Salas Barbadillo’s «La escuela de Celestina», or the Interrupted Heritage

Little has been written on La escuela de Celestina y el hidalgo presumido (1620), one of the few comedies penned by Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo. In this essay I read this piece as part of a tradition of parodies of the famous academic exercises known as gallos and vejámenes, so frequent in the universities of the time. Through humorous inversion, Salas leads us to formulate new questions on the role of high culture, on the nature of true knowledge and, ultimately, on the transmission of specific literary myths —a transmission that is here interrupted by the rewriting of the Celestinesque characte