays largely lost in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, when companies such as Appleton-Century-Crofts and Scribners published editions of plays by Casona, Buero and Sastre that quickly became classics for intermediate reading and undergraduate literature courses. What better way to introduce the student to Spain's people and history than through the theater of such writers?

In his fifty-page introduction, Jordan begins with the play's...