Lost or misattributed works of some of the best writers in Spain’s golden age could be discovered thanks to pioneering artificial intelligence technology that has been used to identify a previously unknown work by the prolific playwright, poet, sailor and priest Lope de Vega.
This week, Spain’s National Library announced that researchers searching its massive archive had found and verified a play Lope is believed to have written a few years before his death in 1635.
Like many plays of the Spanish Golden Age, the cultural boom of the 16th and 17th centuries that accompanied Spain’s imperial growth and gave rise to masterpieces by Lope, Cervantes, Calderón and Velázquez, among many others. The French Laura (The French Laura) is a story of love, jealousy and social hierarchy in which suspicion demands that an innocent woman be sacrificed on the altar of her husband’s honor. But, unlike many similar plays of the time, Laura survives, and the third act ends happily.
Equally unusual was the manner in which the work was discovered. In 2017, Germán Vega, an expert in Golden Age literature at the University of Valladolid, and Álvaro Cuéllar, now in the Department of Romance Philology at the University of Vienna, embarked on Madea project using AI analytics to determine the authorship of Golden Age plays, many of which are anonymous or believed to be misattributed.
As part of the project, 1,300 plays were transcribed digitally, most of them from the National Library of Spain, using a platform, I would transcribetrained to identify and understand 3m words.
After the transcription was complete, another program, Stylo, compared its language and style with the 2,800 digitized works of 350 authors in Etso’s database.
Preserved by the library as an 18th century manuscript copied from earlier texts, The French Laura it had long been listed as an anonymous work, but Etso’s computer quickly came to its own conclusions.
“After having transcribed the 1,300 texts, the computer noticed that one of them was similar to some 100 works, almost all of them by Lope,” says Vega.
“That really caught our attention, we didn’t think we would find a Lope… [But] Then we find many expressions in The French Laura that fit with those of other works by Lope. There were things in The French Laura that people in other works by Lope had said or would say later”.
A more traditional analysis of the work, focusing on everything from plot lines and character names to meter, elisions, and pronunciation of diphthongs, corroborated the computer theory.
Its style fits with that of Lope’s later stage, while its flattering treatment of France has led scholars to believe that it was written at a particular time in the Thirty Years’ War – probably between 1628 and 1630 – when Spain and France shelved their mutual mistrust in the face of a common enemy in England.
“It had never aroused much interest in the National Library,” says Vega. “If it hadn’t been for this new technology, we wouldn’t have known about it unless someone had come across it and thought ‘this reminds me of Lope.’
“Besides the title – The French Laura – Isn’t that attractive? And although I have carefully studied many bibliographies, I have never found any reference to this work except in the catalog of the National Library.”
This was not the first time Etso had proven himself. Nearly four years ago, Vega used the database and Stylo to conclude that The Nun Lieutenant, a 17th-century play based on the astonishing true story of Catalina de Erauso, who escaped from a convent to become a transvestite soldier in the Americas, was written by a Mexican playwright named Juan Ruiz de Alarcón.
Vega believes that AI will uncover more lost treasures as it continues to revolutionize research in its field. When he was preparing his doctoral thesis back in the mid-1980s, “any attempt to try to justify an attribution was an enormous amount of work that involved reading a thousand texts, taking notes and visiting several libraries and ordering ancient manuscripts.” But today, he says, there are programs that can tell you that a play is written in a style closer to that of a particular playwright than hundreds of his peers.
“That’s incredible. Since there’s such an attribution problem with Golden Age theater, so many anonymous pieces or misattributed pieces, I think this new technology means we’ll see more of this. There are still things that need to be cleared up.”
Although Vega admits that The French Laura It is not the pinnacle of Lope’s achievements – the so-called Fénix de los ingenios is believed to have written more than 1,000 works – the academic would still be delighted to see it performed on stage one day under the name of its true author.
“It’s very entertaining and lively and I think it could work very well in the hands of the right theater company,” he says. “It’s not a bad play, but what happens is that Lope has four or five great plays, and this one just doesn’t compare.”