Vega Carpio, Lope Félix de

Vega Carpio, Lope Félix de (1562–1635), Spanish playwright, and the most prolific dramatist of all time; he himself claimed to have written 1,500 plays, though the actual number of extant texts is from 400 to 500, mostly written in neat, ingenious, and superbly lyrical verse. His first plays date from the period of the early open-air theatres of Madrid. When he began to write, the professional theatre in Spain was in its infancy, and he can rightly be considered the consolidator, if not the founder, of the commercial theatre in Spain. He played a large part in the development of the Spanish comedia, and the formula he evolved for its construction in the last decade of the 16th century remained largely unchanged for 100 years.

Critics have endeavoured to cope with Lope's enormous output by dividing his plays into various categories, but it is really more important to stress the unity of his dramatic production. His world is that of a Spanish Catholic of his day—he took orders in 1614. Society is viewed in an idealized light, and its multiple social distinctions are reduced to three: king, nobles, and commoners, the last usually peasants. It is against this background that such plays as Peribán̄ez y el Comendador de Ocan̄a (c.1608), Fuenteovejuna (The Sheep-Well, c.1612), and El mejor alcalde el rey (The King the Best Magistrate, c.1620) should be considered. Fuenteovejuna deals with the rising of a village against its brutal lord; shorn of its subplot—the rising of that same lord against his king—the play has been interpreted in terms of the class struggle. The two plots are, however, interdependent, and both are essential to the true understanding of the play. Here and elsewhere Lope reveals himself clearly as conservative rather than revolutionary: the brutal overlord is removed because he disrupts the harmony of society, failing in his duties to the king above him as well as to the commoners beneath him.

This and other historical dramas of Lope have suffered from an attempt to interpret them according to the ideas of a later age, as have those concerned with the stylized code of honour. Lope's handling of this latter theme is diverse. In the early play Los comendadores de Córdoba, the outraged husband, discovering that he is openly and publicly dishonoured, takes open, public, and bloody revenge. In the mature El castigo sin venganza, the duke secures his public position but revenges himself privately upon the bastard son and adulterous wife who have caused the loss of his honour. His public reputation is saved, since his revenge is secret, and with it the honour of the state, but this secret revenge entails the killing of the only two persons he has loved. The subtlety of the play consists in Lope's demonstration that this state of affairs is the direct consequence of the duke's own licentiousness. The theme of honour is more than a barbaric convention.

Lope also wrote for the entertainment of the Court, usually plays with a mythological or pastoral plot which made use of the most up-to-date machinery and scenic effects. La selva sin amor (The Loveless Forest, 1629) is a particularly interesting work, being partly set to music and thus a forerunner of the later zarzuela. Equally spectacular were his autos sacramentales played on three carts, the centre being the main playing-space, and the outer carts bearing complicated machinery. They do not have the lyrical beauty or the subtle symbolism of those by Calderón, but they present their theme simply, forcibly, and dramatically, and show an assured grasp of technique.