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Actualizado: 5 de junio de 2025
To his plays Lope de Vega has given the general name of comedias, which should not be confused with the word "comedies," for the two are not synonymous. They are divided into three acts or jornadas of somewhat variable length and admit of numerous classifications.
In the early years of the seventeenth century, when the mines of Mexico and South America were pouring forth their untold millions, these Indianos were especially numerous in the Spanish capital, and Lope de Vega, with his usual acute perception ready to seize upon any theme popular with the public, gave them a prominent place in his works.
Before the death of his wife he had given evidence of religious fervor by numerous short poems and in his sacred work, los Pastores de Belén, a long pastoral in prose and in verse relating the early history of the Holy Family. Whether Lope was influenced to take orders by motives of pure devotion or by reasons of interest has been a question of speculation for scholars ever since his time.
Lope de Vega found the Spanish drama a mass of incongruities without form, preponderating influence, or type, he left it in every detail a well-organized, national drama, so perfect that, though his successors polished it, they added nothing to its form. When or how he began this great work, it is not certain. He says in his works that he wrote plays as early as his eleventh year and conceived them even younger, and we have one of his plays, El Verdadero Amante, written, as has been mentioned, when he was twelve, but corrected and published many years later. Of all his plays written before his banishment, little is known but it is natural to suppose that they resembled in a measure the works of predecessors, for this period must be considered the apprenticeship of Lope. Though written for the author's pleasure, they were evidently numerous, for Cervantes says that Lope de Vega "filled the world with his own comedias, happily and judiciously planned, and so many that they covered more than ten thousand sheets." That his merit was soon appreciated is evident from the fact that theatrical managers were anxious to have these early compositions and that during his banishment he supported himself and family in Valencia by selling plays and probably kept the best troupes of the land stocked with his works alone. Of the number of his works the figures are almost incredible. In El Peregrino en su Patria, published in 1604, he gives a list of his plays, which up to that time numbered two hundred and nineteen; in 1609 he says, in El Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias, that the number was then four hundred and eighty-three; in prologues or prefaces of his works Lope tells us that he had written eight hundred plays in 1618, nine hundred in 1619 and one thousand and seventy in 1625. In the
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