Many years, however, elapsed before he published even a single volume of the plays with which he was thus delighting the audiences of Madrid, and settling the final forms of the national drama. This was, no doubt, in part owing to the habit, which seems to have prevailed in Spain from the first appearance of the theatre, of regarding its literature as ill-suited for publication; and in part to the circumstance, that, when plays were produced on the stage, the author usually lost his right in them, if not entirely, yet so far that he could not publish them without the assent of the actors. But whatever may have been the cause, it is certain that a multitude of Lope’s plays had been acted before he published any of them; and that, to this day, not a fourth part of those he wrote has been preserved by the press.[296] [296] Lope must have been a writer for the public stage as early as 1586 or 1587, and a popular writer at Madrid soon after 1590; but we have no knowledge that any of his plays were printed, with his own consent, before the volume which appeared at Valladolid, in 1604. Yet, in the Preface to the “Peregrino en su Patria,” licensed in 1603, he gives us a list of three hundred and forty-one plays which he acknowledges and claims. Again, in 1618, when he says he had written eight hundred, (Comedias, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618, Prólogo), he had printed but one hundred and thirty-four full-length plays, and a few _entremeses_. Finally, of the eighteen hundred attributed to him in 1635, after his death, by Montalvan and others, (Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 49), only about three hundred and twenty or thirty can be found in the volumes of his collected plays; and Lord Holland, counting _autos_ and all, which would swell the _general_ claim of Montalvan to at least twenty-two hundred, makes out but five hundred and sixteen printed dramas of Lope. Life of Lope de Vega, London, 1817, 8vo, Vol. II. pp. 158-180.