Yet even this pious dedication of the proceeds of the theatre did not silence the clergy. In 1600, Philip III. ordered the subject to be referred to a junta of theologians. This council established certain conditions on which the performances were to be tolerated, the principal being that women were not to act, nor to mingle with the audience. It was at this time, and with this licence that Lope's career was run. He alone furnished all Spain with plays; and so great a favourite was he, that none but his were received with any approbation. On the accession of Philip IV., a man of pleasure, the theatre was more frequented than ever. Yet still, it maybe observed, the clergy nourished a prejudice against it, censured Lope for being the occasion of much sin, and caused him on his death bed to express his regret at having written for the stage, and to promise that if he recovered he would do so no more. Cervantes boasts of the improvements he occasioned in theatrical representations. Still his plays, though they have great merit from the passion and poetry they display, are inartificial in their construction, while Lope on the contrary, became popular from the admirable nature of his plots. His dramas are praised by a Spanish critic for "the purity and sweetness of his language, for the vivacity of his dialogue, for the propriety of many of the characters, for his invention, his exact description of national manners, for his serious passages, his merriment and his wit." There is often something barbaric in his carelessness of time and place, and also in the hinging on of his incidents: still the plot was preserved carefully throughout, and the catastrophe showed the intention of the author to have been always in his mind, even when he most seemed to swerve from it. The number of plays that Lope wrote has been alluded to, and is really astonishing: there is something of sameness, perhaps, at the bottom of all, but this is joined to prodigious variety and novelty within the circle by which his invention is circumscribed. He says himself-- "Should I the titles now relate Of plays my endless labour bore, Well might you doubt, the list so great, Such reams of paper scribbled o'er; Plots, imitations, scenes, and all the rest, To verse reduced, in flowers of rhetoric drest. The number of my fables told Would seem the greatest of them all; For strange, of dramas you behold Full fifteen hundred mine I call, And full an hundred times--within a day, Passed from my muse, upon the stage, a play." And so entirely did he possess the ear and favour of the audience, that many a play of which he was innocent was brought out under his name, and thus obtained applause.