Lope de Vega The Knight of Olmedo

September, the cold drop watered the fields, alleviating the drought. I make the oft-repeated path from Medina to Olmedo reciting those verses from my childhood that at night they killed the knight, the gala of Medina, the flower of Olmedo... and the one who in Castilla has to defeat Arévalo, Medina and Olmedo on his part has arrest.

Lope de Vega the monster of the sugar mills. In twenty-four hours the muses went to the theater. Fertility prodigy. He wrote more than two thousand comedies, three hundred dramas and eight hundred sacramental autos. In the Knight of Olmedo he deals with the Fate fatum that afflicts mortals.

The tragic shadows. In the branches of a green olive tree the owl sang the funeral sequences. Love and death. That hovers over the Morañas where the best wheat in Spain grows. This region in the corner of Castilla bordering the provinces of Ávila. Valladolid and Segovia. Crimson banner, land of Goths, Jews, Moors and Christians, was considered the Spanish granary as Ukraine is.

Here the moldboard of the Roman plow sinks several meters deep without touching rock. Feral land, mother that breastfeeds the thirst of Spain. The action takes place during the days of the Medina del Campo fair.

A beautiful girl Doña Inés falls in love with a stranger Don Alonso who was engaged to a rich local farmer, Don Rodrigo. The other characters are Fabia, the pimp who has divinatory arts, and the jester Tello.

In a hidden corner of the drama hides Lucifer, the evil angel who weaves the lawsuit of this comedy of the chain. Leonor is the protagonist's lady-in-waiting. Don Fernando ayo. Don Pedro, Inés's father. Ana. The constable and the vigilante King who sends Don Rodrigo and his compadres to the gallows. Lope believes in the Judiciary. Doña Inés becomes a nun.

Love and fate are written in the stars. Inés is courted by Rodrigo, a villain. When she meets, however, Alonso at first sight. It is a fact in the history of Spain, marriageable girls prefer outsiders, according to the saying, the one who is going to marry far or far away or comes deceived or will deceive, a popular saying. But Doña Inés is convinced that she is a victim of love at first sight. Her spite of the formal suitor must cost the stranger his life.

"The moment I saw

to this foreign gallant

my soul told me this I want

and I told him to be like this."

The greeting Fabia who brought girls to the father of Doña Inés who died young, a diabolical reflection: “That as time passes, so does beauty.” In life you come to enjoy, not to suffer and to live for two days.

It is Luciferian advice, to have a good time with the man you want and disdain the formal boyfriend. Slippers. Fence in the garden. Loving conversations. Don Alonso's servant is scared, he fears something serious. Rodrigo the jilted lover spy. They don't saddle Olmedo because the matchmaker brings a paper inviting Don Alonso to the fence. Superstition. Fabia brings under her bag the tooth of a hanged man.

It is a chain drama, the action a jumble, difficult to understand these days. However, Lope's art is more dazzling than all those Turkish serial dramas that are on TV. Spells and incantations. Misunderstandings, love tickets. The jumble of passions.

The entanglements and goings-on and the deus ex machine so common in our theater of the golden age.

The one they call The Knight of Olmedo saw you at a fair making beautiful eyes out of your eyebrows like a bow and arrow...

The King in Valladolid has granted him great favors because he alone honored the festivities of the royal wedding; he speared six bulls like a Hector, thirty he gave to the ladies in rings and tournaments... you will live with him well spent with a discreet husband. Woe to the lady who has a foolish husband!... oh, mother! Drive me crazy but how can I be yours, if my father gives me Don Rodrigo in marriage.

In the denouement of the play, one night when the knight from Olmedo returns to his villa, some outlaws in the pay of Don Rodrigo kill Don Alonso Manrique.

The moon was in its last quarter. It was a blood moon.

Thus the dire omens that weighed on this love are fulfilled. The king orders the arrest of the killers. Lope knew feminine psychology well. Today they would accuse him of being sexist. After all, his works are hardly performed anymore.

Saturday, September 23, 2023