Contemporary scholarship has situated Miguel de Cervantes and his masterpiece Don Quijote de la Mancha in the center of the canon of Early Modern Spanish literature, as the multiple celebrations in 2016 have reminded us. And yet, during his career as a writer, Cervantes was closer to the margins of the literary field because he was often overshadowed by other, more successful and influential authors. At the forefront of these authors was Lope de Vega (1562–1635), who made his mark on Spain and Europe's Early Modern cultural scene starting in his early twenties and until his death at almost age seventy-three. For more than half a century, Lope was at the center of the (literary) action: from the renewal of popular lyrical poetry during the 1580s and 1590s with the romancero nuevo to his participation in the literary and theoretical disputes surrounding Luis de Góngora's radical poetical innovations from the 1610s onward, and including, of course, his wild success as a playwright and his decisive role in developing the most modern and groundbreaking theatre of Early Modern Europe, or what came to be known as the Comedia nueva. Lope therefore left a significant imprint on many writers of his time—Spanish, European, and American—and his relevance has reached the twenty-first century. This special issue of Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures aims to draw attention to and celebrate the complex nature of Lope's work by offering new perspectives on its multifaceted relationships with other texts, cultures, and times and therefore with ideology, identity, and cultural practices. The five essays included in this issue are the result of a one-day symposium that took place at Syracuse University on April 22, 2016, to honor Emeritus Professor of Spanish Harold G. Jones and the seventieth anniversary of Symposium.
Chad Leahy's essay delves into the romance “Altas y encumbradas torres,” which was published as a pliego suelto in Seville, Spain, in 1601 and is an example of the criticism aimed toward the Duke of Lerma for moving the court from Madrid to Valladolid. This poem has been attributed to Lope de Vega, and Leahy examines with great insight how its presentation of the enkomion poleos of Madrid is articulated through essential elements of this motif as delineated by Menander of Laodicea. The result is an idealized portrait of Madrid that places the city at the symbolical center of Spain's political and religious universe, because the poem also resorts to the biblical narrative model of the exile of Israel from Babylon, and it links with Lope's own madrileñismo as part of his public image as a writer.
Fernando Plata's essay examines El sol parado, a historical drama by Lope that focuses on the figure of Pelayo Pérez Correa, a thirteenth-century Portuguese military leader during the Spanish “Reconquest.” Plata's detailed analysis of Lope's use of historical and literary sources offers convincing arguments that the play was most likely written during the playwright's time at the court of the Duke of Alba, around 1592 to 1595, and that it echoes events such as the annexation of Portugal in 1580 and the defeat of the Armada in 1588 in order to exalt national identity.
Javier Rubiera's article on Lope's play Lo fingido verdadero perfectly illustrates how even the most canonical and studied works need fresh approaches that can shed light on a number of problematic elements. Rubiera points to Alonso de Villegas's Flos Sanctorum as another source used by Lope, which most possibly inspired the title of the play. More importantly, he argues convincingly that the play was probably written to be performed during the feast of Corpus Christi, which would explain the reference to the Eucharist at a key moment of the plot and the importance of bread in the first act of the play.
My own contribution deals with Lope's role in the transnational literary field of his time. I focus on the little-known play La inocente Laura and how Lope expands elements of its main source, a novella written by Italian author Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, by offering a critical image of the court. I examine this theme with a contrastive perspective, as I use a play by Robert Greene based on the same source as a point of comparison, as well as two adaptations of Lope's own play written a few decades later by Antoine Le Métel d'Ouville and Gianbattista Pasca.
Finally, Veronika Ryjik's article is a great example of the significant and complex impact of Lope's work in the modern world. Her article focuses on the reception of Lope's masterpiece El castigo sin venganza in modern Russia through its translations by Serguéi Yúriev in 1877 and, more specifically, by Yuri Korneyev in 1962. Ryjik examines how Yúriev's version of the play's title influenced the interpretation of El castigo sin venganza by twentieth-century Russian critics, as well as a number of elements of Korneyev's own translation decades later. This version stressed the play's main couple's guilt and the duke's rightness in his final punishment, thus projecting a specific reading of Lope's intricate tragedy.
The contributions of this special issue of Symposium therefore offer new light on both canonical and lesser-studied texts by Lope de Vega and highlight some of the lines of research in relation to this writer that will be particularly productive in the near future: connections with the contemporary world; inquiries that showcase the ideologies behind textual strategies in Lope's works; or comparative perspectives that situate his works in their larger, European context—in short, Lope's role in the cultural field of his own time and beyond.
Notes on contributor
Alejandro García-Reidy is Assistant Professor at Syracuse University. His research focuses on different aspects of Early Modern Spanish literature and digital humanities.