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Moreover, the aesthetics of the two oeuvres have much in common, and their practices and capacities can the better be identified and contrasted in that, once at least, they dealt with the same story, with similar characters and setting, treating the theme we know in English under the title of Romeo and Juliet, which Lope de Vega staged as Castelvines y Monteses. Usually such comparisons seem arbitrary, because there is no basic continuity of context or content justifying critical juxtaposition, but Lope (1562-1635) was a contemporary of Shakespeare (1564-1616) and wrote similar plays for popular audiences performed in theatres like that surviving in Almagro, which are almost identical in configuration to such Elizabethan theatres as the Fortune. In his noted book The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate concludes his review of the current interest of his preferred author by wondering whether there might be any challenger worthy of comparison to the great Elizabethan, and concludes that there is only one of sufficient standing: Shakespeare's Spanish contemporary, Lope de Vega.