Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, first published in the fifth edition of his Rimas of 1609, was most likely given as a speech to a literary society called the Madrid Academy some months before it emerged in print. The 389-line text, almost entirely in Spanish and taking the form of hendecasyllabic versos sueltos [blank verse], provides a reliable, if often tongue-in-cheek, condensation of his ideas about drama and playwriting at a period when his theatre had matured and he was at the height of his popularity. The Arte nuevo is clearly the first essential port of call for anyone interested in Lope's dramatic theory and practice. Indeed, because it was Lope, as his contemporaries and followers were well aware, who was the main driving force behind what came to be known as the comedia nueva [new theatre], its study is necessary to understand his whole era's dramatic output. Many would go further, considering the work to constitute ‘el primer manifiesto del teatro moderno’ [the first manifesto of modern theatre], with the implication that Lope's speech, however poorly known outside Spain, is an important milestone in early modern European theatre.

Elements of the comedia nueva can be discerned, in retrospect, in the latesixteenth- century plays of writers such as the Sevillian, Juan de la Cueva, as well as Francisco Tárrega, Gaspar de Aguilar, Cristóbal de Virués and Andrés Rey de Artieda, all four working in a Valencia in cultural ferment at a time when Lope was himself unformed as a dramatist. However, it was the madrileño who knitted them together most effectively for the new, paying audiences of the Spanish playhouses. It was Lope, unsurprisingly, as the undisputed popular champion of these corrales, a ‘felicísimo ingenio destos reinos’ [brilliant Spanish genius], who was invited to explain his principles, and to account for the new approach to theatre in the formal setting of an Academy gathering.

The Arte nuevo must be read and understood, at least in part, then, as a speech, a performance, a rhetorical act, directed to a potentially hostile academic audience — or at least one with conservative elements.