Lope de Vega
Background

Lope was the playwright who established in Spanish drama the three-act comedia as the definitive form, ignoring the precepts of the prevailing school of his contemporaries. In Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609), which was his artistic manifesto and the justification of his style which broke the neoclassical three unities of place, time and action, he showed that he knew the established rules of poetry but refused to follow them on the grounds that the "vulgar" Spaniard cared nothing about them: "Let us then speak to him in the language of fools, since it is he who pays us" are famous lines from his manifesto.

Lope boasted that he was a Spaniard pur sang (pure-blooded), maintaining that a writer's business is to write so as to make himself understood, and took the position of a defender of the language of ordinary life.

Lope's literary influence was chiefly Latin-Italian and, while he defended the tradition of the nation and the simplicity of the old Castilian, he emphasized his university education and the difference between those educated in the classics and the layman.

The majority of his works were written in haste and to order. Lope confessed that "more than a hundred of my comedies have taken only twenty-four hours to pass from the Muses to the boards of the theatre." His biographer Pérez de Montalbán tells how in Toledo, Lope composed fifteen acts in as many days – five comedies in two weeks.

In spite of some discrepancies in the figures, Lope's own records indicate that by 1604 he had composed 230 three-act plays (comedias). The figure had risen to 483 by 1609, to 800 by 1618, to 1000 by 1620, and to 1500 by 1632. Montalbán, in his Fama Póstuma (1636) set down the total of Lope's dramatic productions at 1800 comedias and more than 400 shorter sacramental plays. Of these, 637 plays are known by their titles, but only about 450 are extant. Many of these pieces were printed during Lope's lifetime, mostly by the playwright himself in the shape of twelve-play volumes, but also by booksellers who surreptitiously bought manuscripts from the actors who performed them.
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