La dama boba

People

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Mythological
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Adam

According to the book of Genesis, one of the first pair of humans along with Eve. Ejected from the Garden of Eden for disobedience.

Mateo Alemán

Mateo Alemán (1547-1615) was a Spanish novelist best known for the picaresque work Guzmán de Alfarache.

Phoebus Apollo

The Greco-Roman God of poetry and the sun.

Don Juan de Arguijo

Juan de Arguijo (1567-1623) was a Spanish playwright, novelist and musician during the Spanish Golden Age. He was born in Sevilla to a wealthy family.

Aristotle

Aristole (384 BC-322 BC) was a Greek philosopher. The Golden Age had recently discovered his Poetics and found in it inspiration for rules for the composition of liberary works.

Luís de Camões

Luís de Camões (d. 1580) was Portugal's greatest epic poet. His poem Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads) has been compared to those of Shakespeare, Dante and Virgil.

Guillén de Castro

Don Guillén de Castro (1569-1631) was a playwright of the Spanish Golden Age. He is best known for Las mocedades del Cid.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Soldier, poet, greatest prose writer of the Spanish Golden Age, author of Don Quixote. He and Lope had conflicting views on the nature of the comedia.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero (Jan 3 106 BC-Dec 7 43 BC) was a Roman politician, philosopher, orator, laywer and constituionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family and he is considered as one of the greatest orators and prose stylists. He also had an immense influence on the Latin language.

Marcus Tullius Cicero the younger

Marcus Tullius was the son of Cicero and was a commander of Pompey's in the battle of Pharsalia.

Circe

In Greek mythology, Circe is the daugther of Helios, the god of the sun, and Perse, an Oceanid. She transforms Odysseus's men into pigs in the Odyssey and in the Golden Age was referenced as an archetypical practitioner of magic.

Cumaean sibyl

The Cumaean sibyl was a priestess who looked over an Apollonian oracle in a Greek colony located in Naples, Italy.

Dios

The Christian God

Don Quixote

Don Quixote is the main character of Miguel de Cervantes's famous novel, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. The character read books of chivalry until they caused him to go insane and believe that he really was a knight errant. He attacks windmills and believes peasant girls are princesses.

Duque de Sessa

The noble who owned Juan Latino

Eritrean sibyl

The Eriteran sibyl was the prophetess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Erythrae in Ionia.

Galatea

A lovely shepherdess, main character of Cervantes's pastoral novel La Galatea.

Garcilaso de la Vega

Garcilaso (1501-1536) was a Spanish solider and the most celebrated poet of the sixteenth century in Spain. He introduced aspects of the Italian Rennaisance to Spain.

Graces

The Graces of Greco-Roman mythology are minor goddesses of charm, beauty, and creativity. They are a frequent theme in painting.

Heliodorus of Emesa

Heliodous, active in the 3rd century C.E., is the author of Aethiopika/Ethiopian History, a Classical prototype for romance that was the subject of an international vogue in the 16th and 17th centuries. Lope imitated Heliodorus in El peregrino en su patria / The pilgrim of Castile.

Fernando de Herrera

Fernando de Herrera (1534-1597) was a 16th century Spanish poet.

Jesus

Jesus (Jesús) (4 BC-AD 30) is one of the central figures of the Christian religion.

Jupiter

Jupiter, the chief god of the Greco-Roman pantheon, is the god of sky and thunder and the king of all gods.

Juan Latino

Juan Latino (1518-1596) was a black Spanish professor at the Univeristy of Granada during the 16th century. He was a slave educated alongside his master's son.

Saint Michael

Archangel, leader of the army of God

muse

The nine muses in Greco-Roman myth are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory). They serve as patronesses of the arts. Their names are Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Euterpe (flutes and lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and pastoral poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), Urania (astronomy), and they inhabit the mythical Mt. Parnassus. The word muse can also designate an artist's inspiration for their pieces whether it be a painting, a sculpture or some other form of an art. Women writers are sometimes (condescendingly) referred to as the "tenth muse."

nymph

Nymphs in the Greco-Roman tradition are mythological nature spirits portrayed as beautiful maidens inhabiting rivers and woods.

Ochoa

A writer mentioned in Lope's catalog of illustrious figures of the Golden Age in Spain.

Orestes

In Greek mythology, Orestes was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. He is the center of Aeschylus's trilogy of tragedies the Oresteia, which ends with his taking revenge against his mother for killing his father.

Elena Osorio

Elena Osorio was Lope de Vega's love and poetic inspiration during his youth. Her pseudonym in Lope's poetry is Filis.

Santo de Pajares

The Santo de Pajares is a folklore figure, an image of a saint that did not burn when the barn it was housed in caught fire.

Luis Vélez de Pastraña

Luis Vélez de Pastraña (1579–1644) was a Spanish dramatist and novelist. He wrote over over 400 plays.

Francesco Petrarca

Francesco Petrarca (July 20, 1304-July 20, 1374) was a Italian Poet and scholar during the the Rennaisance period as well as one of the first Humanists.

Phoenix

In greek mythology a phoenix is a bird that, when it dies, is reborn from its own ashes. In the Spanish Golden Age the epithet fénix was frequently applied to exceptional men and women.

Platón

Platón or Plato (428 BC-348 BC) was a classical Greek philosopher and was the founder of the Academy of Athens.

Pylades

Pylades in Greek mythology is mostly known for his strong friendship with his cousin Orestes.

sibyl

The sibyls are priestesses who utter prophecies. Ancient Greek culture believed them to be oracles, able to channel the voice of a god.

Sirens

The Sirens are mytholoical monsters best known from Homer's Odyssey, half fish and half woman. They are said to lure sailors to their island with singing and kill them when they reach the shore.

Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) was a Italian poet of the 16th century best known for his poem Gerusalemme Liberata.

Lope de Vega

Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was a Spanish playwright and novelist, the author of La dama boba and the other works under consideration in this site.

Vergil

Roman poet from the first-century B.C., author of the Aeneid, greatly admired and imitated during the Spanish Golden Age.