Juan de la Cueva de Garoza was a Spanishdramatist and poet. He was born in Seville to an aristocratic family; his younger brother Claudio, with whom he spent some time in Guadalajara, Mexico, went on to become an archdeacon and inquisitor. He was acquainted with a number of major contemporary intellectual figures, including Fernando de Herrera and Juan de Mal Lara, and took part in the Casa de Pilatos literary academy in Seville. After his return to Spain in 1577, he began writing for the stage and produced a total of ten comedies and four tragedies. He appears never to have married, though some of his poetical works are dedicated to a Felipa de la Paz. After apparently spending some time in Cuenca after 1610, he died in Granada in 1612.
Works
His first play, Primera parte de las Comedias y Tragedias, was published in 1579. This was an unusual step in itself; few of his contemporaries bothered publishing their works, which are consequently only partially known. Although he wrote in part on the classical themes that were typical of Spanish theatre at the time, he innovated in a number of regards. He consciously disregarded the conventional classical unities, reduced the traditional number of acts from five to four and introduced new metrical forms. His use of such polimetric verse forms was intended to indicate the mood and tone of scene. He also sought to maximise the theatrical effect of his works by playing up sensational themes of violent death and supernatural events. Cueva's plays draw on a mixture of classical, historical and fictional themes, often adapting stories from ballads and medieval chronicles. This step is considered to be a significant advance in Spanish theatre and proved highly influential on later playwrights such as Lope de Vega. For modern audiences, however, his plays are seen as off-putting due to their sensationalistic nature and the perverse, violent and grotesque characters that inhabit them. Despite his innovations, Cueva's works lack much literary merit as they were often hastily composed. His shortcomings were particularly visible in his poetic works. Some of his earliest published poetry was composed during his stay in Mexico and was published in an anthology of poets then resident in New Spain. Later works of poetry included the Obras, a collection of erotic lyrics in the style of Petrarch, Caro Febeo de romances historiales, which Bartolomé José Gallardo called "the worst that I have read in Castilian", and the epic poemConquista de la Bética, which Philip Ward describes as "tedious". Cueva also produced a treatise in verse titled Ejemplar poético, o Arte poética española, in which he discusses poetry and historical drama. His works were rediscovered after 1917, when Francisco A. de Icaza published all fourteen of his plays, based on the 1588 second edition of Cueva's works. The last surviving copy of the 1583 first edition was found shortly afterwards. Further works were republished in 1924.
