Enter a new Bard

Should Lope de Vega be thought Shakespeare's equal? With the Spaniard's play Peribanez about to open in London, Paul Taylor considers the evidence

Lope de Vega, the great Spanish dramatist, was born in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare. Like the latter, he came from a modest background, wrote for an open-air courtyard theatre that embraced all classes and mastered such a mixture of genres that his diversity would have silenced Polonius. Lope resembles the Bard, too, in his ability to play profound variations on the world-as-stage metaphor and to create plays that cunningly admit of two discrepant interpretations.

If Henry V can be conscripted by both war-mongering nationalists and their peacenik opponents, so can a Lope de Vega drama such as Fuenteovejuna be seen as both revolutionary and finally submissive to the status quo. In it, a whole village unites to eliminate a tyrannical local lord and then keeps a steadfast collective silence over the identity of the murderer. Incendiary stuff – except that in the mercy graciously extended by the king, the rebellion of the lower ranks is calculatedly finessed by the highest representative of established power.

In his brilliant, best-selling book The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate itemises such areas of comparison. He also weighs in with some pointedly invidious statistics that do not spare the Bard's blushes. It's not just that Shakespeare predeceased Lope by some 19 years. That's hardly, so to speak, a hanging offence. But the Spanish master wins hands down in nearly all the number games. For example, he wrote between 500 and 1,800 plays, 300 of which survive. Shakespeare managed to rustle up between 30 and 40. The Bard called it a day with a measly 154 sonnets. Lope declared stumps only when he'd polished off nearly 2,000.

All of which (comparisons and contrasts) prompts Bate to propose a thought-exercise. Imagine a what-if universe in which the Spanish Armada triumphed in 1588 and in which the counter-Reformation succeeded in extirpating Protestantism. Would Shakespeare now be the resident world genius? If it had been the Spanish language rather than English that conquered the globe, would it be Lope de Vega enthroned in supreme ascendancy? Bate's point is puckishly provocative, designed to counter the insular Anglocentric view that Shakespeare's pre-eminence is just part of some divinely ordained natural order, like the sublimity of Niagara Falls. It, too, is the product of history.

To argue that Bate overstates the case, though, would require a way of putting it to the test – which, in turn, would require a good working knowledge of Lope de Vega's surviving output. And who in England – apart from a few specialists in university Spanish departments – can lay claim to that? More important, if Bate is right that Lope is Shakespeare's most serious rival, why don't we see in this country far more of the Spanish Golden Age drama that he spearheaded?

That's the question currently exercising Rufus Norris, associate director of the Young Vic and recent winner of the Evening Standard Best Newcomer award. He is well into rehearsals of Peribanez, a Lope tragedy of love, jealousy and revenge, triggered when the Commander of the locality is carried, wounded and needing urgent medical attention, into the nuptials of the eponymous, hard-working peasant and his beautiful bride. This unscheduled fateful meeting between high and low leaves the nobleman desperately smitten with the virtuous new wife and Peribanez murderously intent on vengeance.

The scene is set for one of those tortured testings of the meaning of honour in which Spanish Golden Age drama rejoices. The Commander believes a low-born peasant should think it a privilege that a lord has devious designs on the virtue of his wife. But what price the lord's honour when, to achieve his lecherous ends, he is prepared to knight the peasant and send him off to war against the Arabs as the captain of a troop? For the wrong reasons, Peribanez is given a social reward for the right-mindedness that is no respecter of class division. How will he defend his honour? A string of ironies, a cock-up and bloodshed ensue. Then there's a royal pardon that's hedged about with self-serving ambiguities.

I met for a chat with Norris and his assistant director Nizar Zubi, whom I last saw together at the Al Kasaba Theatre in Ramallah in the Palestinian territories. With the resident company, Rufus was directing a new comedy about the brutal farce of checkpoints (it included a Palestinian whose life had been chaotically complicated when the Israelis built a new checkpoint between his house and his outside loo). Nizar was preparing the same company for a trip to England with Alive From Palestine, their show, compiled and rehearsed under siege conditions, of stories of the ordinary people's lives during the Intifada.

"They're expensive, these Spanish Golden Age plays," Norris declared, suggesting reasons why they have not (as yet) taken root in the English repertory. "They have a lot of people in them – there's no box-office security because none of them are set texts. And there's apparently a lack of good textual scholarship, because in post-Franco Spain, Lope is viewed as being quite an Establishment figure who wrote to order." But Spanish Golden Age drama created such a buzz here in the late 1980s and early Nineties. "There was Declan Donnellan's Fuenteovejuna at the National, and then Stephen Daldry and Laurence Boswell won an Olivier Award for their season of these plays at the Gate Theatre [including pieces by Tirso de Molina and Caldéron]. It does feel odd that a huge canon of work should have been ignored when it was proved to be so successful. There seems to a slight fear of going back there."

I wonder whether it might be something to do with the fact that these Spanish plays are at once so near and yet so far from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. They were written for the same range of audience, similarly loved bending rules, and played in the same kind of space. Greek tragedy or French neo-classical theatre have the appeal of slightly exotic ritual, whereas what comes across as at once exotic and a real sticking point in Golden Age drama is the obsession with the code of honour. The English mind warms to Falstaff's comically disreputable, easygoing attitude: "Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? What is honour? A word. What is in that word 'honour'? Air. A trim reckoning?" The pragmatic, larger-than-life Falstaff would have had a lean time of it on the Spanish Renaissance stage.

In the Protestant north, we live in a guilt culture. Contrast the shame cultures of the hot Mediterranean. Nizar Zubi's role in the rehearsal room has been to help the cast to open out and find an equivalent sense of community, so that "honour" comes to feel a concept as rooted in the body as the abstract mind. "You've been to Ramallah," he tells me, "you walk around and people are louder, the pitch is higher, there's more air. The actors here are not trying to act out Spanishness. It's their sense of community that creates the laws and the rituals from inside the production."

The polymetric verse of the original has been rendered into supple, nuanced prose dialogue by Norris's wife Tanya Ronder. The two have been at pains to build on the ways in which Lope fashions fallible, flexible human beings rather than rigid code-controlled robots, so there have been a few nips, tucks and additions. The major change is that, rejecting Lope's happy ending as too dismissive of the painful issues that have been raised, they have opted for a more pensive "problem-play" conclusion. It's not just the reconciliation of the central couple "but whether Peribanez can ever be reconciled to himself again" that's at issue.

There's a rumour that the new chief, Michael Boyd, is planning a Spanish Golden Age season for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The mooted director is Laurence Boswell, who, before he made big bucks from directing Ben Elton plays and Madonna's West End debut, masterminded the celebrated Gate Spanish-fest. Long before that, he directed a Youth Theatre production in Worcester of Fuenteovejuna which featured... one Rufus Norris. It looks like the two of them should get back together.

'Peribanez' opens at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut, London SE1 (020-7928 6363) on 2 May