1635 He was born before Shakespeare, outlived him by nearly two decades and wrote (at the most conservative estimate) some 800 more plays. Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio, to give him his full name, invented a new drama for his time and place. He tore into the conventions of classical drama, banishing the three Aristotelian unities of time, place and action and coming up with dialogue and metre adjusted to the social and political status of the characters – formal for toffs, vernacular for peasants. He was the first dramatist to make a living from his plays.
And they came so quickly, so apparently easily. He claimed to have written some 1,500 three-act comedias (a term that includes tragedies as well as comedies), more than a hundred of which, he boasted, took ‘only twenty-four hours to pass from the Muses to the boards of the theatre’. These totals may be exaggerated, but over 637 comedias are known by title, and the texts of 450 are still extant.
They ranged from explorations of conflicts between love and propriety that seem almost to presage English restoration drama – like El perro del hortelano, or The Dog in the Manger (1613), in which a countess falls in love with one of her servants – to plays of revenge, a popular Spanish genre that he began to deconstruct and ironise late in his career, as with El castigo sin venganza, or Punishment Without Vengeance (1631), in which a man kills his wife for an affair she starts in order to pay him back for his own infidelity, and winds up exposing himself, not only as a murderer but (worse) as a cuckold.
Besides his theatrical works he composed a large body of lyric poetry, pastoral novels, epic poems, autobiographical reminiscences and much else. On top of all this he was a man of action in and out of bed, with two wives and many mistresses – all of whom he seems to have loved dearly – not to mention serving with the Spanish army against Portugal, and the navy in the Azores, even joining the Armada to sail against England. He was lucky to be in one of the few ships not blasted out of the water at Gravelines or dashed against the coast of Ireland in the later attempt to escape. But he improved the six-month voyage by writing the better part of La Hermosura de Angelica (1602), a long verse epic in the manner of Ariosto.