Three splendid 1622 productions in Aranjuez inaugurated Felipe IV’s reign: La gloria de Niquea (“Niquea’s Glory”) by the Conde de Villa-mediana; Querer por solo querer (“Love for Love’s Sake”) by Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza; and El vellocino de oro (“The Golden Fleece”) by Lope. The scenery and stage machinery for Niquea were designed by an Italian engineer, Giulio Cesare Fontana, the first of several Italian experts brought to Spain for that purpose, the most important being Cosme Lotti, between 1626 and 1643, and Baccio del Bianco from 1651 to 1657. In these works, visual effect and music were more important than the poetic texts, based on chivalric, pastoral, or mythological motifs.

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250 Early Modern Spain: Renaissance and Baroque

The strength of the comedia tradition encouraged the use of full-length dramatic texts performed by professional actors, often combining the talents of more than one company, in later Court spectacles for occasions of state. In the Coliseo, they were performed before multiple sets of perspective scenery painted on changeable flats, and with machinery that could make mountains and palaces appear or implode, move the waves on a painted sea, or let characters fly solo or mounted on swans, horses, or clouds. They included dance and traditional strophic music as well as a Spanish version of recitative in which the gods sang, while mortal characters spoke. There were also attempts to introduce Italian Court opera, with La selva sin amor (“The Loveless Forest”), a “pastoral eclogue” by Lope, and Caldero´n’s La pu´rpura de la rosa (“The Purple of the Rose”) and Celos aun del aire matan (“Jealousy Even of the Air Kills”). The Spanish Court, however, preferred a semi-operatic mixed style. Other dramatists wrote Court spectacle plays using the same ingredients, but, with the exception of Francisco Bances Candamo, rarely achieved the dramatic coherence of Caldero´ n’s plays.

Court spectacle plays not only served to entertain royalty, court officials, and foreign dignitaries, they also constituted a tool and an expression of absolute monarchy in their lavish production and audience seating arrangement. They sometimes incorporated, along with the exaltation of the monarch, a discreet political lesson for the king, because, as Bances Candamo expressed, performing before the monarch offered an opportunity to instruct him diplomatically by means of the glory and weaknesses of the play’s gods and heroes, with whom he was linked. After the opening performance for the royal family, the Coliseo could be opened to a paying public.

Private performances were also given on certain days of the week in simpler theatres in the Alca´zar and Buen Retiro palaces, beginning as early as the 1560s for Isabel de Valois, Felipe II’s third wife, who did enjoy theatre. The professional companies there performed either plays written for the corrales, or dramas written for palace performance which might later be staged in the corrales as well.

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14 Lope Felix de Vega Carpio

VICTOR DIXON

Lope de Vega’s life, throughout most of its seventy-two years, was notoriously turbulent and riddled with contradictions. Baptized in Madrid on 6 December 1562, he was the son of an embroiderer from La Montan˜a, undoubtedly one of the many craftsmen who were flocking to Spain’s new capital. Lope’s much-mocked pretensions to noble lineage were certainly unfounded, but twentieth-century suggestions of converso antecedents remain unproven too. Having studied, after its foundation in 1572, at the local Jesuit college, between 1577 and 1581 he attended the University of Alcala´ (and may have studied later at Salamanca). In 1583 he saw active service in an expedition to the Azores.

The next few years were marked by a passion that would haunt him forever after, for Elena Osorio (often Filis in his verse), the daughter of an actor–manager for whom he wrote some of his earliest plays. Eventually supplanted by a rich and noble rival, he spread savage poetic libels, for which, early in 1588, he was exiled, for eight years from Madrid and two from Castile. Later that year he abducted and married Isabel de Urbina (Belisa), and enlisted to join the Armada, though he may not have left the peninsula. His banishment took the pair to Valencia, to Toledo, and for some years after 1591 to the cultivated court of the fifth Duke of Alba, near Salamanca.

Isabel died there and in 1595 Lope was allowed to return to Madrid, where he was indicted the following year for concubinage with don˜a Antonia de Trillo (probably his Celia). In 1598 he contracted a second marriage, to Juana de Guardo, but by now or shortly after he was more passionately committed to a liaison with Micaela de Luja´n (Lucinda), and the following decade saw him shuttling between two households, in both Madrid and Toledo, with visits to Valencia, Seville, and other cities. In 1610 he settled definitively in Madrid with Juana, but a period of relatively peaceful domesticity was short-lived; 1612 and 1613 saw the deaths both of their dearly loved six-year-old son Carlos Fe´lix and of Juana herself, and in 1614 a spiritual crisis that he had been experiencing for some years culminated in his ordination as a priest. He was nevertheless soon inflamed by new passions: first for an actress, Luc´ıa de Salcedo, and then in

• The plays of both Virue´s and Cueva may be related to political…

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 242 Early Modern Spain: Renaissance and Baroque Diverse contributors shaped the theatrical mix in the second half of that century. Juan de Timoneda’s own texts – particularly Las tres comedias (“The Three Comedies,” 1559), adaptations of Italian erudite prose comedies to Spanish taste –

• Here, however, the action is often non-linear, the overall…

In Los pastores de Bele´ n (“Shepherds at Bethlehem,” 1612), dedicated to Carlos Fe´lix in 1612, he returned to the pastoral mode, but explicitly, remorsefully, with divine – not human – love as his theme. It retells the Christmas story from its foreshadowings until the flight into Egypt, but the

• Ed. Eric W. Naylor. 2nd. edn. Cla´sicos Hispa´nicos, II.9. Madrid: Consejo…

Perez Magallon and Russell P. Sebold. Cordoba: Cajasur, 2000. Gutierrez Giradot, Rafael. Modernismo: supuestos historicos y culturales. Barcelona: Montesinos, 1983; repr. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988. Gwara, Joseph J., and E. Michael Gerli, eds. Studies on the Spanish Sentimental Romance. London: Tamesis Books, 1997. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language. Ed.

• Only 31 5 indisputably his are extant (alongside…

Far more enjoyable today, however, are his Rimas humanas y divinas del Licenciado Tome´ de Burguillos (“Human and Divine Verses of Master To m e´ de Burguillos,” 1634). He attributes them to Tome´ de Burguillos, a pseudonym invented in 1620, but barely maintains the pretense. The religious poems, for instance,

• In drama it was the dominance of the supposedly hybrid form of tragicomedy, endorsed…

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 18 Eighteenth-century Neoclassicism PHILIP DEACON The appeal to classicizing aesthetic principles which characterized the reformist tendency of high culture in eighteenth-century Spain is best understood as a reaction to the dominant literary mode inherited from the previous century.1 In drama, poetry, and prose writing the