The hagiographical play Santa Teresa de Jesús offers us the opportunity to observe how Lope and others helped shaped the image of a woman who, in the early seventeenth century, was fast becoming a kind of super-star. Lope wrote three plays based on St Teresa, none of which has survived as a pristine autograph. Nevertheless, even the adulterated versions help to show how the visual language of sanctity associated with St Teresa that was emerging in the early seventeenth century found expression on the Lopean stage.

The three plays on Saint Teresa attributed to Lope are La Madre Teresa de Jesús [Mother Teresa of Jesus], now lost, La bienaventurada Madre Santa Teresa de Jesús and Vida y muerte de Santa Teresa de Jesús. A play entitled Comedia famosa de la bienaventurada Madre Santa Teresa de Jesús, monja descalza de Nuestra Señora del Carmen appears in volume V of the 1890 RAE Obras de Lope de Vega, although Lope's authorship has been challenged. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo believed the play that appears in the RAE collection to be by Lope because of its style and possibly because it was mentioned in the 1618 El peregrino en su patria, although he admitted it could be a refundición by Vélez de Guevara of one the Phoenix's earlier works (p. L). Morley and Bruerton cast doubt on Lope’s authorship of Vida y muerte based on its versification. The Italian Hispanist Elisa Aragone Terni concluded that all of the existing manuscripts of Lope's St Teresa plays had been so badly dismembered and recomposed over the years that they defied individualization (pp. 9–12).

Upon examining MS 16579 of the Biblioteca Nacional, entitled La Madre Teresa de Jesús, fundadora del Carmen, Marco Presotto notes: ‘Si trata de una raccolta non ordinate dei vari frammenti delle due commedie lopiane dello stesso tema’ [In question is a disordered collection of assorted fragments of two comedias by Lope on the same theme]. These include segments of the first and third acts of La bienaventurada Madre Santa Teresa de Jesús and an autograph fragment of the second act of Vida y muerte. In 1970 Terni published as Vida y muerte de Santa Teresa a reconstruction of extant manuscripts from the Biblioteca Nacional and other libraries, not all of which are in Lope's hand.