I

The speaking subject of Lope de Vega's lyric poetry, the yo lírico (poetic ‘I’), is uniquely plural. Conceived on the borders of intimacy and imitation, the poetic voice of Lope's early Rimas humanas (1602) has a mercurial fluidity which, while responding in part to the ontological uncertainty that is a general characteristic of the baroque aesthetic,exposes a specific crisis of self-representation that pervades Lope's lyric trajectory. Within an artistic environment that interrogates poetic creation as both a synchronic and diachronic process, and where lived experience (erlebnis) and art (poesis) are inextricably connected, the subject emerges as a dynamic work in progress. And the subject voice is essentially dialectical, fashioned in tense recognition of authorities that exist outside the self, whether these are literary (predecessors, rivals, even implied readers), generic (the conventional resisting beloved of Petrarchan verse), or indeed socio-political (reflected in themes of disillusionment [desengaño] that are historically contingent, or in ‘occasional poems’ that are tied explicitly to an extraliterary context). Moreover, the emphasis placed on the threat of self-erasure (conveyed as the dark side of artistic creation), and on the ambiguous status of identity forged in language that is on loan to the speaker, suggests that there is more at stake when reading Lope's poetry than the issue of the ‘imitative confession’; an even more ‘troubling oxymoron’ to negotiate. The anxieties underlying the construction of a plural subject carry implications for lyric self-fashioning in the Baroque that are not only aesthetic, but epistemic. The selves that are assembled throughout Lope’s verse (whether wearing pastoral, Moorish, Petrarchan, sacred, or even parodic masks) are self-consciously indeterminate, and are received at a multiply determined site of signification; that is, the unsettling interface of private and public.

The yo lírico moves along contradictory, interdependent axes, where private self meets public image, where intimate desire negotiates aesthetic or sociocultural conventions and where creative control is compromised by an awareness of collective consumption. Occasionally these issues coalesce and the speaker’s attempts to shape the subject in the text result in the objectification of the subject by the text. This is exemplified in the Petrarchan-inspired poetics of the early Rimas where the subject of the poem confronts the problematic configuration of an identity that has no stable core, that is, in fact, the reflection of alterity.