In the first sonnet of his Rimas (1602–09), Lope de Vega personifies and apostrophizes his dear and once pristine poem(s), now ravaged and barely recognizable after constant manuscript copying and/or oral transmission. Lope employs in this context “metaphors for texts and textual production” that distance the author from his creation and so, according to the persuasive analysis of Tyler Fisher, “call into question the assumption of the author as principal meaningmaker” (77). Fisher goes on to explain that, where his poetry is concerned, Lope “leaves open the possibility of further change and disfigurement for the texts, rather than imposed limits, closure, and concretized meanings” (77). If Lope can be characterized as a somewhat wistful pragmatist with regard to his lyric verse, when it came to his dramatic poetry there was, emphatically, little room for sentiment, attachment, or commitment to a set meaning. A play, for its creator, was a different matter altogether, and this was not just because of the innate instability or mutability of theatre as a genre. The prevailing conditions and norms of playwriting precluded attachment. As the most sought-after playwright of his generation, he was able to earn very well, but when Lope sold his plays to an autor de comedias—and over the course of his career he sold hundreds of plays to many different actor-managers—he lost legal control of the playtext, to say nothing of its subsequent mise-en-scène in the corral or at court or elsewhere. Lope belonged squarely to a world in which a dramatist was a writer who learned not to be precious about any perceived betrayal of his artistic vision; he knew it would be other men and women who would make his creations breathe, other imaginations that would adapt and translate his poetry for the stage.

Lope de Vega's productivity combined with the scanty performance tradition of Golden Age drama since the seventeenth century have meant that many of his plays still await revivals, even in their original language.