Spain's Phoenix wrote thousands of plays and poems
Lope de Vega (1562–1635) flooded Spain's Golden Age stage with roughly 500 plays, three thousand sonnets, and epic poems enough to awe Goethe and irritate Cervantes—who still dubbed him the Phoenix of Wits and Monster of Nature.
Born in Madrid to embroiderer Félix de Vega, he supposedly read Spanish and Latin at five, translated Latin verse by ten, and drafted a first play at twelve. Jesuit schooling and Alcalá studies bent toward priesthood until love ruled out celibacy. He fought at Ponta Delgada in 1583 under Álvaro de Bazán, then burned through a five-year affair with Elena Osorio until libel earned jail and eight years' banishment from court plus two from Castile. He absconded with sixteen-year-old Isabel de Urbina, married her on 10 May 1588, and days later sailed with the Armada on San Juan—one of the ships that returned.
Exile in Valencia refined his formula: break classical unity of action, braid two plots into imbroglio, and perfect the comic donaire after reading Juan del Encina while serving the Duke of Alba (1592–95). Isabel died in postpartum complications in 1594; later came Juana de Guardo, long liaison with actress Micaela de Luján, and, after ordination in 1614 following family deaths, enduring partnership with Marta de Nevares until 1632. Output peaked in the 1600s while he served as secretary for the Duke of Sessa. He died of scarlet fever in Madrid on 27 August 1635 after losing a son at sea and seeing a daughter abducted.
With Calderón and Tirso de Molina he defined Spanish Baroque drama's grasp of human motives. Nondramatic peaks include La Dragontea (1598) on Drake's last voyage, El Isidro (1599), Angelica poems, and sacred and secular Rimas; Rimas humanas y divinas (1634) under the heteronym Tomé de Burguillos is often called his poetic masterpiece. Knight of Malta from 1627, friend to Quevedo and enemy to Alarcón, he turned personal scandals into Moorish and pastoral masks—Zaide, Belardo, Belisa—feeding a theatre that had become mass culture.
Source: Lope de Vega
