Lope de Vega

Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635), Spain's greatest dramatist, wrote so many plays that Cervantes called him "Nature's mental colossus." Among his sources were history, folklore, saints' lives, the Bible, New World travel reports, mythology, and contemporary events.

Lope de Vega was born in Madrid on Dec. 12, 1562. King Philip II had recently named Madrid capital of the vast Spanish Empire; soon it became an international center swarming with bureaucrats, diplomats, grandees, hidalgos, soldiers, poets, dramatists, actors, actresses, thugs, picaros, judges, magistrates, wild-eyed dreamers, and foreigners from nearly everywhere.

In Lope's childhood, plays were given in corrales, or open courtyards, owned by religious societies. These societies rented their courtyards to producers of plays; the income was used to care for the old and the indigent, thus early identifying Spanish drama with ecclesiastical philanthropy. By the time of Lope's young adulthood, plays at the Corral of the Cross and the Corral of the Prince were attracting eager audiences. With the increasing demand for comedias, other corrales opened in Madrid, Seville, Toledo, Valencia, Granada, Cordova, Barcelona, and Valladolid. Spanish show business grew apace, and playwrights found a ready sale for their products; but throughout Spain for several decades the favorite dramatist was Lope de Vega. The number of Lope's plays has been estimated to be from 700 to 2, 200 (current opinion favors the lesser figure).

His Life

Lope was a well-educated man, intellectually a product of the schools and universities of his day. Yet one wonders when he found time to acquire his education in view of the time consumed by his devotion to his two great passions, literature and love. From early youth - he said he wrote his first play at age 12 - literature and his series of liaisons gave him a turbulent life. His first known entanglement, with Elena Osorio, lasted 4 years and ended in 1587, when he distributed scurrilous verse about her; for this he was imprisoned and banished from Madrid for 8 years. But the affair supplied him with subject matter for one of his masterpieces, La Dorotea, published 3 years before his death.

The year following his break with Elena Osorio, Lope abducted Isabel de Urbina, daughter of a distinguished Madrid family. Soon separated, they were married by proxy. There is evidence that in 1588 he also served with the Spanish Armada in its disastrous encounter with the English fleet. Still banished from Madrid, he and Isabel went to live in Valencia, where Isabel died in 1594.

In Lope's life, liaison followed liaison. He initiated an important affair with Micaela de Luján - called "Camila Lucinda" in his poetry - who bore him several children, among them Marcela, who became a nun, and Lope Félix.

Lope's second marriage, in 1598, motivated by his poverty, was to Juana de Guardo, daughter of a meat and fish wholesaler. From his new father-in-law he hoped in vain to receive fiscal relief. This loveless marriage lasted until 1613, when Juana died in childbirth. The following year Lope became a priest; he tried to live a chaste life, but his attempts proved to be ineffectual. Three more mistresses are known to have entered his life: Jerónima de Burgos in 1613; Lucia de Salcedo, "La Loca, " in 1616; and in 1617 the greatest and deepest love of his life, Marta de Nevares, his inamorata until her death in 1632.

Marta de Nevares, called "Amarilis" in his poetry, seemed to Lope to be the ideal woman he had spent his life searching for. In her middle 20s, she flattered him with the gift of her youth and beauty, and she was in turn flattered by his great fame. His letters and his verse tell how he idolized her. In one letter to the Duke of Sessa, his patron, he wrote, "At last I have found the physician for my wounds." But Marta had a husband, "a brutish man, " according to Lope, who became more and more jealous, finally bringing Lope and Marta before an ecclesiastical court. For weeks the scandal of the trial filled Lope and Marta with anguish. In his letters Lope lashed out diatribes at the man, Roque Hernández, alleging that "the hair on his body begins at his eyes and ends at his toes." Marta, fully as much as Lope, wanted to be rid of the man to whom her parents had married her against her wishes. Besides, she was pregnant with Lope's child. After prolonged labor, the child was born and baptized Antonia Clara. When, soon afterward, an unsuccessful attempt was made on Lope's life, he blamed Hernández. During the lengthy litigation Roque Hernández died. In a letter to the Duke of Sessa, Lope expressed savage joy at the news. Marta then moved with their daughter to Lope's house. In the same household lived Feliciana, daughter of his second wife, Juana, and Lopito, natural son of Micaela de Luján - a singular household for a priest.

When a string of catastrophes struck his household, Lope felt it to be divine punishment for his transgressions. The first catastrophe was Marta's blindness in 1620. Then was added the crushing burden of her temporary insanity and in 1632 her death. Two years later Lopito drowned; the same year a Madrid hidalgo abducted Antonia Clara, his and Marta's beloved teen-age daughter.

Aggressive and growing competition from younger playwrights disheartened Lope professionally. The audience's tastes were changing, leaving him somewhat behind the times. In his last days professional frustration as well as personal grief, melancholy, and remorse enveloped him. His sense of contrition was so strong that he flagellated himself regularly, following a medieval practice of atonement. He died on Aug. 27, 1635.

Lope's Drama

"The man who attempts to write according to [classic Aristotelian] rules known to so few people will fail financially. When I sit down to write a play, I lock up the rules with six keys and drive Plautus and Terence out of my study to stop their howling. I keep an eye on the box office, and because the common man pays the piper, I pipe the tune he likes." These words come from Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609; New Art of Playwriting). It is clear that Lope wrote primarily for the common man; and to judge by the structure and content of what he wrote, the common man ordered the three-act form; disavowal of Aristotle's rules; the presence of a comic (gracioso) to enliven the play with playful, boisterous, or farcical humor often parodying serious lines; verse rather than prose; and a rapid succession of scenes, complex intrigues, and subplots in preference to unified character development.

Lope's audiences demanded plays dealing with honor, religion, love, history (both national and foreign), and Spain's own epic and ballad material. Of all these, Lope said, plays about el honor pleased playgoers most of all. Possibly no word in the language occurred more frequently in the comedias of the period - not even amor.

In Spain custom required women to guard the family honor according to a complex and stringent set of rules which were contradictory and obscure. Even so, on the stage, honor was presented as something to be cherished as life itself; when honor was sullied, it should be "washed in blood." Duels to the death acted out on the stage were standard fare, and fencing skill was indispensable training for all actors.

The upper classes claimed exclusive possession of honor, but Lope ascribed it as well to the common man. In his best-known play, Fuenteovejuna, he exalts the sense of honor of the peasants of the village of Fuenteovejuna who rose in rebellion against an arrogant young governor (comendador) who considered peasants barely above cattle. Becoming predatory toward the young peasant women, he precipitated a violent revolt in which the villagers stormed his palace and slew him - all done in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella. When the Catholic Sovereigns sent a judge to punish the offenders, he followed the current practice of torturing witnesses to obtain evidence. The judge's question and the villagers' answer are famous in Spanish drama: "Who killed the Comendador?" "Fuenteovejuna, señor." Even women and children withstood the torture. Because the insurrection was instigated and consummated in the name of monarchy, Fuenteovejuna was given reprieve, and Lope himself evaded prosecution by the lynx-eyed government authorities, always on the alert for signs of insurgency. Many times over, Lope portrayed noble peasants in plays such as El rústico del cielo (ca. 1605; The Saintly Peasant), Peribáñez (1610), and El mejor alcalde el rey (ca. 1622; The King the Greatest Mayor).

A large number of Lope's plays were based on saints' lives and dramatic - and sometimes sentimental - stories from ancient tradition. Lo fingido verdadero (ca. 1608; From Make-believe to Reality) depicts a playwrightactor, Ginés, commanded by Emperor Diocletian to put on a play ridiculing the new sect of dissenters called Christians. In complying with the Emperor's wishes, Ginés feigns Christianity with such fervor that he is caught up in its spirit and miraculously converted, even though conversion means swift execution.

La buena guarda (ca. 1610; The Erring Nun) portrays a young treasurer of a convent who, before running away with a lover, devoutly commends herself to the Virgin Mary and leaves the treasury keys on the Virgin's altar. When the nun returns, shattered from her experience and repentant, she finds the keys where she had left them and her absence unnoticed - the Virgin Mary had substituted for her to save her from disgrace.

Because of the intimate union of Church and monarchy in Lope's day, both institutions annually sponsored one-act Corpus Christi plays called autos sacramentales in order to exalt the significance of the Last Supper. This type of play regularly made use of allegory - depicting figures such as Sin, Beauty, Wisdom, Religion - and was written principally for an unlettered audience, although everyone from the king on down shared in their performance as spectators. Every major city staged new autos every year. The form reached its fullest flowering in the autos of Pedro Calderón, but those of Lope de Vega ran Calderon's a close second.

Although the autos from Calderón's pen were predominantly theological in theme and treatment, Lope's were more earthborn: he often incorporated popular themes and folksongs and ballads; a beautiful example is his La maya, festive and lyrical, based on a popular springtime festivity; others are El hijo pródigo (The Prodigal Son) from the Bible story, intensely human, and El heredero del cielo (The Heir of Heaven), based on the New Testament parable of the vineyard.

Among Lope's secular plays built on legend, Las famosas asturianas (ca. 1612; The Famous Asturian Women) is representative. The play dramatizes a moving incident alleged to have occurred in the centuries-long war between the Christians and Moors in Spain (711-1492). An Asturian woman, Sancha, roused the Christian troops to put an end to the monstrous tribute of 100 Christian girls annually delivered to the Moors. Sancha disrobed before her military escort and taunted them by declaring that her modesty was not compromised since she was "not in the presence of men." Stung to action by this insult, the Christians once again fought the Moors and stopped the infamous tribute forever.

Although Lope customarily wrote by formula, the variety of his characters strikes one with wonder. In El remedio en la desdicha (ca. 1600; Help in Adversity) he portrays gallant, romanticized Moors in contest with equally gallant and romanticized Christians. In La hermosa Ester (ca. 1610; Esther the Beautiful) he depicts sympathetically a Jewish protagonist from the Old Testament and contrasts her with the infamous Haman. In the notoriously sensational El prodigio de Etiopia (The Ethiopian Prodigy) the author portrays a white woman fulfilling her promise "to give her hand" to the Ethiopian emperor by severing her hand and tendering it to him. Partly because of the play's repugnant sensationalism, its authorship, like that of many other plays of the time also ascribed to Lope, has been called into question.

Nondramatic Works

Lope's greatest nondramatic work is La Dorotea (1632). This work, a novel in dialogue form interspersed with lyric verse, is a frank, largely autobiographical confession alternately sentimental, lyrical, extravagant, capricious, angry, and eloquent. He wrote voluminously in all genres: the pastoral novel La Arcadia (1598) presents contemporary celebrities thinly veiled under pseudonyms; the peripatetic novel El peregrino en su patria (1604; The Pilgrim in His Own Country) traces the starcrossed fate of two lovers; the devotional novel Los pastores de Belén (1612; The Shepherds of Bethlehem) revolves around a group of herdsmen gathered outside Bethlehem some weeks before the birth of Christ.

Lope wrote many pieces in the genres of epic and narrative poetry, both popular in his day. La Dragontea (1598; Drake the Pirate) distilled in verse an entire Spanish nation's animosity toward Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth I. The long poem La corona trágica (1627; The Tragic Crown) reflected strong sectarian solicitude for Catholic Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and, like Drake the Pirate, excoriated Elizabeth. Another epic poem, Jerusalén conquistada (1609; Jerusalem Regained), tells the story of the Third Crusade, pridefully including King Alfonso VIII of Castile, who never went; with this poem Lope hoped - in vain - to provide Spain with a national epic to rival Portugal's Lusiads (1572), by Luis de Camoëns.

Lope de Vega's lyric poetry is interlaced throughout his vast literary production, and on a number of occasions he anthologized it. Two such anthologies are Rimas humanas (1602; Human Poetry) and Rimas sacras (1614; Spiritual Poetry).

Further Reading

The most complete listing of English translations of Lope's work up to the year 1943 is in Remigio Ugo Pane, English Translations from the Spanish, 1484-1943: A Bibliography (1944). The best translation of Fuenteovejuna was made by Roy Campbell and is in Eric Bentley, ed., The Classic Theatre (4 vols., 1958-1961). The standard work on Lope in English for specialists is Hugo Albert Rennert, The Life of Lope de Vega, 1562-1635 (1904), and for the general reader, Francis C. Hayes, Lope de Vega (1967). A standard work on Spanish stagecraft is Hugo Albert Rennert, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (1909). See also William Carlton McCrary, The Goldfinch and the Hawk: A Study of Lope de Vega's Tragedy, El Caballero de Olmedo (1966). Recommended for historical background are Harold Victor Livermore, A History of Spain (1958; 2d ed. 1966), and John Armstrong Crow, Spain: The Root and the Flower; A History of the Civilization of Spain and of the Spanish People (1963).

For more information on Lope de Vega, visit Britannica.com.

Vega, Lope De (1562–1635), Spanish dramatist. Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, the best-known and most influential dramatist of Spain's Golden Age of literature, was known as the "Freak of Nature" for the astonishing quantity and quality of his poetry, drama, and prose. His greatest legacy was to establish the genre of the comedia, a secular three-act play that reached enormous popularity on the public stages of Spanish cities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Though Lope's family origins were humble, he soon drew attention for his unusual talents, being able to read Latin and compose poetry at an early age. He studied with the Jesuits in Madrid and at the University of Alcalá, served in a series of military expeditions, and performed occasional secretarial duties for a variety of marquises and dukes. Defining himself above all as a writer, he was one of the first Spanish playwrights to make a living from his art, although it generally brought him more fame than fortune.

Lope's life contained as much romance, adventure, and conflict as that of any of his fictional characters. He engaged in a series of tempestuous relationships, many of them adulterous, the earliest of which resulted in his exile from Castile for two years. He served on the ill-fated Armada expedition against England in 1588 and not only survived but composed poetry throughout the voyage. As a young man, Lope had considered the possibility of a religious calling, and he finally entered the priesthood in 1614 after the death of his second wife. He also served as an officer of the Inquisition and earned the favor of Pope Urban VIII. Passionately sensual and deeply religious, Lope often suffered the contradictions of his own personality. After his ordination, he continued to have a series of highly publicized affairs, and was said to have been in the habit of furiously scourging himself in penitence. He married twice and fathered more than a dozen children (legitimate and illegitimate). The turbulence of his life was echoed in his family: his last mistress suffered from blindness and fits of insanity, one of his daughters was seduced and abandoned, and a son who demonstrated great poetic talent suffered an untimely death at sea.

However unfortunate, the intensity of his personal experiences enriched Lope's art. Nearly all of the women with whom he was involved appeared in some incarnation in his poetic works: the "Filis" of his ballads was his first love, Elena Osorio; his first wife, Isabel de Urbina, appeared in verse as "Belisa"; Micaela de Luján, a longtime mistress, was immortalized in his sonnets as "Lucinda"; and "Amarilis" represented his last great love, Marta de Nevares. Lope's spiritual anguish was expressed most beautifully in his collection of sacred sonnets, Rimas sacras (1614; Sacred verses), and his best prose was encompassed in the largely autobiographical novel La Dorotea (1632).

As Lope's personal life was closely interwoven with his art, so was his literary career inseparable from the rise of the dramatic genre known as the comedia. Drama in sixteenth-century Spain had roots in a variety of traditions including classical Latin plays, medieval liturgical ceremony, folk traditions, and the Italian commedia dell'arte. Lope drew on all of these to create the comedia, mixing popular and erudite elements, favoring action and clever dialogue over character development, and disregarding the traditional distinction between comedy and tragedy. Though he was well trained in traditional literary techniques and the classic unities of time, place, and action, he argued that these were irrelevant to audiences who simply wished to be entertained. In 1609, he published The New Art of Writing Plays in Our Time, a tongue-in-cheek treatise written for the Academy of Madrid in which he criticized the uneducated tastes of the common people but argued that the style of popular drama must yield to the "tyranny of the audience." This approach was scorned by those who defended the Aristotelian precepts of drama, but it won Lope the adoration of the public. His dramatic career coincided with the opening of a number of public stages in cities across Spain, and under his guidance, the comedia gained enormous popularity and became the standard dramatic form of the Golden Age.

Lope claimed to have written nearly two thousand comedias, of which approximately five hundred survive. With a rich variety of subjects drawn from history, romance, religion, mythology, and adventure, their themes always reflected the principal concerns of early modern Spaniards: the tensions between love and honor, power and responsibility, and the individual and society. In a world very sensitive to status, Lope frequently demonstrated his sympathy for those who were excluded from the ranks of wealth and power. Fuenteovejuna (1614; The sheep well), Peribáñez (1621) and El mejor alcalde, el rey (1621; The best magistrate, the king), all portrayed the dignity and honor of rural villagers struggling against the tyranny and corruption of the nobility. Similarly, in plays such as El perro del hortelano (1613; The dog in the manger), Lope's spirited female characters resisted the expectations of the patriarchal world in which they found themselves (though his conclusions always reinforced the necessity of socially acceptable marriage). All of Lope's plays dealt with these themes in a vivid, energetic, and spontaneous style, demonstrating his preference for the passions and conflicts of real life over the academic abstractions and ideals favored by many of his contemporaries.

Lope's genius was best expressed in drama and lyric poetry, but he composed in nearly every literary genre, including sonnets, epic poems, prose, fables, treatises, short stories, and novels. In spite of his talent, his humble origins (and perhaps his scandalous behavior) prevented him from earning the patronage of the court that he had always hoped for, and he faced financial difficulties throughout his lifetime. This talent did, however, earn him the love of his audiences, both in his own time and in the centuries since his death, and it has guaranteed him a place among the greatest figures in literary history.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Vega, Lope de. La Dorotea. Translated and edited by Alan S. Trueblood and Edwin Honig. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.

——. Five Plays. Translated by Jill Booty. Edited with an introduction by R. D. F. Pring-Mill. New York, 1961. Translations of five of Lope's best-known plays: Peribáñez, Fuenteovejuna, El perro del hortelano, El caballero de Olmedo, and El castigo sin venganza.

——. Obras completas de Lope de Vega, edited by Jesús Gómez and Paloma Cuenca. Madrid, 1993.

Secondary Sources

Hayes, Francis C. Lope de Vega. New York, 1967.

Rennert, Hugo Albert. The Life of Lope de Vega (1562– 1635). New York, 1937.

—JODI CAMPBELL

Quotes:

"Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because the most benevolent price of advice can turn out badly."

"There is no greater glory than love, nor any great punishment than jealously."

"Take every gain without showing remorse about missed profits, because an eel may escape sooner than you think."

"Profits on the exchange are the treasures of goblins. At one time they may be carbuncle stones, then coals, then diamonds, then flint stones, then morning dew, then tears."

For the municipality in the Philippines, see Lope de Vega, Northern Samar.

Lope de Vega
Portrait of Lope de Vega
Born	25 November 1562(1562-11-25) Madrid, Spain
Died	27 August 1635 (aged 72) Madrid, Spain
Occupation	Poet, playwright
Literary movement	Baroque
Notable work(s)	Fuente Ovejuna The Dog in the Manger La Arcadia

Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (usually called simply Lope de Vega) (Madrid, 25 November 1562 – 27 August 1635) was one of the most important playwright and poets of the Spanish Golden Century Baroque literature. His reputation in the world of Spanish letters is second only to that of Cervantes, while the sheer volume of his literary output is unequalled, making him one of the most prolific authors in world literature.

Nicknamed "The Phoenix of Wits" and "Monster of Nature" (because of the sheer volume of his work) by Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega renewed the spanish theatre at a time when it was starting to become a mass cultural phenomenon. He defined the key characteristics of it, and along with Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina, he took spanish baroque theatre to its greater limits. Because of the insight, depth and ease of his plays, he is regarded among the best dramatists of western literature, his plays still being represented worldwide. He was also one of the best lyric poets in the Spanish language, and author of various novels. Although not well known in the English-speaking world, his plays were represented in England as late as the 1660s, when diarist Samuel Pepys recorded assisting to some adaptations and translations of them, although he omits mentioning the author.

He is attributed some 3,000 sonets, 3 novels, 4 novellas, 9 epic poems, and about 1,800 plays. Although the quality of all of them is not the same, at least 80 of his plays are considered masterpieces. A friend to Quevedo and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, the sheer of his lifework made him envied by not only contemporary authors such as Cervantes and Góngora, but also by many others; for instance, Goethe once wished he had been able to produce such a vast and colourful work ^[1].

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Exile 1.2 Return 2 Work 2.1 Background 2.2 Themes and sources 2.3 Legacy 3 List of works 3.1 Plays 3.2 Opera 3.3 Poems 3.4 Prose fiction 4 References 4.1 Notes 4.2 Sources 5 External links

Life

Lope de Vega was born in Madrid to a family of undistinguished origins, recent arrivals in the capital from Valle de Carriedo in Cantabria, whose breadwinner, Félix de Vega, was an embroiderer.

The first indications of young Lope's genius became apparent in his earliest years. At the age of five he was already reading Spanish and Latin, by his tenth birthday he was translating Latin verse, and he wrote his first play when he was 12.

His fourteenth year found him enrolled in the Colegio Imperial, a Jesuit school in Madrid, from which he absconded to take part in a military expedition in Portugal. Following that escapade, he had the good fortune of being taken into the protection of the Bishop of Ávila, who recognized the lad's talent and saw him enrolled in the University of Alcalá. Following graduation Lope was planning to follow in his patron's footsteps and join the priesthood, but those plans were dashed by his falling in love and realizing that celibacy was not for him.

In 1583 Lope enlisted in the army, and he saw action with the Spanish Navy in the Azores. Following this he returned to Madrid and began his career as a playwright in earnest. He also began a love affair with Elena Osorio, an actress and the daughter of a leading theater owner. When, after some five years of this torrid affair, Elena spurned Lope in favor of another suitor, his vitriolic attacks on her and his family landed him in jail for libel and, ultimately, earned him the punishment of eight years' banishment from Castile.

Exile

He went into exile undaunted, in the company of the 16-year-old Isabel de Urbina, the daughter of a prominent advisor at the court of Philip II, whom he was subsequently forced to marry. A few weeks after their marriage, however, Lope signed up for another tour of duty with the Spanish navy: this was the summer of 1588, and the Invincible Armada was about to sail against England.

Lope's luck again served him well, and his ship, the San Juan, was one of the few vessels to make it home to Spanish harbors in the aftermath of that failed expedition. Back in Spain, he settled in the city of Valencia to live out the remainder of exile and to recommence, as prolifically as ever, his career as a dramatist.

In 1590 he was appointed to serve as the secretary to the Duke of Alba, which required him to relocate to Toledo.

Return

Lope's house in Madrid (1610–1635).

In 1595, following Isabel's death, he left the Duke's service and – eight years having passed – returned to Madrid. There were other love affairs and other scandals: Antonia Trillo de Armenta, who earned him another lawsuit, and Micaela de Luján, who inspired a rich series of sonnets and rewarded him with four children. In 1598 he married Juana de Guardo, the daughter of a wealthy butcher. Nevertheless, his trysts with others – including Micaela – continued.

The 1600s were the years when Lope's literary output reached its peak. He was also employed as a secretary, but not without various additional duties, by the Duke of Sessa. Once that decade was over, however, his personal situation took a turn for the worse. His favorite son, Carlos Félix (by Juana), died and, in 1612, Juana herself died in childbirth. Micaela also disappears from the history around this point. Deeply affected, Lope gathered his surviving children from both unions together under one roof.

His writing in the early 1610s also assumed heavier religious influences and, in 1614, he joined the priesthood.^[2] The taking of holy orders did not, however, impede his romantic dalliances, although it is somewhat unclear what role his employeer the duke, fearful of losing his secretary, played in this by supplying him with various female companions. The most notable and lasting of his relationships during this time was with Marta de Nevares, who would remain with him until her death in 1632.

Further tragedies followed in 1635 with the loss of Lope, his son by Micaela and a worthy poet in his own right, in a shipwreck off the coast of Venezuela, and the abduction and subsequent abandonment of his beloved youngest daughter Antonia. Lope de Vega took to his bed and died of Scarlet fever, in Madrid, on 27 August of that year.

Work

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Title page of El testimonio vengado.

A rapid survey of Lope's nondramatic works can begin with those published in Spain under the title Obras Sueltas (Madrid, 21 vols., 1776–79). The more important elements of this collection include the following:

• La Arcadia (1598), a pastoral romance, is one of the poet's most wearisome productions;
• La Dragontea (1598) is a fantastic history in verse of Sir Francis Drake's last expedition and death;
• El Isidro (1599) is a narrative of the life of Saint Isidore, patron saint of Madrid, composed in octosyllabic quintillas;
• La Hermosura de Angélica (1602), in three books, is a sort of continuation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

Lope de Vega is one of the greatest Spanish poets of his time, along with Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo. In the 1580s and 1590s his poems of moorish and pastoral themes were extremely popular, in part because Lope —who appears in these poems as a moor called Zaide or a shepherd called Belardo— portrayed elements of his own love affairs. In 1602 he published two hundred sonnets with his La Hermosura de Angélica and in 1604 he republished them with new material in his Rimas. In 1614 his religious sonnets appeared in a book entitled Rimas sacras, which was another huge bestseller. Finally, in 1634 a third book of similar name, Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos, which has been considered his masterpiece as a poet and the most modern poem book of the 17th century: Lope created a heteronym, Tomé de Burguillos, a poor scholar who is in love with a maid called Juana and who observes society from a cynical and disillusional position.

Background

It curious to note that he always treated the art of comedy-writing as one of the humblest of trades and protested against the supposition that in writing for the stage his aim was glory and not money. Spanish drama, if not literally the creation of Lope, at least owes him its definitive form – the three act comedia – regardless of the precepts of the prevailing school of his contemporaries. Lope accordingly felt bound to prove that from the point of view of literary art, he attached no value to the rustic traits of his humble age: in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609) – his artistic manifesto and the justification of his style, breaking the neoclassical three unities (place, time, and action) – Lope begins by showing that he knows as well as anyone the established rules of poetry, and then excuses himself for his inability to follow them on the ground that the "vulgar" Spaniard cares nothing about them: "Let us then speak to him in the language of fools, since it is he who pays us."

Lope belonged in literature to what may be called the school of good sense: he boasted that he was a Spaniard pur sang, steadfastly maintained that a writer's business is to write so as to make himself understood, and took the position of a defender of the language of ordinary life. Unfortunately, the books he read, his literary connections, and his fear of Italian criticism all exercised an influence upon his naturally robust spirit and, like so many others, he caught the prevalent contagion of mannerism and of pompous phraseology.

His literary culture was chiefly Latin-Italian and, while he defends the tradition of the nation and the pure simplicity of the old Castilian, he still did not wish to be taken for an uninformed person, a writer devoid of classical training: he especially emphasizes the fact that he has passed through university, and he continually accentuates the difference between those who know Latin and ignorant laymen.

Another reason for him to speak deprecatingly of his dramatic works was the fact that the vast majority of them were written in haste and to order. Lope does not hesitate to confess that "more than a hundred of my comedies have taken only twenty-four hours to pass from the Muses to the boards of the theatre." His biographer Pérez de Montalbán, a great admirer of this kind of cleverness, tells how on certain occasion in Toledo, Lope composed fifteen acts in as many days: that is to say, five entire comedies in two weeks.

In spite of some discrepancies in the figures, Lope's own records indicate that by 1604 he had composed, in round numbers, as many as 230 three-act plays (comedias). The figure had risen to 483 by 1609, to 800 by 1618, to 1000 by 1620, and to 1500 by 1632. Montalbán, in his Fama Póstuma (1636) set down the total of Lope's dramatic productions at 1800 comedias and more than 400 shorter sacramental plays. Of these 637 plays are known to us by their titles, but only the texts of some 450 are extant. Many of these pieces were printed during Lope's lifetime, either in compilations of works by various authors or as separate issues by booksellers who surreptitiously bought manuscripts from the actors or had the unpublished comedy written down from memory by persons they sent to attend the first performance. Therefore such pieces that do not figure in the collections published under Lope's own direction – or under that of his friends – cannot be regarded as perfectly authentic, and it would be unfair to hold their author responsible for all the faults and defects they exhibit.

Themes and sources

The classification of this enormous mass of dramatic literature is a task of great difficulty. The terms traditionally employed – comedy, tragedy, and the like, do not apply to Lope's oeuvre. Another approach to categorization is needed.In the first place, Lope's work essentially belongs to the drama of intrigue: be the subject what it may, it is always the plot that determines everything else. It is from history, Spanish history in particular, that Lope borrows more than from any other source. It would in fact be difficult to say what national and patriotic subjects, from the reign of the half-fabulous King Pelayo down to the history of his own age, he did not put upon the stage. Nevertheless, Lope's most celebrated plays belong to the class called capa y espada or "cloak and dagger", where the plots are almost always love intrigues complicated with affairs of honor, most commonly involving the petty nobility of medieval Spain.

Among the best known works of this class are El perro del hortelano (The Dog in the Manger), La viuda de Valencia (The Widow from Valencia), and El maestro de danzar. In some of these Lope strives to set forth some moral maxim and to illustrate its abuse by a living example. Thus, on the theme that poverty is no crime, we have the play entitled Las Flores de Don Juan. Here, he uses the history of two brothers to illustrate the triumph of virtuous poverty over opulent vice, while simultaneously (but indirectly) attacking the institution of primogeniture, which often places in the hands of an unworthy person the honor and substance of a family when the younger members would be much better qualified for the trust. Such morality pieces are, however, rare in Lope's repertory; generally, his sole aim is to amuse and stir his public, not troubling himself about its instruction. His focus remains fixed on the plot.

Legacy

Monument in Madrid (1902).

To sum up, Lope found a poorly organized drama: plays were composed sometimes in four acts, sometimes in three, and though they were written in verse, the structure of the versification was left far too much to the caprice of the individual writer. Because the Spanish public liked it, he adopted the style of drama then in vogue. Its narrow framework, however, he enlarged to an extraordinary degree, introducing everything that could possibly furnish material for dramatic situations: the Bible, ancient mythology, the lives of the saints, ancient history, Spanish history, the legends of the Middle Ages, the writings of the Italian novelists, current events, and everyday Spanish life in the 17th century. Prior to Lope, playwrights barely sketched the conditions of persons and their characters; with fuller observation and more careful description, Lope de Vega created real types and gave to each social order the language and accoutrements appropriate to it. The old comedy was awkward and poor in its versification; Lope introduced order into all the forms of national poetry, from the old romance couplets to the rarest lyrical combinations borrowed from Italy. He was thus justified in saying that those who should come after him had only to go on along the path which he had opened.

List of works

Plays

Listed here are some of the more well-known of Lope's plays:

• El maestro de danzar (1594) (The Dancing Master)
• El acero de Madrid (The Steel of Madrid)
• El perro del Hortelano ("The Dog in the Manger")
• La viuda valenciana (The Widow from Valencia)
• Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña
• Fuente Ovejuna
• El anzuelo de Fenisa
• El cordobés valeroso Pedro Carbonero
• El mejor alcade, el Rey (The Best Mayor, The King)
• El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus)
• El caballero de Olmedo (The Knight of Olmedo)
• La dama boba (The Stupid Lady; The Lady-Fool)
• El amor enamorado
• El castigo sin venganza (Justice Without Revenge)
• Las bizarrías de Belisa
• El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi (The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward)
• Lo Fingido Verdadero (What you Pretend Has Become Real)

Opera

• La selva sin amor (18 December 1627) (The Lovelorn Forest), first Spanish opera / zarzuela^[3]

Poems

• La Dragontea (1598) ("Drake the Pirate")
• El Isidro (1599) ("Isidro")
• La hermosura de Angélica (1602) ("The Beauty of Angelica")
• Rimas (1602) ("Rhymes")
• Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609)
• Jerusalén conquistada (1609)
• Rimas sacras (1614)
• La Filomena (1621)
• La Circe (1624)
• El laurel de Apolo (1630)
• La Gatomaquia (1634)
• Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (1634)

Prose fiction

• Arcadia (published 1598) (The Arcadia), pastoral romance in prose, interspersed with verse
• El peregrino en su patria (published 1604) (The Pilgrim in his Own Country), adaption of byzantine novels
• La Dorotea (published 1632)

References

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Wikisource has original text related to this article: Lope de Vega

Notes

1. ^ Cfr. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe: in 1828 Eckermann recorded having a conversation about the extent of author's works, in which Goethe expressed his admiration towards Lope's.
2. ^  "Félix de Lope de Vega Carpio". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/F%C3%A9lix_de_Lope_de_Vega_Carpio. 
3. ^ Melveena McKendrick: "Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700", p. 215. CUP Archive, 1992. ISBN 9780521429016

Sources

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Hayes, Francis C. (1967). Lope de Vega. Twayne's World Author Series. New York: Twayne Publishers. 

External links

• Works by Lope de Vega at Project Gutenberg
• Audiobooks. Read, listen along and download Lope de Vega's poetry in Spanish. Free at AlbaLearning

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