Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega, full name Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635). Spanish poet and dramatist. As a young man he sailed to the Azores and with the Armada. In the 1590s he began writing plays in Madrid, where he developed a new type of drama called the comedia, a mixture of comedy and tragedy. After a series of personal misfortunes, including the deaths of his wife, mistress, and favourite son, he was ordained as a priest in 1614 and began to write religious poetry instead of plays. Over 475 of his reputed 1500 plays have survived, including Fuenteovejuna (c. 1613); he also wrote the novel Dorotea (1632).
