Lope de Vega
Themes and sources

The classification of this large mass of dramatic literature is a task of great difficulty. The terms traditionally employed – comedy, tragedy, and the like – are difficult to apply to Lope's oeuvre and another approach to categorization has been suggested. Lope's work essentially belongs to the drama of intrigue, the plot determining everything else. Lope used history, especially Spanish history, as his main source of subject matter. There were few national and patriotic subjects, from the reign of King Pelayo to the history of his own age, he did not put upon the stage. Nevertheless, Lope's most celebrated plays belong to the class called capa y espada (" cloak and dagger "), where the plots are chiefly love intrigues along with affairs of honor, most commonly involving the petty nobility of medieval Spain.

Among the best known works of this class are El perro del hortelano (The Dog in the Manger), El castigo sin venganza (Punishment without Revenge), and El maestro de danzar (The Dance Teacher).

In some of these, Lope strives to set forth some moral maxim and to illustrate its abuse with a living example. On the theme that poverty is no crime, in the play Las Flores de Don Juan, he uses the history of two brothers to illustrate the triumph of virtuous poverty over opulent vice, while indirectly attacking the institution of primogeniture, which often places in the hands of an unworthy person the honor and substance of a family when younger members would be better qualified for the trust. However, such morality pieces are rare in Lope's repertory; generally, his aim is to amuse and stir with his focus being on the plot, not concerning himself with instruction.

In El villano en su rincón, described as a romantic comedy, Francis I of France ends up spending the night in a woodcutter 's hut, after becoming lost during a hunt, resulting in a confrontation between peasant-philosopher and king. The peasant's refusal to even look upon the king's magnificence, grand and dramatic compared with the humble rincón, is rebuked by a gentleman of the king's court: "a king of such might/that the Scythian and fierce Turk/tremble before his golden fleurs de lis!"
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