Lope de Vega

Felix Lope de Vega y Carpio, who lived from 1562 to 1635, was a Spanish playwright and poet of the Baroque period, regarded as second only to Miguel de Cervantes in the canon of Spanish letters; Cervantes himself called him the Phoenix of Wits. Lope de Vega established the three-act comedia as the dominant form of Spanish theatre, deliberately rejecting the neoclassical unities of place, time and action to make drama accessible to ordinary audiences, and his prolific output totaled roughly five hundred stage plays, three thousand sonnets, three novels, four novellas and nine epic poems, with his dramatic works numbering around fifteen hundred comedias by 1632. Among his most celebrated plays are Fuenteovejuna (1619), The Dog in the Manger (1618) and Punishment Without Revenge (1631), and his poetic collections include Rimas sacras (1614) and Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tome de Burguillos (1634), considered his poetic masterpiece.