This room begins with Gil Vicente at the threshold between medieval dramatic forms and Renaissance court performance. Its first volume preserves four complete plays in Portuguese with Aubrey F. G. Bell's 1920 English translation and scholarly apparatus.

The room is not “Portuguese theatre complete.” Future coverage should include later Portuguese drama, Brazilian theatre, African and Asian Portuguese-language performance, women playwrights, popular and musical forms, and the multilingual stages on which Portuguese has never spoken alone.