Lope de Vega's reputation today as a dramatist rests on a meagre proportion of his dramatic output. He suffers, as his successor Calderón de la Barca does, from the fact that only a small percentage of the plays he created are available in modern, scholarly editions and even fewer are regularly performed in theatres. One of the aims of this Companion is to reveal some of what lies beyond the theatrical canon, as the chapters that follow will demonstrate, but it would be perverse to ignore the recognised major works such as El perro del hortelano, La dama boba, El caballero de Olmedo, Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña, Fuenteovejuna, and El castigo sin venganza and the reasons they are considered great. The first two in this list, both comic in nature, are examined in chapter 11, where they are placed in the context of Lope's other comedies; the last of them, a Spanish-style tragedy, has, as it deserves, a chapter of its own (chapter 15).

The remaining three plays are all serious in nature: El caballero de Olmedo (c. 1620), which will be dealt with last, is a fascinating mix of comic recourses with a tragic trajectory; the other two are so-called ‘peasant honour’ plays and are quite closely related. The works in question, Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (c. 1605–8) and Fuenteovejuna (c. 1612–14), are perhaps the most widely studied, performed and translated of Lope's entire oeuvre today. The extent to which this popularity distorts their place in his output reflects the story of the changing appropriations of these works in performance since their original appearance. Both dramas have come to occupy an important place in literary history not least as a result of their ideological complexity, a function of their commercialism and their creator's mastery of the resources of dramatic entertainment, as well as their availability to act as ciphers in a number of cultural and political contexts from Lorca's Spain to Pinochet's Chile. The plots of both Fuenteovejuna and Peribáñez surround the irruption into idyllic rural communities of sexually rapacious and tyrannous authority figures.