Abstract The objective of this study is to answer the question: Do the central nodes of a social network of characters correspond with the protagonists of a theater play? To answer this question we evaluate different measures of centrality along with other textual quantitative values in relation to other manually annotated metadata on a corpus of twenty five dramatic plays of the Spanish theatre of the Silver Age (1868-1936). The found results show that centrality correlates moderately with importance, but the correlation with the textual quantitative values is stronger.