Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (1562-1635). He did not influence Shakespeare, but provides valuable comparisons and analogues.

Lope de Vega may have written as many as 1500 plays of various kinds, including one based on the same story as Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," called "Castelvines y Monteses" (see later image on this page). Lope de Vega's treatise on "The New Way of Writing Plays Nowadays" defines and defends the style of tragicomedy characteristic of Shakespeare (see Hugh M. Richmond, "Dramatists Against Theory: the Affective Dramaturgy of Cinthio, Lope de Vega, and William Shakespeare," Shakespeare Bulletin, 22.4 (Winter 2005), 43-53). The open-air Spanish theatres such as that surviving at Almagro closely resembled those in London, such as the Globe and the Fortune (see "Shakespeare and the Spanish Connection" in the Video Gallery of this site). Although not well known in the English-speaking world, his plays were presented in England as late as the 1660s, when diarist Samuel Pepys recorded having attended some adaptations and translations of them, although he omits mentioning the author. Picture and some data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).