On this day in 1562, the greatest playwright of all time, Lope de Vega, was born. Of course, most people wouldn’t think that because Lope didn’t write in English and he was not used as the cultural sword of the expansion of a major empire the way that Shakespeare was. But Lope did not only write great plays, he wrote a lot of plays. As Shakespeare scholar Gary Taylor wrote, “We assume that Shakespeare’s thirty-odd plays contain more of humanity than the five hundred plays of Lope de Vega we have not read.” That’s right: 500 plays. In fact, it might be more than that.
The Shakespeare apologists, of course, will claim that this is why Shakespeare is so great. He took his time. He didn’t write so many plays. But this is always the way it is with Shakespeare. However he did something is the best. For example, scholars have claimed that Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is better than Plautus’ Menaechmi. Why? Because Shakespeare has two sets of identical twins. Of course, if the situation were reversed, these scholars would argue the opposite: that two sets of twins is needlessly silly. So just the same, if a playwright wrote fewer plays than Shakespeare or more plays, it just goes to show that Shakespeare is the greatest playwright ever. Because everything shows that.
Lope de Vega is the literary equivalent to Mozart. Although born into a working class family (his father was an embroiderer), Lope was writing plays by the time he was 12-years-old. Many people helped him out during his teen years, because his genius was so clear to everyone. But for most of his 20s and early 30s, he was focused on chasing after women. This is an avocation that got him into some trouble: jail, exile, and eventually an assignment with the Spanish Armada, which he was quite lucky to survive.
And then he started to write in earnest. By his count, he had written over 200 plays by the age of 40. By the age of 60, he had written a thousand. There is no doubt that Lope was something of a hack. People wanted a play about X and Lope would spit one back at them in a couple of days. But they weren’t fluff. The average Shakespeare play is about 20,000 words. His comedies are shorter: about 17,000 words. The only play of Lope’s I’ve been able to read, Fuenteovejuna, is roughly 12,000 words. It runs roughly two hours. So it’s shorter, but not terribly so.
In addition to this, Lope wasn’t slavishly committed to holding up the ruling class as the savior of the world. Let me just present three synopses taken from Melveena McKendrick’s excellent Theatre in Spain 1490-1700:
[S]et in the fifteenth century, [it] portrays the idyllic marriage and life together of the prosperous and ambitious young peasant Peribáñez and his lovely bride Casilda, and the attempts made by their overlord to seduce her. When Casilda remains impervious to his blandishments, the Commander makes Peribáñez a captain and sends him off to fight the king’s war. He enters his house at night intending to take Casilda by force if necessary, but aware by now of his intentions Peribáñez returns in time to prevent the rape of Casilda and the destruction of their lives by killing his lord. His action is subsequently pardoned though not condoned by the King, he is given a full captaincy and sent off to fight in the Granada campaign…
Fuenteovejuna
Like Peribáñez, Fuenteovejuna also deals with the relationship between honour and noble birth by presenting sexual aggression in the context of class relationships. Here, however, the conflict is not the cat and mouse game played by the Commander in Peribáñez, but open confrontation from the start between a brutally predatory overlord and the entire village of Fuenteovejuna which he tyrannizes in the name of his seigneurial rights; the tension is created not so much by how he will be stopped but by whom. The village’s sense of impotence and fear is encapsulated in its name, Fountain of the sheep: the men are emasculated, almost dehumanized, by their overlord’s grotesque abuse of power and privilege and it is a woman, Laurencia, who eventually shames them into action in the play’s major speech. In the name of their communal self-respect the men and women of Fuenteovejuna kill the Commander and, when tortured for the truth by the King’s men, answer only “Fuenteovejuna did it”…
El Mejor Alcalde, el Rey (No Greater Judge Than the King Himself)
The Galician peasant hero, Sancho, does not take the law into his own hands but invokes the law’s majesty by appealing to the King himself for aid. The noble, for his part, don Tello, not only transgresses against the principles of duty and responsibility on which the social contract is founded but defies the King himself, refusing to accept his monarch as ultimate arbiter of law and justice on earth. The play is set in the twelfth century, when seigneurial rights were only just beginning to yield before monarchical power and this gives credibility to don Tello’s reckless anarchy. The King in the guise of a judge travels to the village and hears for himself don Tello’s defiance. Revealing his identity he marries don Tello to Sancho’s bridge-to-be, whom he has raped, and then executes him so that Elvira, now a rich widow, can marry the man who loves her. Justice is done not by meeting force with force but by recourse to the processes of law. The play, therefore, marks in a sense a more mature and a more serene state in Lope’s exploration of the theme of power and its relationship to justice.
Lope de Vega is a writer that everyone should know a whole lot more about. I think we have all seen enough Shakespeare for the rest of our lives. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of plays of Lope’s that have never even been translated into English. It is a shame.
Happy birthday Lope de Vega!
Over the weekend, 
Now that Chuck Hagel is on his way out as Defense Secretary, maybe we can revisit the whole question of why our New Democratic heroes are so fond of appointing Republicans to this post. It’s a really bad idea from a political standpoint. It implies that Republicans are better when it comes to the art of war. This is totally refuted by looking at how Republicans actually do manage our wars. But the people can be forgiven if they think, “Well even Democratic presidents think Republicans are best for the job; Republicans must really be better than Democrats!”
As I wrote at the time of Hagel’s nomination, “Obama cares more about his legacy than he does the legacy of his party.” It’s always the same with the New Democrats. Their constituencies are not, you know, the people who voted for them. Those silly people probably think that electing a Democrat means they would get a Democratic cabinet and liberal governance. But instead, Obama and company care about the kind of Very Serious People that brought us the DLC of the 1990s and “third way” today. Obama explicitly wanted a “team of rivals” like Lincoln had. (Apparently, Obama had read 
The thing that impresses me about Chris Christie is how he manages to have the reputation of an brave truth-teller while being as craven a politician as there is. I still remember his big Bridgegate press conference where he was gentle as a lamb. What’s really going on with him is just the manipulation of power. He knows better than other politicians what power he has and just what he can get away with. As such, it speaks poorly of people and people in New Jersey specifically that they buy his act. When I call him a bully, I don’t say it lightly. I call him that because he attacks the powerless. He’s never stood up to a powerful person or institution in his life.
On this day in 1858, the great Ukrainian painter 
The most repetitive story in America never gets boring. You know the one. The police pick up some guy and decide he committed a murder. The guy is always poor and almost always dark skinned. So the police get someone to lie or do so themselves. And then decades later, he is exonerated. It’s so much nicer than the much more common story that is the same except for the end, “And the state put him to death despite many problems with the case.” Now we have the story of 
I heard from my father that the Fox News ranters have been talking about our double plus good border fence. You know the one: the double fence mandated by the 
In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould published an essay, “Non-Overlapping Magisteria.” In it, he posited the idea that there was no conflict between religion and science because they dealt with different things. For example, religion was concerned with questions of morals and existence — issues on which science had no opinion. One could question this on the moral front, where science actually has a lot to say about many of our morals. But the obvious counterargument is that religion isn’t really concerned with morality as we find it but rather morality as we ought to find it. On the issue of existence, science really does have nothing of value to add, although sadly most atheists can’t seem to understand that.
What Mehta is getting at is that people who accept the “scientific method” only believe things that have been proved. This is patently false. What it means in practice is that atheists believe in the current state of science. Hooray for that! But most issues are not this clear. When it comes to the murky waters of economics or child rearing, do atheists really use the “scientific method” or do they just go with their gut? We all know the answer to that regardless of what some iconoclastic atheist might say.
Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, ran for the presidency in 1984 on a platform that The New York Times called “bluntly conservative,” a “turn to [the] right,” because it promised spending cuts and higher taxes in order to deal with the federal deficit. Yet, after Mondale lost — in a landslide even worse than Carter’s — the verdict among pundits and Democratic strategists was well-nigh unanimous: The party had to cut its ties to what were then called “special interests” (meaning labor and African-Americans) and find its way to the center.
The great screenwriter 
I’ve noticed that YouTube is overflowing with quite good copies of the late 1970s television show, Fernwood 2 Night. When I was a kid, I thought it was a big deal. But I was wrong. It only played for 65 episodes during the summer of 1977. Then they did another 65 episodes in the fall of 1978 in a “national” format as America 2-Night. But I’m often impressed with just how good my taste was as a young boy. I don’t recall fully understanding the show, but I certainly understood that it was something hip and generally silly enough to enjoy.