Short summary to study!

One of the most prolific authors of the Golden Age Spanish was Lope de Vega. He was one of those who caused the theatrical revolution of the time, managing to bring this literary genre closer to a mass public and creating a new way of doing theater that he himself brought together in his text "The new art of making comedies ". In this lesson from a PROFESSOR we want to bring you closer to the life and work of this outstanding writer and, therefore, below we offer you a short biography of Lope de Vega. Keep reading and get to know better this figure who was (and still is) one of the most prominent in Spanish literature.

We will begin this short biography of Lope de Vega talking about the life of this author and, thus, we will get to know his story a little better. The full name of the writer is Felix Lope de Vega y Carpio, from Madrid who was born in 1562 into a humble family.

He for a time he went to live in Seville but, in the end, he returned to his city to study with the Jesuits. Training him allowed

master classical languages, something that opened the doors to attend universities such as Alcalá de Henares or the prestigious University of Salamanca.

In 1583 he fell in love with Elena Osorio, a woman who was married and the daughter of a theatrical manager. In Lope's works we can find traces of this figure with the nickname "Filis". Elena in 1587 got engaged to an important and wealthy person of the time, something that hurt Lope a lot and caused him to publish defamatory information about Elena and her family. This made Lope in the end exiled from Castile.

Finally, Lope married Isabel de Urbina until she passed away in 1595. From then on, Lope began to have a sentimental and love life very moved She and she agitated, therefore, she is known numerous romances and it is believed that she had different children from different women.

In 1614 Lope de Vega he was ordained a priest But, despite his condition, he continued to have love and sexual relationships with well-known personalities of the time such as the actress Lucía de Salcedo or Marta de Nevares. In August 1635 Lope de Vega died in Madrid at the age of 73.

Throughout his life, Lope was a very active and dynamic author. This made him known by the nickname of "The Phoenix of the Mills" and, of all his work, the theatrical is the one that has stood out the most in our literary history. And it is that Lope was a renovator of Spanish theater and managed to promote some rules that still remain in our literature today.

Now that you have been able to know the life of Lope de Vega, we are going to continue with this short biography of Lope de Vega talking about the reason why he is one of the best known personalities in our culture: his production literary. He was an author who he wrote a lot of pieces both theatrical and other genres. In fact, it was a custom at the time for writers to cultivate various literary genres.

Inside of narrative by Lope de Vega we highlight these works:

• His first novel to appear in 1598, "The Arcadia". It is a pastoral genre novel in which the author added a great variety of poems of a lyrical nature.
• A Byzantine novel is the one he published in 1604, "The pilgrim in his homeland." Here, the author added 4 autos sacramentales.
• "The shepherds of Bethlehem" in 1612 it was another novel of pastoral genre but in which, in addition, he added some divine and religious themes. For this reason, here, the poems that we find are of a sacramental genre.
• A novel with Italian influences is the set of "La Filomena and La Circe", a publication that has 4 short novels.
• "La Dorotea" is a novel that follows the comic and humanistic trend of "La Celestina"And, here, the author takes the opportunity to talk about his love life with Elena Osorio

The poetry of Lope de Vega

But Lope de Vega also dared with poetic expression and cultivated both popular lyric and the most cultured and worked type of poetry that Góngora led.

The most outstanding characteristic of Lope's poetry is that he bet on clear verse and, in his production, we distinguish different types of poetic compositions:

1. Long poems: They were quite extensive compositions that had a narrative tone and that, almost always, spoke of mythological or epic themes. Some of the most prominent titles were Angelica's beauty, La Dragontea or amorous soliloquies.
2. Short poems: Lope also wrote shorter poems. In these compositions the author tried a wide variety of lyrical resources and, therefore, tried different meters, rhymes, genres, and so on. All of his short poems are found in collections such as "Sacred Rhymes", "Spiritual Ballads", "Human Rhymes", etc.

To conclude our lesson with the short biography of Lope de Vega we have to mention the author's theatrical production. And it is in this genre where he most stood out and where he established himself as one of the most important figures of his time and, in general, of the history of our literature.

Lope was the renovator of the Spanish theater. With his publication of "The new art of making comedies"the writer established new bases and rules that broke with some of those set by the classical authors. For this reason, Lope bet on stop obeying the 3 Aristotelian units of time. place and action to only respect one of them, action, which allows playwrights to create credible and easy-to-understand stories.

Another of Lope's theatrical bets was the creation of a narrative subgenre that was the most suitable for the plays: the tragicomedy. That is to say, a mixture between tragedy and comedy that made characters as typical as the funny one appear. The authors of the time followed Lope's premises and, thus, a more popular, more dynamic and more satirical type of theater was configured. Because, between laughs and entanglements, the author took the opportunity to criticize the society of the time or make fun of some typical characters of Spanish society.

The main themes that Lope de Vega talks about in his plays are love and honor, therefore, they are two themes that reach both the most refined personalities and the worldly people.

Some most known plays by Lope de Vega They are title that, sure, you have heard before:

• Sourceovejuna
• Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocaña
• The Knight of Olmedo
• The dog in the manger
• The beautiful ugly

His theater cultivation was unstoppable, indeed, some 300 plays are attributed to him.