VEGA CARPÍO, LOPE FELIX DE

LOPE FÉLIX DE VEGA CARPIO. — Poet, born in Madrid on 25 Nov. 1562, died there on 27 Aug. 1635.

Of modest family background, a pupil at the Jesuit Imperial College, precocious in all the attractions of imagination and sense. At fifteen, and until nineteen, through the patronage of the Bishop of Cartagena, he attended the University of Alcalá de Henares; then, returning to Madrid, he became secretary to the Marquis de Las Navas, dissipated himself in the life of the theatre folk, and formed a liaison with Elena Osorio, whose abandonment he attempted to avenge with defamatory writings that earned him a sentence of exile from Madrid and the Kingdom of Castile for ten years. In 1588 he abducted and married the noblewoman Isabel de Urbina; in the same year he enlisted in the Spanish Armada and, after its defeat and return, settled in Valencia. Secretary to the Duke of Alba, he lived in peaceful, archaic years; but after Isabella’s death he resumed his fiery, sensual wandering, interrupted neither by a conviction for concubinage nor by a second marriage to the wealthy commoner Juana de Guardo. Without pursuing further the chronicle of his loves, it suffices to mention the pathetic decline of her whom he called Amarillis, Marta de Nevares Santoyo, blind and insane. He had received holy orders in 1614. Religious fervours and tumultuous abandonments of an untamed nature, exquisite sentimental refinements and shameless confessions, a life in continual disorder, rushing between opposing impulses—now towards vile abasements of the senses, now towards the purest images of divine love. Yet the drama that glimmers behind the radiance of his fantasy does not seem to afflict him in the intensity of its moral fact: before the torment of being severed from the Good, he appears to take pleasure in feeling himself different; and though he never renounces the aid of intellect in recognizing his sin, he speaks with the candour of an original, childlike condition, even amid the tumult of weary years. He was called a “monster of nature”: let this baroque eulogy serve to comprehend the other, equally famous title by which he is known: “phoenix of wits.”

To order the salient facts of the work of the most prolific poet of all time and peoples, one may observe him living and writing with the same buoyant nonchalance; and begin by restoring the proportions of his moral life from that work, La Dorotea, which, reflecting the adventure with Elena Osorio meditated in youth, was rewritten shortly before his death. Derived from Fernando de Rojas’s celebrated Celestina (written a century earlier to erect a barrier of sorrowful horror and condemnation against the flood of hedonism), La Dorotea re-evokes the invincible force of blind impulse: without adapting the open story to the closed form of customary stagecraft, it comprises, in prose, a confession of wretchedness and evil—albeit altering the data, yet on a real foundation. Without this work the portrait of the poet would lack a moral dimension; or rather, amid the many impassioned testimonies of carnal life and the many impassioned testimonies of religious life, one would not find the intermediate term: that of penitence. That it accompanied him throughout his life, while his volcanic imagination erupted in myriad sparks, indicates that this reflection is a constant moment, albeit hidden behind the illusions of scenic evidence and aesthetic sense. One must therefore take this confession as the centre of his work: beyond it, in the sphere of poetic images, stand the lyrics that best define the poetic animation of the entire oeuvre, the aesthetic projection of that sensual abandonment which was his way of living; below it, in the world of natural and human reality which he confronts with an eager will to comprehend and equally to love, stands his work as a dramatist. Yet even this centre and reference would be invalid if, in the very act of gathering himself, the poet did not include and compose beside it delicate and vague transfigurations: such is the Arcadia, also in prose, variegated with splendid lyrics.

Already reflected in the self-critical act of arranging his verse collections, Lope de Vega establishes a climax and anticlimax: Rimas (1604), Rimas sacras (1614), Rimas humanas y divinas del Licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (1634). He adopts the Italianizing modes introduced by Garcilaso; yet where Italian academism had readily surrendered to formalistic exercise, he understands better than any poet in the world the immense value of illuminating the ever-unpredictable and divinely fruitful reality through ingenious form, which reduces the adventure of imagination to the constancy of a natural law. Thus he can be at once a learned poet and a popular poet, drawing on the verses of Ariosto, Tasso, Camões, Petrarch and Horace, and gathering around the theme of love a vast reflection in epic and moral modes. All of the Rimas sacras are religious in subject; yet where one might expect the monotony of a constant paternal and gnomic stance, here triumphs what has been termed mystical realism, 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 depth to the most concretely victorious ecstasy. Few collections exist in world literature in which the experience of Christianity is so directly, so insistently invoked, and with results of such luminous intelligence regarding the human, as in this of a poet who seems to open himself without division to charismatic grace as once he did to the call of the senses. Finally, the Rimas humanas y divinas, which also contain the elegant burlesque poem Gatomaquia, the war of the cats, form an exquisitely ironic and gently mocking counter-melody to the abandonments of his early verse—at least where he does not speak with sober sense, disdaining the responsibility of what he has to say. Human love, divine love and parody of the real: as though seeking in a retractable, shadowy and smiling zone the contradiction and the remedy (one of the remedies: Lope de Vega is not lacking in his expectations!) of his prodigal self-giving; and always, above all, an immense luminosity of confession: the boldness of his eternal surrender, defenceless and trusting, to the word.

His lyrical word went forth among a people rich in adventure;
and they were a people ostentatious and prodigal, who had conquered the world and were hurtling toward their swiftest decline. Yet to study their encounter, the theatre is far more illuminating: for certainly the word of L. de V. as, and more than, that of Cervantes, but his theatre penetrated into everyday life, shaping it unforgettably; and when European culture rediscovered Spain, it reached him through that costume steeped in his spirit. He was credited with the formidable number of two thousand dramatic compositions; and even if this number is reducible (275 titles are known to us, with 470 surviving stage texts), the number still helps to measure the extent of his dominion over the Spanish theatre: which he found open but uncertain, and which he led to the broadest expression of Renaissance-inherited art, making the theatrical gathering the vehicle for a message that the poet launches in every direction and dimension of the universe—an extension not even matched by Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, certainly deeper than his, but not as vast. He composed his Ars poetica in 376 hendecasyllables in the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609), and immediately surpassing the supposed Aristotelian preceptivism and the tradition of Italian academism—which he respects nonetheless—and seeking literary fame through works of more elaborate taste, he centres his reflections on the fact that his comedies are for a paying public, upon whose pleasure everything depends: confident, moreover, that he can always win the battle against any resistance; and he concludes with a schema of theatrical typology and a little treatise on the metrical forms to be used on stage. The formal and practical technicalities of these proposals should not mislead: the truth is that the poet does indeed meet his public but anticipates its destiny. Plays of “cape and sword,” comedies of adventure and love: Spanish dramaturgy had hitherto developed between the opposing poles of lofty representation (whether learned composition or religious drama) and the interlude; now it centres on a middle ground, yet one not devoid of grandeur. Unlike the bourgeois drama that would emerge from the presumptuous caution and circumspect conformism of Enlightenment thought, it immediately blazes forth. *Los caprichos de Belisa*, *El perro del hortelano*, *El villano en su rincón*, *La dama boba*... And all the extremes of love and chance, all earthly passions, all transfigurations become possible, after that concentrated attention framed in apparently humble terms: the pathetic humility consoled in *Los amantes de Teruel* (the story of the poor youth who wins by fleeing into the shadows of his humble dreams), the ferocity that drags the plot into a circle of horror (*El castigo sin venganza*), the play of illusions and fireworks and shadows (*La noche de San Juan*). Love, death, and salvation are the knots of this perpetual storytelling, where, in a balance never before achieved with such boldness between the expansiveness of adventure and the concentration of dramaturgy, the world of human knowledge grows. And the people respond, come alive, find themselves in harmony: they even mete out justice to evil; and the Monarch, who in the conception of Vega embodies every discordant impulse and, exercising justice, transfers social life into the transcendent unity of moral life (*El mejor juez, el Rey*), seals with his sacred authority the attainment of concord. In this sense, the culminating point of L. de V.’s work is the drama of the avenging oppressed: that rustic common people who, having exercised punitive justice against the violent corrupter, answer the judge who seeks to know who committed the deed with the name of their small homeland: *Fuenteovejuna*. And the King absolves and consecrates.