The Dog in the Manger by Lope de Vega
Published 1618 · 18,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama, Comedy, Classic Literature
How hard is The Dog in the Manger to read?
The Dog in the Manger scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Courtly Golden Age verse with a vocabulary of rank, service and honour, plus the servants' quick colloquial register.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Fast verse exchanges in shifting metres, with sonnets embedded as soliloquies where the syntax tightens considerably.
- Abstraction: 46 out of 100
- A comedy of manoeuvre grounded in concrete social situations, with its argument about class carried by plot rather than statement.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- A single household, half a dozen suitors and servants, and an intrigue that requires the audience to track who has been told which version.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- Characters lie constantly and soliloquise honestly, so the audience always knows more than the players but must keep track of who knows what.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The proverb of the title governs the whole action, and the forged pedigree stands for every social fiction the play examines.
- Ironic distance: 74 out of 100
- The happy ending rests on a fraud that all parties know is a fraud, and Lope ends by asking the audience to keep the secret.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- The marriage takes place and the couple are settled, though the lie holding it up is left standing in full view.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Three acts of intrigue with rival suitors and a servant's counterplot, all in one house and one continuous time frame.
How The Dog in the Manger is regarded
The Dog in the Manger holds a literary regard score of 71 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.