ABOUT THE PLAY

Lope de Vega’s play The Travels of Teodor the Wise (La doncella Teodor) recounts the many adventures of a brilliant young Spanish woman named Teodor. Written by Hispanic theater’s most renowned and prolific playwright between 1610 and 1615, Teodor retells a story that most likely originated in medieval Baghdad. In Lope’s adaptation, Teodor is an educated scholar from Toledo who uses her impressive intellect to escape every kind of danger, from kidnappings to shipwrecks, all around the Mediterranean, in classic romance fashion. While Teodor is dazzling the world with her brilliance, her fellow student Félix gets mixed up in a series of conflicts that take him from North African courts to Constantinople and finally Persia. Will Teodor’s wit and learning actually give her any say over her own fate? Will she end up with a man who appreciates her talents? One of the most widely read stories of the medieval and early modern world, in Lope’s rendering Teodor continues to thrill for how it celebrates women’s intellectual accomplishments, while examining men’s suspicion of them. 

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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635) is a towering figure of the Spanish Golden Age, a theatrical innovator and prolific author in multiple genres. He is known as a master of the comedia—witty three-act plays popular across the globe-spanning Spanish empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He composed hundreds of plays, in addition to poetry and prose, earning him the name Fénix de los ingenios (“Phoenix of Wits”), as the expression es de Lope (“it’s by Lope”) became a shorthand for praising quality.

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In his own time, Lope’s fame grew from his prodigious literary talent as well as his colorful biography. Born in Madrid to parents who had migrated to the capital from Spain’s northern regions, he saw in his youth the emergence of the urban outdoor corral theaters where he would go on to make his name. Though he took religious orders in 1614, he continued romantic affairs throughout his life, which often put him on the wrong side of the law and left an unknown number of illegitimate children. Sor Marcela de San Félix, Lope’s daughter with the actress Micaela de Luján, went on to become a poet and playwright herself, one of many successful female authors of the period, including her fellow literary nun—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

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Despite the varied scandals of his life, Lope was a truly successful commercial playwright, who earned income as well as fame through his literary efforts. Today he is best remembered for his work in the comedia form he came to define. After Calderón’s Life is a Dream, Lope’s Fuenteovejuna is perhaps the best-known comedia in the English-speaking world, and others such as Peribañez and The Dog in the Manger exemplify the well-constructed Lopean plot.

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Miguel de Cervantes, his contemporary and rival, may not have meant it entirely as a compliment when he called Lope a “monster of nature” (monstruo de la naturaleza). Yet Lope’s prodigious output was fundamental to developing the theater of his age, and to our understanding of it today. The monster of nature left us many gifts.

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*The UCLA Working Translation Group are: Raquel Cruz , Diana Echeverria Palencia, Barbara Fuchs, Richard Huddleson, Saraí Jaramillo, Rachel Kaufman, Luis Miguel Macías, Laura Muñoz, Victoria Rasbridge, Cristián Reyes, Rhonda Sharrah, Rebecca Ogden Smith and Aina Soley i Mateu 

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