The intense sexual life of the Spanish poet is well known but, how did he reconcile in the s. XVII your long list of lovers with the priesthood?
The Doctor of Literature and author of the book 'The true lover: Lope de Vega and love' tells in him the exciting and contradictory life of Lope
It is documented that Lope de Vega's funeral was massive. The entire city of Madrid attended and, in particular, the feminine sector of the Court overturned. "The women appreciated Lope very much and for that reason they went in mass to his funeral. He was always surrounded by them and never treated them like an object", affirms José María Marco, author of The true lover: Lope de Vega and love (Editions Unusual, 2019). The chronicle of the funeral of Lope in August 1635 written by Juan Pérez de Montalbán portrayed the moment: "The streets were so crowded with people that the passage to the funeral was almost pregnant, without having an idle balcony, an empty window or an empty car."
Many lines have been written about the adventures and misadventures of the love life of the Spanish poet and playwright. In the collective imaginary it gives the feeling that he lived love in a frivolous way, due to his wide list of lovers. He had fifteen children between legitimate and illegitimate. However, in the trajectory of Lope, one of the most important exponents of the Golden Age of Spanish literature, love had many more aspects and edges than a first approach to its figure can convey. Look for the meaning of love in all his prolific work, define it. "Cervantes, Garcilaso and many others write a lot about love but Lope takes the whole love spectrum, from eroticism and physical love to idealization, the exaltation of a love that overcomes contact, that discovers the truth of the world. There is no limit for him, there is no one in the seventeenth century who resembles him in this study of love. Besides, he is not moralistic, as Cervantes is, he does not need to morally justify his characters, he lets himself go ... ", he says José María Marco.
Lope's first great love was Elena Osorio, a young woman she fell in love with. He lived the story so intensely that he ended up banished. Osorio left him for another rich and powerful young man and he ended up insulting her publicly. He went to jail and had to leave Madrid. He would never recover from this wound and tell it in great works such as La Dorotea.
Lope married twice: at a young age, with Isabel de Urbina and later, with Juana Guardo. Despite his numerous lovers, Lope also devoted many efforts to his married life. Isabel was taken care of when she became ill and Juana always spoke with respect and affection, although it was said that his was a marriage of convenience. Juana was the daughter of a rich businessman who supplied meat and fish to the city of Madrid.
In her long list of lovers, actress Micaela de Luján stands out, among others, such as María de Aragón, Antonia Trillo and Jerónima de Burgos. Her last lover was Marta de Nevares, whom she took care of and saw her die after a long illness.
Without losing sight of his family life, he dissected like no other human desire and eroticism. "In Lope everything always begins with the erotic impulse, including the most refined and detached love [...] Endowed as very few for verbal invention, Lope recreates multiple voluptuousness on multiple occasions," Marco says in the book.
In addition, his scandalous life contained an element that made it even more extraordinary: Lope was ordained a priest in 1614, at age 52, after the death of Juana Guardo, his second wife. On May 29 of that year he officiated his first mass, in the Church of San Hermenegildo in Madrid. As a priest, she began her relationship with Marta de Nevares (who was married to a merchant she would end up leaving) and continued with her sporadic affairs. But how was it possible for a priest to have that intense sex life?
"For a long time, Lope's love life was considered scandalous. At the end of the 19th century, the Royal Spanish Academy prevented the publication of a biography that began to detail, with indisputable documentary evidence, the unorthodox history of love affairs de Lope. He had never been well seen, of course, but the extraordinary freedom of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, the same that made life and work like his own possible, had gone out and was no longer understandable. " , is detailed in The True Lover: Lope de Vega and love.
Indeed, in the Golden Age, a public character like Lope de Vega was allowed to exercise the priesthood while his love life was not resentful. "Lope was so popular and had such prestige that they forgave everything. And indeed, that was a society allergic to Puritanism. They were able to see the human being as a whole, often contradictory. And then there is Catholicism, with a God who forgive everything, "says Marco. Lope believes that God's love places us on another stage: the lover becomes loved.
On the other hand, his work also deals with the destructive force of love: jealousy. "Lope was a great jealous. He explored the side related to pure uncontrollable lust. He considers jealousy to be the most ignoble and toughest part of love," explains the author.
Lope did not understand love as something secret but as something to be told and explained to the loved one. His work is the proof of that. All his characters try to reason about what they feel and why they fall in love . Love and relationships, however short, always become transcendent for him. "In that sense we have lost, now everything goes," concludes Marco.
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