Hello and welcome to this episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about

Fuence Overhuna by Lopa de Vega. Now I realize that this is not

a play that many people may have heard before, but it is a play from the Spanish Golden Age.

And I wanted to cover it really. Not only because as a play, it's a very good play, but also

to talk around the play as well about some of the

technical aspects of what this play is doing, the particular time and place that it came from,

and something about the life of Lopo de Vega as well, because he did lead a very, very interesting life

and was an absolutely immense, a very, very prolific

writer, writing well over apparently 800 plays. We have several hundred of them, not all of them

have survived down to our day. But yeah, the Spanish Golden Age. So just for his dates, Felix Lopa de Vega Icapio,

just known really as Lopo de Vega, was born in 1562 in Madrid, one year after it was proclaimed

the official capital of Spain, and he died in 1635.

So for much of Lope's life, he lived through a time of Spanish dominance in the world,

and actually this entire period from the 16th century to the 17th century, the output plays creative writing

from Spain alone was more vast than the rest of Europe combined. It was a genuine

flourishing of the arts of culture. And obviously, Lop de Vega himself was very, very close to all of this,

being in the heart of it, in the thick of it, in Madrid, though not necessarily all of his life,

as I say, had quite a turbulent life. He was actually exiled from Madrid at one point in his life

because he wrote a somewhat libelous play against

another member of the nobility and so he had to wait for relations to smooth over again for that.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable little events in his life was actually in 1588, Lopo de Vega himself was

aboard one of the battleships in the Spanish Armada. And if anyone knows the history of the Spanish

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