ABSTRACT
Experimental and intuitive, Lope’s poetic art is not a theoretician’s poetics. Nor is it, by any means, Aristotelian: it constantly contradicts Aristotelian principles by blending the tragic and the comic or by multiplying the levels of action. In one respect, though, it does converge with Aristotle’s theoretical stance in the Poetics, in that it supports a dramatic enterprise that is conceived as a veritable machine to explore and understand passions. Taking as a starting point the hypothesis that the vast territory of tragedy and its margins is, of all Lope’s theatrical production, the one where this practical and theoretical work on passions is the most visible, this chapter focuses on those passions that are explored in the serious side of his dramaturgic poetics: serious and sad passions.
