Virtuous Labor, Courtly Laborer: Canonization and a Literary Career in Lope de Vega's Isidro

In the course of one of early modern Europe’s longest and most prolific literary careers, Lope de Vega (1562–1635) wrote numerous hagiographies, typically upon commission from a city council, an aristocrat, or a court official. Yet his saints’ lives have received far less critical attention than his cloak-and-dagger comedias or his love lyrics. ¹ Scholars, in general, have emphasized questions about how creative authorial energies shaped or altered literary forms that enjoy high prestige in our own time. Lope’s arte nuevo that transformed the comedia de capa y espada fits this preference, while his numerous hagiographies represent a now marginal literary form. Moreover, the devotional works written on commission highlight Lope as a writer whose pen bolstered or depended upon political and religious authorities. Of course, the dependance of writers upon patrons shaped letters within ancien regime societies, and in this regard, Lope offers an indispensable case study of one such milieu. ² We can recall the questions that Foucault poses in order to determine “what is an author?”—“where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?” (138). These lines of inquiry underscore why we should assay the poet/playwright’s literary service-for-hire. Commissions rendered the authorial subject a collaboration or even a struggle among these constituting elements. With lives of saints, they included the commissioning patron, the hagiographer, and the royal and ecclesiastical censors who controlled the works’ circulation.

Lope’s hagiography devoted to Madrid’s patron saint, Isidro labrador, gives us an excellent vantage point for such an inquiry. ³ As a poet and playwright, he contributed at least two texts that promoted the rustic holy man’s canonization: Isidro. Poema castellano (Madrid, 1599), a ten thousand line hybrid of hagiography and epic; and a play known as San Isidro Labrador, a near-contemporary to the poem. Later he presented two more plays and led two poetic jousts to celebrate the saint’s beatification (1620) and canonization (1622). ⁴ In recent years, only two scholars have considered the Isidro hagiographies at length; both portray the texts as part of a quest to reintroduce traditional values into a changing society. Noël Salomon’s classic study portrays this traditionalism as part of a widespread revalorization of manual labor amid severe economic crisis, thus contemplating this traditionalism in the positive light of reform (199–211). Francisco Márquez Villanueva, in contrast, argues that the rustic theme makes Lope part of a reactionary attack on humanist ideals of individual freedom and scholarly inquiry (26–92).

But if we reexamine the Isidro with a different theoretical framework, we find that self-writing coexists with or even undercuts hagiography. Here Stephen Greenblatt’s model of Renaissance identity offers a fruitful point-of-departure. His influential theory pivots on a paradox of early modern European society that Lope’s literary career exemplifies: the “increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” developed amid powerful, often extreme, limits to individual flexibility (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 2). New Historicist theory bypasses the literary exceptionalism that has often viewed canonical writers as unique figures rather than actors within specific historical and social contexts. Instead of discussing authorial contributions to the longue durée of prestigious genre, this theory asks how individuals navigated the channels of power within their societies. ⁵ Lope, the son of an embroiderer, parallels Shakespeare, the son of a glover, who serves as a key example in Greenblatt’s study: each writer had a grammar school education, a breadth of readings once limited to nobility and clergy, and a theatrical career that thrived in the shadow of a royal court. ⁶ Lope, moreover, exemplifies the new limits that came along with the freedom to fashion a new identity. The power of his society’s network of patrons and clients defined his career even from the stellar heights of incredible fame and widespread artistic influence, an incongruence that shapes his letters to the Duke of Sessa. This article focuses on a historical...