Vega Carpio, Lope Félix de

VEGA CARPIO, LOPE FÉLIX DE. - Poet, b. in Madrid on 25 Nov. 1562, d. there on 27 Aug. 1635.

Of modest family circumstances, a pupil at the Imperial College of the Jesuits, extremely precocious; he lets himself run wild after every attraction of the imagination and the senses. At fifteen, and until nineteen, through the patronage of the bishop of Cartagena, he attends the University of Alcalá de Henares; then, having returned to Madrid, he is secretary to the Marquis de Las Navas, dissipates himself in the life of the theatre people, becomes attached to Elena Osorio, whose abandonment he tries to avenge with defamatory writings, which earn him a sentence of exile from Madrid and from the Kingdom of Castile for ten years. In 1588 he abducts and marries the noble Isabel de Urbina; in the same year he enlists in the "Invincible Armada," and on his return, after the defeat, he settles in Valencia. Secretary to the Duke of Alba, he lives for some years in Arcadian peace; but, when Isabella dies, he resumes his fiery sensual wandering, interrupted neither by a conviction for concubinage nor by his second marriage to the rich commoner Juana Guardo. Without following further the chronicle of his loves, it is enough to mention the pathetic decline of her whom he calls Amarillide, Marta de Nevares Santoyo, blind and demented. He had received, in 1614, the sacred Orders. Religious fervors and tumultuous abandonments of an indomitable nature, exquisite sentimental delicacies and shameless confessions, a continuous disorder of life, spent entirely in the play of opposing impulses, now toward vile abjections of the senses, now toward the purest images of divine love. But the drama that is glimpsed behind the glow of his fantasizing, he does not seem to suffer in its intensity as a moral fact: before the torment of being separated from the Good, he seems to take pleasure in feeling himself different; and if he never disowns the aid of the intellect in recognizing himself in sin, he comes to speech with the candor of a first ingenuous condition, childlike even in the tumult of his weary years. "Monster of nature" he was called: let the baroque eulogy serve to understand the other, equally famous, of his titles: "phoenix of wits."

To arrange the important facts of the work of the most prolific poet of every time and people, one can observe him living and poetizing with the same winged ease; and begin to reestablish the proportions of his moral life from that work, La Dorotea, which, reflecting the adventure of Elena Osorio, meditated in his youth, was reworked shortly before his death. Derived from the famous Celestina of Fernando de Rojas (written a century earlier also to form a dike of sorrowful horror and condemnation against the spreading of hedonism), the Dorotea evokes the invincible force of blind impulse: without adapting the open event into the closed form of the usual scenic organism, this acción en prosa comprises, albeit altering the data, but on real foundations, a confession of misery and evil. Without it the portrait of the poet would remain deprived of a moral dimension; and, to put it better, among the testimonies, so many and passionate, of the carnal life, and the testimonies, so many and passionate, of the religious life, one would not find an intermediate term, that of penitence: that it accompanied him throughout his life, while his volcanic fantasy exploded in myriads of fiery fragments, indicates that this reflection is a constant moment, though hidden behind the illusions of scenic evidence and of aesthetic sense. One must therefore refer to this confession as to the center of the work: beyond it, toward the sphere of the images of poetry, stand the lyrics, which better define the poetic animation of the whole work, the aesthetic projection of that sensuous self-abandonment that was his living; on this side, toward the world of natural and human reality which he goes out to meet with an uninvited will to understand everything and equally to love, stands his work as a dramatic author. But neither this center nor this reference would be valid if, doubling itself in the very act of gathering itself, the poet did not include and compose beside it delicate and vague transfigurations: such is the Arcadia, also in prose, variegated with stupendous lyrics.

Already reflecting himself in the self-critical act of arranging the collections of verses, 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 Italianizing modes already introduced by Garcilaso; but where Italian academicism had willingly surrendered to a formalistic exercise, he, better than any poet in the world, understands what immense value of illumination of a perpetually unforeseeable and divinely fecund reality the ingenious form has, which brings the adventure of the imagination back to the constancy of a law of nature. He can therefore be at once a learned poet and a popular poet, a centonist on verses of Ariosto, Tasso, Camões, and Petrarch and Horace, and gather around the theme of love a vast reflection of epic and moral modes. The Rimas sacras are all on religious subjects; but where others would expect the monotony of a constant parenetic and gnomic attitude, here triumphs what has been called mystical realism, alongside the naturalistic realism of his other work, with an immense variety of attitudes, from the most contrite self-abasement to the most triumphant abandonment, from psychological deepening to the most victoriously concrete ecstasy. Few collections has world literature in which the experience of Christianity is so directly, so insistently called into question, and with results of such luminous understanding of the human, as this one of a poet who seems to open himself without gap to charismatic grace as at other times to the call of the senses. And finally the Rimas humanas y divinas, which, though they contain the elegant burlesque poem of the Gatomagria, the war of the cats, are a most elegant and ironically mild counter-song to the abandonments of the first rhymes, at least where he does not speak in earnest, aware of the responsibility of what he has to say. Human love, divine love and parody of the real, almost as if to seek in a retractile and shadowy and smiling zone the contradiction and the remedy (one of the remedies: L. de V. is not lacking in his expectations!) of his self-giving; and an immense luminosity of confession, meanwhile and always: the boldness of his eternal delivering himself up defenseless and confident to the word.

His lyrical word went among a people rich in fortune; and it was a pompous and prodigal people, which had conquered the world and was hurtling into a very rapid decline. But to study the encounter, the theater is far more useful: for certainly the word of L. de V. remains in the Spanish language as much as and more than that of Cervantes, but his theater penetrated custom and shaped it unforgettably; and when European culture rediscovered Spain, it came to him through that custom impregnated with him. The formidable number of two thousand dramatic compositions was attributed to him; and even if it is reducible (275 titles of his are known, and stage texts survive in a number of 470), the number also helps to measure the extent of the dominion he exercised over the Spanish theater: which he found open but uncertain, and which he led to the broadest expression of the art of Renaissance inheritance, making the theatrical gathering the intermediary of a message that the poet hurls in all directions and dimensions of the universe: with an extension that not even Shakespeare's dramaturgy knows, certainly deeper than his, but less vast. He composed his Ars poetica in 376 hendecasyllables in the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609), and immediately going beyond the supposed Aristotelian preceptism and the tradition of Italian academicism, which he nonetheless respects, and awaiting literary fame from works of a more elaborate taste, he makes the center of his reflections the fact that his comedies are for the paying public, on whose pleasure everything depends: certain, moreover, of always being able to win the battle against every resistance; and he concludes with a scheme of theatrical typology and a short treatise on the metrical forms to be used on the stage. Let the formal technicality and the practical technicality of these proposals not deceive: the truth is that the poet does indeed go to meet his public but anticipates its destiny. Dramas of "cape and sword," comedies of adventure and love: Spanish dramaturgy had until now been elaborated between the opposite terms of the illustrious representation (whether it was learned composition or religious drama) and the intermezzo: now it centers on a middle ground, but not a humble one. Unlike the bourgeois drama that would emerge from the presumptuous cautions and circumspect conformisms of encyclopedism, it immediately catches fire. The Caprices of Belisa, The Gardener's Dog, The Peasant in His Corner, The Foolish Girl... And all the extremities of love and chance, all earthly passions, all transfigurations are possible, after that attention gathered in apparently poor terms: the pathetic consoled humility of the Flowers of Don Giovanni (the story of the poor young man, who wins by fleeing into the shadow of his humble dreams), the horror that drags the story into a circle of horror (The Punishment without Vengeance), the play of illusions and fires and shadows (The Night of St. John). Love, death and salvation are the knots of this perpetual storytelling, where in a balance that was never reached so boldly between the relaxation of adventure and dramaturgical concentration the world of human knowledge grows. And the people responds, takes heart, finds itself in concord: it also does justice to evil; and the Monarch, who in Vega's conception sums up every discordant motion and, exercising justice, transfers social life into the transcendent unity of moral life (The Best Judge is the King) seals with his sacral authority the acquisition of concord. In this sense, the point of arrival of L. de V.'s work is the drama of the oppressed avengers: that people of the common rustic who, having exercised punitive justice against the violent corrupter, answers the judge who wants to know who committed the deed with the name of the small fatherland: Fuenteovejuna. And the King absolves and consecrates.

Mario Apollonio