VEGA CARPÍO, LOPE FELIX de. — Poet, born in Madrid on 25 November 1562, died there on 27 August 1635.
Of modest family circumstances, a pupil at the Jesuits’ Imperial College and precocious from the outset, he gave himself over to every attraction of the imagination and the senses. From the age of fifteen until nineteen, through the patronage of the bishop of Cartagena, he attended the University of Alcalá de Henares; then, having returned to Madrid, he became secretary to the marquis de Las Navas, dissipated himself in the theatrical world, and entered into a relationship with Elena Osorio, whose abandonment he attempted to avenge with defamatory writings, earning him a sentence of exile from Madrid and the Kingdom of Castile for ten years. He abducted and married the noble Isabel de Urbina in 1588; in that same year he enlisted in the « Invencibile Armada » and, on his return after the defeat, settled in Valencia. Secretary to the duke of Alba, he lived for several peaceful Arcadian years; but after Isabella’s death he resumed his fiery sensual wandering, interrupted neither by a conviction for concubinage nor by his second marriage to the wealthy commoner Juana Guardo. Without pursuing further the chronicle of his loves, it is enough to mention the pathetic decline of the woman he called Amarillide, Marta de Nevares Santoyo, who became blind and demented. He had received Holy Orders in 1614. Religious fervours and tumultuous abandonments by an indomitable nature, exquisite sentimental delicacies and brazen confessions, a life of continual disorder, traversed wholly by the play of opposing impulses, now toward the vile abjections of the senses, now toward the purest images of divine love. Yet the drama glimpsed behind the radiance of his fantasising does not seem to have been suffered by him in its full intensity as a moral fact: before the anguish of being separated from the Good, he seems to enjoy feeling himself different; and although he never rejects the assistance of the intellect in recognising himself as a sinner, he comes to the word with the candour of a first, naïve condition, childlike even amid the tumult of weary years. He was called a « Mostro di natura »: let the baroque eulogy serve to convey the meaning of the other, equally famous, of his titles: « fenice degli ingegni ».
The important facts concerning the work of the most prolific poet of every age and nation may be ordered by observing him living and writing with the same winged ease; and one may begin to re-establish the proportions of his moral life from that work, La Dorotena, which, reflecting the adventure of Elena Osorio meditated upon in his youth, was rewritten shortly before his death. Derived from the famous Celestina of Fernando de Rojas (written a century earlier, in part also to erect a barrier of sorrowful horror and condemnation against the spread of hedonism), Dorotea recalls the invincible force of blind impulse: without adapting the open course of events to the closed form of the customary dramatic organism, this acción en prosa contains, even while altering the facts but on real foundations, a confession of misery and evil. Without it, the portrait of the poet would lack a moral dimension; or, better put, among the many and impassioned testimonies to carnal life and the many and impassioned testimonies to religious life, there would be no intermediate term, that of penitence. The fact that it accompanied him throughout his life, while his volcanic imagination exploded in myriads of sparks, indicates that this reflection was a constant moment, though hidden behind the illusions of scenic evidence and aesthetic feeling. We must therefore take this confession as the centre of his work: beyond it, toward the sphere of poetic images, stand the lyrics, which best define the poetic animation of the whole work, the aesthetic projection of that sensuous abandonment which was his life; on this side, toward the world of natural and human reality, which he approached with an inviting willingness to understand everything and love everything equally, stands his work as a dramatist. Yet neither this centre nor this reference would be valid if the poet, splitting himself in the very act of gathering himself together, did not also comprehend and compose beside it delicate and vague transfigurations: such is the Arcadia, likewise in prose and variegated with splendid lyrics.
Already reflecting himself in the self-critical act of arranging his collections of verse, L. de V. establishes a climax and an anticlimax. Rimas (1604), Rimas sacras (1614), Rimas humanas y divinas del Licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (1634). He accepts the Italianising modes already introduced by Garcilaso; but where Italian academicism had willingly surrendered to formalistic exercise, he, better than any poet in the world, understands the immense value of ingenious form as an illumination of reality, perpetually unforeseeable and divinely fruitful—a form that brings the adventure of the imagination back to the constancy of a law of nature. He can therefore be both a learned and a popular poet, stringing together verses by Ariosto, Tasso, Camões, Petrarch, and Horace, and gathering around the theme of love a broad reflection on epic and moral modes. The Rimas sacras are wholly religious in subject; but where one might expect the monotony of a constant parenetic and gnomic attitude, here what has come to be called mystical realism triumphs, alongside the naturalistic realism of his other work, with an immense variety of attitudes, from the most contrite abasement to the most triumphant abandonment, from psychological probing to the most victoriously concrete ecstasy. Few collections in world literature exist in which the experience of Christianity is summoned so directly and so insistently, and with results of such luminous understanding of the human, as in this work by a poet who seems to open himself without distinction to charismatic grace, just as at another time he opened himself to the summons of the senses. Finally, the Rimas humanas y divinas, which also contain the elegant burlesque poem Gatomagria, the war of the cats, are an exceedingly elegant and ironically gentle counterpoint to the abandonments of the first rhymes, at least where he does not speak in earnest, conscious of the responsibility of what he has to say. Human love, divine love, and parody of reality, as though seeking in a withdrawn, shadowy, and smiling zone the contradiction and remedy—one of the remedies: L. de V. is not sparing in his expectations—of his prodigality; and meanwhile, always, an immense luminosity of confession: the boldness of his eternal surrender, defenceless and trusting, to the word.
His lyrical word went among people rich in good fortune; and they were a magnificent and prodigal people, who had conquered the world and were plunging into the most rapid decline. But in order to study this encounter, the theatre is useful in quite another way: for certainly the word of L. de V. remains in the Spanish language as much as, and even more than, that of Cervantes, but his theatre entered into custom and shaped it indelibly; and when European culture rediscovered Spain, it reached him through that custom impregnated with his presence. He was credited with the formidable number of two thousand dramatic compositions; and even if this number must be reduced (275 titles by him are known, and 470 stage texts remain), it too helps to measure the extent of the dominion he exercised over the Spanish theatre: a theatre he found open but uncertain, and led to the broadest expression of the art inherited from the Renaissance, making the theatrical gathering the intermediary of a message that the poet launches in every direction and dimension of the universe—with an extension matched not even by Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, certainly deeper than his, but less broad. He composed his Ars poetica in 376 hendecasyllables in the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609), and, immediately surpassing the supposed Aristotelian precepts and the tradition of Italian academism, which he nevertheless respected, and while awaiting literary fame from works of more elaborate taste, made the centre of his reflections the fact that his comedies were intended for a paying public, on whose pleasure everything depended: confident, moreover, that he could always win the battle against every resistance; and he concluded with an outline of theatrical typology and a short treatise on the metrical forms to be used on the stage. The formal and practical technicality of these proposals should not mislead us: the truth is that the poet does indeed move towards his audience, but anticipates its destiny. Dramas of “cloak and sword,” comedies of adventure and love: Spanish dramaturgy had until then developed between the opposing terms of illustrious representation (whether learned composition or religious drama) and the interlude; now it finds its centre in a middle ground, but not a subdued one. Unlike the bourgeois drama that would emerge from the presumptuous cautions and circumspect conformisms of encyclopaedism, it immediately bursts into flame. The Caprices of Belisa, The Dog in the Manger, The Peasant in His Corner, The Foolish Girl...
And all the extremes of love and chance, all earthly passions, all transfigurations become possible after that concentrated attention upon apparently impoverished terms: the pathetic and consoled humility of The Flowers of Don Giovanni (the story of the poor young man who triumphs by fleeing into the shadow of his humble dreams), the brutality that draws the action into a circle of horror (Punishment without Revenge), the play of illusions, fires and shadows (The Night of S. John). Love, death and salvation are the knots of this perpetual fable-telling, in which, through a balance never so daringly achieved between the relaxation of adventure and dramatic concentration, the world of human knowledge expands. And the people respond, come alive, find themselves in agreement: they even dispense justice against evil; and the Monarch, who in the conception of L. de V. gathers into himself every discordant movement and, by exercising justice, transfers social life into the transcendent unity of moral life (The Best Judge Is the King), seals with his sacred authority the attainment of concord. In this sense, the point of arrival of L. de V.’s work is the drama of the oppressed who become avengers: that people of rustic commoners who, having exercised punitive justice against the violent corruptor, answer the judge who wishes to know who committed the deed with the name of their small homeland: Fuenteoce-juna. And the King acquits and consecrates.