THE RISE OF THE PHOENIX. A NEW COMEDY BY LOPE DE VEGA

This book examines and edits a comedy by Lope, never considered, which we nevertheless believe undoubtedly belongs to him: "Yo he hizo lo que he pudo, Fortuna lo que ha quiere" (I have done what I could, Fortune has done what she wanted). This is not the discovery of a new manuscript in some hidden library or archive, but rather a work printed in an early 17th-century edition under the name of another author, Miguel Bermúdez, which we are in a position to assert belongs to the Phoenix of Wits, according to the evidence we will present later. The comedy is not just another in Lope's dramatic work; on the contrary, it is one of the works that scholars considered lost and which sparked a war with a young culterano poet, Don José de Pellicer y Tobar, who, in the very year we give as the composition of this work, 1629, robbed the Madrid author of the position of royal chronicler he had sought. Lope did not take the blow well and mocked the poet in our work, which led to an angry reply from the young Pellicer in a book entitled precisely "The Phoenix" (1630).