Lope de Vega is on a higher plane as an executant, and is moreover a great original inventor. In its final form the Spanish theatre is his work, and whatever he may once have said of Lope de Rueda, he finally claimed the honour which undoubtedly belongs to him. Anticipating Tennyson, he pointedly remarks in the _Égloga á Claudio_ that
Most can raise the flowers now, For all have got the seed.
The passage is well worth quoting. ‘Though I have departed from the rigidity of Terence, and though I am far from questioning the credit due to the three or four great geniuses who have guarded the infancy of the drama, yet to me’—he proudly continues—‘to me the art of the _comedia_ owes its beginnings. To whom, Claudio, do we owe so many pictures of love and jealousy, so many stirring passages of eloquence, so copious a supply of all the figures within the power of rhetoric to invent? The mass of to-day’s productions is mere imitation of what art created yesterday. I it was who first struck the path and made it practicable so that all now use it easily. I it was who set the example now followed and copied in every direction. ‘I it was who first struck the path—I it was who first set the example.’ It is a daring thing to say, but it can be maintained.
One of the chief difficulties in dealing with Lope, or in persuading others to deal with him, is his prodigious copiousness. But it is not insuperable. For our immediate purpose we may neglect his non-dramatic writings—in every sense a great load taken off, for they alone fill twenty-one quarto volumes. There remain his plays, and their number is astounding. We shall never know precisely how many plays Lope wrote, for only a small part of what was acted has survived, and his own statements are not altogether clear. Roughly speaking, he seems to have written 220 plays up to the end of 1603, and from this date we can follow him as he gallops along: the total rises to 483 in 1609, 800 in 1618, 900 in 1620, 1070 in 1625, and 1500 in 1632. Four years afterwards Pérez de Montalbán published a volume of eulogies on the master by various hands—something like _Jonsonus Virbius_, to which Ford, Waller and others contributed posthumous panegyrics on Ben Jonson in 1638; and in this _Fama Póstuma_ Pérez de Montalbán asserts that Lope wrote 1800 plays and more than 400 _autos_ and _entremeses_. Consider a moment what these figures mean: they mean that Lope never wrote less than thirty-four plays a year, that he usually wrote fifty, that the yearly average rose to sixty as he grew older, and that in the last three years of his life it increased to over a hundred—say, two plays a week. Devout persons are sometimes prone to exaggerate the number of miracles performed by their favourite saint, and, if Pérez de Montalbán’s statements were not corroborated by Lope, we might be inclined to suspect him of some such form of pious fraud. As it is, we have no ground for thinking that Pérez de Montalbán was guilty of any deliberate exaggeration: most probably he set down what he heard from Lope, as well as he remembered it. But perhaps Lope’s calculations were wrong. If anything like 1800 of Lope’s plays survived, nobody would have the courage to attack them. Most have perished, and we must judge Lope by the comparatively few that have escaped destruction—431 plays and 50 _autos_.