Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598–1621 by Elizabeth R. Wright

168 BO Reviews Wright, Elizabeth R. Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2001.184 pp. HB. ISBN 0-8387-5454-6. Lope de Vega's tumultuous personal and professional anxieties and their self-expression in his works have been of perennial interest, from the Fama postuma (1636) published by friends shortly after his death to our times. Serious scholarship on the topic took a tremendous advance in 1974 with the publication of Alan Trueblood's Experience and Artistic Expression in Lope de Vega, which, as Elizabeth Wright observes, posited life-experiences as the raw material for his literary endeavors (142). Her study now progresses along the same methodological path, but in the ideological direction of the often ambivalent attitudes Lope expressed about his relationship to the court power structure and his place within it. Concurrently, Wright examines how the Court shaped Lope's creativity and how, in turn, that creativity helped shape the Court's notion of a poet's place within the power structure. How, in short, did Lope aspire to fit into the political and artistic world at Court? "How did Lope de Vega's ambition to enter the court of Philip III and Lerma [i.e., from 1598 to 1621] shape his literary practice? And how, in turn, did Lope's fame as a playwright and poet—learned outside the royal palace—shape the institution of literary patronage at court?" (15). Many of Lope's works, Wright affirms, express an anxious desire for upward mobility within the social hierarchy, which is sought both by producing literary works which ingratiate the author with those in power and by flouting Court patronage with a tremendous production of economically profitable material for mass consumption. The latter (romances, comedias, certdmenes poeticos) remain popular today and receive abundant scholarly attention. The former have been marginalized as "strange" (24), "humorously incoherent" (74), and paradoxical (134). In these works, "exploiting his flexibility to use various literary forms, often simultaneously, the writer delivers varied, even contradictory messages" (97). Wright's Pilgrimage to Patronage examines a number of these lesspopular works to show that part of their strangeness is due to Lope's efforts to use their publication to attract municipal, aristocratic, and royal benefactors in the court that took shape around Philip III. She explores Lope's strategies in a number of literary genres, including two epic poems, a romance of adventure, a performance as a jester during Carnival, and some plays. Chapter One is a close analysis of La dragontea within the context of Lope's aspirations at court, for which, in this case, he takes the role Resenas ca 169 of poet/chronicler/statesman. The contemporary epic favors the role of Diego Suarez de Amaya over that of the military commander Alonso de Sotomayor, perhaps because someone commissioned Lope to construct the tale that way. Furthermore, the contemporary nature of the topic makes the tale more a "cronica" of what really happened in Panama than an imaginative "dpica"; and within the narrative there are cautionary statements about the governance of overseas empires. Chapter Two looks into Lope's role as poet/entertainer at the marriage ceremonies of Philip and Margaret in 1599, for the festivities unveiled the Court as a new form of public space for the artist in terms of both profit and honor. Lope's 1599 Lasfiestas de Denia trades homage for patronage by extolling his patron and the ruling elite. Other later pieces concerning the wedding, however, such as the plays El Argel fingido and El rustico del cielo, present a mocking attitude towards the festivities; and El peregrino en su patria (1604) appears to be a veiled parody of the wedding ceremonies in which Lope displaces Lerma as the "author of the events" (77). The reason for Lope's change in ideological attitude may have been Lerma's moving the Court to Valladolid, thereby leaving Lope as an "exile" in Madrid. In 1609 Lope again attempted to ingratiate himself with the court by dedicating his Jerusalen conquistada to Philip III. Chapter Three explores the way Lope adapted the third Crusades to a contemporary Spain in which he, as...