Works of Lope de Vega

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 (q.v.) 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.