VEGA, LOPE DE (1562–1635)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also Drama: Spanish and Portuguese ; Inquisition, Spanish ; Spanish Literature and Language ; Urban VIII (pope) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

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

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

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

Secondary Sources

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

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

Jodi Campbell