Lope de Vega’s life, throughout most of its seventy-two years, was notoriously turbulent and riddled with contradictions. Baptized in Madrid on 6 December 1562, he was the son of an embroiderer from La Montaña, undoubtedly one of the many craftsmen who were flocking to Spain’s new capital. Lope’s much-mocked pretensions to noble lineage were certainly unfounded, but twentieth-century suggestions of converse antecedents remain unproven too. Having studied, after its foundation in 1572, at the local Jesuit college, between 1577 and 1581 he attended the University of Alcalá (and may have studied later at Salamanca). In 1583 he saw active service in an expedition to the Azores.

The next few years were marked by a passion that would haunt him forever after, for Elena Osorio (often Filis in his verse), the daughter of an actor–manager for whom he wrote some of his earliest plays. Eventually supplanted by a rich and noble rival, he spread savage poetic libels, for which, early in 1588, he was exiled, for eight years from Madrid and two from Castile. Later that year he abducted and married Isabel de Urbina (Belisa), and enlisted to join the Armada, though he may not have left the peninsula. His banishment took the pair to Valencia, to Toledo, and for some years after 1591 to the cultivated court of the fifth Duke of Alba, near Salamanca.