Lope de Vega


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  • Achievement
  • Characteristics of Lope's Drama
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    LOPE DE VEGA (1562-1635) , Spanish poet and dramatist, who ranks as the founder of the Spanish theater. Usually referred to by his Christian name alone, he was born Lope Félix de Vega Carpio in Madrid. Lope was educated at the Jesuit Colegio de los Teatinos and later at the University of Alcalá. In 1583 he became secretary to the Marquis of las Navas and, about this time, made his mark as a playwright. Entering into a passionate liaison with Elena Osorio, daughter of the actor-manager Jerónimo Velázquez and wife of another actor living in the Indies, he circulated scurrilous poems attacking her and her family when she broke off their relationship. He was arrested for libel and, brought to trial in 1588, was banished for eight years from Madrid. The memories of this sensational episode inspired the masterpiece of his old age, La Dorotea.

    Lope celebrated his release from prison and began his exile by eloping with a young lady, Isabel de Urbina, whose family started legal proceedings against him that were suspended on his marrying her. Leaving his wife in Valencia, Lope embarked in the Armada against England. He served on the flagship San Juan and was one of the survivors of the expedition. On his return to Spain he settled with his wife in Valencia, where he earned his living by writing plays and where his nationwide popularity began. With his sentence of exile reduced by one year Lope returned to Castile in 1595 as secretary to the Duke of Alba in Toledo. Losing his wife that year (the two daughters of the marriage died in infancy), Lope moved to Madrid in 1596 as secretary of the Marquis of Malpica and later of the Count of Lemos. From 1605 till his death he was in the service of the Duke of Sessa, whose intimate friend and confidant he became. Lope's duties included composing for the Duke gallant letters to a number of ladies, but such letters were a conventional feature of fashionable society. More undignified was the familiarity with which each man confided his amours to the other. The Duke was no paragon of sexual morality, and Lope, 20 years his senior, had an experience in the arts of amorous intrigue on which his patron could draw.

    In 1598 Lope contracted a second marriage, with Juana de Guardo. His son from this marriage died as a boy, the daughter did not outlive her father, and Juana herself died in 1613, her last years embittered by Lope's relations with the actress Micaela de Luján, by whom he had two children. Juana's death brought a crisis of conscience and Lope took orders in 1614. If this step was intended to help him regularize his life it proved a great mistake. Two years after his ordination he contracted a liaison with a married woman, Marta de Nevares, whose husband started legal proceedings which he did not live to terminate. Lope lived with Marta till her death in 1632, caring for her devotedly when she lost both her sight and her reason. Two years after Marta's death a daughter born from this liaison eloped with a man who failed to marry her and Lope's only surviving son was drowned at sea. These final domestic trials, following on the early deaths of nearly all his children, seemed to him to be the punishment for his sins, and his last months were full of remorse of conscience. He died in Madrid on Aug. 27, 1635.

    A vast crowd followed his funeral procession, for the scandals of his life, though they seem to have prevented him from obtaining the recognition he hoped for from the court, had not dimmed his enormous prestige with the general public. Their idolization of him led to the coining of the phrase es de Lope ("it is by Lope") to denote "superb," "incomparable." There even began to circulate a paraphrase of the Creed beginning, "I believe in Lope almighty, poet of heaven and earth," but this was promptly suppressed by the Inquisition. A volume of panegyrics published the year after his death contained contributions of 153 writers. His Italian admirers published simultaneously a volume of homage to the man whom one of them called "the poet of Europe" and "the Columbus of the Indies of poetry." His popularity and influence in France were also considerable. A sign of this international prestige was the conferment on him by Pope Urban VIII, to whom he had dedicated an epic poem, of an honorary doctorate in theology and a knighthood in the Order of Saint John.

    Despite his faults, Lope was, on the whole, a warm and openhearted man, charming and generous to his friends, a devoted though not constant husband and an affectionate and tender father. His sexual laxity was due to an indiscipline deeply rooted in his temperament. Frank and open, he was essentially an extrovert, unable to bottle up any emotion or repress his dynamic energy.

    Achievement

    The indiscipline of Lope's life was paralleled by an indiscipline of composition, an unrepressed outpouring of every experience and of an inexhaustible imagination. He himself claimed to have written 1,500 full-length plays and his first biographer put the total at 1,800. These figures are almost certainly exaggerated. The titles of about 800 plays by Lope are known, but the texts of only 470 have survived. It is recorded that in one particular fortnight he wrote five plays, but if we are to believe his own boast, over 100 were written in less than 24 hours each. In addition, his nondramatic works, when first published together, filled 21 quarto volumes. These comprise La Dorotea (a long prose narrative in dialogue form), three novels, some short stories, five major and four minor epic poems, three long didactic poems, an account of the martyrdom of Christians in Japan, two devotional works, and an enormous output of lyrical poetry. All this is not the production of a superficial hack writer, but of a genius of a high order who possessed the facility for composition to match the restless energy that impelled him at times to unreserved self-expression and always to the unrestrained externalization of his creative powers.

    Two styles are, broadly speaking, visible in his works --a sophisticated, artificial manner, consciously, even pedantically, heir to the humanistic culture of the Renaissance, and a freer, racy, more natural manner close to the directness of the folk tradition. The former is exemplified by the epics, novels and formal poetry, the latter by his plays, his autobiographical verse, ballads, and songs. In general the distinction follows the audience for which he was writing, academic for the literari, popular for the wider public.

    Lope's outstanding achievement was to have established a type of drama that exactly corresponded to the spirit and traditions of his country. He imposed a structural pattern that was to remain unaltered in its main outlines for a century and a half. Thereby he stabilized certain basic assumptions concerning the nature and form of drama. Lope could not but venerate in principle the validity of the classical rules, which he acknowledged to be "art." But against "art" he appealed to "nature," constantly stressing the superiority of the natural to the artificial, the dynamic to the static: dramatic poetry, being vital movement and not doctrine, appeals primarily to the imagination and sensibility rather than to the reason. Lope's creative vitality gave him the strength to prevail against the intellectual temper of the age by thus establishing a nonclassical type of play. Cervantes, in the name of the classical rules of art, condemned the new drama in Don Quixote, Part I (1605), chap. xlviii, but was eventually converted to it. Academic attacks on Lope's anticlassicism continued until 1618, but every single dramatist adopted the pattern of the new drama and opposition was finally silenced in the recognition that Lope's plays were more suited to his own age and people than those of the Greeks could ever be.

    Characteristics of Lope's Drama

    The "New Comedy" as Lope's popular, nonclassical drama came to be called (comedia covering both tragedy and comedy, the distinctions between which is often blurred), is characterized externally by a division into three acts and by a polymetrical structure, the use, namely, of a wide variety of meters throughout a single play. The nature of the dramatic material in the different scenes determines their poetic color and therefore their metrical forms. Internally this type of drama is characterized by the primacy of action over character: swift and varied movement leads to a certain constriction or schematization of the means of expression.

    The plots of Lope's plays mirror the values, social standards, and conventions of the age. For this reason, as well as for its distinctive form, Lope's drama is always called "national." When reading his plays one is certainly more conscious of the place and time that produced them than one is when reading those of Shakespeare or the Greeks, but this is chiefly a matter of external garb and it is unfair to Lope to view this as limiting his drama's expression of human truth.

    Though many of his plots are historical, and some are even purely fanciful, the most striking characteristic of his drama as a whole, when compared with that of his predecessors, is its strong social relevance. Love, for instance, while it could at first be idealized in a romantic and chivalrous way following the traditions of sixteenth-century literature, as in El remedio en la desdicha ("Remedy in Misfortune," c.1599), came generally to be presented in an entirely new light, as something that breeds social conflict because of the inherent opposition between nature and civilization. The awakening of love and the impossibility of not responding to it are the work of nature; but civilized society in order to safeguard its continuance must rationalize human relationships. This it tries to do by laying down certain rules governing courtship, by placing marriage under the authority of the father, and in general by curbing the natural freedom of women, with the result that love and marriage do not necessarily coincide.

    Lope has some entertaining comedies, like La discreta enamorada ("The Discreet Woman in Love," c.1606) in which the intrigue consists in the ingenuity with which a young woman circumvents social conventions in order to win the man she loves, but this is a common type. A more original kind of comedy is represented by El perro del hortelano ("The Dog in the Manger," c.1613), where a countess finds to her horror that she has fallen in love with one of her servants --her secretary. She cannot marry beneath her class or allow another woman to marry him. This deadlock brings her and everyone else concerned to a state of despair, but is solved by palming the secretary off on a nobleman as his long-lost son. The light-hearted character of the ending does not rob the play of its implicit social criticism: class distinctions are artificial and should break down before the equalizing force of nature working through love. But while Lope is prepared, within reason, to emancipate women from social conventions, he will not emancipate them from nature: he will not allow them to be false to their sex by granting them freedom to scorn love in order to seek complete independence from men.

    Much more distinctive and original are a group of plays in which this type of theme is treated with a seriousness akin to tragedy. La moza de cántaro ("The Woman with the Water Pitcher," c.1624) is an interesting example. The heroine, cultivating a masculine pride in order to retain her personal independence, refuses to marry and scorns all men. She even arrogates to herself a man's role in avenging her father's dishonor by killing his offender. To escape arrest she flees to another town and disguises herself as a workingclass woman. Exposed now to the roughness of life, she comes to see that the independence proper to a woman, the appropriate sphere in which she should show manly resolution, is the defense of her own honor by repelling direct attacks on her virtue. The social humility forced upon her leads eventually to the moral humility of accepting love. Nature must rule supreme: it must assert itself not only against the artificial restrictions of society but also against the pride that can impel women to seek an unnatural freedom. The natural but unreasoning passion of love may, however, conflict with the moral and social duty that reason dictates: the most ecstatic love poetry lavished by Lope on any play is to be found in El caballero de Olmedo ("The Knight of Olmedo," c.1622), where it serves to deepen the sadness of just such a tragedy.

    The most distinctive Spanish type of tragedy is represented by the "honor plays," in which a husband kills his wife in order to avenge her actual or suspected adultery. The social concept behind these plays is that love becomes criminal when, by violating the sanctity of an individual marriage, it sullies the integrity of society whose guardian, in this instance, is the husband. Nowadays these plays appear ruthless and unpleasant. Lope, in fact, in his early period, does write honor plays that are melodramatic in their violence, such as Los comendadores de Córdoba ("The Lords of Cordova," c.1597), but at the end of his dramatic career he is able to treat with tragic irony the ambiguities of this type of conflict. In El castigo sin venganza ("Punishment without Vengeance," 1631) the adulterous wife is put to death by her husband whose own licentious conduct, as he is well aware, had driven her to dishonor him in order to pay him back in his own coin; and what he imagines to be the restoration of his honor is in effect the act that completes the ruin of his social life by showing him to have been in every respect a failure.

    The honor theme leads to no ambiguities when it is combined with Lope with something approaching a class struggle. Instances of conflict between serf and overlord as recorded in the medieval chronicles are turned into plays in which the aristocratic lord denies to his vassals the honor he claims to be the exclusive privilege of his class. Lope vindicates for the common people equality with the nobility in dignity and self-respect. Three well-known plays of this type are Fuenteovejuna (c. 1613), El mejor alcalde el Rey ("The Best Magistrate, the King," c.1621) and Peribáñez (c. 1621). In all three, but especially in the last, Lope exalts, by contrast with the life of a courtier, the sanity and moral health of a peasant's way of life, since direct contact with the soil breeds a natural candor, honesty and dignity. At the same time, in these plays and many others, Lope also exalts monarchy as the principle and source of justice and social order, and therefore as the guardian and vindicator of the honor of the common people.

    Religious Plays

    Besides giving the Spanish drama a strong social tone, Lope also extended its range by introducing religious themes into the public theaters which, before him, had been predominantly secular. His religious plays are generally either Biblical, dramatizing episodes from the Old Testament, or comedias de santos, i.e., plays dealing with the lives of historical or legendary saints. Lo fingido verdadero ("The Feigned Comes True," c.1608), dealing with the conversion of the Roman actor St. Genesius, is one of the most interesting. On the whole, however, Lope lacked theological penetration and insight into the psychology of conversion, and his religious plays cannot bear comparison with those of Tirso de Molina and Calderón.

    Lyric Poetry

    If he had written no plays Lope would still rank as a major figure of Spanish literature by virtue of his lyrical poetry. Here too his abundance, variety, and virtuosity were prodigious. His flair for capturing the delicate charm of folk poetry was unrivaled, and he was able, at need, to strike a note of exquisite tenderness that is all his own. Most of his poetry stemmed directly from his own experience, and this imparted reality and freshness to the writing of love poetry, which had become a stilted and abstract art. By also turning the commonplace events of daily living into poetry Lope introduced something completely new into the Renaissance poetic tradition.

    Other Writings

    The rest of his literary output, with one exception, has neither the vitality of his plays nor the freshness of his poetry. Such works as the pastoral novel La Arcadia (1598) and Pastores de Belén ("Bethlehem Shepherds," 1612), a religious novelistic miscellany set in a bucolic framework, stand quite outside the remarkable development of the Spanish novel at this period. His epic poems are long, mannered, and dull; they include La hermosura de Angélica ("The Beauty of Angelica," 1602) and La Jerusalem conquistada ("Jerusalem Conquered," 1608), in which Lope sought to emulate Ariosto and Tasso respectively, and two poems on British themes: La Dragontea (1598), on Drake's last expedition and death, and Corona trágica ("Tragic Crown," 1627), on Mary, Queen of Scots. But when in his old age he turned to memories of his turbulent youth he produced in La Dorotea (1632) a work that, despite a diffuse and often disorderly form, must rank among the masterpieces of Spanish prose. The imaginatively expanded record of his stormy passion for Elena Osorio, it is a work in which the headstrong giddiness of youth is confronted with the disillusionment of old age. The characters, victims of a romantic conception of love, cannot escape from their own feelings but go round and round themselves, endlessly talking, in a futile, self-frustrating way. Yet the ideal of love is in itself a beautiful thing, if only because it can be turned into poetry. All the lovers in the work cultivate poetry. Although this contributes to their lack of backbone, and although we are left disillusioned with the enchantment of poetry, there is all the time a wistful nostalgia for the beauty of poetic illusions. La Dorotea is the moving testament of an old man who all his life had been generously reckless in the arts of living, loving, and writing. Thereby he had been able to bring into being a whole multitude of plays rich in human truth, finding in the process both a significant content and an expressive form for a national drama.

    Source: Collier's Enclycopedia, 1997. Author: A. A. Parker
    Copyright © 1997 Collier Newfield, Inc., all rights reserved.

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