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Lope de Vega, a famous 17th-century Spanish playwright, is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights in Spanish history. Lope lived a life full of as many vicissitudes as his vast and varied works. Above all, his intimate relationships with women became a basic and decisive element in constituting the value of love that provides an important motive in the world of his works. Therefore, it will be very interesting to associate a variety of love images described in his plays with those images of love Lope had sought throughout his life and their backgrounds.
Lope left a great number of images of love for us while engaging in creative writing for more than 50 years from the age of 20 in the early 1580s until when he died in 1634. This paper explores the images of love in three different ways: The first is renaissance-style enthusiastic love; and the second is sublime love above and beyond social status, and the third is urban-style bourgeois love. These images of love go along with the traces of Lope’s own life. Actually, while young he was fascinated with renaissance values and dreamed of a little unrealistic but passionate love. Lope was charmed with love-specific values during the peak of his life when he was madly in love with a number of women. Finally, he tried to discover the value of true love in the placidity of his common everyday life during the closing days of his life after experiencing ups and downs.