Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621 (review)

Elizabeth R. Wright, Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2001. 184 pp.

The substantive body of biographical narratives written about Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio has been one of the cornerstones of Spanish Golden Age studies. In the twentieth century alone, this historical treasure ranges from the early volumes The Life of Lope de Vega (1562-1635), by Hugo Albert Rennert (1904), Lope de Vega en sus cartas by Agustín de Amezúa, and Lope de Vega: biografía espiritual by Nicolás González Ruiz (both dated 1935), to those by Florentino Zamora, Lope de Vega, censor de libros (1941), Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, Vivir y crear de Lope de Vega (1946), Alonso Zamora Vicente, Lope de Vega, su vida y su obra (1961), Dámaso Alonso, En torno a Lope: Marino, Cervantes, Benavente, Góngora, los Cardenios (1972), Alan Trueblood, Experience and Artistic Expression in Lope de Vega (1974), and Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Lope—vida y valores (1988), to name just a few. In fact, readings about this "life" frequently compete with the vast number of critical studies about the dramatic, poetic, and narrative texts signed by and attributed to this central figure of Hispanic letters. Moreover, such biographical approaches have been used oftentimes as the key measure for the critical exercise of reading the body of literature "owned" (in the authorial sense proposed by Foucault) by Lope. The end result, and one of the points of liability of much scholarship concerned with the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque, is that once upon a time these biographies—some of which, paradoxically enough, were based on Lope's writings—moved center stage in the "modern" configuration of Golden Age studies and, by extension, to the larger disciplinary umbrella of Hispanism, of which the former used to be a core element.

As Pilgrimage to Patronage points out, the critical problem of these studies is that many of them "appeared in [or before] the late 1950's, before scholars had the theoretical tools necessary to decipher the ambition that hid behind gestures of servility" (14). Indeed, the study that Elizabeth Wright critiques in this particular instance—James Crosby's reading of the role played by Quevedo and Lope in the 1615 double wedding of Felipe IV and Louis XIII—illustrates, on the one hand, the academic rigor and erudition that by the middle of the twentieth century characterized Golden Age studies; at the same time, most scholarly work of the kind that Crosby's study exemplifies fell in the hermeneutical trap of considering the literary production from the Siglo de Oro irreparably bound by a sense of determinism that oftentimes sprang from a merge of those two strange bedfellows, Counterreformation rhetoric and fascist nationalism. This scholarship, as a result, failed to detect numerous political and aesthetic contributions that both motivated and were motivated by the production of literature in Spain during these two centuries. The contradictory nature of servitude that lies at the heart of this book is only one of the many points that remained largely unquestioned by previous scholarship.

This critical path is the one chosen by Prof. Wright, risking dismissal by readers at the mere thought of facing yet another biography of the great comediante. However, the shrewd design of Pilgrimage to Patronage, which revolves around these two capital issues in Lope's life and production, considers them the mirrors in which reading and writing by and about Lope reflect to produce, in the end, shining literary and critical images. This is a brilliant interpretive tactic, because it does not only infuse new critical energy on this somewhat tired venue, but it also rewrites certain foundational fictions about seventeenth-century Spain—such as the tale of the relationship of the courtier with the king, and of the protégé with the patron...