This chapter considers don Luis de Haro’s relationship with
important literary figures of the Spanish Golden Age, and includes an appendix
that lists over sixty of the poems, relaciones,
manuscripts and books that were dedicated to him. As a young man during the
1620s and 1630s, Haro appears to have been closely connected with leading
writers of the court of Madrid, people like José de Pellicer, Lope de Vega and
Juan de Moncayo. However, when he entered his political maturity, he seems to
have become less interested in cultivating literary relationships, and this is
reflected in a decline in dedications to him of books published in Madrid after
1648. One suspects that as someone who enjoyed a highly privileged but also
very insecure position as valido, he
was reluctant to be publicly associated with literary works that might
compromise his situation. Those writers who were allowed to dedicate books to
him therefore had to do so in an indirect way, by addressing their texts to
Philip IV, with a second dedication to Haro requesting that he intercede with
the king on their behalf.