Lope de Vega’s Theater: Themes, Techniques, and Legacy
Monarchical Sentiment and National Pride
Monarchical sentiment, honor, national pride, and religion were deeply rooted in the people.
Theatrical Agility and Storytelling
The theater provided agility to the scene, creating entertaining, interesting, funny, and passionate stories. (Theatrical)
The Spectacle of Theater
The work was conceived as a spectacle, with staging that mattered to the plot, the dances, songs, and the evolution of “funny” elements. With all this, the theater became professional, and specific locations were used for representation (pen comedies).
Technical Renovations of ‘New Comedy’
Lope de Vega was not limited to renewing the attitude or the contents but also renewing the theatrical technique. For the first time, the theater was leaving the Greek concept.
The technical changes included:
- Reduction of three events (approach, middle, end), instead of the five Greek.
- Design of the play, imitating life, as an intrigue with constant changes of place, time, and scenes.
- Rupture on the Aristotelian rule of unity of place, time, and action.
- Mix of the tragic and the comic.
- Rejection of the metric unit (in verses): Use hendecasyllables in serious moments and eight syllables for lighter topics and stanzas.
- Variety: romances (for narration), sonnets (for claims), quatrain and Limerick (for dialogue), stanzas of high art to serious business.
- Decorum and expressive: the character speaks according to his age and condition.
- Fixed character structure: the lady (with beauty and lineage), the dandy, the servant/a, the villain (and clean old Christian blood), the King (dispensing justice).
- Convergence of the dramatic action in the feeling of love and even more so in honor.
The Theme of Honor
Lope makes these two issues engines in his theater:
- Honor: Privilege of nobles, inherited and based on the value and the ancestors. Lope equals the honor of a noble with a villain (hence the success), provided they were clean of blood.
- Honors: Virtue inherited personally was based on the opinion of others of oneself. Honor and honor had an important value, as their lives and their loss meant social death. This was to be repaired with life and revenge. Just before the king was an absurd revenge, because he was the source of honor. In case of tyranny of a ruler, was the duty of law respects.
Lope de Vega’s Creativity
Lope enjoyed this creativity that his work is estimated at more than 1,800 plays and 400 cars. Some 500 works are preserved. The theme of his plays, as his poetry and prose, was varied according to its spirit, alternating between divine love and human passion. Lope’s dramatic production ranges from secular subjects (pastoral, with Belardo the furious Historically, with the punishment without vengeance, Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocana, The Best Judge, King, Fuenteovejuna, swashbuckling and custom, with the dog in the manger, La dama boba, Los Belisa fuss; legendary …) to a religious theme (cars, with the harvest of saints with the good saves, the Bible, with the creation of the world ;…)
Among the followers of Lope, include:
- Guillen Castro: Author of Las Mocedades del Cid and narcissism in his opinion
- Juan Ruiz de Alarcón: Truth suspicious privileged Breasts
- Luis Velez de Guevara: Reigning after death, The mountain of Vera
- Antonio Mira de Amezcua: The slave of the devil, which deals with Faust and his deal with the devil