Vega Carpio. LOPE FELIX DE, was born in 1562 at Madrid, but of a family that had its seat on the Vega of Carriedo, south of Santander. The story of Lope’s life, as commonly told, is full of confusion. That he lost his parents early; was a student and graduate of Alcalá; a soldier in the Portuguese campaign of 1580, and in the Armada, 1588; secretary to the Duke of Alva, Marquis of Malpica, and Marquis of Sarria; had many amours, was twice married, and father of at least six children, three of them illegitimate; was banished from Madrid because of a quarrel, and lived two years at Valencia; took orders, became an officer of the Inquisition, and died at seventy-three a victim to hypochondria—all this is indisputable, but the order and relation of the facts are by no means clear. Too much reliance has been placed upon his friend and biographer, Perez de Montalvan, who suppresses everything touching his reputation, and, knowing him only in his ascetic days, and being forty years his junior, was not likely to hear much from him about his love-affairs and early adventures. Lope himself, too, increases the confusion by his obscurity and invariable practice of making himself out younger than he was in his reminiscences. Thus he has puzzled Schack and Ticknor by giving his age as fifteen when he fought against the Portuguese at Terceira, a thing he had no opportunity of doing until he was twenty. On Montalvan’s authority it is said that on leaving Alcalá he attached himself to the Duke of Alva (i.e. the third duke, the Alva of history), at whose instance he wrote the pastoral romance of the Arcadia, that soon afterwards he married and was banished, and that grief on the death of his wife drove him to join the Armada. But his own words in the Eclogue to Claudio and in the Dorotea (Act V. sc. viii.) show that it was not the loss of a wife, but trouble with a mistress, Filis, alias Dorotea, that sent him to sea; and that his marriage came later; and abundant evidence, internal and external, proves that the Arcadia was written after the Armada, and not for Duke Ferdinand, but for his grandson Antonio, the fifth Duke of Alva. It is, in fact, the story, in a pompous, pastoral setting, of the young duke’s matrimonial vacillations in 1589–90, the sober prose version of which may be found in Cabrera’s Felipe Segundo (part ii.). It must have been soon after this that he married his first wife, Isabel de Urbina, and got into the scrape that drove him to Valencia, for both events are referred to in the Romancero General, in ballads written at the latest in 1593. He hints at a woman’s revenge as the cause of the latter; but in a petition to the king in 1598 he specifies ‘certain satires against a manager,’ for which he was sentenced to ten years’ banishment and suffered two, the remainder being remitted. The only issue of his marriage that we hear of was a daughter, Theodora, whom he calls ‘the consolation of his exile.’ The year of his wife’s death is uncertain, but about 1600, apparently, he married Doña Juana de Guardio. Soon after marriage he had a liaison with one Doña María de Luxan, the fruit of which was two children born in 1605 and 1606, Marcela, who took the veil in 1621, and Lope, who was drowned at sea the same year. By his wife he had also a son and a daughter, Carlos, who died in childhood, and Feliciana, who survived him. In giving birth to the latter (1612) the mother died, and Lope, already a Familiar of the Inquisition, took orders, resolved, Montalvan says, to devote himself to the welfare of his soul; but three years later a woman, beautiful, brilliant, and ‘mated with a clown,’ crossed his path, and after a struggle he yielded to his destiny. Tenderness for his name has withheld the mass of his letters to his friend and patron the Duke of Sessa, but a few bearing on this episode were printed in 1876, and it was as well they were, for they dispose of some of the worst imputations against him—e.g. that of having been pander in the duke’s amours, which is only true in so far that he drafted his love-letters. But they are evidence of deplorable moral laxity. He was no hypocrite: he had a conscience, and it troubled him sorely; but the opiates of the church enabled him to lay it to sleep, and as soon as it was silent he fell to sinning again. Out of his own mouth he is proved to have been a miserably weak man with passions too strong for him. A daughter born to him in 1617, to whom he was tenderly attached, as indeed he was to all his miscellaneous offspring, deserted him, it seems, in his old age, and his last years were darkened by sorrow as well as remorse. He took to practices of the severest asceticism, and, sinking at last into what Montalvan describes as a 'continued melancholy which of late has been called hypochondria,' he died, August 27, 1635. His funeral was more like a prince's than a poet's, and the largest and most illustrious concourse ever seen in Madrid followed his remains along the same street where Cervantes had been carried to his obscure grave on the shoulders of four friars; a contrast, yet not greater than that between the cheerful serenity of the one deathbed and the gloom that lay heavy upon the other. He died poor, but not because of his Castilian love of pomp and display, as Sismondi assumes. His large income from his dramas and other sources was all but wholly devoted to charity and church purposes. His tastes, wants, and habits were of the simplest; a little flower-garden a few yards square was his one luxury, and a few books and pictures all his worldly goods.
The mere list of Lope's works presents a picture of unparalleled mental activity from boyhood to old age. He wrote plays, he says, in his twelfth year, and certainly wrote some not much later, but his first work of any length was a characteristic attempt in twenty cantos to prove that his was the miglior plettro to which Ariosto left the completion of Angelica's story. It was written at sea in 1588, but not printed till 1602. The Arcadia was written, as book v. shows, before the Duke of Alva's marriage, July 1590, but he, no doubt, was not eager to see in print pre-nuptial vagaries, which had already, as Cabrera says, 'made a noise,' and it was kept back till 1598. The Dragontica, a shout of exultation in ten cantos over the death of the Dragon, Drake, the destroyer of Spanish naval supremacy, appeared at Valencia the same year, but a few months earlier, and was Lope's first publication with his name. But it was as a ballad-writer that he first made his mark. The 'Flores de Romances,' the little 'garlands' out of which the Romancero General was formed, had begun to come out at Valencia when he was there in 1590-92, and of the contributors of the Moorish and pastoral ballads in vogue 'Belardo' (his name in the Arcadia) was, we learn, the most esteemed. Of his miscellaneous works some, like those on St Isidro and his canonisation, and on the marriage of Philip III., are merely occasional, and others owe their escape from utter oblivion solely to his name. The more notable are the Rimas (1602), comprising the Angelica, 200 sonnets, and a reprint of the Dragontea; the Peregrino en su Patria (Seville, 1604), a romance on the model of Thcagenes and Chariclea, with a preface giving his views on the drama, and a list of the 219 plays he had already produced; the Jerusalen Conquistada (1609), an epic in twenty books in competition with Tasso; the Pastores de Belen (1612), a religious pastoral; Filomena and Circe (1621-24), miscellanies in which he tried to rival the Novelas of Cervantes; the Corona Tragica (1627), an epic with Mary Stuart for heroine; the Laurel de Apolo (1630), a poem on the pattern of Cervantes' Viage del Parnaso; the Rimas de Tome de Burquillos (1634), a collection of his lighter verse, with the
Gatomaquia, a mock-heroic. The most noteworthy of all is the Dorotea (1632), in form a prose drama, but obviously the story of his own early love-adventures from 1583 up to a little before the sailing of the Armada, with a prediction from an astrologer of his marriage, imprisonment, and banishment.
Originality, it will be seen, was not Lope's forte. He was fonder of following in the wake of others than of striking out a line of his own. He was always measuring himself against any one who had achieved success, and always unsuccessfully. All these works show the hand, not of a great artist, but of a consummate artificer. The merits of Lope's verse are undeniable. He was a master of easy, flowing, musical, graceful verse; but he rarely passes the frontier line between mere excellent verse and poetry, and never tarries long when he does. Once only he seems to write from his heart and not from his head, in the ballad on his first wife's grave, visited on a bright spring day when the trees were coming into leaf, the birds singing gaily, the lambs frisking round him, and all nature as usual unsympathetic with sorrow. These obras sueltas—detached works—of Lope's shine in fact in the reflected light of his dramatic renown. It is clear that though he had written plays he did not become a writer for the stage until after 1588. From his quarrel with a manager, it seems he had tried his hand at Madrid; but no doubt it was at Valencia, where it was more forward, that he served his apprenticeship to the drama. Not the least of his many gifts was his intuitive perception of the Spanish playgoer's tastes. He saw what his predecessors, Cueva, Virues, Argensola, Cervantes, all failed to see, that the public did not care for tragic emotion or development of character or passion; that what it wanted was excitement pure and simple, and that a drama that ignored a craving which had been utilised by the Inquisition, been the mainstay of chivalry romance, and had made the bull-fight a sacred institution, could never become a popular national drama. In the New Art of Comedy-writing and in the Peregrino he puts the case with a candour almost cynical. It is true, he says, that plays written in defiance of the rules of art are barbarous, but the public does not trouble itself about the unities, or the twenty-four hours rule, or inconsistencies, or improbabilities, and he who would be listened to must put away all restrictions that hamper him, and make it his business to give the public what it asks for, even if that be nonsense: he who pays the piper calls the tune. The great point was not to allow the excitement to flag for an instant, and to drop no hint of how the play was going to end; the enredo—not 'plot' but 'entanglement'—was all in all. Lope's qualifications for this were extraordinary. His invention was boundless. He could string striking situations and ingenious complications one after another without stop or stay, and keep the audience breathless and the stage in a bustle for three long acts, all without a sign of effort. Not less astonishing was his mastery of easy musical verse that charmed the ear and gave additional brilliancy to the dialogue. And then, long before one play had ceased to excite he was always ready with another as good or better. It is no wonder that Cervantes called him a prodigy of nature, or that he was idolised by the nation which for forty years he kept supplied with the stimulant it craved. Imagination or creative power need not be looked for in Lope's drama; they were not among his gifts, and would have been useless if they had been. His dramatis personæ, for the most part, have no more individuality or character than a batch of puppets. Don Luis of one play is only Don Lope of another in a different wig and doublet, declaiming rage, jealousy, or despair with precisely the same unchanging wooden countenance. In principle Cervantes was right in his strictures on Lope's drama, but on the practical question he was wrong, as is amply proved by the reception given to the plays of Alarcon, a dramatist in a sense in which neither Lope nor Calderon could claim the title. As regards his relations with Cervantes, Lope has not been fairly treated. The charge of malignity rests upon his disparagement of Don Quixote and its author in a private letter, and his silence in public as to the merits of the book. He would have been a marvel of magnanimity if he had liked either. Impartiality must allow that Cervantes was the aggressor. His attack was in the language of a courteous gentleman and an honest critic, but it was an attack all the same; and the sly hits at little vanities that accompanied it could not but be galling to a vain and sensitive man. As for the charge brought by Don Ramon Leon Mainez, that Lope was 'Avelaneda,' that rests on nothing at all, and evidence must be forthcoming before any one who knows human nature will believe that a gallant soldier who had fought in the Armada sneered at another for having been wounded at Lepanto.
Lope's plays have been elaborately classified by Schack, Hennig, and others, but for convenience they may be roughly divided into the historical or quasi-historical (including legendary and sacred dramas) and those that deal with every-day life. Of the latter the most characteristic in every way are the 'Comedias de capa y espada'—cloak and sword plays—a picturesque title that puts the principal figures before the eye. They are as a rule dramas of upper-class society, in which love, gallantry, jealousy, and above all the hyper-sensitive Spanish honour supply the necessary complications. The Noche de San Juan, one of Lope's very last plays, the Maestro de Danzar, one of his first, and the Azero de Madrid, the source clearly of Molière's Médecin Malgré Lui, are excellent specimens. It is not easy to make a selection of typical characteristic examples out of a repertory so vast and varied as Lope's, but his peculiarities and excellences as a dramatist may be studied with advantage in such plays as the Perro del hortelano, the Desprecio agradecido, the Estrella de Sevilla, the Esclava de su Galan, the Premio del bien hablar; and no student of Calderon should overlook the Alcalde de Zalaméa, which, if not better than Calderon's famous play, as Chorley thought it, is unquestionably the bold vigorous outline that left little more than filling in to be done by Calderon's hand, and is one more proof that later dramatists found Lope, as Fuseli said the painters found Blake, 'good to steal from.'
The number of Lope's plays is given by Montalvan as 1800, exclusive of 400 autos; but this is obviously excessive, as he wrote but few during the last two or three years of his life, and in 1632 the number is put at 1500 both by himself in the Eclogue to Claudio and by Montalvan in Para Todos. This is probably near the truth, as it agrees with the rate of production indicated by other statements. In 1603 he had written 230; in 1609, 483; in 1620, 900; and in 1624, 1070. Of these the very names of all but 608 according to Barrera, 680 according to Chorley, have been lost, in a great many cases nothing but the name has survived, and frequently one play is represented by two names. All necessary deductions made, we have about 440 plays and 40 autos in print or MS. Some have been printed singly or in general collections, but the greater number are to be found in the Comedias de Lope de Vega, a series of 25 volumes of which 9-21 were authorised by himself. A selection comprising about a fourth of the extant plays, edited by Hartzenbusch, fills 4 volumes of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. The non-dramatic works were collected and published at Madrid in 1776-79 in 21 handsome volumes; and a selection fills vol. xxxviii. of the Bib. Aut. Esp.
See also Ticknor's Spanish Literature, Schack's Geschichte der dramatischen Literatur in Spanien, Hennig's
Studien zu Lope de Vega, Chorley's Catalogo de Comedias y Autos de Lope de Vega, Barrera's Catalogo del Teatro Español, Lord Holland's Life of Lope de Vega, and G. H. Lewes' Spanish Drama, an unpretending little book full of sound criticism. A complete edition of Lope's works is being issued by the Spanish Academy.