Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621 (review)

Abstract

The substantive body of biographical narratives written about Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio has been one of the cornerstones of Spanish Golden Age studies. In the twentieth century alone, this historical treasure ranges from the early volumes The Life of Lope de Vega (1562-1635), by Hugo Albert Rennert (1904), Lope de Vega en sus cartas by Agustín de Amezúa, and Lope de Vega: biografía espiritual by Nicolás González Ruiz (both dated 1935), to those by Florentino Zamora, Lope de Vega, censor de libros (1941), Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, Vivir y crear de Lope de Vega (1946), Alonso Zamora Vicente, Lope de Vega, su vida y su obra (1961), Dámaso Alonso, En torno a Lope: Marino, Cervantes, Benavente, Góngora, los Cardenios (1972), Alan Trueblood, Experience and Artistic Expression in Lope de Vega (1974), and Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Lope—vida y valores (1988), to name just a few. In fact, readings about this "life" frequently compete with the vast number of critical studies about the dramatic, poetic, and narrative texts signed by and attributed to this central figure of Hispanic letters. Moreover, such biographical approaches have been used oftentimes as the key measure for the critical exercise of reading the body of literature "owned" (in the authorial sense proposed by Foucault) by Lope. The end result, and one of the points of liability of much scholarship concerned with the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque, is that once upon a time these biographies—some of which, paradoxically enough, were based on Lope's writings—moved center stage in the "modern" configuration of Golden Age studies and, by extension, to the larger disciplinary umbrella of Hispanism, of which the former used to be a core element.