BETWEEN THE COURT AND FLANDERS: LOPE DE VEGA'S ROMAN PLAYS

The present article examines Lope de Vega's Roman plays in connection with courtly theater, which in other periods and places in Europe has been traditionally favorable to subject matter drawn from Antiquity. In order to achieve our goal, we ref lect about Golden Age courtly theater, a subject very much studied by critics, and we present a state of the art about plays set in Ancient Rome. Next, we examine the corpus of Lope's Roman plays and propose some criteria to divide it, which allows us to reflect about how courtly theater influenced Lope's work. This analysis leads us to our central point of analysis: to study which are the main traits of Lope's Roman plays, to point out how they relate to each other, and to observe to which other plays by Lope they can be connected. In particular, this last question allows us to propose an unexpected constellation which unites Roman Plays and Plays on Flanders, a connection which is very telling about the nature of Lope's aesthetic proposal for the first years of Philip III's reign.