Lope de Vega's Women and Servants (c. 1613-14) was recently rediscovered in an overlooked 17th-century manuscript in Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional, the comedia emerges from its 400-year sleep with a remarkable freshness: it presents a world of suave self-fashioning and accommodation, where creaky notions of honor and vengeance have virtually no place. Translated by Barbara Fuchs. Syracuse University Spanish professor Alejandro García-Reid found the volume at the BNE in 2010 while researching Spanish theater of the 16th and 17th centuries. He spent the next three years analyzing the manuscript and ensuring the attribution to Lope de Vega was accurate. Lope Félix de Vega y Carpio (1562 – 1635) was a Spanish playwright, poet, novelist and marine. He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Age of Baroque literature. His reputation in the world of Spanish literature is second only to that of Cervantes, while the sheer volume of his literary output is unequalled, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of literature. He was nicknamed "The Phoenix of Wits" and "Monster of Nature" (in Spanish: Fénix de los Ingenios, Monstruo de la Naturaleza) by Cervantes because of his prolific nature. (By his own tally, Lope de Vega wrote about 1,800 plays (although he is generally thought to have been exaggerating with the real number closer to 1,500), plus 3,000 sonnets, three novels, four novellas and nine epic poems). Lope de Vega renewed the Spanish theatre at a time when it was starting to become a mass cultural phenomenon. He defined its key characteristics, and along with Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina, took Spanish Baroque theatre to its greatest heights.
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