Note 296 — Chapter XV

Lope must have been a writer for the public stage as early as 1586 or 1587, and a popular writer at Madrid soon after 1590; but we have no knowledge that any of his plays were printed, with his own consent, before the volume which appeared at Valladolid, in 1604. Yet, in the Preface to the “Peregrino en su Patria,” licensed in 1603, he gives us a list of three hundred and forty-one plays which he acknowledges and claims. Again, in 1618, when he says he had written eight hundred, (Comedias, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618, Prólogo), he had printed but one hundred and thirty-four full-length plays, and a few entremeses. Finally, of the eighteen hundred attributed to him in 1635, after his death, by Montalvan and others, (Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 49), only about three hundred and twenty or thirty can be found in the volumes of his collected plays; and Lord Holland, counting autos and all, which would swell the general claim of Montalvan to at least twenty-two hundred, makes out but five hundred and sixteen printed dramas of Lope. Life of Lope de Vega, London, 1817, 8vo, Vol. II. pp. 158-180.