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

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-OCT-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association

Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621. By ELIZABETH E. WRIGHT. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 184 pp. 30 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-8387-5454-6.

Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was arguably the greatest and undoubtedly the most prolific of Spanish dramatists. His three hundred or so surviving plays demonstrate an unrivalled ability to entertain all levels of Golden Age society. Yet, in spite of his enormous popularity, he had great difficulty in gaining formal recognition because the public theatre in Spain was still only very gradually beginning to acquire literary respectability. So, from the late 1590s, he began to broaden the scope of his writing, turning his attention to the publication of more ambitious works than the plays and short lyrical pieces to which he had previously dedicated his attention. Quite suddenly, epic poems such as La Dragontea (Valencia, 1598) and La Jerusalen conquistada (Madrid, 1609), the adventure romance El peregrino en su patria (Seville, 1604), the prose eclogue Arcadia (Madrid, 1598), and the enormous hagiographic epic Isidro (Madrid, 1599) rolled off the presses as part of Lope's strategy to draw...

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