2 - Lope de Vega and the Theatre in Madrid

Summary

On 7 September 1610, Lope de Vega bought a two-storey house on Francos street, on the edge of the Madrid theatre district. The focal points of this district were the Church of St Sebastian — which in 1631 would house the actors’ guild1 — the mentidero de los comediantes, or actors’ ‘gossip shop’, in León street; and the two public playhouses: the Corral del Príncipe and the Corral de la Cruz.

Lope paid 9,000 reales for the property, 5,000 as a down payment and the remainder in two instalments of 2,000 reales each payable in four and eight months. Two years later, he applied for an exemption from the Regalía del Real Aposento de Corte [Royal Privilege on Private Dwellings], applicable since the time of Philip II to two-storey houses in Madrid. In accordance with this ‘privilege’, the owners of such houses, known as casas de aposento, were obliged to lodge (aposentar) a royal functionary and his family rent free on one of their two floors. On 13 February 1613 the exemption was granted in perpetuity to Lope in return for an annual tax of 4,500 maravedís (132 reales), money which in theory would pay the rent of the functionary who would have occupied one-half of his house. In order to assess this annual tax, the house had to be properly measured. The length of the façade was found to be 53 Castilian feet and the depth of the property (including, one assumes, the backyard) 100 feet, giving a total of 5,300 square feet.

The exact location of Lope's house was established in 1790 by José Antonio Álvarez de Baena in his Hijos de Madrid ilustres [Illustrious Sons of Madrid]. It was situated, past Niño street (present-day Quevedo street), on the left side of Francos street, as one enters it by the mentidero. 5 Years later, Mesoneros Romanos examined the original deeds of purchase and reconstructed the history of the property from the time it was endowed to the parish priest of the Church of the Holy Cross (c. 1570) to the building of the house (before 1587) and its purchase by Lope (1610) down to 1825, when it was bought by the father of the person who resided there at the time of his investigation.