Mujeres y criados, una comedia recuperada de Lope de Vega

Abstract

Lope de Vega's corpus of plays is one of the most studied of Spanish Baroque theater, although it still presents numerous problems that need to be solved. In this article I study the extant manuscript of a play entitled Mujeres y criados in relation to a play by Lope of the same title, which several catalogues consider lost. In the first part of my paper I prove Lope's authorship of the play based on internal elements of the text and the manuscript's relation to several seventeenth-century documents. In the second part of this article I study the most relevant characteristics of this play. I focus my attention on the traits of the urban comedy it presents, the subversion of certain themes -such as social hierarchies or honor-that takes place and the predominant role Lope gave women in the play's plot.