This is a major book about one of the luminaries of the golden
age of Spanish literature. In spite of his great reputation, Lope
de Vega is to most of us merely a name, in part because of the
prodigious quantity and variety of his plays and other writings in
verse and prose. Alan Trueblood's book does not pretend to survey
all of Lope's works or to touch on all the events of his colorful
career; yet it probes the mind and heart, and art, of Lope as no
other study in English has done.
Trueblood pursues the artistic consequences of a key experience
in Lope's life, the four-year love affair with Elena Osorio that
terminated violently in 1587. (The rejected Lope, age twenty-five,
wrote slanderous verses about Elena's family and associates, was
jailed on charges of libel, and was sentenced to ten years' exile.)
Notwithstanding his subsequent marriages and liaisons, his mounting
literary fame in Spain and abroad, and his eventual dedication to
the Church as a priest, for forty-five years this experience
reverberated intermittently in his writings, culminating in the
great prose dialogue "La Dorotea." Trueblood's demonstration of the
increasing objectivity and sympathy with which Lope treats Elena/
Dorotea--in ballads, in sonnets, in plays, in "La Dorotea"--is
psychologically as well as aesthetically revealing.
Trueblood provides by far the fullest analysis and elucidation
of Lope's masterpiece, "La Dorotea," that it has ever received--and
in the process he probes the nature of literary creativity, the
symbiosis between personal experience and artistic expression, in
contexts going well beyond Lope and his age. Because the book will
appeal to many readers who do not know Spanish, all quotations have
been translated into English.
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