5 - LOPE DE VEGA (continued)

Abstract

This chapter reviews Lope De Vega's best-known plays and those in which his temperament and his view of life find their clearest expression—probably the ones depicting country life. His peasants are always sane and healthy in their outlook and their social morality, and happy until some discordant element such as a licentious nobleman or the insidious attraction of the court comes to disturb their peace. The superiority of rural to urban life was a well-worn topic of the Renaissance. Lope was primarily a town-dweller; however, his presentation of the same idea, for example, in Los Tellos de Meneses, is not just an empty convention. He puts into the mouth of an old farmer one of the versions of Horace's Beatus ille at which virtually every poet of the period tried his hand; however, after the obligatory denunciation of court life, the old man goes on to give a much livelier picture of himself, going out early to break the ice on his streams, busying himself in the morning with his livestock, all branded with their owner's initial, and in the afternoon with his crops and orchards.