Noblemen against craftsmen. Ideological and social background of the controversy between Cervantes and Lope

Abstract

The enmity between Lope de Vega and Cervantes, and the disputes that both maintained during the early seventeenth century, besides being the expression of a literary quarrel, have their origin in the different position that each of them occupied in the Spanish society of 1600, in which family origins and insertion of an author within a class order was a fact that influenced decisively in his career, and in the degree of protection he received. Lope, a gentleman and an old Christian, lived comfortably installed in that society, and had numerous friends and powerful patrons, while Cervantes, a man of dark lineage, who had to practise trades considered unworthy, was a marginal person, and was never accepted fully in the literary salons or in the aristocratic houses.