Researchers from the universities of Valladolid and Vienna have discovered a new comedy by Lope de Vega entitled The French Laura, written five or six years before his death. “For the detection of it, the use of computer tools has been essential, the results of which have been fully supported by philological analyses,” says the institution in a press release.
The legacy of Lope de Vega, a genius that continues today 400 years later
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The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been crucial in the discovery by researchers Álvaro Cuéllar (University of Vienna) and Germán Vega (University of Valladolid) after intense work that combines the use of advanced computer techniques with research traditional philology.
The document was stored at the BNE, along with many others yet to be attributed, within the institution’s collection of theatrical manuscripts, the most important of its kind in the world.
“No ancient or modern document, no lopist of yesterday or today, had put it to date in relation to what was known in his time as the phoenix of wits”, affirms the institution.
First, the work was transcribed automatically using Artificial Intelligence techniques through the Transkribus tool. Thanks to it, ancient manuscripts can be accurately transcribed with a high degree of precision, something impossible until a few years ago. To do this, it has to be trained by providing handwriting and its corresponding transcription (in this case, about 3 million correctly identified words were needed) until it reaches a point where the machine has learned enough to recognize the letters. and words autonomously.
From this moment on, it can be applied to handwritten documents that you want to transcribe. On this occasion, some 1,300 plays from the Golden Age (both printed and handwritten) were processed and transcribed in just a few hours, instead of the years of intense work that would have taken a traditional research team. The result of these transcriptions is not perfect, but it is useful for the next step in which the AI turns to the authorial attribution of this text to its legitimate author.
No ancient or modern document, no lopista of yesterday or today, had put it to date in relation to what was known at the time as the ‘Phoenix of sugar mills’.
In this phase, an attempt is made to classify them by their corresponding author. In recent years, analyzes have been developed to a great extent to achieve this based on the use of the words they make. Each writer – and, in fact, each one of us – uses the words (love, time, rose, when, what, etc.) in different proportions. The processes of machine learning (one of the main branches of AI) are capable of classifying works as written or not by Lope de Vega with over 99% correct answers, as recent studies show. Well, among the 1,300 automatically transcribed comedies, La francesa Laura was classified as written by Lope de Vega, both complete and each of his days. That is to say, the lexical uses of the work closely aligned with his own, and they did not do so with the other 350 playwrights of the time with whom he counted in the experiment.
The discovery was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the BNE with the ETSO project: Stylometry applied to the Golden Age Theater, directed by Álvaro Cuéllar and Germán Vega, the researchers responsible for the discovery, and which has up to 150 collaborators dedicated to the application of computer analysis to the theatrical literature of the Golden Age to unravel its authorship problems; the PROLOPE group, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), with its enormous work in publishing and studying Lope’s work; the Transkribus tool, which has facilitated the preparation of the necessary materials for the experiments; as well as the Universities of Valladolid and Vienna, to which the authors of the research belong.
Confirmation by traditional philological studies
AI, therefore, has been essential to, on the one hand, automatically transcribe hundreds of plays and on the other, among all these plays, to find one that was in line with Lope de Vega’s scriptural uses. Of course, the researchers, trained mainly in the philological discipline, did not just settle for this computer result, but began intensive research work around The French Laurato determine if it could really be a comedy by the distinguished playwright, but this time with traditional resources of philological research, which have been developed since the origins of the discipline.
Among these tests, the study of versification stands out (how Lope habitually used metrics in his works), orthology (how he pronounced words and used diphthongs, hiatus or sinalefas), and especially the study of lopesco echoes, that is, the coincidence both in ideas, issues and motives as well as in specific lexical structures between our work and other texts by the playwright close to the time of its writing, revealing his possible paternity. All the tests seem to confirm what was pointed out by the initial experiments with AI: the work fits like a glove in the theatrical production of Lope de Vega.
A comedy at the artistic height of Lope’s final stage
“Everything indicates that we are facing a new genuine comedy by the playwright composed in a last stage of his life, of which we had no news until now. A political context of writing and first representations of great interest are glimpsed: the presence and flattering treatment of the French, which the title already highlights, seem to indicate that it was composed in the short period in which the crown of the neighboring country allied with the Spanish against the English at the end of the twenties, putting on pause the tension between nations that marked the Thirty Years’ War”, they affirm from the BNE.
The French Laura It is a remarkable theatrical work, with a dramatic force to be expected from a mature Lope de Vega. The plot takes place in France and revolves around Laura, daughter of the Duke of Brittany and married to Count Arnaldo. The Dauphin, heir to the French throne, falls in love with her and sets out to woo her at any cost. The protagonist resists the prince’s attacks and the suspicions of her husband who, in a fit of jealousy and fear of public dishonor, even tries to end the life of her wife with a powerful poison. Finally, Laura’s integrity is proven and happiness is restored to the couple.
The work, although the fruit of its time, presents at its start a determined defense of women, from which these verses can be extracted:
out of that to women
they have plenty of feats,
that in arms and letters
envy men cause.
We also find Lope’s hand in his description of love in Spain, which, according to him, is the “tenderest” nation when it comes to making people fall in love. We can hear it about the main couple:
– I have not seen
two people who love each other
like both. it’s lucky
what they love and require,
They look Spanish
that, although it is such a severe nation,
in coming to love
it is of all the most tender.
– Is there so much love in Spain?
– They venture without patience
for love souls and lives,
honors and estates.
In short, they conclude from the BNE, AI has revealed itself as a great ally for the historical-philological discipline, an aid for solving problems and for optimizing time and processes, with a processing power unprecedented up to now, that has managed to discover a needle in a haystack: a new comedy written by Lope de Vega from among thousands of printed and handwritten documents: “It is up to the next readers and scholars to continue investigating this comedy, accessible to all from the Digital Library Hispanic of the BNE”.
The scientific article explaining the finding appears in the latest issue of the journal Lope de Vega Yearbook. Text, literature, culture from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, under the title “The French Laura. The discovery of a new comedy of the last Lope de Vega». The careful and annotated edition of the work will see the light of day in the coming months thanks to the Gredos publishing house.