Picture a courtyard between houses in Madrid, mid-afternoon, no roof and no lamps because the sun is doing the lighting. Benches at the front, standing room in the middle for the men who shouted, a railed gallery for the women, and neighbours leaning out of their own windows above the stage. That was a corral de comedias, and its appetite was enormous: a company needed new plays constantly, and the audience was not shy about telling you when one wasn't working. Lope de Vega fed that appetite for decades. He is said to have written a play in a matter of days when the company needed one, and hundreds of his plays survive, which is more than most writers manage to begin.
He died in Madrid on this day in 1635, at seventy-three. The theatres and the public turned out for the funeral, and the procession took its time getting through the city. Cervantes had called him the Phoenix of Wits and the Monster of Nature, which is the kind of thing colleagues say about someone whose output frightens them a little.
The portrait below shows him late, in a black clerical robe with a white cross at the shoulder; he took holy orders in his later years. It is a sober picture of a man who spent his working life writing for a yard full of people standing in the sun, and who understood, as few have, exactly how long they would stay quiet.
Constance, he claimed something over a thousand plays and roughly 430 survive, which is still an alarming shelf. He also wrote a short treatise on the new art of writing comedies, essentially explaining, with great courtesy, why he was ignoring the classical rules: the yard had paid, and the yard wanted a story.
Constance, he was ordained a priest in 1614, in his fifties, and went right on writing for the corrales afterwards — sacramental plays and comedies from the same desk. His contemporaries seem to have found nothing strange in it; the two vocations both ran on the calendar of a city that wanted something new each week.