Marcella Trambaioli’s research while affiliated with University of Piemonte Orientale Amedeo Avogadro and other places

The series of types and situations present in Quevedo's prose, poetry and comic theater shows that the motif of poverty is one of the most fertile in relation with the author's capacity to create both ingenious and witty neologisms and caricatures. At the same time, it offers many features that harmonize with the cultural misogyny of the writer and his time. According to the many examples collected, the beggar's figure can be assimilated to that of the pedigüeña, while the beggar is looking for sexual charity. In both cases, the relationship between men and women offers to Quevedo's satirical pen the opportunity of adapting the poor's type to a materialistic and degenerated vision of love. Moreover, even some philological and moral comments encourage original metaphors of the type or features of the poor.

At his time Lope de Vega, in spite of his private scandals, his low social status and the lack of patronage, is a legendary man, is the «Nature Monster», is the prolific poetic genius par excellence , both in poetry and drama; is the absolute protagonist of all literary wars; is admired and criticized at the same time; everything good is «Lope’s». He personally creates his own image of well-educated poet and tries to autopromote himself with all kind of strategies, even if most of them produce the opposite effect. When he dies, Fama Postuma , collected and edited by Perez de Montalban, represents the top of his contemporary celebration. Nevertheless, his fame starts declining quite soon, and posterity finds it hard to recognize him a relative popularity even in Spain for many and complex historical and cultural reasons that have nothing to do with his talent, huge production and marvellous lyricism.

Reseña de Lope de Vega Carpio, Tirso de Molina, Miguel de Cervantes, Il teatro dei Secoli d’oro, coord. M.G. Profeti, Bompiani (Classici della Letteratura europea), Milán, 2014, vol. I, 2436 pp. ISBN: 9788845277252.

Lope and Quevedo know each other and go to the same artistic circles of Madrid; as far as concerning satire, critics tend to consider the first one as a disciple of the second one, even if Lope is quite older than don Francisco. Nevertheless, a relevant series of grotesque portraits of ugly women, that we can find both in Lope's poetry and theater from the beginnings of his artistic career, could have influenced Quevedo's writing together with innumerable other sources. Therefore, Lope too could be surprisingly considered, to some extent, a model for Quevedo's depiction of the ugly and old woman, which is a leitmotif of his unbeatable satirical writing.

All critics agree on considering that María de Zayas writes inspired by the anger that she feels for the women condition. Both in her prose and in the only play we know, La traición en la amistad, Zayas censures with irony and wit the don-Juan type who deceives women leaving them without honour. She does it elaborating an intertextual relationship with El burlador de Sevilla. Specifically, in the play she uses three characters: Liseo, who deceives three women, Fenisa, who is a don-Juan female even more exaggerated than Liseo, and don Juan, the less donjuanesco of all. As a matter of fact, Zayas creates an anti-don Juan similar to the one that Ventura de la Vega will realize in the XIX century with his play El hombre de mundo, a parody of Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio; nevertheless it has a clear ethical purpose: to warn women of his age in order to avoid men's abuses.

Review of Irene Romera Pintor y Josep Lluís Sirera, eds., La mujer: de los bastidores al proscenio en el teatro del siglo XVI, Publicacions de la Universitat de València, Valencia, 2011, 338 pp. ISBN: 978-84-370-8232-5.

The dramatic mask of the false gardener, one of the many types of noble disguised as a peasant, is specially frequent in Lope de Vega’s urban comedy; if in the main plot the love gardener courts his lover taking profit of the disguise, in the comic plot the dramatic type is parodied thanks to his links with real peasants; about 1615, Lope, already masked as Belardo in the Romancero, makes use of this dramatic type as a spokesman of his personal courtly ambitions.