"Blando sueño amoroso, dulce sueño" : lecturas y contextos para un soneto de Lope

The development of the ad somnum tradition reaches its highest point during the Golden Age with an almost total replacement of the original pleading of the sleepless sick supplicant that Neolatin poetry had largely maintained. In La batalla del honor, Lope includes an invocation to sleep which recovers that first poetical voice, but to do so he turns to the phraseology formulated by the subsequent erotic line. This lays out the possibility of a double reading and thus the question of whether the sonnet was written for the comedy or was instead conceived previously and independently.