Lope de Vega

Lope de Vega
Portrait of Lope de Vega. Work attributed to Eugenio Cajés (c. 1627). (Lázaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid).
Born	Lope de Vega Carpio (1562-11-25)25 November 1562 Madrid, Spain
Died	27 August 1635(1635-08-27) (aged 72) Madrid, Spain
Resting place	Church of San Sebastián
Other names	Lope Félix de Vega Carpio; Monster of Nature and Phoenix of Wits; Phoenix of Wits
Occupations	Priest and writer
Spouse	See Marriages
Children	See Offspring
Writing career
Language	Spanish
Genres	Theater, poetry and novel
Movement	Golden Age
Signature

Title page of Las comedias del famoso poeta Lope de Vega Carpio, compiled by Bernardo Grassa, 1604.

Lope de Vega Carpio (Madrid, November 25, 1562 – Madrid, August 27, 1635) was one of the most important poets and playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age and, owing to the extent of his output, one of the most prolific authors in world literature.

Called the Phoenix of Wits and the Monster of Nature (by Miguel de Cervantes), he renewed the formulas of Spanish theater at a moment when theater was beginning to be a mass cultural phenomenon. The foremost exponent, together with Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca, of Spanish Baroque theater, his works are still performed today and constitute one of the highest peaks reached in Spanish literature and arts. He was also one of the great lyric poets of the Castilian language and the author of several novels and long narrative works in prose and in verse.

Some 3,000 sonnets are attributed to him, along with five novels, four novellas, nine epics, three didactic poems and several hundred comedias (1,800 according to Juan Pérez de Montalbán). A friend of Francisco de Quevedo and of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, at odds with Luis de Góngora and in long rivalry with Cervantes, his life was as extreme as his work. He was the father of Sister Marcela de San Félix, who was also a playwright.

Biography

Youth

Lope de Vega by Francisco Pacheco. Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y memorables varones, Madrid, Library of the Lázaro Galdiano Foundation.

Lope de Vega Carpio, descended from a hidalgo family, albeit a humble one, with its ancestral seat, according to Lope himself, in the Vega de Carriedo, today Vega de Villafufre, Cantabria, was the son of Félix or Felices de Vega Carpio, an embroiderer by profession, who died in 1578, and of Francisca Fernández Flórez, who outlived him by eleven years. There is no precise information about his mother. It is known, on the other hand, that after a brief stay in Valladolid, his father moved to Madrid in 1561, attracted perhaps by the opportunities offered by the newly established status of the Villa y Corte as capital. However, Lope de Vega would later claim that his father came to Madrid because of a love affair from which his future mother would rescue him. Thus, the writer would be the fruit of the reconciliation, and would owe his existence to the very jealousy he would analyze so much in his dramatic works.

He was baptized with the name of Lope, son of Félix de Vega and of Francisca his wife, in the parish of San Miguel de los Octoes on December 6, 1562. Lope had four siblings: Francisco, Juliana, Luisa and Juan. He spent part of his childhood in the house of his paternal great-uncle, Don Miguel de Carpio, Inquisitor of Seville.

A very precocious child, he could already read Latin and Castilian at the age of five. At the same age he was composing verses. In his Fama póstuma..., his friend Juan Pérez de Montalbán describes those early days thus:

He went to school, clearly surpassing the others in his eagerness to study his first letters; and since, because of his age, he could not form the words, he repeated the lesson more with gestures than with his tongue. At five he read in Romance and in Latin; and so great was his inclination to verse that, before he knew how to write, he shared his lunch with the older boys so that they would write down what he dictated. He then went on to the studies of the Society, where in two years he became master of Grammar and Rhetoric, and before turning twelve he had all the accomplishments that the curious youth of young men allows, such as dancing, singing and handling the sword well, etc.

He studied at the prestigious Imperial College of the Jesuits, then improperly called Theatines. Always according to the testimony of Lope himself, at twelve he was writing comedias ("I composed them at eleven and twelve years of age / in four acts and on four sheets / because each act took up one sheet"). It is possible that his first comedia was, as Lope himself would state in the dedication of the work to his son Lope, El verdadero amante, although the text of this comedia that we know today probably underwent modifications after the date of its first draft. He attributed this tremendous facility for writing to a natural gift. And so, through the mouth of Belardo, when he is asked for some sonnets for the King in El animal de Hungría and asked how much time he will take, he writes:

Within an hour. / —An hour? —And less, and right now. / —Hush, for it cannot be, / for I hear many say / that those who compose sweat, / grunt, groan and perspire / like one about to give birth... / —They lack the natural gift / that heaven gives to whom it wills.

His great talent led him to the school of the poet and musician Vicente Espinel, in Madrid, whom he always cited with veneration (he dedicated to him his comedia El caballero de Illescas, c. 1602). Thus the sonnet: This pen, celebrated master / that you placed in my hands, when / I was signing / my first characters, fearful and unskilled... While studying around 1573 at the college of the Theatines, he translated into Castilian verse Claudian's poem De raptu Proserpinae, which he dedicated to the future pro-Spanish cardinal Ascanio Colonna in 1577; but it has been lost. Lope himself did not consider it worthy of publication: It lives without light, for being of tender infancy. He then continued his education with the Jesuits (1574):

The notebooks of the lessons served me as drafts for my thoughts, and many times I wrote them in Latin or Castilian verse. I began to collect books of all letters and languages, for, after the rudiments of Greek and great practice in Latin, I knew Tuscan well and had some acquaintance with French... (La Dorotea, IV).

He then spent four years (1577-1581) at the Colegio de los Manriques of the University of Alcalá, but did not obtain any degree. Perhaps the disorderly and womanizing conduct (as early as 1580 the student Lope was living in concubinage with María de Aragón, the Marfisa of his verses, by whom he had his first daughter, Manuela, the following year) of a fatherless youth made him ill-suited for the priesthood. Many of the characters of his early comedias are true libertines. He himself, through the mouth of Belardo, paints himself thus:

If I flatter the beautiful woman / I sell her like a friend, / and in the very thing I tell her / I am feeling something else. / I strive to make her love me; / and, if I come to win her, / I already have the town filled / with talk that she is very foolish and very ugly...

His high patrons stopped paying for his studies. Thus, Lope did not obtain the degree of bachelor, and to earn a living he had to work as secretary to aristocrats and prominent men, or by writing comedias and occasional pieces. In 1583 he enlisted in the navy and fought in the Battle of Terceira Island under the orders of his future friend Álvaro de Bazán, 1st Marquis of Santa Cruz. Some time later he would dedicate a comedia to the Marquis's son.

Exile

Colophon of El piadoso aragonés, autograph manuscript, dated and signed by Lope de Vega in Madrid on August 17, 1626.

At that time (perhaps 1586) he studied liberal arts with the master Juan de Córdoba and mathematics and astrology at the Royal Academy with Juan Bautista Labaña, chief cosmographer to Philip II, and served as secretary to Pedro Esteban Dávila y Enríquez, Marquis of las Navas; but he was distracted from all these occupations by his continual love affairs. Elena Osorio, whom he met in 1583, was his first great love, the "Filis" of his verses, then separated from her husband, the actor Cristóbal Calderón; Lope was with her for four years and paid for her favors with comedias for the company of his beloved's father, the theatrical impresario or autor Jerónimo Velázquez. In 1587 Elena agreed, out of convenience, to enter into a relationship with the nobleman Francisco Perrenot Granvela, nephew of the powerful Cardinal Granvela. A spiteful Lope de Vega then circulated some libels against her and her family, among them one in macaronic Latin, In doctorum Damianum Velazquez Satira Prima, which has not survived:

A lady is for sale to whoever wants her.

She is up for auction. Do you want to buy her?

Her father is the one selling her, for though he says nothing,

her mother served as her crier...

He denounced the situation in his comedia Belardo furioso and in a series of sonnets and pastoral and Moorish ballads. He was put on trial and ended up in the Royal Prison of Segovia for defaming Elena. He reoffended, and a second trial was more severe: he was banished for eight years from the Court and for two from the Kingdom of Castile, under threat of the death penalty if he disobeyed the sentence. Lope de Vega took his revenge by going over to selling his comedias to the impresario Porres, and years later he would recall his love affair with Elena Osorio in his dialogued novel ("action in prose," he called it) La Dorotea. However, by then he had already fallen in love with Isabel de Alderete y Urbina, daughter of the King's painter Diego de Urbina, whom he married on May 10, 1588 after abducting her with her consent. In his verses he called her by the anagram "Belisa."

On May 29 of the same year he attempted to resume his military career, marching to Lisbon with his friend Claudio Conde and enlisting in the Great Armada, on the galleon San Juan; his intention was, at least, that his sentence would be reduced for doing so, as recent documents have revealed. At that time he wrote an epic poem in octavas reales in the manner of Ludovico Ariosto, La hermosura de Angélica, which went unnoticed. It is likely that his enlistment in the navy mobilized for the assault on England was the condition imposed by Isabel de Urbina's relatives, eager to lose sight of so unpresentable a son-in-law, in order to forgive him for the abduction of the young woman. He would allude precisely to his voyage to England when, through the mouth of Belardo, he complains of not yet having gone to see the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, despite having traveled so far:

I was born / in Madrid, and trusting / in being so close, I have been / without seeing it until now, and I went / two thousand leagues once / only to see England...

The reason for this departure, however, seems rather complex. In his Arcadia he included in this regard some verses that declared an image of Spain that he never repeated, however: a beloved country, but essentially envious and ungrateful:

Ah, sweet and dear Spain, / stepmother to your true sons / and, with strange pity, / merciful mother and host to foreigners! / Envy in you kills me, / for every homeland tends to be ungrateful. / But, because it is my glory / to avenge my enemies with my absence, / I will hold it a greater victory / to match my patience with their envy / than to suffer the fury / of one who does not see himself and insults the other... / I depart to be an example / of vain hopes and favors, / for I already see myself / beyond their envies and fears, / where I may end my life / poor, envied, sad and persecuted (BAE, XXXVIII, 65 a)

In December 1588 he returned on the ship San Juan after the defeat of the Great Armada and headed for Valencia, again with his friend and almost brother Claudio Conde, after breaking the terms of his sentence by passing through Toledo. He lived with Isabel de Urbina in Valencia, and there he continued perfecting his dramatic formula, attending the performances of a series of wits who would later form the so-called Academia de los Nocturnos, such as the canon Francisco Agustín Tárrega, the secretary of the Duke of Gandía Gaspar de Aguilar, Guillén de Castro, Carlos Boil and Ricardo de Turia. He learned to disobey the unity of action by narrating two stories instead of one in the same work, the so-called Italian imbroglio or embrollo. Claudio Conde ended up in the prison of the Torres de Serranos, but Lope got him out of there.

After serving the two years of exile from the kingdom, Lope de Vega moved to Toledo in 1590. Isabel de Urbina, the "Belisa" of some of his poems and the heroine of Las bizarrías de Belisa, was a minor when she married Lope. The young woman's family, of high social standing, rejected this marriage, motivated largely by the sentence of banishment against Lope on account of the insults against the actor Jerónimo Velázquez and his family. The lovers organized the abduction of the bride and, faced with the fait accompli, the Urbinas ended up accepting a marriage by proxy because of the banishment. After two years in Valencia and with eight still to go before fully completing the sentence, Lope decided to settle on Calle de la Sierpe in Toledo, so close to Madrid that he could remain in contact with the center of the monarchy without violating the distance ("five leagues from the court") established in the sentence. And there he served Francisco de Ribera Barroso, later second Marquis of Malpica, and, some time later, the fifth Duke of Alba, Antonio Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont. For this he joined as a gentleman of the chamber the ducal court of Alba de Tormes, where he lived between 1592 and 1595. In this place he read the theater of Juan del Encina, from which he took the character of the gracioso or figura del donaire, a plebeian character played by a professional comic actor, serving as a contrast to the serious plane of the noble characters, thus perfecting his dramatic formula even further. There he became friends with another great poet who served the Duke, the Toledan Pedro Liñán de Riaza (1588-1607). Near Alba de Tormes there was, moreover, the Castle of El Carpio, which served him to fantasize about a possible chivalric origin of his surname, which could be linked to that of the hero Bernardo del Carpio, to whom he dedicated three comedias. In the autumn of 1594 Isabel de Urbina died of complications following childbirth, or puerperium. At that time he wrote his pastoral novel La Arcadia, in which he included numerous poems and an engraving representing the coat of arms of Bernardo del Carpio: nineteen towers. This display provoked the mockery of Luis de Góngora, who dedicated a sonnet to him:

Upon my life, Lopillo, erase for me / the nineteen towers from your shield / because, although all are made of wind, I doubt / you have wind enough for so many towers...

This blazon was considered to belong to the lineage of Bernardo del Carpio because it could be seen in a relief on the tomb of Pedro Bernardo del Carpio (1135), held to be a descendant of the legendary hero, in the old Church of San Martín in Salamanca.

Return to Castile

In December 1595 he completed the eight years of banishment from the Court and returned to Madrid. The following year, in that same city, he was prosecuted for concubinage with the widowed actress Antonia Trillo. In 1598 he married Juana de Guardo, daughter of a wealthy meat supplier to the Court, which prompted the mockery of various wits (Luis de Góngora, for example), since she was apparently a vulgar woman and everyone thought Lope had married for money, since love was precisely not what he lacked. He settled in Toledo for the second time, from August 1604 to 1610, with his wife, his mistress Micaela de Luján and his children. With his lawful wife he lived in a house "on the alley of the San Justo neighborhood" (today Calle de Juan Guas). The exact building of the house inhabited by Lope and Juana Guardo on Calle de Juan Guas is unknown, although the rental document reports that it belonged to his friend, the writer Gaspar de Vargas. Lope noted that it was so tall "that it has made me think that from here one can reach heaven with less effort," something consistent with the height of some of these dwellings, which allow a certain airy sensation from their large windows. In September 1610, the couple left this residence and moved to Madrid, where three years earlier Lope had already rented a house with Micaela Luján. Jokingly, Lope blamed his departure on the sacristan of the Church of Saints Justo and Pastor ("San Yuste"), because, apparently, he was bothered by the ringing of the bells so close to his home. He says as much in an epistle addressed to his Toledan friend, the doctor of Law Gregorio de Ángulo:

"May God keep the Peralera a thousand years, / for were there no sacristans in San Yuste, / Madrid would never have seen me in its corner."

The "Peralera" (today "Peraleda") is an estate adjoining the Palacio de Buenavista (Toledo), separated by a stretch of the Tagus river, which surely was the setting for pleasant walks among the members of the Literary Academy of Buenavista, to which the writer belonged during his stays in Toledo. At the same time, he rented a dwelling for his mistress in the nearby San Lorenzo neighborhood of the Imperial City. Lope came to have as many as five children with the actress from La Mancha Micaela de Luján (Angelilla, Mariana, Félix, Marcela and Lope-Félix). The "Celia" or "Camila Lucinda" of his verses was a beautiful but uneducated and married woman, with whom he maintained relations until 1608, when her literary and biographical trace is lost. She was unique among the Phoenix's major mistresses in that their separation left no mark on his work. In 1606 his wife Juana Guardo gave birth to Carlos Félix, a son very dear to Lope.

In Toledo he had numerous friends, such as the poet Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla, to whom he dedicated his comedia Santiago el Verde, from around 1615 (Lope mourned in verse his accidental killing in 1620). He again worked as personal secretary to Pedro Fernández de Castro y Andrade, at that time 4th Marquis of Sarria and future 7th Count of Lemos, to whom he wrote in an epistle: "I, who so many times have slept at his feet like a faithful dog."

Portrait of Lope de Vega, work by Luis Tristán (1614). Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

For quite a few years Lope divided himself between the two households and an indeterminate number of mistresses, many of them actresses, among others Jerónima de Burgos, as attested by the legal proceedings opened against him for living in concubinage in 1596 with Antonia Trillo; the name of another mistress, María de Aragón, is also known. To sustain this way of life and support so many relationships and legitimate and illegitimate children, Lope de Vega displayed an uncommon firmness of will and had to work enormously, lavishing a torrential output consisting above all of lyric poetry and comedias, the latter often printed without his permission, corrupted and uncorrected.

At thirty-eight he was finally able to correct and publish part of his work free of the errors of others. As the first professional writer of Spanish literature, he litigated to obtain copyright against those who printed his comedias without his permission. He obtained, at least, the right to correct his own work.

In 1602 he made a trip to Seville, where his uncle Don Miguel del Carpio had lived, his mother's brother and a feared inquisitor in Seville, with whom he was educated in his childhood, when he was at most eight or nine years old. He met the classicist poet Juan de Arguijo, a nobleman and musician who held the office of veinticuatro and was his host and patron, including him in the literary gathering he held at his house, and from there he visited Granada on one or two occasions. In the course of this last journey he stopped in Antequera, where he was attended and feted by the poet Luis Martín de la Plaza, who composed two sonnets for the occasion. It is also proven that in Seville he met the poet Antonio Ortiz Melgarejo and the great and already famous novelist Mateo Alemán. In Seville Lope completed La hermosura de Angélica, printed in Madrid in 1602 in the same volume that included the three parts of his celebrated Rimas, openly Mannerist, which includes among its two hundred sonnets a group forming a Petrarchan canzoniere devoted to Lucinda; they are also dedicated to Arguijo himself.

In 1605 he entered the service of Luis Fernández de Córdoba y de Aragón, sixth Duke of Sessa. This relationship would later torment him, when he took holy orders and the nobleman continued to use him as secretary and go-between, to the point that even his confessor would come to deny him absolution. This is confirmed by the abundant correspondence he exchanged with the Duke, which has been edited in modern times.

In 1609 he read and published his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, a theoretical work of capital importance, contrary to the neo-Aristotelian precepts, and joined the Confraternity of Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament at the Oratory of the Cristo del Olivar, to which almost all the relevant writers of Madrid belonged. Among them were Francisco de Quevedo, who was a personal friend of Lope, and Miguel de Cervantes. With the latter he had strained relations because of the anti-Lope allusions in the first part of Don Quixote (1605).

Priesthood

Monument to Lope, wearing a cassock, in Madrid (J. López Sallaberry and M. Inurria, 1902).

The period that fostered Lope de Vega's priestly ordination was one of profound existential crisis, driven perhaps by the death of close relatives. His Rimas sacras and the numerous devotional works he began to compose respond to this inspiration, as does the meditative and philosophical tone that appears in his last verses. On the night of December 19, 1611, the writer was the victim of an assassination attempt from which he barely managed to escape. He was appointed a familiar of the Holy Office in 1612; this office was the lowest level within the Inquisition. Juana de Guardo suffered frequent illnesses, and in 1612 Carlos Félix died of fevers. On August 13 of the following year, Juana de Guardo died while giving birth to Feliciana. So many misfortunes affected Lope emotionally, and on May 24, 1614 he finally decided to be ordained a priest. Lope was ordained a priest in his diocese of Toledo, and as a first measure, the cardinal's auxiliary, titular bishop of Troy, ordered him to shave off his mustache and goatee, since wearing them went against the synodal constitutions. His reply is famous: "From Troy had to come what would quench my fires." While awaiting his ordination he lodged in the house of his former mistress, Jerónima de Burgos, and since he continued acting as go-between in the love correspondence of his patron, the Duke of Sessa, his confessor denied him absolution after he had been ordained a priest; but Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, much more indulgent, appointed him a member of the tribunal conducting the beatification process of Teresa de Jesús, and two years later appointed him procurator fiscal of the Apostolic Chamber of the Archdiocese of Toledo, on the grounds of "his gifts of wisdom, the rectitude of his conduct and his good reputation in letters both divine and human." By contrast, Sandoval y Rojas's successor, the Cardinal-Infante Don Fernando de Austria (son of Philip III), would soon dismiss him because of his weaknesses of conduct. In his correspondence Lope shows the doubts he harbored at this time about the direction he should give his life, reaching disquieting conclusions: "I was born in two extremes, which are to love and to loathe; I have never had a middle ground... I am lost, if ever I was in my life, for the soul and body of a woman, and God knows with what grief of mine, because I do not know how this is to be or to last, nor how to live without enjoying it..." (1616). However, the priesthood opened for him the tap of ecclesiastical benefices: through the Duke of Sessa he obtained a "prestamera" in the diocese of Córdoba, and in 1615 he applied for a chaplaincy founded in Ávila by his former patron Jerónimo Manrique. In October of that same year he accompanied his lord in the retinue that went to Irun with the Infanta Ana de Austria and gave an escort of honor as far as Madrid to Isabel de Borbón, future wife of Philip IV; but the Duke asked Lope in return to keep serving him as go-between, and that broke the conscience of the now priest. However, some women involved in Lope's shady dealings did not cease to scandalize the Toledo neighborhood.

The literary expression of this crisis and of his repentance is the Rimas sacras, published in 1614; there he says: "If the body wishes to be earth in the earth / the soul wishes to be heaven in heaven," an unredeemed dualism that constitutes his whole essence. The Rimas sacras are a book at once introspective in the sonnets (he uses the technique of the Spiritual Exercises he learned in his studies with the Jesuits) and devotional in the poems dedicated to various saints or inspired by sacred iconography, then in full flourish thanks to the recommendations issued by the Council of Trent. He was then taken by surprise by the aesthetic revolution provoked by the Soledades (1613) of Luis de Góngora and, although he increased the aesthetic tension of his verse and bimembrations began to appear at the end of his stanzas, he kept his distance from extreme culteranismo and continued cultivating his characteristic blend of conceptismo, learned Castilian casticismo and Italian elegance. Moreover, he derided the new aesthetic and mocked it whenever he had the opportunity. Góngora reacted with satires to this hostility, which the Phoenix always expressed indirectly, taking advantage of any corner of his comedias to attack, rather than Góngora himself, his disciples, an intelligent way of confronting the new aesthetic and one that has to do with his famous conception of satire: "Let it sting without hatred, for if perchance it defames / let it neither hope for glory nor seek fame." In any case, he tried to ingratiate himself ambiguously with the wit from Córdoba by dedicating to him his comedia Amor secreto hasta celos (1614), a very significant title. On the other hand, he had to contend with the contempt of the Aristotelian preceptists who vilified his dramatic formula as contrary to the three unities of action, place and time: the poets Cristóbal de Mesa and Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa and, above all, Pedro Torres Rámila, author of a Spongia (1617), a libel intended to denigrate not only Lope's theater but also all his narrative, epic and lyric work.

Lope's humanist friends responded furiously against this pamphlet, led by Francisco López de Aguilar, who around June 1618 wrote an Expostulatio Spongiae a Petro Hurriano Ramila nuper evulgatae. Pro Lupo a Vega Carpio, Poetarum Hispaniae Principe. The work contained praise of Lope from no less than Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, Vicente Mariner, Luis Tribaldos de Toledo, Pedro de Padilla, Juan Luis de la Cerda, Hortensio Félix Paravicino, Bartolomé Jiménez Patón, Francisco de Quevedo, the Count of Salinas, and Vicente Espinel, among other lesser-known figures. Encouraged by this support, Lope, though besieged by the criticism of the culteranos and the Aristotelians, pursued his epic endeavors. After Góngora's Polifemo, he tried the extended mythological fable with four poems: La Filomena (1621; in which he attacks Torres Rámila), La Andrómeda (1621), La Circe (1624) and La rosa blanca (1624; the blazon of the Count-Duke's daughter, whose complicated mythical origin he sets out). He returned to the historical epic with La corona trágica (1627, in 600 octaves on the life and death of Mary Stuart).

Final years

Madrid house in which Lope lived from 1610 until his death (1635). Today it is the Lope de Vega House-Museum.

In the last years of his life Lope de Vega fell in love with a twenty-five-year-old young woman, Marta de Nevares, married at thirteen, in what may be considered "sacrilege" given his status as a priest; she was a very beautiful woman, with curly hair and green eyes, a skilled singer and dancer, as Lope declares in the poems he composed for her, calling her "Amarilis," or "Marcia Leonarda" after her husband died in 1619, as in the Novelas he addressed to her. In this period of his life he especially cultivated comic and philosophical poetry, splitting himself into the burlesque heteronym poet Tomé de Burguillos and meditating serenely on old age and his reckless youth in ballads such as the famous "barquillas."

In 1627 he entered the Order of Malta, it being debated to this day whether he had to provide proof of his nobility on his father's side and was exempted from the other three required quarterings, or whether it was exclusively at the Pope's request that the Grand Master received him into the Order. Be that as it may, this membership was an enormous honor for Lope, who in his most widely circulated portrait wears precisely the habit of Saint John. Lope's interest in the orders of chivalry in general, and in that of Malta in particular, led him to write, between 1596 and 1603, the play El valor de Malta, set in the maritime struggles that the Order waged throughout the Mediterranean against the Turks. But between March and April 1628 he fell so gravely ill that he was at death's door, as he writes to the Duke of Sessa:

Your Excellency now has, thanks be to God, Lope de Vega, whom until today you did not have: so much was my life in doubt. I carried this black illness on my feet—and black it must be, since Your Excellency prescribes black ones for me—for more than twenty days with great hardship and pain, so much so that I thought I had turned into Don Juan de Alarcón; and at last I took to my bed, eighteen days ago today, with a swelling so painful that it inflamed me with terrible fevers and caused me so many ills that the Muses, both domestic and foreign, were already weeping for me. Praised be God, His Most Holy Mother and Saint Isidore, for I am in a harbor of clarity; for in April, and [with] not a few years, there was much to fear.

Lope was by then sixty-six years old. The jab at Juan Ruiz de Alarcón is explained by slander: in the comedia Los pechos privilegiados by the severe and moralizing Mexican wit, a roguish allusion to the marital union of the Don Juan priest and the young woman had slipped in:

He blames a wrinkled old man / so green that, at the same time / that he is lined with martens, / goes about playing the Magdalene.

Amid the barely concealed scandal of the nearly twenty years of life he spent with Marta de Nevares Santoyo, and despite the honors he received from the King and the Pope, Lope's last years were unhappy. The Count-Duke of Olivares ignored him for having served the Duke of Lerma and for being secretary to Sessa, who had fallen into disgrace and been banished from the Court. Moreover, Lope's private escapades caused his claims to offices, honors and sinecures to be dismissed at the Palace, since Olivares wanted to moralize customs after the unbridled corruption of the reign of Philip III. In his Égloga a Claudio (1632), addressed to his old friend and companion of youthful escapades Claudio Conde, appears his bitter disillusionment at having tried to obtain the permanent post of chaplain to the Duke of Sessa or that of chronicler to Philip IV, and he considers himself already past everything. Furthermore, he had suffered Marta going blind in 1626 and dying insane in that same year of 1632, as he recounts in the remembrance he dedicates to her in the octavas reales of the eclogue Amarilis, which would be published in 1633. Also in 1632 he published La Dorotea, a meditation on the loves of his youth. And he evokes Marta's death in this sonnet from the Rimas humanas y divinas de Tomé de Burguillos (1634) entitled "That true love is forgotten neither by time nor by death":

Dissolved now into dust, yet ever beautiful, / without letting me live, serenely lives / that light which was my glory and my pain, / and wages war on me while it rests in peace. / So alive is the jasmine, the pure rose, / that, gently burning in a lily, / it sets my soul, full of memories, ablaze: / the ashes of its amorous phoenix. / Oh, cruel memory of my sorrows! / what honor can my feeling give you, / her remains turned into dust? / Allow me to be silent just a moment: / for my eyes no longer have tears, / nor my thought conceits of love.

In 1633 his friend, the poet and playwright Jerónimo de Villaizán, died suddenly; he was so affected that he dedicated to him the Elegía en la muerte del Ldo. Don Gerónimo de Villaiçan por sv amigo Frey Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, printed as a pliego suelto in that same year of 1633. The Rimas humanas y divinas (1634), the last of his collections of poems, show that Lope de Vega was by then writing for himself, to entertain himself, to escape and to distance himself by means of parody and humor, which are so important in this collection. For there were still more misfortunes: Lope Félix, his son by Micaela de Luján, who also had a poetic vocation, drowned while fishing for pearls in 1634 on Margarita Island, off the coast of Venezuela. His beloved daughter Antonia Clara was abducted by a hidalgo, her suitor, surnamed Tenorio. Feliciana, his only legitimate daughter by then, had had two children: one became a nun and the other, Captain Luis Antonio de Usategui y Vega, died in Milan in the service of the King. Only one natural daughter of his, the nun Marcela, outlived him.

Lope de Vega died on August 27, 1635. His remains were laid in the Church of San Sebastián, on Calle de Atocha. By the middle of the same 17th century they had been moved to the common grave. Two hundred authors wrote eulogies of him, which were published in Madrid and Venice. During his lifetime, his works attained a mythical reputation. "It's by Lope" was a phrase frequently used to indicate that something was excellent, which did not always help to attribute his comedias correctly. In this regard his disciple Juan Pérez de Montalbán relates in his Fama póstuma a la vida y muerte del doctor frey Lope de Vega Carpio (Madrid, 1636), a printed work composed to exalt the memory of the Phoenix, that a man saw a magnificent funeral procession pass by and said that "it was Lope's," to which Montalbán added that "he was right twice over." Also in Italy, where he was always very popular, a counterpart work was published with eulogies by its principal writers: Essequie poetiche overo Lamento delle Muse italiane in morte del Sig. Lope de Vega... (Venice: G. Imberti, 1636), which was in fact a concealed initiative of the Ambassador of Spain, Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa, 1st Count of la Roca, hidden behind several Italian pseudonyms. Cervantes, despite his antipathy toward Lope, called him a "monster of Nature" for his literary fecundity, but also, ironically, for the anticlassical disorder of his theatrical poetics, in the likeness of the monstrous hircocervus of Horace's Ars poetica, an animal made up of pieces of animals of different species that served as a counterexample of a poorly crafted literary work.

Funeral of Lope de Vega (1853), work by Paul Balze.

Marriages and offspring

Sister Marcela de San Félix watching the funeral procession of her father, Lope de Vega, go by. Ignacio Suárez Llanos. 1862. (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

During his life, Lope de Vega was a man given to love affairs, which more than once brought him difficulties. In all he had fifteen documented children, legitimate and illegitimate:

• With María de Aragón (called Marfisa in Lope's works), daughter of a Flemish baker named Jácome de Amberes, settled in Madrid:
  • Manuela, apparently the firstborn of all his progeny. Baptized on January 2, 1581, she died on August 11, 1585.

After the end of the relationship, Marfisa married a Fleming in 1592 and died on September 6, 1608.

• With Isabel Ampuero de Alderete Díaz de Rojas y Urbina (known as Isabel de Alderete while single, and as Isabel de Urbina after marrying), his first wife, whom he married by proxy on May 10, 1588, after having "abducted" her from her father's house (although in reality she agreed to leave voluntarily):
  • Antonia, probably born in 1589, died in 1594, apparently shortly before her mother.
  • Teodora, born in November 1594, died in infancy between 1595 and 1596.

Isabel de Urbina died in the birth of her second daughter, in November 1594.

• With Juana de Guardo, his second wife from April 25, 1598. The daughter of Antonio de Guardo, a wealthy supplier of meat and fish to Madrid, it is believed to have been a marriage of convenience:
  • Jacinta, baptized in Madrid on July 26, 1599, possibly died in infancy since there is no further news of her.
  • In a letter written to a friend dated August 14, 1604, Lope announces that his wife is about to give birth. In his will of 1627, Lope names a daughter, Juana, already deceased. It is likely, given the name and dates, that this daughter is the child born to Lope and his wife in August 1604.
  • Carlos Félix, baptized on March 28, 1606, which is why he is believed to have been born the previous year, in 1605. His father's favorite son, he died on June 1, 1612, after an illness of several months. The devastated Lope dedicated to him an elegy published in the Rimas Sacras.
  • Feliciana, born on August 4, 1613. The only one of the legitimate offspring to survive infancy, she married Luis de Usátegui, "official of the secretariat of the Royal Council of the Indies for the province of Peru," on December 18, 1633. Lope promised to endow his daughter with clothes and money to the value of 5,000 ducats, from the inheritance of her maternal grandparents.

Juana de Guardo died nine days after giving birth, on August 13, 1613, from complications following childbirth. Lope did not marry again. At the beginning of March 1614 he received minor orders in Madrid. On March 12 he went to Toledo (he lodged in the house of the actress Jerónima de Burgos, with whom he carried on a romance), where he received the degree of subdeacon (clerk of the Epistle) and then that of deacon (of the Gospel). On May 25, in Madrid, he received the last degree of his priestly ordination. On May 29 he said his first Mass in the church of the Discalced Carmelites in Madrid.

Sister Marcela de San Félix. Anonymous work from the 17th century. (Lope de Vega House-Museum, Madrid).

• With the actress Micaela de Luján, married to the actor Diego Díaz, who had gone away to Peru, where he died in 1603. The mother of nine children, at least five of them are Lope's, with whom she maintained a relationship of nearly fifteen years (possibly begun after his second marriage, around 1599), despite other fleeting love affairs:
  • Ángela.
  • Mariana.
  • Félix, baptized on October 19, 1603.
  • Marcela, baptized on May 8, 1605. On February 2, 1621 she was consecrated in the convent of the Discalced Trinitarians, with the name of Sister Marcela de San Félix. Lope describes the consecration in the Epístola a don Francisco de Herrera Maldonado.
  • Lope Félix, born on January 28, 1607. A boy of unruly nature, he was confined by his father, due to his bad behavior, in the asylum of Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados, in 1617. With literary inclinations like his father, he eventually became a soldier, dying in 1634 in a shipwreck off the coast of Venezuela, where he had gone on an expedition to fish for pearls. Lope dedicated a piscatory eclogue to him.

• With Marta de Nevares (the Marcia Leonarda of the novels, and Amarilis of Lope's poems and letters), born around 1591 and married on August 8, 1604 (against her will) to Roque Hernández de Ayala, a merchant, from whom she soon separated. Fond of poetry, she wrote verses, sang, played instruments and danced, was a good conversationalist and prose writer, and even had talent as an actress (she performed a comedia by Lope at her home). Their relationship, begun around September 1616, produced a daughter:
  • Antonia Clara (Clarilis), born on August 12, 1617. The youngest of all his offspring and the joy of his old age, she ran away from her father's home on August 17, 1634 with Don Cristóbal Tenorio, Knight of the Order of Santiago, a protégé of the Count-Duke of Olivares and gentleman of the chamber to His Majesty. Lope never recovered from this blow.

Marta de Nevares went blind in 1622, and some time later lost her reason. She died in Lope's care, at his home, on April 7, 1632. She was 41 years old. This was the last significant relationship in Lope de Vega's life.

In addition to these offspring, Lope de Vega fathered two other children from fleeting relationships:

• Fernando Pellicer, Fray Vicente, had with a Valencian woman.
• Fray Luis de la Madre de Dios, by an unknown mother.

Narrative works

Arcadia: prosas y versos de Lope de Vega Carpio...; con vna exposición de los nombres históricos y poéticos..., Cádiz, Por Iuan de Borja, y a su costa, 1621

The Arcadia

The author did not dare to publish an unstructured collection of poems, nor did he wish to give up presenting his verses to society under the protection of his name. The device chosen was—and it is a usual formula of the period—to set them within a pastoral novel: Arcadia, written in imitation of the work of the same name by Jacopo Sannazaro and of its Spanish continuators. Lope's novel saw the light in Madrid in 1598. It had considerable success. It was the Phoenix's most frequently reprinted work in the 17th century: Edwin S. Morby records twenty editions between 1598 and 1675, sixteen of them during the author's lifetime. Osuna recalled that "there are nearly 6,000 [verses] contained in the novel, more than lines of prose in the edition we are using." Indeed, today the reader finds it hard to imagine that a novel, however poetic it may be, could contain more than 160 poems, some brief, but of considerable length. It does not seem that such a quantity of verse serves as ornament to the prose. Rather, it reveals to us that the narrative comes to be an excuse for offering the public an extensive earlier poetic production, to which he probably added numerous lyric compositions written ad hoc.

El peregrino en su patria

This new novel, in which Lope tries his hand at the Byzantine novel or novel of adventures—with the peculiarity that all of them take place within Spain—saw the light in Seville at the beginning of 1604. It was an immediate success (there are two Madrid printings and another two from Barcelona from 1604 and 1605, another from Brussels from 1608 and a new revised edition from Madrid, 1618). El peregrino en su patria does not present the poetic richness of the Arcadia. Not because the number of interspersed verses is smaller, but because many of them are dramatic: four autos sacramentales, with their loas, prologues and songs. Among the thirty-odd poems he introduced into the Byzantine narrative there is not much worth highlighting.

Pastores de Belén

Pastores de Belén. Prosas y versos divinos appeared in Madrid in 1612. The work enjoyed notable success. In the same year new printings saw the light in Lleida and in Pamplona. Six new editions would come out during the poet's lifetime. We are dealing with an avowed contrafactum that turns to sacred matter that blend of amorous prose and verse of the 1598 Arcadia. The canvas of the pastoral novel is used here to narrate some Gospel episodes related to the Nativity of the Lord. Like the Arcadia, it contains an extensive poetic anthology. A total of 167 poems in the most varied metrical forms have been catalogued.

La Dorotea

Main article: La Dorotea

As with other poetic cycles, Lope opened this one of his old age with a prose text, in this case in dialogue, into which he inserted a varied poetic anthology. La Dorotea appeared in 1632. It is probably no coincidence that the first poem heard in the action in prose is "A mis soledades voy" and that it appears expressly attributed to Lope. The penultimate of his elegies, and the most celebrated, "Pobre barquilla mía," has the fragile little boat as its interlocutor.

Lope calls this work an "action in prose," and its most evident model is the celestinesque genre. It evokes the story of his jealous love for Elena Osorio from the vantage point of his adult age. The style is simple and natural, but at times, as in other works by Lope, particularly the prologues, there is an accumulation of stony bargain-bin erudition taken mainly from the encyclopedic repertories of the period, among which he was particularly fond of the Dictionarium historicum, geographicum, poeticum of Carolus Stephanus (1596) and the inevitable Officina and Cornucopia of Jean Tixier, better known as Ravisio Textor.

Lyric works

House of Lope de Vega in Madrid

In his novel La Arcadia (1598) and elsewhere, Lope de Vega repeatedly states that he agrees with the Syntaxeon of Pierre Grégoire that lyric poetry is a conjunction of initial natural inspiration followed by rhetorical labor:

Poetry, by its precepts, is shown / to be an art of ingenious preeminence, / although nature first instills / its harmony with greater force. / Art assists, and together, vying, / they reach such an extreme of excellence / that it seems a divine and rare frenzy / and a clear instrument of their powers

Later, in the fifth Silva of his Laurel de Apolo, written in measured Gongorism, he writes that "poetry is / an art that, consisting of precepts, / clothes itself in figures and conceits". As regards the poet's relationship with musicians, Lope composed many songs, mainly letrillas and tonos for the five-course vihuela; he worked first, in his youth, with the Sevillian composer Juan Palomares, and when the latter died, with Juan Blas de Castro. He always remembered both of them with gratitude in many passages of his works; for example, of the second he wrote in El acero de Madrid (1608):

Little crystalline streams, / sonorous and gentle murmur, / it seems that you run along / singing tonos by Juan Blas, / for now running swiftly / and now slowly over the pebbles, / it seems that you enter into fugues / and that you are trebles and bass.

The romances

Together with his eternal rival, the Cordoban Luis de Góngora, Lope headed a precocious poetic generation that became known in the decade from 1580 to 1590; these are the so-called «romancista poets», who returned to the octosyllable once the fever for the hendecasyllable and the Italian stanzas introduced by Garcilaso and Boscán in the first half of the 16th century had passed; they did not disdain the Italian school and continued to cultivate its forms, but they no longer scorned the earlier octosyllabic and popular tradition of the 15th century, and they took it up as well, writing what would later be known as the Romancero nuevo. From the early age of eighteen or twenty these poets began to be known and celebrated for their romances and—obviously—they had no great interest in controlling or demanding anything from the printers. They were, in general, young poets (Lope, Góngora, Cervantes, Pedro Liñán de Riaza), under thirty years of age, and they frequently did not bother to claim their authorship, at least directly. Modern criticism has concerned itself with elucidating the authorship of this or that romance, but it has not made the necessary effort to attempt seriously to establish the romance corpus of the different poets. That of Lope has remained at vague approximations. Much has been said about the meaning and scope of this romancero of the Generation of 1580, in which Lope imposed guidelines that were recreated by many others. Our poet's leading role was recognized from the very first moment. The new romancero was a literary formula that rapidly permeated social sensibility, and the young poets offered their readers and listeners a happy hybrid of conventional fantasy and coded references to loves and love affairs, favors and disdains, pleasures and displeasures of erotic activity. But sentimental exhibitionism does not appear naked in them. It appears, for greater charm, veiled by the heroic fantasy of the Moorish romances or by pastoral melancholy. The old tradition of the border romances, composed for the most part in the 15th century in step with the historical events to which they allude, flourished anew at the end of the 16th century in this fashionable genre.

The Moorish romances were the first fashionable romances composed by the Generation of 1580 [vid. «Ensíllenme el asno rucio»; «Mira, Zaide, que te aviso»]. The fashion for the Moorish romancero was replaced by the pastoral one, although there was a period in which both coexisted [vid. «De pechos sobre una torre»; «Hortelano era Belardo»]». Cf. on this last aspect Francisco de Quevedo: Historia de la vida del buscón. Edited by Ignacio Arellano. Madrid: Espasa, 2002, p. 129:

Item, noting that after they ceased to be Moors (although they still preserve some relics) [the poets] have turned shepherds, for which reason the flocks go about thin from drinking their tears, singed by their burning souls, and so absorbed in their music that they do not graze, we order that they leave such an occupation, assigning hermitages to the friends of solitude.

Alonso Zamora Vicente described how Lope used the romance form to embed his own love life: «Under a Moorish or pastoral disguise (the two great veils of the artistic romancero), Lope, with unbridled impetus and with the youthful vigor with which we have seen him live, transmutes his love affair with Elena Osorio, his exile, his marriage to Isabel de Urbina». All these romances achieved enormous popularity and were copiously disseminated, to the point that Lope complained that many that did not belong to him were attributed to him. It is this dissemination that he recalls in a song, as time went on:

Now then, since the whole world presumes / my passions from my verses, / the weary blame of my hyperboles, / I wish to change my style and my reasons.

Consequently, Lope abandoned the specific composition of personal romances at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries (but not in his theater) and returned to them in his old age in the famous barquillas: «Pobre barquilla mía...» and «A mis soledades voy...».

Rimas

Portrait of Lope de Vega (c. 1628), by Juan van der Hamen.

In November 1602, sandwiched between La hermosura de Angélica and La Dragontea, a collection of sonnets appeared from the Madrid press of Pedro Madrigal: the first collection of poems without narrative mortar that Lope published under his own name. The public must have received the collection of two hundred sonnets favorably, because Lope decided to publish them, without the epic poems, and accompanied by a «Second part» made up of eclogues, epistles and epitaphs. This new edition saw the light in Seville in 1604. The 1604 edition emended certain details of the sonnets published in 1602 and judiciously reordered some of them. The process of enlargement had not yet ended. In 1609 Lope published them again in Madrid, with the addition of the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias. The printing, although careless in the highest degree, was well received. The text, which we may consider definitive, with the two hundred sonnets, the Segunda parte and the Arte nuevo, was reprinted in Milan, 1611; Barcelona, 1612; Madrid, 1613 and 1621; and Huesca, 1623. In the case of the «Rimas» we find poems that can be dated between 1578 and 1604. The two hundred sonnets traverse, in disorderly fashion and with incrustations of other subjects, the obligatory itinerary of the Petrarchist canzonieri. The love conflicts with [Elena] Osorio gave rise to a celebrated series of sonnets by Lope: that of the mansos (bellwethers). The pastoral motif is recreated in a trilogy formed by the sonnet «Vireno, aquel mi manso regalado», preserved in the «Cartapacio Penagos» but not printed until Entrambasaguas edited it in 1934, and sonnets 188 and 189 of the Rimas. Sonnet 126, «Desmayarse, atreverse, estar furioso», confines itself to noting contrary, psychologically plausible reactions of the lover. The first thirteen lines accumulate the predicate of the definition without naming the subject. The second hemistich of the last line convinces us that we have not heard an abstract and impersonal scholastic definition, but the artistic expression of a living experience: «whoever has tried it knows it». Of all the poems that gloss these subjects, number 61 achieved prompt and lasting fame: «Ir y quedarse, y con quedar partirse». The poems added in 1604, despite their notable interest, have hardly aroused the curiosity of critics and readers. This part begins with three eclogues of differing workmanship, interest and depth. The Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, written at the end of 1608 for an academy in order to silence the voices of the classicist dramatists devoted to the unities, and printed in 1609, is a didactic but lighthearted poem, a talk or lecture, and, as such, it escapes the strict limits of lyric poetry or epic poetry.

Rimas sacras

The first edition is from Madrid, of 1614, with the precise title Rimas sacras. Primera parte. As far as we know, there was never a second part. We are faced with one of those poetry collections in which the author synthesizes a whole vein of his fertile muse. Its structure corresponds to what we have been calling the Lopean cancionero. It is made up of a Petrarchist canzoniere (the hundred opening sonnets) and a variety of compositions in diverse meters and genres: narrative poetry in octaves, glosas, descriptive romances, poems in terza rima, liras and songs. The Rimas sacras amply develop the palinode demanded by the literary tradition of Petrarchism. Not only because the opening sonnet is a rewriting of that of Garcilaso de la Vega («Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado»), but because the essential idea of offering an example of repentance for worldly love is developed here, not in a single sonnet, but in the whole opening series and in many other poems that stitch through the Petrarchan «canzoniere». Most of the sonnets of the Rimas sacras are written in the first person and addressed to an intimate and immediate "you". The most celebrated of all, number XVIII, is a monologue of the soul, which speaks with colloquial and direct words to a Jesus in love: «¿Qué tengo yo, que mi amistad procuras?». In contrast to these sonnets of intimacy are found, in smaller but relevant number, those of hagiographic, liturgical or commemorative character. However, some narrative poems, such as «Las lágrimas de la Madalena», the longest, are a continuation of the poetic universe predominant in the sonnets. «Las lágrimas» belongs to a species of the epic.

La Filomena

In July 1621 La Filomena con otras diversas rimas, prosas y versos appeared in Madrid. In that same year it had a new Barcelona edition, the work of the most passionate devotee of Lope among the Catalan printers: Sebastián de Cormellas. It is, then, a miscellaneous volume, in which Lope essays, with that permanent experimental vocation we have been pointing out, two genres that had burst forcefully onto the literary panorama of his time: the novel and the mythological fable; and he tries to reply to their greatest creators and his perpetual rivals: Góngora and Cervantes. The poem that gives the volume its title is presented in two parts that differ in meter (octaves versus silvas), genre (narrative versus symbolic fable of literary polemic) and intention. The first part, in three cantos, narrates the tragic story of Filomena, raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law Tereus, following the well-known Ovidian account in book VI of the Metamorphoses. «Las fortunas de Diana», a novella, is not free either of polemical zeal and a spirit of emulation. We are faced with an almost final lash of the bitter dispute that arose from the publication of Don Quijote. Primera parte (1605) and the response of Lope's circle in the apocryphal sequel signed by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (1614). But our purpose is not to comment on the narrative art of the Novelas a Marcia Leonarda, but to point out their lyric dimension. Its main core is a new installment of pastoral romances. La Andrómeda is a poem related to La Filomena, although somewhat shorter: 704 lines in a single canto. It narrates, with his usual fluency and with fewer digressions than usual, the story of Perseus, the death of Medusa, the birth of Pegasus, the rescue of Andromeda and the emergence of the spring of Hippocrene. Much more interesting are the poetic epistles that follow, among which two are included that are not by Lope.

La Circe

La Circe con otros poemas y prosas appeared in Madrid in 1624. It is a miscellaneous volume, twin to La Filomena, although with nuances and differences. The poem that gives the volume its title is a reply to and, in a certain way, a surpassing of the model of the mythological fable established by Góngora. In two senses: in its length and complexity (three cantos with 1232, 848 and 1232 lines) and in its moral scope. An omniscient narrator presents to the reader the tragic fall of Troy. The same narrator tells us how the soldiers of Ulysses open the wineskins in which Aeolus has enclosed the winds and, in the midst of the storm, reach the island of Circe. We witness the transformation of the soldiers into animals. Once Circe is defeated, Ulysses' friends recover their original form. Ulysses departs, but he still has to descend to the underworld to consult the seer Tiresias about his future. «La rosa blanca» is the second mythological poem of this volume, shorter and more concentrated than La Circe, with 872 lines in octaves. It brings together in rapid succession a series of mythical episodes linked to the goddess Venus. As in La Filomena, Lope reserved three novellas «A la señora Marcia Leonarda» to insert the contribution of Castilian verses that we find in all his poetry collections. He does not abuse them: each of the narratives contains three or four original poems. The six verse epistles of La Circe (there are three more in prose) are a prolongation and refinement of the genre and of the poetic temperament we saw in La Filomena.

Triunfos divinos

After ten years of priesthood, amid the literary polemics surrounding culteranismo, Lope returned to sacred poetry as one more instrument for drawing closer to political and ecclesiastical power. These circumstances are evident in Triunfos divinos (Madrid, 1625), dedicated to the Countess of Olivares. The long poem that gives the volume its title is a version a lo divino of the Triomphi of Petrarch. The liveliest part of the collection is the sonnets that continue the penitential and introspective line of the 1614 volume. With its own half-title page, addressed to Queen Elisabeth of Bourbon, a short epic poem (three cantos; 904 lines) titled La Virgen de la Almudena closes the volume.

Laurel de Apolo

The publication of Laurel de Apolo (1630) must be included within the campaign by which Lope sought to project his figure among the upper spheres and in literary circles. The central poem, which gives the volume its title, is the record of a session of the courts of Parnassus. For this transcription he uses the silva as his stanza. Lope set out to praise the poets of his time, and so he did. Over ten silvas, some three hundred Spanish and Portuguese bards, thirty-six Italian and French ones and ten illustrious painters parade past. Within the long catalogue of poets some mythological fables are inserted, two of them with their own identifying title (El baño de Diana, El Narciso). Lope also takes the opportunity to attack indirectly his rival for the post of Chronicler of the Kingdom of Castile and León, José Pellicer de Salas y Tovar, who was, moreover, one of the commentators of his great enemy, Luis de Góngora, whose style is also criticized in Laurel de Apolo through his bad followers. The volume of Laurel de Apolo, although occupied for the most part by the long poem described, has an appendix that is not without interest. There one finds La selva sin amor, a pastoral eclogue, a silva, an epistle and a small bundle of eight sonnets, among which the anti-culterano satires have always stood out: "Boscán, tarde llegamos. ¿Hay posada...?".

The Égloga a Claudio

The Égloga a Claudio, of which there is an autograph copy in the Códice Daza with many variants, was probably composed in January 1632 and printed separately without a date, addressed to the scholar Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado; it later appeared within the posthumous La Vega del Parnaso (1637). It is a fundamental work of the late Lope, when he had already been disillusioned of his last vehement hopes: to obtain the permanent post of chaplain to the Duke of Sessa or to be chronicler of Philip IV.

Thus, after so many delays / suffered with peaceful modesty, / forced and impelled / by so many wrongs, / amid proud humilities there issue / from the mine of the soul the truths. [...] / I go along the clearest path of dying / and withdraw from all hope; / for I only heed and look / to where all things end; / for I have never seen that afterward he lived / who did not first look to his dying

As Juan Manuel Rozas, the foremost scholar of this much-cited work, writes, it expresses a disillusionment «surprising for its intensity in the mouth of the creator of a theater that propagated the monarchical-aristocratic principle and, at the same time, theocentric monarchy. It is the disenchantment of the vitalist and triumphant Lope de Vega. I have called this cycle de senectute. It has its beginnings in the Corona trágica (1627) and the Laurel de Apolo (1630), it shows itself clearly from 1631 onward through the Dorotea (1632) and the Rimas de Burguillos (1634), and it finds its most direct, almost monographic, expression in the poetry collected in La Vega del Parnaso (1637)».

In its themes, as heterogeneous and miscellaneous as is characteristic of the author, its ample autobiographical content stands out (his friend Juan Pérez de Montalbán called it the «epitome of his life»), and its title is misleading: it is not a dialogued eclogue but an epistle. Its thematic axes, according to Rozas, are three of a symmetrical type: young Lope / old Lope; young writers / Lope the creator of the new comedy; Lope's life and work in the service of his nation and of the Crown / the contempt shown to him, now old, by the Court. Its structure is also threefold; according to Rozas, «a rapid review of his life, a very detailed account of his learned work and an assessment of his theater»; in reality it conceals an apology pro domo sua, something quite habitual in the work of his last years. Lope addresses Claudio Conde, the only friend of his youth who remained alive, so that he is for that reason an exceptional witness of the events.

The criticism of his disciples in theater and lyric poetry is based on their lack of «concepto» and realism, on their excessive philosophizing and on their abuse of formal ornamentation, stagecraft and scenery («apariencias»)... criticisms ultimately aimed at Gongorism or culteranismo and at the school of Pedro Calderón de la Barca:

It is true that I fear the brilliance / of so many metaphysical violences / founded on appearances, / a deception the wind works / (the bell being struck) upon the ear, / which seems a conceit and is but sound.

Against all this he opposes his idea of poetry in two words: «Purity and harmony». Like Quevedo, he seeks consolation in the old Stoicism: "Away, hope, if I have ever had any: / for I no longer have need of Fortune" or "Claudio, thus changes all that lives: / I do not know if I am that man".

La vega del Parnaso

Among Lope's poetry collections, this one has a very peculiar history. Its core is made up of a series of lyric compositions of some length printed as loose sheets or pamphlets of few pages in the last years of the poet's life. Lope thought of sending El Parnaso to press, but he did not carry out his purpose. The new collection did not see the light until, after the author's death, his friends and heirs published it in 1637 at the Imprenta del Reino with the title La vega del Parnaso. La vega gathered works of very different depth, intention and importance. The separate printings prior to 1633 already mentioned were included. Old texts were recovered. Occasional poems from Lope's last period were accumulated, among them a deeply felt elegy, "Elogio en la muerte de Juan Blas de Castro", in which he recalled the times when this musician was his confidant at the court of Alba de Tormes, where both worked for the Duke, and his love affair with Filis, and how he went to his house to kiss the hand of the deceased, who had set so many of his songs or tonos to music; he was also the composer of the incidental music for many of his theatrical pieces, and he had gone blind in his last years, like Marta de Nevares. Some works written in the last months of the poet's life were also grouped together. This mixture of dramas and lyric poems is entirely foreign to Lope's editorial habits. La vega del Parnaso constitutes Lope's penultimate lyric revolution. In several poems he uses two types of six-line lira. With this meter he seeks a more concise expression. It is a momentary abandonment of his long trajectory as a Petrarchist and amorous poet in order to attempt a poetry turned toward the social, which would win him the respect and the help of the court. One of the key themes of the collection is the awareness of death.

Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Burguillos

In November 1634 the last poetry collection that Lope would see in his lifetime finished printing at the Imprenta del Reino, at the expense of Alonso Pérez: Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos. The book has the usual structure of the Lopean cancioneros: a Petrarchist cancionero (formed by most of the 161 sonnets), which is fundamentally parodic and humorous, since it centers on a washerwoman of the Manzanares, Juana, who is courted by the author, a mask or heteronym of Lope, the poor student Tomé de Burguillos. Alongside these poems there are others that are epigrammatic, humorous, serious, disillusioned, satirical, jocular, religious and even philosophical, belonging to the tranquil Lopean de senectute cycle, as well as an exceptional comic-burlesque epic, La Gatomaquia, in seven silvas, without doubt the most perfect and finished example of the epic genre to come from Lope's pen, with cats as its protagonists. On the title page appears the «licenciado Tomé de Burguillos», together with an engraving, a presumed portrait of him; his brief biography is given to us in the «Advertimiento al señor lector». Burguillos, parallel in a certain sense to the figura del donaire of his comedy, embodies the anti-heroic, skeptical and disillusioned vision of the old Lope, who parodies in him his own biography and his literary creation. However, the approval written by the author's friend, Francisco de Quevedo, hints that his style is very similar "to that which flourished without thorns in Lope de Vega". Burguillos traces a Petrarchist canzoniere in a key of parody, of self-parody.

Lyric in the theater

With Lope de Vega, around 1585, Spanish theater recovered its primitive lyric vocation. After all, the creators of the new comedy were the same ones who had made the Moorish and pastoral romances fashionable. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo already perceived that numerous comedies by Lope were inspired by songs of a traditional character. In El caballero de Olmedo, for example, although there was a real tragic historical event, the murder of the knight Juan de Vivero, the subject gave rise to popular seguidillas and to an anonymous romance that are quoted in the text and give the comedy much of its atmosphere. In others, for example in Fuenteovejuna, he not only introduces but imitates the traditional romances, which appear on stage sung by musicians ("Down to the vale of Fuenteovejuna / the maiden comes with her hair unbound..."); at other times he uses popular songs, such as the harvest song in Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña. Much ancient traditional Castilian lyric (villancicos, serranillas, wedding songs, seguidillas...), now vanished, has been preserved or reconstructed thanks to its inclusion by Lope and his imitators in their comedies.

On the other hand, Lope inserts in his comedies passages of learned lyric that use above all the sonnet (when there are monologues and the characters are left alone) or when the action slows down in comedies whose strength lies in characterization, as happens in the case of El perro del hortelano, in which he goes so far as to include no fewer than five. He also uses lyric in the décimas (which "are good for complaints", as he indicates in the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias) and less frequently in the romances and the octavas reales, which he uses only for "relaciones", that is, when one character recounts something to another.

Epic works

La dragontea

Lope devoted a considerable part of the efforts of his best years to becoming the learned epic poet par excellence of Spain. His first published attempt, La dragontea, met with notable problems upon its appearance. Permission to publish it was denied him by the Castilian authorities in 1598, which is why the book had to be printed in Valencia. Relying on this Valencian permit, Lope again requested authorization to publish it in Castile. Not only was the new edition not permitted, but the copies circulating in the Kingdom of Castile were ordered to be collected. The poet did not give up and, concealing it behind La hermosura de Angélica and the two hundred sonnets, he published it in Madrid in 1602.

In the 732 octaves (5856 lines) of its ten cantos he narrates the raids of Sir Francis Drake, accompanied by "Juan Achines", that is, John Hawkins, through American lands in 1595 and 1596 (the Canary Islands, Puerto Rico, Panama, Nombre de Dios and Portobelo), his pursuit at the hands of General Alonso de Sotomayor, and his death in Portobelo, poisoned by his own men (in reality, of dysentery), drawing inspiration, as Lope himself states, from a Relación composed by the Real Audiencia of Panama using reliable testimonies from several persons present at the events, and perhaps from the information offered in the Discurso del capitán Francisco Drake y San Diego de Alcalá composed by Juan de Castellanos, which was corroborated by that offered in the Expeditio Francisci Draki Equitis Angli in Indias Occidentales Anno MDLXXXV (1588) of Walter Bigges.

The poem sought to reflect popular anti-English sentiment; "never have the English had good success, unless through the inclemency of the sea or through great inequalities in numbers", he writes in the prologue. In spite of everything, it did not achieve success and was only reprinted in the following century, in the Obras sueltas of 1776.

Isidro

The liveliest parts of the hagiographic poem Isidro (Madrid, 1599), on the life of the patron saint of Madrid, Saint Isidore the Laborer, written in quintillas over ten cantos, are, beyond dispute, the abundant fragments in which the poet approaches the rural universe in which the saint moves; indeed, Lope loved with all his heart the simple life of peasants and longed all his life for direct contact with nature. But this biographical poem is something more than that, since it is solidly documented: he read everything previously written about the saint and had access to the papers of the beatification cause gathered by Father Domingo de Mendoza, papal commissary for the beatification of Isidore.

La hermosura de Angélica

This poem was published in 1602, together with the Rimas and La dragontea; it is dedicated to his Sevillian friend, the poet Juan de Arguijo; in the prologue Lope says that he wrote it in the moments left free by seafaring life, "on the waters, among the rigging of the galleon San Juan and the banners of the Catholic King", continuing the loose threads of the story of Angélica that Ludovico Ariosto traced in his Orlando furioso, since Ariosto himself had invited other wits to continue it if they could do so better. He transfers the story of Angélica to Spain and, with her adventures and misadventures, traces twenty cantos in octavas reales.

Jerusalén conquistada

In 1604, in the prologue to the Seville edition of the Rimas, Lope announced the imminent appearance of a new epic poem. The work did not see the light until February 1609, with the title La Jerusalén conquistada, epopeya trágica. The text that was printed has not sixteen books, but twenty. Rafael Lapesa suggests that the original text ended with the wedding of the daughter of Alfonso VIII to Richard the Lionheart in the newly liberated Jerusalem but that, to equal the number of cantos in the poem by Torquato Tasso (Gerusalemme liberata, 1581), Lope added four in which he had to narrate the abandonment of the enterprise by the crusaders.

This heroic poem, dedicated to Philip III, is of more than dubious historicity: it sets forth the false military presence of the Castilian King Alfonso VIII (represented in a magnificent preliminary engraving, and whom he supposes to be a direct ancestor of Philip III) in the ill-fated Third Crusade, undertaken with the purpose of liberating the Holy Land from Muslim power, and it is accompanied by not a few learned notes; there were Spaniards in the enterprise, it is true, but not the King himself. Consequently, it turns out to be a poem of encomiastic purpose as well as "a nationalist revision of Tasso's epic, and of history itself", although also, according to modern criticism, a "tale of tales". Each of its twenty cantos in octavas reales is preceded by a prose "argument" summarized in the form of a sonnet, and the work is preceded by a eulogy by his friend, the painter and poet Francisco Pacheco. In it he praises the author's "great imagination" and his "understanding and art so joined, so perfect", as well as his well-achieved facility. Lope reciprocated by dedicating to Pacheco his comedy La gallarda toledana in the Parte XIV of his comedies, and with praise in his Laurel de Apolo. Furthermore, Antonio Carreño, a modern editor of the work, states that

The genealogical, mythical discourse alternates in [the work] with the nationalist and ethnic one. The desire to serve the homeland, to rescue from oblivion the deeds of its heroes, to counter the silent version of foreign historians who, when describing the heroic deeds of the crusaders, pass over the Castilian presence in silence, also moves the strokes of the pen of this motley narrator. And, although Lope contravenes historical narration with fabled narration and mixes both indiscriminately as possible, he justifies, with the help of the Poetics of Aristotle, the validity of alternating factum—the narration of a fact—with poesis—the universal truth that transcends the particular fact—

Indeed, Aristotle, in his Poetics, distinguishes History and Poetry by saying that "the one tells what has happened and the other what could happen", and for that reason "poetry is more philosophical and elevated than history, for poetry tells rather the general, and history the particular". But this precaution of Lope's did not discourage his critics, in particular the humanist Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo, who pointed out its defects in several passages of his Poética de Aristóteles traducida de latín (1623): "The hybrid mixture of diverse tales, the lack of characterization, the absence of a hero (individual or collective) and, above all, the extensive digressions, sometimes erudite, tiresome". Among these digressions the narrative ones stand out, such as the story of the love affair of Alfonso VIII with the Jewish woman Raquel in Toledo, a subject already treated by Lope and which is like a separate poem; as for the diffuse leading role, it is shared by King Philip II of France, Richard the Lionheart and Alfonso VIII himself; the final cantos appear superfluous, and there are other flaws of structure and composition that do not tarnish the poetic verve and brilliance of the author, whose vivid and portentous imagination achieves admirable and brilliant passages. But the harm that criticism in Spain would do him was not hidden from Lope himself, and at the end of the last canto he wrote:

I, ever persecuted by envy, / a stranger in my homeland and exiled, / resembling Ovid in this alone, / though always honored by foreign lands; / favored by my truth alone / and disillusioned with mortal power... / But what can a wit that walks through Spain / hope for from its mountain?

So complex an epic was edited in three volumes by the Lope scholar Joaquín de Entrambasaguas (Madrid: CSIC - Instituto "Miguel de Cervantes", 1954) and more recently by Antonio Carreño (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio Fernández de Castro, 2003, vol. III of the Obras completas of the Biblioteca Castro).

Dramatic works

Title page of the Tercera parte de las comedias de Lope de Vega y otros autores, Madrid: house of Miguel Serrano de Vargas, at the expense of Miguel Martínez, 1613

The creation of the Comedia Nueva

Lope de Vega created the classical Spanish theater of the Golden Age with a novel dramatic formula. In this formula he mixed the tragic and the comic, and he broke the three unities advocated by the Italian school of poetics (Lodovico Castelvetro, Francesco Robortello) based on the Poetics and the Rhetoric of Aristotle: unity of action (that a single story be told), unity of time (within 24 hours or a little more) and unity of place (that it take place in a single location or in adjoining places).

As for the unity of action, Lope's comedies use the Italian imbroglio (telling two or more stories in the same work, generally a main one and a secondary one, or one with nobles as protagonists and another with their plebeian servants). The unity of time is advisable but not always observed, and there are comedies that narrate the entire life of an individual, although he recommended making the passage of time coincide with the intervals between acts. As for the unity of place, it is not observed at all.

Moreover, Lope de Vega does not respect a fourth unity, the unity of style or decorum, which is also sketched in Aristotle; he mixes the tragic and the comic in his work and makes use of a polymetric theater that employs different types of verse and stanza according to the substance of what is being represented. He uses the romance when a character makes relaciones, that is, recounts events; the octava real when it is a matter of making brilliant relaciones or descriptions; redondillas and quintillas for dialogues; sonnets for introspective monologues or waits, or when the characters must change costume backstage; décimas for complaints or laments. The predominant verse is the octosyllable, somewhat less the hendecasyllable, followed by all the others. It is, then, a polymetric and hardly academic theater, unlike French classical theater, and in that sense it more closely resembles Elizabethan theater.

On the other hand, theme dominates over action and action over characterization. The three main themes of his theater are love, faith and honor, and it is interwoven with beautiful lyrical interludes, many of them of popular origin (Romancero, traditional lyric). Themes related to honor are preferably chosen («they move all people forcefully», writes Lope) and overly open satire is avoided.

Lope took special care of the female audience, which could make a performance fail, and he recommended «deceiving with the truth» and making the audience believe in outcomes that then did not occur, at least until the middle of the third act; he recommended some tricks, such as dressing actresses in male disguise, something that excited the libidinous imagination of the male audience and that in the future would spread through universal comic theater as a habitual plot device in comedy of all times: the battle of the sexes, that is, inverting male and female roles. Impetuous women who behave like men and indecisive men who behave like women. Lope recommends all these precepts to those who wish to follow his dramatic formula in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609), written in blank verse interspersed with couplets for a literary academy.

Lope against the publishers of his theatrical works

Lope frequently complained that the manuscripts he handed over to the «autores» (theater managers, in the language of the time) were altered, disfigured, cut and adapted and, frequently, taken to press without his permission just as they had been left. This had been happening ever since Partes of his dramatic works began to be published in 1604. Through the mouth of Belardo, Lope says in Los burgaleses de Lerma (1613):

And since through the first / printings they run swiftly, / I end up being the soap: / mine are the marks / and theirs are the scissors.

Tired of their being printed without the slightest care or correction, he sued the publisher Francisco de Ávila, who prepared the edition of the Sexta parte of his Comedias and the Flor de las comedias de diferentes autores, both of 1615, trying to prevent him from publishing the seventh and eighth Partes without his prior review; but Ávila won the suit on the basis of the rights acquired when he bought the original manuscripts from the «autores» Baltasar de Pinedo and Luis de Vergara, to whom Lope had sold them.

The Phoenix complained bitterly of this when he managed to publish his comedies himself, from the ninth Parte, of 1617, onward; in its prologue he lamented «the cruelty with which certain interests tear my reputation to pieces» and, to prevent it, he continued publishing his own comedies up to volume XX. Ever since he had been convicted of libel, Lope never had any confidence in the courts; he devotes an ironic sonnet to lawsuits in his Rimas humanas y divinas:

Lawsuits, to your procedural gods / I humbly confess my ignorance; / you make an anatomy of hope, / harmful even to what is judicial.

And in the comedy Amistad y obligación, he speaks through the mouth of Belardo:

Forgive me for leaving you thus / and for not seeing the Court, / for I fear that even to the village / some lawsuit may come after me... / Rather I flee from people; / for though I am no criminal / everything looks to me like a constable's staff. / There is no pillar that I do not imagine / to be some attorney; / I shall be better off there. / May God guide your affairs!

A prohibition in 1625 on publishing comedies and entremeses obstructed his purpose; then, like other authors, he managed to circumvent the law by publishing them separately within poetic miscellanies such as La Filomena, La Circe, El laurel de Apolo and La vega del Parnaso (in which he included no fewer than eight) until the prohibition was finally lifted in 1634. Lope had already prepared parts XXI to XXIV, but he died before seeing them printed.

Classification and principal dramatic works

Lope's dramatic works were composed only for the stage, and the author did not keep any copy. The copy underwent the cuts, adaptations, expansions and retouches of the actors, some of whom were also writers of comedies.

Autograph manuscript by Lope de Vega of La encomienda bien guardada, signed and dated 16 April 1610, which he titled La buena guarda on interior pages and in its publication in the Décima quinta parte of his comedies (1621).

Between 1604 and 1647 twenty-five volumes of Partes collecting Lope's comedies were published, although the first ones came out without the playwright's consent. He only took the reins of the publication of his own work from Parte IX (1617) until his death, when he had partes XXI and XXII in press. Juan Pérez de Montalbán, a writer of comedies and his disciple, states in his Fama póstuma that he wrote some one thousand eight hundred comedies and four hundred autos sacramentales, a large part of which has been lost. The author himself was more modest and in his works estimated that he had written some one thousand five hundred, which may be understood as including even the autos sacramentales and other stage works; but even so it is a very high figure. To explain it, Charles Vincent Aubrun supposed that the playwright only drew up the plan and composed some loose scenes, while other poets and actors of his workshop completed the work; however, the poets of the time had no qualms about declaring their authorship in collaborative works by as many as three wits, so that point of view cannot be sustained, even if the author's fame may have made it prudent to conceal his helpers in order to sell the work better. Rennert and Castro carried out a serious study which concludes that the megalomaniac figure is exaggerated and that 723 titles can be firmly attributed to him, of which 78 are of doubtful or mistaken attribution and 219 have been lost, so that Lope's dramatic repertoire would be reduced to 426 pieces. Nevertheless, Morley and Bruerton, making use, though not exclusively, of metrical criteria that have since proven very reliable, narrowed the criteria still further and established 316 comedies as undoubtedly his, 73 as doubtful and 87 that, though commonly attributed to Lope, are not his.

The list of notable comedies is certainly very long. One may cite La discreta enamorada, El acero de Madrid, Los embustes de Celauro, El bobo del colegio, El amor enamorado, Las bizarrías de Belisa, La malcasada, La esclava de su galán, La niña de plata, El arenal de Sevilla, Lo cierto por lo dudoso, La hermosa fea, Los milagros del desprecio, El anzuelo de Fenisa, El rufián Castrucho, El halcón de Federico, La doncella Teodor, La difunta pleiteada, La desdichada Estefanía, El Rey Don Pedro en Madrid...

Of all these, only a couple of dozen are recognized as masterpieces, although in every work by Lope there is always some scene that betrays his genius. Among those two dozen are undoubtedly Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (1610), Fuenteovejuna (1612-1614), La dama boba (1613), Amar sin saber a quién (1620-1622), El mejor alcalde, el rey (1620-1623), El caballero de Olmedo (1620-1625), El castigo sin venganza (1631), El perro del hortelano, El villano en su rincón, El duque de Viseo and Lo fingido verdadero.

El caballero de Olmedo is one of his most lyrical works, while at the same time a tragic one. It is divided into three episodes, which correspond to the exposition, the complication and the dénouement. Don Alonso (the knight of Olmedo) asks his servant Tello for help in winning Inés; in this way Tello comes into contact with Fabia (endowed with Celestina-like traits), who helps the two of them so that they «correspond» and come to marry. However, Rodrigo and his brother Fernando will try to prevent it. In a fatal outcome, Alonso dies near a stream while heading to Olmedo, at the hands of Rodrigo, despite having been warned by dreams, etc., but Tello asks the King for justice, and the King sentences them to death.

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, one of the first editors of his theater, using as his criterion the themes of these works and their sources, separated Lope's works into eleven blocks, although his classification is somewhat confusing because the same comedy can sometimes be classified in two or more categories:

• 1. Heroic and honor dramas; they have themes of national history and real characters, and nationalist and protodemocratic ideas; rich farmers are idealized (Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, 1605-12), or peasants, as in Fuenteovejuna (1612-14), the latter characterized by having a collective protagonist, as in Cervantes's Numancia (1585) or The Persians of Aeschylus. Works: Los comendadores de Córdoba (1598), El mejor alcalde, el Rey (1620-23), El Rey Don Pedro en Madrid (1618), Audiencias del Rey Don Pedro (1613-20) and La estrella de Sevilla (1623), considered to be by Lope until 1920.
• 2. Themes of honor and revenge. Los comendadores de Córdoba, El médico de su honra—not Calderón's—, El Alcalde de Zalamea—not Calderón's—, Las paces de los reyes y judía de Toledo (1610-12), about Alfonso VIII, which provided the subject for the pieces of Antonio Mira de Amescua, Juan Bautista Diamante and the Austrian Franz Grillparzer; El castigo sin venganza, inspired by a tale («novella») by Matteo Bandello; El castigo del discreto (1598-1601); Las ferias de Madrid (1585-89); La locura por la honra (1610-12); El bastardo Mudarra (1612), inspired by the 10th-century Cantar de los siete infantes de Lara, which resembles a work by Juan de la Cueva on the same subject and has points in common with the Electra of Sophocles and King Lear by Shakespeare.
• 3. Dramas of the history of Spain: Las almenas de Toro (1612-13), the only Lopean work dealing with the subject of the Cid. El mejor Alcalde el Rey (Alfonso VII). El mejor mozo de España (about Ferdinand the Catholic). El cerco de Santa Fe (Granada). Los Guanches de Tenerife (about the Conquest of the Canary Islands). Sometimes they intersect with the previous theme, as in La campana de Aragón (c. 1600), which takes up the legend of revenge of the Bell of Huesca and also chronicles the reigns of Peter I of Aragon, Alfonso I the Battler and Ramiro II the Monk. Lope always had a fondness for the historical genre and even sought, with little success, to be royal chronicler; he wrote in the dedication of La campana de Aragón that:

The force of history when represented is as much greater than when read as the difference observed between truth and painting and between the original and the portrait, because in a picture the figures are mute and the persons are in a single action... Well then, in view of this, no one can deny that famous deeds or sentences, presented to the life with their persons, are of great effect in renewing fame from the theaters into the memory of the people, where books do so with less force and with greater difficulty and time.

Lope de Vega researched the comedies of national history in various historical chronicles, especially in Frey Francisco de Rades y Andrada and his Crónica de las tres órdenes y caballerías de Santiago, Calatrava y Alcántara, from which came, for example, the plot of Fuenteovejuna, or in the Crónica de Enrique IV by Alfonso de Palencia. The plot of La divina vencedora comes from the Crónica de Fernando III and from cantiga 185 of Alfonso X the Wise.

• 4. Dramas based on the Romancero. During the 16th and 17th centuries collections of romances became very popular, and many were printed (Romancero general, 1600), collected and sung, even giving rise to the so-called Romancero nuevo. Spaniards were fascinated by hearing incomplete romances in dramas, and Guillén de Castro imposed the model of this type of comedy by writing Las mocedades del Cid; Lope responded with El caballero de Olmedo (1622), set in the times of Juan II (1406-54), and other comedies.
• 5. Dramas on foreign subjects. El Duque de Viseo (1608-09), Roma abrasada (1598-1600), El Gran Duque de Moscovia (1606) and La Reina Juana de Nápoles (1597-1603).
• 6. Comedies of manners, on Spanish cultural stereotypes and urban, rural or simply bad customs, of satirical and moral intention. El villano en su rincón (1614-1616), about the rural life of Juan Labrador, glorifies the literary topos of beatus ille, etc. Castelvines y Monteses (1606-12) is based on a novella by Matteo Bandello that Shakespeare also used for his Romeo and Juliet, although in Lope's work the lovers end up marrying and the families are left at peace; and Hartzenbusch, already in the 19th century; Los novios de Hornachuelos. Many are also called urban comedies or palace comedies
• 7. Cloak-and-sword comedies have the aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie as their characters, and their intrigues are always amorous and comic, without bloody revenges, in a manner opposite to the honor drama: La noche de San Juan (1631) was written in one hour.
• 8. Comedies of intrigue, in which women are the main characters: La dama boba (1613), Los melindres de Belisa (1608), Las bizarrías de Belisa (1634), El perro del hortelano (1613), El acero de Madrid (1610), La viuda valenciana (1604) and La mal casada (1610-15). His disciple Tirso de Molina would end up becoming a master of these comedies.
• 9. Bucolic or pastoral dramas. Imitating the Italian Renaissance, inspired by La Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro, the Églogas of Juan del Encina and Garcilaso de la Vega, the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor, etc. El pastor Fido (1585), for example, is inspired by the famous pastoral novel by Guarini.
• 10. On mythological subjects; they use the Metamorphoses of Ovid as material, and they are court dramas performed for the high aristocracy, even for the monarchs themselves or for nobles, who sometimes acted in them. They had more scenographic apparatus and sometimes even music. They were also called comedias de teatro, comedias de cuerpo or comedias de ruido, with deus ex machina endings: Adonis y Venus, El vellocino de oro (1620), El laberinto de Creta (1612-15).
• 11. Religious dramas, on Old or New Testament history, saints' lives or pious legends; many were performed on the feast day of a saint: La creación del mundo (1631-35), La hermosa Ester (1610), Barlán y Josafat (1611, on the Western version of the legend of the Buddha), El divino africano (1610), on the life of Saint Augustine, San Isidro de Madrid (1604-06), San Diego de Alcalá (1613), and autos sacramentales, still little evolved toward the abstract and spectacular psychomachias of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, such as El tirano castigado, a work of which a manuscript copy by Ignacio de Gálvez is preserved today.

Aubrun reduces the thematic categories of the Lopean comedy to three themes: love, honor and faith. Francisco Ruiz Ramón, however, prefers to speak of dramas of unjust power between a noble and a commoner, or a commoner and the King, or the King and the noble; of honor dramas; and of love dramas. Another classification distinguishes between comic works and dramas, with different subgroups in each:

• Comic works:
  • Comedies of intrigue, which would come to be called cloak-and-sword comedies: La dama boba, El rufián Castrucho or El galán Castrucho, Los locos de Valencia, La viuda valenciana, La discreta enamorada, El acero de Madrid, Las bizarrías de Belisa.
  • Palace comedies, in which the intrigue moves to the courtly and aristocratic setting, forerunners of high comedy: Servir a señor discreto, El perro del hortelano, El villano en su rincón, the most philosophical of the three.
  • Pastoral comedies, in which the author usually appears under the name of Belardo: El verdadero amante, La pastoral de Jacinto, Belardo furioso, La Arcadia.
• Dramas:
  • Historical-legendary dramas:
    • On strictly historical subjects: El esclavo de Roma, El nuevo mundo descubierto por Colón, Don Juan de Austria en Flandes.
    • Inspired by the Romancero, such as Las mocedades de Bernardo, El bastardo Mudarra and Siete infantes de Lara, Las paces de los reyes y judía de Toledo, or by the Carolingian cycle, such as La mocedad de Roldán, El Marqués de Mantua and Ursón y Valentín.
    • Inspired by the chronicles, such as El Rey Don Pedro en Madrid or El infanzón de Illescas.
    • Inspired by independent literary sources, such as the Moorish comedy El remedio en la desdicha, on the story of Abindarráez y la hermosa Jarifa.
    • Tragedies, most of them corresponding to what we call the honor drama: Fuenteovejuna, Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña, El mejor alcalde, el rey, La estrella de Sevilla, of doubtful authorship, El castigo sin venganza and El caballero de Olmedo.
    • Mythological comedies, such as Las mujeres sin hombres, El vellocino de oro, El marido más firme, on the myths, respectively, of the Amazons, Jason and Orpheus.
    • Biblical: La creación del mundo y primera culpa del hombre, on Cain and Abel, Los trabajos de Jacob, La historia de Tobías, La hermosa Ester.
    • Saints' plays: the trilogy dedicated to the patron saint of Madrid: San Isidro labrador de Madrid, La niñez de San Isidro and La juventud de San Isidro; La buena guarda.
    • Autos, such as La maya or La siega.

The dramatic school of Lope de Vega

Many playwrights took up Lope de Vega's novelties and even perfected his model. Among the best of his followers were Guillén de Castro, Antonio Mira de Amescua, Luis Vélez de Guevara and his son, Juan Vélez de Guevara, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Tirso de Molina (to the latter, a great imitator of his comedies of intrigue, he dedicated his metatheatrical comedy Lo fingido verdadero, from around 1608). Minor figures were Miguel Sánchez, Damián Salucio del Poyo (to whom he dedicated his «tragicomedy» Los muertos vivos, datable between 1599 and 1602), Andrés de Claramonte, Felipe Godínez, Diego Jiménez del Enciso, Rodrigo de Herrera, Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, Jerónimo de Villaizán, Juan Pérez de Montalbán (to whom Lope dedicated his comedy La francesilla, from around 1596), Luis Belmonte Bermúdez, Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Alonso Remón and Jacinto de Herrera, not to mention an innumerable series of wits of the third rank.

Biographers

Many books have been written about Lope de Vega, so much so that an entire branch of Hispanic philology has developed, Lopismo. The first to write one was his disciple, close friend and admirer Juan Pérez de Montalbán in his Fama póstuma (1636). Other writers who have done so are Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado (Madrid, 1890), Hugo Rennert and Américo Castro (Madrid, 1919, with a second edition to which the notes of Fernando Lázaro Carreter were added, Salamanca: Anaya, 1969), Karl Vossler (Lope de Vega y su tiempo, Madrid, 1940), Luis Astrana Marín (La vida azarosa de Lope de Vega, Barcelona, 1941), Joaquín de Entrambasaguas (Vivir y crear de Lope de Vega, Madrid, 1946), Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles (El otro Lope de Vega), Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Lope viviente) and Ángel Flores (Vida de Lope de Vega).

Works

(The list is incomplete, owing above all to the enormous size of his theatrical output.)

Lyric

• Romancero general (1600, which gathers romances by various authors)
• La hermosura de Angélica, con otras diversas rimas (1602)
• Rimas (1604; 1609 with the addition of the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias...)
• Cuatro soliloquios or Soliloquios (religious poetry, 1612)
• Rimas sacras (1614)
• Romancero espiritual (1619)
• Justa poética en honor de san Isidro (prose and verse, 1620)
• La Filomena con otras diversas rimas, prosas y versos (1621)
• Fiestas en la canonización de san Isidro (prose and verse, 1622)
• La Circe con otras rimas y prosas (1624)
• Triunfos divinos, con otras rimas (1625)
• Soliloquios amorosos (prose and verse, 1629)
• Laurel de Apolo (1630)
• Amarilis (eclogue, 1633)
• Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (1634)
• Filis (eclogue, 1635)
• La Vega del Parnaso (posthumous miscellaneous works, predominantly lyric poetry, 1637)

Epic

• La Dragontea (historical epic, 1598)
• Isidro (hagiographic epic, 1599)
• Fiestas de Denia (1599)
• La hermosura de Angélica, con otras diversas rimas (1602)
• La Jerusalén conquistada (1609)
• Corona trágica (1627)
• La Gatomaquia (burlesque epic, 1634)

Byzantine novel

• El peregrino en su patria (1604)

Pastoral novel

• La Arcadia (1598)
• Pastores de Belén (pastoral novel a lo divino, 1612)

Celestinesque novel

• La Dorotea (novel in dialogue, 1632)

Novella

• Novelas a Marcia Leonarda. This is the title under which four novelle are published today: «Las fortunas de Diana» (published in La Filomena, 1621), «La desdicha por la honra», «La más prudente venganza» and «Guzmán el Bravo» (published in La Circe, 1624).

Theater

The selection includes all the works mentioned by Edward M. Wilson and Duncan Moir in the third chapter, «El teatro de Lope de Vega», of their Historia de la literatura española, vol. 3: Siglo de Oro: teatro (Ariel). The datings come (unless another source is indicated) from the database of Lope de Vega's theater Artelope and generally constitute the ad quem limit.

Preceptive works

• Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609)

Cloak-and-sword comedies

• Las ferias de Madrid (picaresque comedy, 1585-1588)
• El caballero del milagro (1593)
• La viuda valenciana (1595-1600)
• El vaquero de Moraña (comedy and historical drama, 1599-1603)
• El sufrimiento premiado (1603)
• La prueba de los amigos (1604)
• La noche toledana (1605)
• El anzuelo de Fenisa (picaresque comedy, 1606)
• La discreta enamorada (1606)
• El acero de Madrid (1608)
• Los melindres de Belisa (1608)
• La niña de plata (1610-12)
• Servir a señor discreto (1610-1612)
• La dama boba (1613)
• La malcasada (1615)
• Santiago el verde (1615)
• El galán de la Membrilla (1615)
• El sembrar en buena tierra (1616)
• La moza de cántaro (1618)
• La cortesía de España (1619)
• Quien todo lo quiere (1620)
• Los locos de Valencia (1620)
• Amar sin saber a quién (1620-1622)
• ¡Ay, verdades que en amor! (1625)
• Sin secreto no hay amor (1626)
• La noche de San Juan (1631)
• Las bizarrías de Belisa (1634)

Palace comedies

• Los embustes de Fabia (on ancient history, 1588-1595)
• Los donaires de Matico (1596)
• La quinta de Florencia (palace drama, 1600)
• Castelvines y Monteses (1606-1612)
• La discordia en los casados (1611)
• El perro del hortelano (1613)
• El valor de las mujeres (1616)
• Amor, pleito y desafío (1621)
• Los Tellos de Meneses (1620-1628)
• La hermosa fea (1630-1632)

Pastoral

• El pastor Fido (1585)
• Belardo el furioso (1586-1595)
• El verdadero amante (1588-1595, although Lope claimed he had composed it c. 1575, at about 13 years of age)
• La Arcadia (1615)

Chivalric

• Los celos de Rodamonte (before 1596)
• El marqués de Mantua (1596)
• La mocedad de Roldán (1599-1603)
• Mujeres y criados (1613-1614)

Biblical

• La historia de Tobías (1609)
• La hermosa Ester (1610)
• El robo de Dina (1615-1622)
• Los trabajos de Jacob (1620-1630), also titled Sueños hay que verdad [o verdades] son
• La creación del mundo y primer culpa del hombre (1630-1635)

Saints' plays

• San Diego de Alcalá (1588)
• Comedia de San Segundo (1594)
• San Isidro de Madrid (1604-1606)
• Lo fingido verdadero (1608)
• La buena guarda (1610)
• El divino africano (1610)
• La vida de San Pedro Nolasco (1635)

Mythological plays, court plays and zarzuela

• Adonis y Venus (1597-1603)
• El laberinto de Creta (1610-1615)
• Barlán y Josafat (1611)
• La fábula de Perseo o la bella Andrómeda (1611-1615)
• El marido más firme (1620)
• La bella Aurora (1620-1625)
• El vellocino de oro (1622)
• La selva sin amor (1629)
• El amor enamorado (1630)

Tragedies and historical dramas

• Los comendadores de Córdoba (1596)
• El remedio en la desdicha (Moorish drama, 1596)
• Vida y muerte del rey Bamba (1598), also titled El Rey Bamba or simply Bamba.
• Roma abrasada (1598-1600)
• La piedad ejecutada (1599-1602), also titled Pimenteles y Quiñones
• El postrer godo de España (1600), also titled El último godo
• La imperial de Otón (1600)
• El castigo del discreto (c. 1600)
• La campana de Aragón (c. 1601)
• La reina Juana de Nápoles (1597-1603)
• Los Guanches de Tenerife y Conquista de Canaria (c. 1604)
• El gran duque de Moscovia (1606), also titled El Gran Duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido
• Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (1605-1608)
• El duque de Viseo (1609)
• El villano en su rincón (1611)
• Los ponces de Barcelona (1610-1612)
• El bastardo Mudarra (1612)
• La locura por la honra (1612)
• Las paces de los reyes y judía de Toledo (1612)
• Las almenas de Toro (1613)
• El Asalto de Mastrique por el Príncipe de Parma (1614). Tragicomedy.
• Fuenteovejuna (1614)
• El niño inocente de La Guardia (1617)
• La discreta venganza (1620)
• El mejor alcalde, el rey (1620-1623)
• El caballero de Olmedo (1620-1625)
• Porfiar hasta morir (1628)
• Contra valor no hay desdicha (1625-1630)
• El castigo sin venganza (1631)

Autos sacramentales

• La adúltera perdonada (1608)
• El pastor lobo y cabaña celestial
• La venta de la zarzuela
• La siega
• La maya

Late discovery

In January 2023, a hitherto anonymous work in the collection of the National Library of Spain, La francesa Laura, was identified with the help of artificial intelligence as another comedy by Lope de Vega. The comedy was attributed to Lope de Vega's late output and dated to 1628–1630. Subsequent research by literary historians confirmed the result obtained by the artificial intelligence.

Editions of works by Lope de Vega

• Obras completas, edited by Jesús Gómez and Paloma Cuenca (comedies) and Antonio Carreño (poetry and prose). Madrid: Biblioteca Castro. So far (2023) it includes: 16 vols. of Comedias, 1 of Ocho comedias magistrales, 6 of Poesía and 3 of Prosa
• Lope de Vega, Comedias de…, edited by PROLOPE (UAB), Partes I-X, various coordinators and editors, Lérida, Milenio-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, (1997-2010).
• Lope de Vega, Comedias, edited by PROLOPE (UAB), Partes XI-XVIII, various coordinators and editors, Madrid, Gredos (2012-2019).
• Historias de Lope de Vega, adaptation by María Luz Morales, Madrid, Anaya. "Biblioteca Araluce" collection. ISBN 84-207-8289-0 and ISBN 978-84-207-8289-8.
• Colección de las obras sueltas así en prosa como en verso de Frey Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, Madrid, Arco Libros, 2001. Second edition (21 volumes). ISBN 84-7635-062-7 and ISBN 978-84-7635-062-1.
• Lope de Vega, Mujeres y criados, edited by Alejandro García Reidy, prologue by Alberto Blecua, Madrid, Gredos, 2014 (ISBN 9788424928186).
• Obras escogidas, Madrid, Aguilar. ISBN 84-03-00990-9 and ISBN 978-84-03-00990-5.
• Cancionero musical de Lope de Vega, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1986. "Cancioneros musicales de poetas españoles del Siglo de Oro, 2-4" collection. ISBN 84-00-06207-8 and ISBN 978-84-00-06207-1.
• Epistolario, Madrid, Real Academia Española, 1989. ISBN 84-600-7292-4 and ISBN 978-84-600-7292-8.
• Antología poética, Barcelona, Orbis, 1994. ISBN 84-402-1624-6 and ISBN 978-84-402-1624-3.
• Lírica, Madrid, Castalia, third edition. Clásicos Castalia collection, 1999. ISBN 84-7039-318-9 and ISBN 978-84-7039-318-1.
• Obras poéticas, literary ed. José Manuel Blecua, Barcelona, Planeta, 1983.
• Rimas, literary ed. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez, Ciudad Real, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1993.
• Rimas humanas y otros versos, literary ed. Antonio Carreño, Barcelona, Crítica, 1998.

Lope as a literary character

Although Lope himself used to cast himself as a secondary character in his own works under the name «Belardo», he was also the main character and protagonist of the theatrical pieces El fénix de los ingenios (1853) by Tomás Rodríguez Rubí and Don Lope de Vega Carpio by Manuel García Muñoz. His youth inspired the film Lope directed by Andrucha Waddington (2010).

Controversies

In Spain in July 2023, the political party Vox demanded that the staging of his play La villana de Getafe be withdrawn because of its sexual innuendos.

See also

• Spanish Baroque literature
• Spanish literature
• Baroque literature
• Spanish Golden Age
• Theater
• Sonnet
• Lope de Vega House Museum
• Códice Daza

Bibliography on Lope de Vega

• Castro, Américo and Hugo A. Rennert, Vida de Lope de Vega: (1562-1635), ed. by Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Salamanca, 1968.
• De Salvo, Mimma, «Notas sobre Lope de Vega y Jerónima de Burgos: un estado de la cuestión», pub. in Homenaje a Luis Quirante. Cuadernos de Filología, supplement L, 2 vols., vol. I, 2002, pp. 141-156. Online version revised in 2008. URL. Accessed 28-09-2010.
• «Lengua y literatura, Historia de las literaturas», in Enciclopedia metódica Larousse, vol. III, Mexico City, Larousse, 1983, pp. 99-100. ISBN 968-6042-14-8
• Dámaso, Alonso, En torno a Lope, Madrid, Gredos, 1972, 212 pp. ISBN 9788424904753
• Huerta Calvo, Javier, Historia del Teatro Español, Madrid, Gredos, 2003.
• Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino, Estudios sobre el teatro de Lope de Vega, Madrid, Editorial Artes Gráficas, 1949, 6 volumes.
• MONTESINOS, José Fernández, Estudios sobre Lope de Vega, Salamanca, Anaya, 1967.
• Pedraza Jiménez, Felipe B., El universo poético de Lope de Vega, Madrid, Laberinto, 2004.
  • —, Perfil biográfico, Barcelona, Teide, 1990, pp. 3-23.
• Rozas, Juan Manuel, Estudios sobre Lope de Vega, Madrid, Cátedra, 1990.
• Pedraza Jiménez, Felipe B., Lope de Vega: pasiones, obra y fortuna del monstruo de naturaleza, EDAF, Madrid, 2009 (ISBN 9788441421424).
• Arellano, Ignacio, Historia del teatro español del siglo XVII, Cátedra, Madrid, 1995 (ISBN 9788437613680).
• Arellano, Ignacio; Mata, Carlos; Vida y obra de Lope de Vega, Bibliotheca homolegens, Madrid, 2011 (ISBN 978-84-92518-72-2).

External links

• Lope de Vega at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.
• Prolope Research Group, responsible for editing the playwright's entire work
• Artelope, database on 406 works by Lope de Vega
• Works by Lope de Vega in the Hispanic Digital Library of the National Library of Spain
• Analysis of Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias
• Overview of Lope de Vega by Robert Lauer
• Historical-scenic atlas of Spanish theater of the 17th and 18th centuries
• El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, de Lope de Vega Archived 2008-04-12 at the Wayback Machine, article by Carmen Ramírez Ruiz
• Biography of Lope de Vega by Cayetano Alberto de La Barrera
• Works by Lope de Vega: text, concordances and frequency list
• Notas sobre Lope de Vega y Jerónima de Burgos: un estado de la cuestión
• El perro del hortelano, Lope de Vega at the Centro Virtual Cervantes
• On the cast of Lope de Vega's El tirano castigado
• On the cast of Lope de Vega's La dama boba
• Profile at the NNDB
• Lope de Vega House Museum (Madrid)
• Link to La casa di Lope (Rome)
• Anuario Lope de Vega (yearbook on Lope de Vega)
• Virtual book: Mujeres y criados, facsimile edition. Critical text by Alejandro García-Reidy
• La evolución de la comicidad en la trayectoria dramática de Lope de Vega, lecture delivered at the March Foundation by Felipe Pedraza Jiménez.