Note 631 — Chapter XXIII

This character of Lope de Figueroa may serve as a specimen of the way in which Calderon gave life and interest to many of his dramas. Lope is an historical personage, and figures largely in the second volume of Hita’s “Guerras,” as well as elsewhere. He was the commander under whom Cervantes served in Italy, and probably in Portugal, when he was in the Tercio de Flándes,—the Flanders regiment,—one of the best bodies of troops in the armies of Philip II. Lope de Figueroa appears again, and still more prominently, in another good play of Calderon, “El Alcalde de Zalamea,” the last in the common collection. Its hero is a peasant, finely sketched, partly from Lope de Vega’s Mendo, in the “Cuerdo en su Casa”; and it is said at the end that it is a true story, whose scene is laid in 1581, at the very time Philip II. was advancing toward Lisbon, and when Cervantes was probably with this regiment at Zalamea.