Spanish · 1562–1635
Cervantes called him a monster of nature, and the arithmetic supports it: Lope claimed to have written more than a thousand plays, of which perhaps four hundred survive, along with epics, sonnets by the hundred, novels and pastorals. He sailed with the Armada, was banished from Madrid for libelling a former lover's family, abducted and married a nobleman's daughter, kept mistresses through two marriages, and took priestly orders in 1614 without slowing down on either count. His New Art of Writing Plays in This Age, delivered to a Madrid academy in 1609, told playwrights to mix comedy and tragedy, break the unities, and give the public what it wanted — a manifesto for the commercial theatre that Spain's corrales had already made profitable. He invented the shape of Spanish drama: three acts, honour, disguise, peasant dignity, a king who arrives to settle the account.