Félix Lope de Vega was a Spanish poet and playwright who, along with Cervantes, Quevedo and Calderón de la Barca, is part of the plethora of literary artists of the Spanish Golden Age , born under the protection of the imperial splendor and the gradual decline and inquisitorial fury of the Habsburg court, from Felipe II to Felipe IV. He was the most prolific author of comedies of his time and in them he reflects the traditional values of honor, respect for the king and Catholic religiosity of the Counter-Reformation that accompanied the destiny of the Spanish Empire in its hegemonic stage.
He claimed to have written between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred comedies and four hundred cars; but only four hundred and eighty-seven of the first ones and forty of the second ones are preserved, in addition to epic poems such as La Dragontea (1598), classical-Renaissance parodies such as La Gatomaquia (1634), eclogues, elegies, his influential New Art of making comedies (1609) and some of the most perfect sonnets of Castilian poetry. For this prolific character he was called the Phoenix of Wits. His numerous plays were the basis of that art during the Golden Age and in them he elaborated and fixed the dramatic uses that prevailed in the Spanish tradition until well into the 20th century.
Birth and education
Félix Lope de Vega y Carpió was born in Madrid on November 25, 1562 , son of a lace maker named Félix de Vega and Francisca Fernández Flores. A year earlier his parents, originally from Valladolid, had arrived in the capital of the kingdom determined to open a store. Little else is certain about his parents and about his four brothers. His earliest biographers claim that he had been a precocious child and that he mastered his father's trade while easily assimilating Latin. The truth is that between 1572 and 1573 he studied this language and grammar with the poet Vicente Espinel and that at the age of twelve he entered the Jesuit college, where he remained until 1577 , when the bishop of Ávila took him under his protection and took him to Alcalá de Henares, probably to perfect his training at the Complutense University. But his personality and his intellectual and worldly gifts did not only attract the attention of the bishops and preceptors:at the age of fifteen, the clever young man stars in the first but not the only escape from him in the arms of a beautiful and anonymous married woman. He then wanders with a friend until he reaches Segovia, and there, while trying to sell some Portuguese coins and ill-gotten objects, they are arrested and returned to Madrid. On his return, he will find his father on his deathbed, and will only have time to say goodbye to him definitively. It was 1578.
From then on, the young man added to his surname that of one of his servants, del Carpió, to whom he attributed a noble origin. In the following five years he continues his erratic studies at the University of Salamanca , he visits a distant relative in Seville, the inquisitor of Carpió, he joins a Spanish expedition against the Azores, and at the age of twenty-three he returns to Madrid again.
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Since then, it can be affirmed that he lives from his work, writing at the rate of five pages per day . He was the richest of the writers of his time, the happiest and the most carnal:his eventful life is a rosary of turbulent loves of fiery eroticism, tortured and strange relationships with protectors and patrons, conversions to a religiosity as anguished and episodic as inconsistent, along with the aesthetic construction of a formally innovative dramaturgy, but subject in everything to the vision and general values of the imperial Spain of the Habsburgs, marked by the dominance of the Inquisition and the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.
Lover, courtier, and familyfounder
By 1583 Lope had forgotten the distant beauty that had torn him from his father's home and found himself at the service, as a courtier and secretary, of the Marquis de las Navas, with whom he would remain until 1587. During that time he met « Phillies» , the fatal Elena Osorio, daughter of Jerónimo Velázquez, a man of the theater, a woman somewhat older than the poet . He first loved her with reverence and to be equal to her he resumed his studies of Latin, Italian and French; then they were passionate lovers, although Elena Osorio forced him to share his favors with Francisco Perrenot de Granvelle, another of his gallants; later, passed in
Lope the stage of jealousy and reproaches, he decided that he could even borrow money from Granvelle through Osorio herself. Finally, when the woman leaves him, Lope unleashes a libel campaign on her and her family that culminates in the poet's arrest at the Corral de la Cruz theater. During the trial, the defendant redoubled his accusations and even forged a letter from Osorio; however, when the fact was proven, he was sentenced to exile outside the limits of Madrid for a period of eight years .
But before the trial was over, Lope had kidnapped the adolescent Isabel de Urbina (in her poems "Belisa" ), sixteen years old, daughter of an official of Felipe II. After seducing her, he had been forced to marry her, and then, driven by who knows what warrior impulse of hers, he had enlisted in the hosts that left with the Invincible Army to conquer England . He rested from the marital fatigue on the way to Lisbon in the arms of a prostitute who, delighted with him, refused to charge him, and when she returned she settled, like his wife, in Valencia. From 1590 to 1595 he was secretary to the Duke of Alba , with whom he lived in Toledo and Alba de Tormes (where he would write the Arcadia, in pastoral style). In 1595 Isabel de Urbina and her two young daughters would die. Lope did not hesitate to sell everything he had inherited from her, he left the service of the Alba family and, now free from the sentence of exile, he arrived in Madrid, where he settled down to share a roof and bed with a widow of easy life, called Antonia Trillo de Armenta.
Despite this concubinage, Lope is an active courtier:he begins to serve the Marquis of Sarriá in 1598; he is present at the wedding of Felipe II's heir, Felipe III, in 1599; He travels to Valencia to have an affair with a woman whose surname is known (Pellicer) and from whom he would have a son named Fernando. . But then a constant presence in his life since 1595 becomes obsessively passionate:it is the beautiful Micaela de Luján, an illiterate actress ( "Camila Lucinda" in her poems) from whom he will have a daughter, Marcela, and a son, Lope Félix or Lopito . Around 1602, his stays with Micaela in the south (Seville and probably Granada) alternated with his marital life with the not so beautiful but wealthy Juana del Guardo, daughter of rich peasants, who gave him two sons, Carlos Félix and Feliciana .
It is not known if Micaela preceded Juana in founding a home for Lope and his children, the truth is that around 1605 the writer had two houses in Toledo and divided his attentions between the beautiful and the rich. This state of affairs would continue until 1612:Doña Juana, whose health was precarious, died in childbirth, followed by her favorite son, Félix, and at some point in 1613 Micaela de Luján must have died, since Lope would gather at his house all their children from that date.
Lope, weak, needy, and beggar
Previously, in 1605, while his comedies are released at a rate rarely seen, Lope enters the service of who will be his confidante, protector and correspondent until his death, the Duke of Sessa, Luis Fernández de Cordova. In the fabulous correspondence discovered in the 20th century, Lope appears as a weak, needy, begging being. It was strange that the money did not reach him, since in addition to the duke's salaries, and his participation in the tickets of the plays, cars, impressions and dowries, he had a pension from the crown, in Galicia; a chaplaincy in Ávila; a house of his own in Madrid and donations and gifts from gentlemen . However, in the letters to the duke he shows himself to be a beggar:dresses, rugs, bonuses, cotton, advances. At the same time, his fame was overwhelming:at the end of his life, on his daily walk, people recognized him and followed him down the street, kissed his hand, asked for his blessing. His portrait was known in taverns, rich mansions and humble houses. In 1608, due to his fame and prosperity being few, he is named relative of the Holy Office and fiscal promoter of the Apostolic Chamber.
Religious crisis
For that reason, when the deaths of Juana, Micaela and her son occur, the writer was prepared to take care of the children and raise them. However, he had turned forty-eight years old and was facing tired and gloomy the approach of old age, the threat of the decline of his sexual faculties and the fear of death. Some biographers have seen in this continual complaining of Lope a certain delight in imagined or foreboded poverty . But despite his complaints, he lived a long and prosperous old age, punctuated, yes, by sordid episodes in his relationship with the Duke of Sessa.
In accordance with the tone of oppressive religiosity of the time, Lope de Vega, as was customary in laymen and married men, had been taking minor orders and joining congregations:in 1609 in the Brotherhood of Slaves of the Blessed Sacrament, like his contemporary Miguel de Cervantes; in 1610 in the Oratorio de la calle del Olivar; in 1611 in a minor order of Franciscans. He then publishes A Brief Form of Prayer (1610), and in 1614, after months of intense shock, contrition, and sorrow for his carnal and literary sins, he professes repentance of his former life and writes Four Soliloquies; crying and tears that he made kneeling before a crucifix.
Lope de Vega is ordained a priest
The crisis reaches its peak and Lope consults the barefoot Carmelite fray Martín de San Cirilo. This urges him to take major orders, and surrounded by his children, on May 24, 1614, he says his first mass as a priest in the Madrid monastery of the order of Fray Martín. . Until 1616 Lope de Vega manages to continue in the service of the Duke of Sessa while he performs his priestly duties. But pressured by his confessors, he wants to leave the duke and the duke, according to all indications, lays a trap for him whose bait is, for the fifty-year-old priest, completely irresistible:he puts an old lover in his path, the comical Lucía of Salcedo. Lope de Vega falls into her arms , closely followed in his wanderings by Sessa, who had all the makings of a voyeur. Thus ends the ecclesiastical career of the prolific and passionate writer . But now he knows that his love affairs are sacrilegious and will be from then on, since he is already ordained a priest.
Marta de Nevares, Amaryllis
To the well-known delicacies of the meat are now added those of transgression and the threat of eternal damnation:Marta de Nevares («Amarilis» in her poetry), twenty-six, married, is her next goal.
He pursues her relentlessly, while she feigns the strongest of disdain for her. Sessa's favors her encounters, bribes her husband's friends, erases the lovers' tracks. In 1617, Lope and Marta de Nevares had a daughter, Antonia-Clara, and a year later, in obscure circumstances, her husband died . But little tranquility could bring this fact to the life of the writer and even less to his widow. Blind since 1618, the one from Nevares will go mad in 1622 and will die in 1632. She was unable to read the work in which Lope transformed his love affairs and those of Elena Osorio into platonic affairs:Galatea, a novel that many have considered autobiographical.
Since 1617 Góngora, one of the poets most admired by Lope de Vega, lived in Madrid . Despite the fact that his success was incomparably greater than that of any of his contemporaries, the playwright would try in vain to be received by the Cordovan poet and obtain his approval; Góngora would not stop inciting him in satirical sonnets, while the followers of classical theater redoubled his attacks against Lope de Vega's way of conceiving theater. However, nothing would darken his fame. His older children, meanwhile, had abandoned him:in 1623 his daughter Marcela entered the order of the Barefoot Trinitarians, Feliciana would marry in 1632, Lopito would die at sea in 1633 or 1634, the same year that Marta's daughter de Nevares would be kidnapped by a certain Tenorio, a gallant under the protection of King Philip IV, against whom the desperate father could do nothing.
Death of Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega died surrounded by the crowd on August 27, 1635. Next to him was the strange but devoted Duke of Sessa, a daughter and some relatives . Outside, the people of Madrid were preparing for the funeral apotheosis. The magnificent burial and the sumptuous funerals were paid for by Sessa and in various parishes of Madrid masses and funerals were celebrated for nine days. The day before he died, Lope de Vega, indefatigable, had composed a silva of 246 verses (To the Golden Age) and a sonnet, considered by some to be premonitory , since the last triplet of it reads: «Bad cypress your laurel branch / although you won in what you lost the most / because when you die, fame is born» .
He fixed the formula of the Spanish comedy, with its three days or acts (and not five as the classical tradition commanded) . With its rules of combination of the lofty and the comic and with some types due to it, it influenced the European theater of the following centuries, from Fletcher and Shirley to Corneille, Grillparzer and Victor Hugo. In fame he obscured other illustrious contemporaries of his, deeper and more conflictive, such as the incomparable Cervantes or Quevedo; but this tyranny of his popularity and his enormous influence, sometimes sterilizing, in the Spanish theater after him, should not diminish the admiration for his brilliance and ingenuity, his poetic gifts and the strength of the aesthetic project. of him.
