Lope de Vega
Spanish author
born Nov. 25, 1562, Madrid
died Aug. 27, 1635, Madrid
Main
in full Lope Félix De Vega Carpio, byname The Phoenix Of Spain, Spanish
El Fénix De España outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age,
author of as many as 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic
pieces, of which 431 plays and 50 shorter pieces are extant.
Life.
Lope de Vega was the second son and third child of Francisca Fernandez
Flores and Félix de Vega, an embroiderer. He was taught Latin and
Castilian in 1572–73 by the poet Vicente Espinel, and the following year
he entered the Jesuit Imperial College, where he learned the rudiments
of the humanities. Captivated by his talent and grace, the bishop of
Ávila took him to the Alcalá de Henares (Universidad Complutense) in
1577 to study for the priesthood, but Vega soon left the Alcalá on the
heels of a married woman.
On his father’s death in 1578, the embroidery shop passed to the
husband of one of the poet’s sisters, Isabel del Carpio. Vega later
adopted the noble name of Carpio in order to give an aristocratic tone
to his own. He acquired a humanistic education from his abundant though
haphazard readings in erudite anthologies. In 1583 he took part in the
Spanish expedition against the Azores.
By this time Vega had established himself as a playwright in Madrid
and was living from his comedias (tragicomic social dramas). He also
exercised an undefined role as gentleman attendant or secretary to
various nobles, adapting his role as servant or panderer according to
the situation. By this time, also, the poet’s life was already launched
on a course of tempestuous passion. The “remote beauty” who took him
from the Alcalá was followed by Elena Osorio, an actress of exceptional
beauty and maturity. His romantic involvement with her was intense,
violent, and marred by Vega’s jealousy over Elena’s liaison with the
powerful gallant Don Francisco Perrenot de Granvelle, nephew of the
cardinal de Granvelle. Finally, when Elena abandoned the poet, he wrote
such fierce libels against her and her family that he landed in prison.
The libel continued in a court case in 1588, which sent him into exile
from Castile for eight years. In the middle of this incredible court
scandal, Vega abducted Isabel de Urbina (the “Belisa” of many of his
poems), the beautiful 16-year-old sister of Philip II’s earl marshal.
They were forced to marry, and the new husband immediately departed with
the Spanish Armada against England. On his return, he passed the
remainder of his exile in Valencia, at that time a centre of
considerable dramatic activity, and took to the serious writing of
plays. Here, too, he engaged in writing romanceros, or ballad poetry,
which had become fashionable. In 1590 he was appointed secretary to the
duke of Alba, whom he followed to Toledo and then to the ducal estate at
Alba de Tormes, where his wife died in childbirth in 1595. He auctioned
off everything he owned and left for Madrid, where his public
concubinage with the widow Antonia Trillo de Armenta caused him another
lawsuit (1596).
He had left the duke’s service in 1595, and in 1598 he went to the
home of the marqués de Sarriá, with whom he remained until 1600.
Sometime around 1595 he also met the illiterate and singularly beautiful
actress Micaela de Luján, who was to be for nearly 20 years the poet’s
most peaceful love; she was the “Camila Lucinda” of numerous magnificent
verses composed for her by Vega. He took a second wife, Juana de Guardo,
the daughter of a wealthy pork butcher, by whom he had two children,
Carlos Félix and Feliciana. He was mercilessly pilloried by his literary
enemies for such an opportunistic union.
Height of literary productivity.
From 1605 until his death he remained a confidential secretary and
counselor to the duke of Sessa, with whom he maintained a voluminous and
revealing correspondence. In 1608 he was also named to a sinecure
position as a familiar of the Inquisition and then prosecutor (promotor
fiscal) of the Apostolic Chamber. By this time, Vega had become a famous
poet and was already regarded as the “phoenix of Spanish wits.” In 1609
he published Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (“New Art of
Writing Plays in This Time”), a poetic treatise in which he defended his
own plays with more wit than effectiveness.
In 1610, in the midst of full literary production—on the road to his
500 comedias—Vega moved his household definitively from Toledo to
Madrid. In Madrid, Vega was afflicted by painful circumstances that
complicated his life in a period when he was still very creative. Juana
became ill, miscarried, and lived in precarious health under Vega’s
constant care; Carlos Félix, his favourite son, also became ill and
died, in 1612. Juana died in childbirth with Feliciana, and Micaela de
Luján must also have died during that time, since Vega took into his own
home the children remaining from this relationship, Marcela and Lope
Félix, or Lopito.
These heartbreaks moved the poet to a deep religious crisis. In 1609
he entered the first of several religious orders. From this time on he
wrote almost exclusively religious works, though he also continued his
theatrical work, which was financially indispensable. In 1614 he entered
the priesthood, but his continued service as secretary and panderer to
his patron, the duke of Sessa, hindered him from obtaining the
ecclesiastical benefits he sought. The duke, fearful of losing Vega’s
services, succeeded in having one of the poet’s former lovers, the
actress Lucia de Salcedo, seduce Vega. The duke thus permanently
recovered his secretary. Vega thereafter became involved in new and
scandalous romantic relationships. In 1627 his verse epic on the life
and execution of Mary, queen of Scots, La corona trágica, which was
dedicated to Pope Urban VIII, brought in reward a doctorate in theology
of the Collegium Sapientiae and the cross of the Order of Malta, out of
which came his proud use of the title Frey (“Brother”). His closing
years were full of gloom. His last lover, Marta de Nevares, who shared
his life from 1619 until her death in 1632, lost first her sight and
then her sanity in the 1620s. The death at sea of his son Lope Félix del
Carpio y Luján and the abduction and abandonment of his youngest
daughter, Antonia Clara, both in 1634, were blows that rent his soul.
His own death in Madrid in August 1635 evoked national mourning.
Works.
Vega became identified as a playwright with the comedia, a comprehensive
term for the new drama of Spain’s Golden Age. Vega’s productivity for
the stage, however exaggerated by report, remains phenomenal. He claimed
to have written an average of 20 sheets a day throughout his life and
left untouched scarcely a vein of writing then current. Cervantes called
him “the prodigy of nature.” Juan Pérez de Montalván, his first
biographer, in his Fama póstuma (1636), attributed to Vega a total of
1,800 plays, as well as more than 400 autos sacramentales (short
allegorical plays on sacramental subjects). The dramatist’s own first
figure of 230 plays in 1603 rises to 1,500 in 1632; more than 100, he
boasts, were composed and staged in 24 hours. The titles are known of
723 plays and 44 autos, and the texts survive of 426 and 42,
respectively.
The earliest firm date for a play written by Vega is 1593. His 18
months in Valencia in 1589–90, during which he was writing for a living,
seem to have been decisive in shaping his vocation and his talent. The
influence in particular of the Valencian playwright Cristóbal de Virués
(1550–1609) was obviously profound. Toward the end of his life, in El
laurel de Apolo, Vega credits Virués with having, in his “famous
tragedies,” laid the very foundations of the comedia. Virués’ five
tragedies, written between 1579 and 1590, do indeed display a gradual
evolution from a set imitation of Greek tragedy as understood by the
Romans to the very threshold of romantic comedy. In the process the five
acts previously typical of Spanish plays have become three; the
classical chorus has given way to comment within the play, including
that implicit in the expansion of a servant’s role to that of confidant;
the unities of time, place, and action have disappeared, leaving instead
to each act its own setting in time and space; and hendecasyllabic blank
verse has yielded to a metrical variety that, seeking to reflect
changing moods and situations, also suggests the notable degree of
lyricism soon to permeate the drama. The Spanish drama’s confusing of
tragic effect with a mere accumulation of tragic happenings has
deflected the emphasis from in-depth character portrayal to that of
complexity of plot, action, and incident, and the resulting emphasis on
intrigues, misunderstandings, and other devices of intricate and
complicated dramatic plotting have broken down the old divisions between
dramatic genres in favour of an essentially mixed kind, tragicomedy,
that would itself soon be known simply as comedia. Finally, from
initially portraying kings and princes of remote ages, Virués began to
depict near-contemporary Spain and ordinary men and women.
There can be no claiming that Vega learned his whole art from Virués.
Bartolomé de Torres Naharro at the beginning of the 16th century had
already adumbrated the cloak and sword (cape y espada) play of
middle-class manners. A decade before Virués, Juan de la Cueva had
discovered the dramatic interest latent in earlier Spanish history and
its potential appeal to a public acutely responsive to national
greatness. In the formation of the comedia this proved another decisive
factor on which Vega fastened instinctively.
It was at this point that Vega picked up the inheritance and, by
sheer force of creative genius and fertility of invention, gave the
comedia its basic formula and raised it to a peak of splendour. The
comedia’s manual was Vega’s own poetic treatise, El arte nuevo de hacer
comedias en este tiempo, in which he firmly rejected the Classical and
Neoclassical “rules,” opted for a blend of comedy and tragedy and for
metrical variety, and made public opinion the ultimate arbiter of taste.
The comedia was essentially, therefore, a social drama, ringing a
thousand changes on the accepted foundations of society: respect for
crown, for church, and for the human personality, the latter being
symbolized in the “point of honour” (pundonor) that Vega commended as
the best theme of all “since there are none but are strongly moved
thereby.” This “point of honour” was a matter largely of convention,
“honour” being equivalent, in a very limited and brittle sense, to
social reputation; men were expected to be brave and proud and not to
put up with an insult, while “honour” for women basically meant
maintaining their chastity (if unmarried) or their fidelity (if
married). It followed that this was a drama less of character than of
action and intrigue that rarely, if ever, grasped the true essence of
tragedy.
Few of the plays that Vega wrote were perfect, but he had an unerring
sense for the theme and detail that could move an audience conscious of
being on the crest of its country’s greatness to respond to a mirroring
on the stage of some of the basic ingredients of that greatness. Because
of him the comedia became a vast sounding board for every chord in the
Spanish consciousness, a “national” drama in the truest sense.
In theme Vega’s plays range over a vast horizon. Traditionally his
plays have been grouped as religious, mythological, classical,
historical (foreign and national), pastoral, chivalric, fantastic, and
of contemporary manners. In essence the categories come down to two,
both Spanish in setting: the heroic, historical play based on some
national story or legend, and the cloak and sword drama of contemporary
manners and intrigue.
For his historical plays Vega ransacked the medieval chronicle, the
romancero, and popular legend and song for heroic themes, chosen for the
most part as throwing into relief some aspect either of the national
character or of that social solidarity on which contemporary Spain’s
greatness rested. The conception of the crown as fount of justice and
bulwark of the humble against oppression inspires some of his finest
plays. Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (Peribáñez and the Commander
of Ocaña), El mejor alcalde, el rey (The King, the Greatest Alcalde),
and Fuente Ovejuna (All Citizens Are Soldiers) are still memorable and
highly dramatic vindications of the inalienable rights of the
individual, as is El caballero de Olmedo (The Knight from Olmedo) on a
more exalted social plane. In Fuente Ovejuna the entire village assumes
responsibility before the king for the slaying of its overlord and wins
his exoneration. This experiment in mass psychology, the best known
outside Spain of all his plays, evoked a particular response from
audiences in tsarist Russia.
Vega’s cloak and sword plays are all compounded of the same
ingredients and feature the same basic situations: gallants and ladies
falling endlessly in and out of love, the “point of honour” being
sometimes engaged, but very rarely the heart, while servants imitate or
parody the main action and one, the gracioso, exercises his wit and
common sense in commenting on the follies of his social superiors. El
perro del hortelano (The Gardener’s Dog), Por la puente Juana (Across
the Bridge, Joan), La dama boba (The Lady Nit-Wit), La moza de cántaro
(The Girl with the Jug), and El villano en su rincón (The Peasant’s
House Is His Castle) are reckoned among the best in this minor if
still-entertaining kind of play.
All Vega’s plays suffer from haste of composition, partly a
consequence of the public’s insatiable desire for novelty. His first
acts are commonly his best, with the third a hasty cutting of knots or
tying up of loose ends that takes scant account both of probability and
of psychology. There was, too, a limit to his inventiveness in the
recurrence of basic themes and situations, particularly in his cloak and
sword plays. But Vega’s defects, like his strength, derive from the
accuracy with which he projected onto the stage the essence of his
country and age. Vega’s plays remain true to the great age of Spain into
which he had been born and which he had come to know, intuitively rather
than by study, as no one had ever known it before.
Vega’s nondramatic works in verse and prose filled 21 volumes in
1776–79. Much of this vast output has withered, but its variety remains
impressive. Vega wrote pastoral romances, verse histories of recent
events, verse biographies of Spanish saints, long epic poems and
burlesques upon such works, and prose tales, imitating or adapting works
by Ariosto and Cervantes in the process. His lyric compositions—ballads,
elegies, epistles, sonnets (there are 1,587 of these)—are myriad.
Formally they rely much on the conceit, and in content they provide a
running commentary on the poet’s whole emotional life.
Among specific nondramatic works that deserve to be mentioned are the
7,000-line Laurel de Apolo (1630), depicting Apollo’s crowning of the
poets of Spain on Helicon, which remains of interest as a guide to the
poets and poetasters of the day; La Dorotea (1632), a thinly veiled
chapter of autobiography cast in dialogue form that grows in critical
esteem as the most mature and reflective of his writings; and, listed
last because it provides a bridge and key to his plays, the Arte nuevo
de hacer comedias en este tiempo. This verse apology rested on the sound
Aristotelian principle that the dramatist’s first duty is to hold and
satisfy his audience: the comedia, he says in effect, had developed in
response to what the Spanish public demanded of the theatre. The
treatise provides a clear picture of the principles and conventions of a
drama entitled to be called national in its close identification with
the social values and emotional responses of the age.
