From a very early stage, the Portuguese education system decided to include Gil Vicente’s work in secondary school programmes, treating it primarily as a literary monument and a document of the history of mentalities. Only recently has the primacy of theatre been restored, and this edition has been prepared accordingly.

Texts were selected which, at the time of publication, were on the syllabuses of the various years of secondary education, giving priority to their specificity as theatre objects. The transcription tries to take account of the phonetic realisation of the language at the time of the author; using, as far as possible, the orthographic standard in force in 2000.