Crowd-Pleasing Poetry: Lope de Vega’s Theatre of Contrasts
– by Travis Acreman (B.F.A., ’09)Lope de Vega’s life had it all: romance, passion, honor, exile, combat, religion, comedy, tragedy – and his plays were exciting, too. De Vega bridged the gap between drama and reality, living a life full contrasts: although he was rumored to be a lifelong womanizer, Pope Urban VIII made him an honorary doctor of theology. His plays and philosophies mirror this disparity. Cherished by audiences and demonized by academics, de Vega’s writings defined a captivating dramatic style founded on extreme contrasts, which turned him into a hero of his time.
While William Shakespeare was defining Elizabethan drama in England, simultaneously de Vega was creating the styles, genres, and subject matter of popular theatre in Spain. In fact, both of them published crucial works in 1609; Shakespeare, his sonnets, and de Vega, a dramatic treatise called The New Art of Making Plays in This Epoch. This document shows how de Vega changed the course of Spanish theatre and provides an important look into the mechanics of his works. In The New Art, Lope attacked what theatre historian Henryk Ziomek, in his History of Spanish Golden Age Drama, has called “the pseudo-Aristotelian precepts that were being propagated in Spain.” Ziomek explains how de Vega’s contemporaries, citing Aristotle’s theatrical directives found in “The Poetics,” condemned the popular playwright’s use of a tragic-comedic form, a style that consistently blends comedy and tragedy within a single work.
De Vega, however, did not back down from his ideals. He attacked his critics and replaced their sense of tradition with a popular and crowd-pleasing style. Referring to de Vega’s New Art, historian Vera Mowry Roberts writes, “In this famous document he claims… that he is perfectly aware that the division of playwriting into tragedy and comedy does not meet the tastes of the Spanish public. He writes plays, he says, that will please his audiences.” De Vega recognized that his audiences wanted to see the contrasts of light and dark, comedy and tragedy, next to each other in a single work. He was more interested in pleasing the public than in the rules established by academies and critics.
One example of such a tragicomedia, de Vega’s The Knight of Olmedo, plays on his public’s traditional expectations to make the contrast even more effective. Dramaturge Melveena McKendrick’s Theatre in Spain describes how the comedia “is a devastating reversal of the very presumptions of comedy in which it appears to be rooted.” While the play begins as a comedy about a love triangle, McKendrick explains how de Vega begins to lead his audience through the darkness of jealous, deception, ghostly omens, assassination, and tragedy. She writes:
For all the gradual intensification of the play’s tragic mood, the ending when it comes still has a sickening impact. Far from providing the play with an explicit prologue like Romeo and Juliet’s to prepare us for the outcome, Lope deliberately plays on our expectations of romantic comedy and exploits our reluctance to believe the evidence of our ears.
De Vega explained in The New Art that this was a more successful tactic than isolating the two genres of comedy and tragedy. By blending elements that contrast so sharply, de Vega is able to manipulate and move his audience to extreme emotion.
Contrast and contradiction were not strictly isolated to de Vega’s plays, however; many of the master’s theatrical philosophies were flexible and followed different models of playwriting and dramatic theory that were popular at that time in Spain. As described by Ziomek, de Vega vehemently defended himself in The New Art against the pro-Aristotelian academics for his use of tragicomedia—the mixing of the genres of tragedy and comedy in a single play—along with disrupting the three unities of action, time, and place central to pro-Aristotelian or Neoclassical theorists. De Vega deliberately wrote plays that utilized time spans ranging from days to years and multiple locations, all in the name of pleasing his audience. On the other hand, regarding questions of theatrical spectacle, de Vega seemed to dismiss the audience’s interest in favor of ideas directly out of The Poetics.
For example, during most of de Vega’s career, the playwright crafted works around a very simple playing space. Permanent theatres, as detailed by Roberts, were designed like the courtyards, surrounded by the backs of homes, in which plays were originally presented. She writes, “This simple platform stage, for most plays, was hung about on three sides with green baize curtains… At the back of the stage the curtain could be drawn to reveal doors, and the scene was often changed by the simple expedient of having actors exit through one door and come in the other.” Roberts quotes de Vega’s appreciation for this simplicity: he spoke fondly of “‘four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion,’” and expressed his contempt of later theatres, saying they employed painted scenery “‘because there are no good actors, or because the poets are bad, or because the auditors lack understanding.’” In this regard, he follows Aristotle’s directive that “the visual adornment of the dramatic persons can have a strong emotional effect but is the least artistic element, the least connected with the poetic art.” Rather than impressing his audience through the visual spectacle of elaborate sets, de Vega wrote his plays with a greater emphasis on more artistic elements, specifically dialogue, plot, and theme.
Comedia, traditionally a dramatic style written in verse, filled the bare, simple stage with poetic descriptions and imagery through the words spoken by the actors. As Ziomek describes, Lope de Vega was a master of this practice. Ziomek writes, “Recommending that different verse forms be chosen in order to differentiate between the episodes and to harmonize with particular dramatic situations, [de Vega] lays down rules for the five most favored verse forms.” The scholar goes on to explain how de Vega encouraged using various combinations of meter and rhyme to fit different moods: one is for “grievances,” while another “is considered appropriate for moments of suspense.” Poetic variety was critical for effective storytelling.
While de Vega retained certain stylistic standards throughout his comedias, his themes and subject matter demonstrated the versatility of his poetry. Various sources credit de Vega as having penned anywhere between 1,500 and 1,800 plays during his career, only 470 of which are believed to have survived . These plays almost always fit the same formal structures, popular during the Spanish Golden Age: they were divided into three acts, were generally plot-driven, and were written with character types rather than more dynamic roles. Thematically, however, de Vega covered an enormous spectrum with his plays. Roberts explains, “One type of play… [was] the light ‘cloak and sword’ plays founded upon intrigue, mistaken identities, love affairs, and the doings of a flamboyant aristocracy” , while other material included mythology, such as “Lope de Vega’s Rome in Ashes, a melodrama based on the character of Nero,” plays about history or legends, religious plays, and those that are “harder to classify,” like Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep-Well).
When de Vega died, Spaniards took to the streets and celebrated his life for nine days. This more than anything shows the manner in which, through his mastery and his innovations, Lope de Vega defined not only a popular theatre, but also a popular identity, with all the variety and contradictions that includes.