El «artificio griego» en Lope de Vega: narrativa y teatro

When dealing with the abrupt beginnings of Golden Age Spanish drama, current scholarship routinely refers to the in medias res technique. The poetics of this structural device is developed by the application of the epic tradition to Heliodorus’s narrative model, which includes the «Greek artifice» —as labelled by Lope de Vega in La dama boba —. Considering the various dramatic subgenres explored by Lope, a number of his works are revisited in this article in order to ascertain whether such a break of the chronological order is present throughout the playwright’s career. Since Lope adapted the Greek Narrative tradition for his El peregrino en su patria , the background provided by the so-called byzantine novel is also studied.