«No solo la imitaba, mas vencía». From Silvio to Amarílida: Tradition and Mythology in Lope de Vega´s «La rosa blanca»

Abstract

In 1621 Lope published the miscellaneous volume La Filomena, in which he includes two mythological fables, one with the same name as the title of the book, in which he tells the story of the metamorphosis of the Athenian maiden into a nightingale, and the fable of Andromeda. In 1624 he published La Circe, a book with a structure quite similar to that of 1621, with «La Circe» and «La rosa blanca», which tells a legendary origin for this flower related to the noble coat of arms of Doña María de Guzmán.  In this paper we explore this last poem in order to explain the characteristics of a text whose primary intention was not to tell a mythological fable, but to build a final object to offer to the daughter of the Count of Olivares related to Lope's courtly will. We will show that «La rosa blanca» deploys a series of mechanisms that go beyond its extra-literary functionality and that poses new coordinates of relationship with the mythological matter. With this poem, Lope de Vega thus inserts himself within the tradition of mythological poetry, but also within the generic problematic that surrounds the concept and within the line of other models that experiment with mythological matter.