Cervantes, I have no doubt, used it in wonder at Lope’s prodigious fertility.
[296] Lope must have been a writer for the public stage as early as 1586 or 1587, and a popular writer at Madrid soon after 1590; but we have no knowledge that any of his plays were printed, with his own consent, before the volume which appeared at Valladolid, in 1604. Yet, in the Preface to the “Peregrino en su Patria,” licensed in 1603, he gives us a list of three hundred and forty-one plays which he acknowledges and claims. Again, in 1618, when he says he had written eight hundred, (Comedias, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618, Prólogo), he had printed but one hundred and thirty-four full-length plays, and a few entremeses. Finally, of the eighteen hundred attributed to him in 1635, after his death, by Montalvan and others, (Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 49), only about three hundred and twenty or thirty can be found in the volumes of his collected plays; and Lord Holland, counting autos and all, which would swell the general claim of Montalvan to at least twenty-two hundred, makes out but five hundred and sixteen printed dramas of Lope. Life of Lope de Vega, London, 1817, 8vo, Vol. II. pp. 158-180.
[297] This curious list, with the Preface in which it stands, is worth reading over carefully, as affording indications of the history and progress of Lope’s genius. It is to Lope’s dramatic life what the list in Meres is to Shakspeare. It is found in the Obras Sueltas, Tom. V.
[298] In his “New Art of Writing Plays,” he says, “I have now written, including one that I have finished this week, four hundred and eighty-three plays.” He printed this for the first time in 1609; and though it was probably written four or five years earlier, yet these lines near the end may have been added at the moment the whole poem went to the press. Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV. p. 417.
[299] In the Prólogo to Comedias, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618;—a witty address of the theatre to the readers.
[300] Comedias, Tom. XIV., Madrid, 1620, Dedication of “El Verdadero Amante” to his son.
[301] Comedias, Tom. XX., Madrid, 1629, Preface,—where he says, “Candid minds will hope, that, as I have lived long enough to write a thousand and seventy dramas, I may live long enough to print them.” The certificates of this volume are dated 1624-25.
[302] In the “Índice de los Ingenios de Madrid,” appended to the “Para Todos” of Montalvan, printed in 1632, he says Lope had then published twenty volumes of plays, and that the number of those that had been acted, without reckoning autos, was fifteen hundred. Lope also himself puts it at fifteen hundred in the “Egloga á Claudio,” which, though not published till after his death, must have been written as early as 1632, since it speaks of the “Dorotea,” first published in that year, as still waiting for the light.
[303] Fama Póstuma, Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 49.
[304] Art. Lupus Felix de Vega.