1 - Lope's Knowledge

Summary

Pero mil dan a entender [But heaps of folk imply

que apenas supe leer, I barely learnt to read,

y es lo más cierto, a fe mía; and that's quite true, I swear;

que como en gracia se lleva for just as knowing how

danzar, cantar o tañer, to dance, or sing, or play

yo sé escribir sin leer, is only a happy gift,

que a fe que es gracia bien nueva. I don't read but I can write

(Peribáñez, lines 2355–61.) — a novel gift, I’m sure.]

Under his favourite pseudonym, Belardo, Lope was responding tongue in cheek to all who might doubt if as a writer he could claim to be truly learned. No one could deny of course the breadth of the knowledge he displayed over the range of his immense output, but doubt has indeed been expressed, from his own time to our own, as to whether that knowledge had any depth or was merely superficial. Though the question has been addressed, largely in general terms, by countless modern scholars, it is still unresolved, and probably doomed to remain so, but in approaching it here I shall seek to be specific.

The doubt can be said to have been fuelled, in at least three ways, by Lope himself. Firstly, his intense activity throughout his life and his phenomenal output as a writer have led some to wonder if he can ever have had the time, energy or opportunity to acquire any true erudition. But another look at his biography gives reason to question that view. We can be sure, without taking literally what we are told by Montalbán, his first biographer, or by Fernando, his alter ego in La Dorotea, that his genius showed itself early. Having perhaps been taught initially by ‘mi maestro’ [my master] Vicente Espinel, he attended a Jesuit college (where he will have studied Latin grammar, composition and rhetoric, plus a range of Roman authors), and we need not doubt, though we cannot document, his repeated assertions that he studied (perhaps from his mid-teens) at the University of Alcalá. Unquestionably, moreover, his memory, which educators then set great store by exercising, was exceptionally retentive and ready, and it may well have been assisted by maintaining, as many Humanists advised, a codex excerptorius.