Fuente Ovejuna Research Articles

Fuente Ovejuna (1612), by Lope de Vega. Translated by Adrian Mitchell. Directed by Flordelino Lagundino. Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn, NY. April 30–May 28, 2023

<i>Fuente Ovejuna</i> (1612), by Lope de Vega. Translated by Adrian Mitchell. Directed by Flordelino Lagundino. Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn, NY. April 30–May 28, 2023

Children’s Theater Production Workshop: Diversifying the Classics and LA Librería

Abstract: UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics project (DTC) recently partnered with LA Librería, a bookstore that promotes children’s literature in Spanish and holds cultural events, to present a theatrical adaptation for children of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna. As readers will no doubt remember, Lope’s play presents a community of villagers who band together to overthrow their tyrannical overlord, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, in the town of Fuente Ovejuna, near Córdoba, in 1476. For this workshop, various activities were offered in preparation for the play itself: rehearsing lines, decorating the stage, and the well of Fuente Ovejuna; painting T-shirts and cardboard daggers; and learning to sing ¡O Peor!, an original song composed for the play. This article will explain how the authors communicated with their partner organization, the planning and execution of the workshop itself, and the overall responses from both the participants and audience members.

Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega, directed by Mariano de Paco Serrano, Teatro Círculo, October 7-23, 2022

Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega, directed by Mariano de Paco Serrano, Teatro Círculo, October 7-23, 2022

Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture by Anne Fuchs

MLR, .,   character who speaks. Chapter  examines the difficulties of conveying the shis in tone and situation that this rich polymetric verse marks in the original. Jeffs examines the opening stanzas of the four plays that were staged in the Swan to exemplify the kinds of decisions that were taken to preserve some sense of the original verse structure. Chapter  augments the analysis of these decisions with respect to characterization, while Chapter  analyses the deployment of metatheatrical moments, particularly with respect to the play-within-the-play sequences, ceremonies, and role-play. ese two chapters offer a wealth of individual case studies of how the texts were explored in rehearsal and how they worked in performance. e final chapter considers the impact that the RSC’s Golden Age season has had on subsequent productions in the US, Spain, and, more centrally, the UK until . Apart from briefly considering two American stagings of e Dog in the Manger, it traces Boswell’s subsequent comedia productions, first in Madrid with Rakatá (El perro del hortelano in – and Fuente Ovejuna in , both performed in Spanish) and then in Bath. As Artistic Director of the Ustinov Studio in the latter city, he produced e Phoenix of Madrid (a reworking of No hay burlas con el amor) by Calderón in , and then a three-play season in : A Lady of Little Sense (La dama boba) by Lope de Vega, Don Gil of the Green Breeches (Don Gil de las calzas verdes) by Tirso de Molina, and Punishment without Revenge (El castigo sin venganza) by Lope de Vega. Jeffs’s book is a stimulating and hugely detailed account of the making of the landmark RSC’s Spanish Golden Age season. It analyses the challenges of working on the interface between two very different dramatic traditions and languages, displaying rigorous linguistic, cultural, and scholarly awareness of the processes of translation and adaptation. is book proposes a model to foster more widespread production of these plays, a kind of collaborative toolbox to revive Spanish comedias for modern English-speaking audiences in the twenty-first century. We can only hope that theatre practitioners and producers may draw inspiration from Jeffs’s painstaking work to revive more of the hidden treasures of Spain’s rich dramatic heritage. U  L J A. P D Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture. By A F. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. . xx+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Precarious Times takes as its starting point fundamental shis in the temporal conditions of the twenty-first century brought about by the interconnected forces of digitization, globalization, and accelerated capitalism. As Anne Fuchs observes, much recent criticism on these matters is imbued with ‘temporal anxieties’ (p. ) and pervaded by a crisis narrative that paints present-day experiences of time as stagnant, flat, disembedded, or atomized. Wary of such ‘monolithic and deterministic ’ (p. ) perspectives, Fuchs turns to the realm of culture to draw a more  Reviews multifaceted picture of our contemporary timescapes. Engaging with a remarkable collection of authors and genres, ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and focusing on German-language literature and culture in particular, Fuchs interrogates the alarmism underpinning much of the recent temporal diagnostics. She convincingly illustrates that temporal anxieties and complexities ‘are part and parcel of the complicated story of modernity’ (p. ) and hence not solely a problem of the here and now. Moreover, she emphasizes that artistic practice has since modernity provided opportunities for questioning dominant time regimes, allowing for the exploration of alternative temporal trajectories and the recuperation of Eigenzeit (pp. –). Fuchs is careful, though, not simply to celebrate art as a panacea for modern culture’s continuing struggles with time. While contemporary art in particular is deeply committed to the possibility of alternative experiences of time, oen accompanied by more attentive relationships with the world and others, these attempts oen remain fleeting and precarious. e book’s first chapter introduces key theoretical engagements with time in the era of digitization, including seminal accounts by Hartmut Rosa, Byung-Chul Han, John Tomlinson, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, David Harvey, and Robert Hassan. Fuchs identifies...

90 Monologues from Classical Spanish Theater in Spanish and in English

90 Monologues from Classical Spanish Theater in Spanish and in English

The Violence of Everyday Life: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna as Urban Allegory

In the wake of Spain’s economic crisis and the accompanying surge of anti-austerity social movements such as 15M, theater groups and dramatists in Ma-drid looked to Spanish playwright Felix Lope de Vega y Carpio’s canonical play Fuente Ovejuna with renewed interest. This paper discusses two interpretations of the play that emerged from this trend: one staged in the central patio of a classic corrala in Aranjuez in 2013 by the theater collective AlmaViva Teatro, and the other a 2015 adaptation by dramatist Juan Mayorga performed by the theater group La Joven Compania in the Centro Cultural Conde Duque. I argue that the script adaptations and the staging used by each performance demonstrate how Fuente Ovejuna remains a compelling alegoria de poder for contemporary society by emphasizing the original work’s preoccupations with the relationship between violence, power, and sovereignty. I also contend that they should be understood within the geography of the city and the architectural legacy of the respective performance sites. These adaptations resonate deeply with the material realities of the contemporary city and the spatial politics of cultural production during Spain’s economic crisis and its aftermath

Dictating Aesthetic and Political Legitimacy through Golden Age Theater: Fuente Ovejuna at the Teatro Español, Directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena (1944)

Emboldened by their success in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Nationalist ideologues sought to revitalize the stagnant Spanish theater and promote values associated with the newly formed authoritarian regime. The memory and restaging of seventeenth-century comedias became a crucial part of this project that focused particularly on Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, a history play that dramatizes a village's fifteenth-century rebellion against a tyrannical overlord. The definitive performance of Fuente Ovejuna during the early years of Franco's dictatorship, a production directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena at the Teatro Espanol in 1944, represented the culmination of the right's struggle to regenerate the theater. By adopting a fascist aesthetic and reinforcing the regime's political legitimacy through history, Luca de Tena's production captured its contemporary moment and signaled a possible solution to the theatrical crisis, one that blended historiography, aesthetics, and politics.

Diálogos en las tablas: Últimas tendencias de la puesta en escena del teatro clásico español ed. by María Bastianes et al.

Dialogos en las tablas: Ultimas tendencias de la puesta en escena del teatro clasico espanol Ed. Maria Bastianes, Esther Fernandez, and Purificacio Mascarell. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2014. 381 pp.As Joan Oleza's pointed prologue and self-proclaimed manifiesto (ix) indicates, theater practitioners and scholars have long operated apart from one another, a lamentable tendency that this volume attempts to remedy. By including both academic approaches to the performance of Spanish classical theater and interviews with theater scholars and professionals working in varying capacities, Dialogos en las tablas not only dialogues between theory and praxis, but also facilitates actual conversations about the history and current state of comedia performance. Oleza is justified in lauding this collection of essays and interviews as a unique and necessary addition to studies of Spanish classical theater and in lamenting the common tendency of critics to fall to one side or the other of the stage/page binar}'. He insists that the way forward is found in this compilation of discussions and scholarly works, which represents a holistic approach to theater studies that encompasses both the study of dramatic texts and their on-stage iterations.The majority of Dialogos consists of nine chapters authored by different scholars. Each essay is followed by an interview with a director, actor, or dramaturg involved with the production or company featured. For example, Sergio Adillo Rufo's chapter on adapting La vida es sueno immediately precedes his interview with Juan Mayorga, creator of the Compania Nacional de Teatro Clasico's latest version of the play. These essays range widely in focus and scope, from case studies on adaptations of specific works, such as La vida es sueno and Fuente Ovejuna, to more historical explorations of the trajee tor}' of a particular play, such as La Celestina and El galan fantasma, over a period of time. Other chapters focus on the work of certain theater troupes and directors, including Eduardo Vasco (Compania Nacional de Teatro Clasico), Teatro Corsario, and Ana Zamora (Nao d'amores Teatro).The second section is a series of forty short interviews, each consisting of just three questions, conducted with a wide variety of theater professionals and academics from Spain, England, and the United States. The interviewees, ranging from Ignacio Arellano to Mar Zubieta, are professors, actors, directors, lighting designers, costume designers, set designers, translators, dramaturgs, musicologists, theater critics, and editors. These interviews are an excellent window to the work and working philosophies of those who have dedicated their professional labor to the drama of the Golden Age. It is not an exhaustive list of theater specialists and practitioners, but it is an important one.It is worth noting that although most of the chapters deal with stagings by Spanish companies within Spain, Esther Fernandez's study of Fuente Ovejuna focuses on performances in New York and India, while the final chapter, by Jonathan Thacker, explores the history and reception of Golden Age plays staged in Great Britain. …

Crossing Over

In this interview, playwright Michael John Garcés discusses Los Illegals, his 2007 play about undocumented workers in Los Angeles. He describes Cornerstone Theater's process of working collaboratively with local immigrants to develop the play as well as his artistic influences (including Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna). Garcés also discusses the birth of the independent theater company comprising immigrants and day-laborers that came out of the Los Illegals project.

Unfettering Confession: Ritualized Performance in Spanish Narrative and Drama (review)

PACE, DONALD GENE. Unfettering Confession: Ritualized Performance in Narrative and Drama. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2009. 88 pp.In Unfettering Confession: Ritualized Performance in Narrative and Drama, Donald Gene Pace proposes to reexamine confession as a literary genre independent of autobiography, of which it has usually been considered a subgenre. He further argues that confession has been traditionally understood almost exclusively as a linguistic practice, against which he proposes to focus on confessions as contextually determined bodily performances. In his approach he brings to bear several theoretical schools, most prominently those of speech act theory and a theory of hegemony based on Gramsci and Foucault.While confessional literature transcends its traditional generic boundaries, author does contend that its primary model is religious and, specifically, Catholic: Whether religious or secular, confession assumes a structure that imitates Roman Catholic religious sacrament of penance (11). This fact serves as a further justification for book's exclusively corpus, because, given their Catholic heritage, Spanish writers are predisposed to utilize confessional frames and refer to penitential scenes (15). author does not attempt to substantiate this assertion in any way, so one can only assume it remains at level of speculation. Nevertheless, reliance on Catholic model does not seem to limit relevance of Pace's thesis concerning power relations revealed by focusing on confessions as an independent genre.The real work of book occurs in readings Pace performs on a series of texts ranging from early modern period to early twentieth century. In each of these cases he tries to shows how confessional structure establishes a hegemonic between confessant and confessor, in which control is ultimately strongest when confessant's consent cements a hegemonic relationship (16). In light of this claim, he goes on to interpret a number of canonical texts as confessional literature, including Cervantes 's Don Quijote, Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, martir, Ramon Sender's Requiem por un campesino espanol, and Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, others. For reasons of space, I will focus these comments on his treatment of two early modern texts.Chapter 3, Confession and Liberty, is dedicated to a reading of intercalated novel The Captive's Tale from Don Quijote. At outset, Pace claims that Don Quijote is, among so many things, a confessional novel with a confessional frame as well as many embedded confessional scenes (27). Interpreting tale itself within framework of a religious act of confession, Pace argues that cautivo, in telling Zoraida's story, is essentially serving as a proxy confessant for her, while interlocutors, specifically Dorotea and Luscinda, assume the role of joint confessor (28). With this setup Pace can then proceed to claim that narrative of el cautivo is much more than an individual confession; it is a national confession that proclaims superiority of nation while advancing a subtle appeal for greater catholicity in terms of accepting minority groups (29). Furthermore, combined speech acts produce a collective confession that suggests universal attraction of Christianity and its superiority over Islam (30). …

Theatre Workshop's Translations of Three Spanish Plays

In 1936 Joan Littlewood staged Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century play, Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well); in 1945 Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden; and in 1958 Fernando de Rojas's sixteenth-century La Celestina. There were also plans to produce Lorca's Blood Wedding in 1948. The English versions of Fuente Ovejuna, Don Perlimplín, and Blood Wedding have been preserved in the Theatre Workshop archive at Littlewood's former base, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the following article Gwynne Edwards compares these translations with the original Spanish plays, considers the changes which were introduced in the process of adaptation, and assesses the merits of each. Gwynne Edwards is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays, have been published by Methuen, and many have been given professional productions. He has recently completed the libretto of an opera on the last days of Dylan Thomas.

Los Illegals (review)

Reviewed by: Los Illegals David Romn Los Illegals. Written by Michael John Garcés . Directed by Shishir Kurup . Cornerstone Theater Company. Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California. 1406 2007. Los Illegals, the inaugural production of Cornerstone Theater's planned three-year cycle of plays based on the question of justice, is also the inaugural production of the Los Angeles–based theater's new artistic director, Michael John Garcés. Both of these factors signal a significant shift in the history of this multi-ethnic ensemble, which rightfully prides itself in its mission statement on "making theater with and for people of many ages, cultures, and levels of theatrical experience, and building bridges between and within diverse communities in our home city of Los Angeles and nationwide." For its first twenty years, Cornerstone's artistic director was the visionary Bill Rauch, whose talents and contributions are documented in Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater, Sonja Kuftinec's important study of Cornerstone's history. The arrival of Garcés provides Cornerstone the opportunity to build on the artistic legacy that Rauch and his co-founders established since their first productions during the late 1980s. The first move marking this change is the justice-play cycle, an ambitious and timely effort to interrogate the concept of justice in contemporary US culture. For this project, Cornerstone has commissioned five world-premiere productions, each exploring how justice functions in society. Following its standard process of outreach and collaboration, Cornerstone plans to work with communities that have been created through—or disrupted by—laws surrounding illegal immigration, reproductive rights, incarceration, and the environment. The series will culminate in a bridge play that will bring each of these particular issues and their collaborators together. However, unlike earlier projects where Cornerstone identifies specific communities and collaboratively stages the group's particular concerns, the justice cycle inverts this logic by identifying the issues first before seeking out the communities formed around them. Los Illegals, which tackles the contentious debates around immigration through the prism of day-laborers in Los Angeles, is loosely inspired by Lope de Vega's classic play of class revolt, Fuenteovejuna(1612), in which a Spanish village collectively stands up against tyrannical injustice and abuse. In Lope's play, the village members kill a military commander who has tormented the community. When the royal magistrate arrives to investigate the murder, the community refuses to identify the culprits even in the face of torture; instead, they claim it was "Fuente Ovejuna," the name of their village, who is responsible for the death. Garcés's play updates the theme of collective political resistance through a unified voice in order to comment upon the social inequities, legal labyrinths, and dehumanizing conditions that undocumented workers and illegal immigrants face in Southern California. The play begins with scenes dramatizing two separate attempts at border-crossing. One young man full of energy and hope sets out to cross the southwestern desert from Mexico to the United States and join his brother, who is already living in Los Angeles; the second migration involves a young Guatemalan woman who is inhumanely stacked in an overcrowded refrigerated truck with innumerable others. These episodic solo vignettes, often no longer than a few minutes, accentuate the hardship of the border as they remind us of the lives behind the statistics. The play's main drama, however, takes place in the surrounds of Giant Hardware, a Home Depot–like business that attracts day-laborers searching for work. As the audience arrives, we are led into the fenced-in parking lot of the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, which will serve as the main stage for the production. Picnic tables have been set up throughout the space and the action unfolds among them. A cast of nearly thirty professional and amateur performers, many of whom are seated alongside [End Page 115]the audience, begins to dramatize the primary story. Tensions have arisen between the regulated day-laborers, who assemble daily at the sanctioned community center and are organized by the community advocates and business management, and the newly arrived immigrants, who for any number of reasons choose to assemble outside of Giant Hardware's...

"Es de Lope": The Drama of Confession and Fuente Ovejuna

While critics have written much about Lope de Vega's popular Golden Age play Fuente Ovejuna , they have not yet tapped its bursting confessional possibilities that culminate in a spectacular group confession. By the early seventeenth century, confession is so deeply entrenched in Spanish religious practices that its inclusion in this play provides a unifying religious theme that buttresses Lope's encouragement of a national theater. In this highly allegorical work, the united penitence of an entire town may be viewed as the confession of an emerging Spanish nation. Balancing justice and mercy, the king acts the part of a royal Confessor who is both national judge and doctor. Lope's repetition of the confessional torture scene—rehearsal, performance and celebration—is an effective didactic technique that reinforces the ritualistic nature of confession. Fuente Ovejuna , a drama of multiple confessions and of secular rituals that mimic the religious sacrament, demonstrates how confession is an eminently performative speech act that is both seen and heard. (DGP)

The Threat of Rape in Leonor de la Cueva's La firmeza en la ausencia

RAPE is an all too common motif in the literature of the Golden Age. In many cases the rapist is someone of high socio-economic privilege, such as the Comendador in Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna or Don Juan Tenorio in Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla. In addition, most potential rape victims do, in fact, become actual rape victims, although the rapes often take place offstage in the case of drama or while the female victim is unconscious (Miguel de Cervantes's La fuerza de la sangre and Maria de Zayas's La inocencia castigada and La esclava de su amante, to name but a few) in the case of narrative, likely for reasons of decorum and as a means to highlight the female rape victim's innocence and noncompliance. What is unique about Leonor de la Cueva's rendering of the topic in her drama La firmeza en la ausencia is the fact that the rapist is the king and the potential rape victim Armesinda is never actually raped, although the threat is omnipresent. Cueva allows her heroine Armesinda to successfully dissuade her rapist, the king Filiberto, for a time, by using her wit and her intelligence, thereby allowing her to appear to be the agent of her own defense, at least up to a point. It is precisely this point--the king's threatened rape--and the questions it provokes that merit a more detailed analysis of the omnipresent menace that does not ultimately occur. A number of questions that warrant consideration are: I. Why does Leonor de la Cueva represent the king as the rapist? II. How would the drama unfold if the king actually raped Armesinda? III. Why does Leonor de la Cueva not allow Armesinda to be raped? While the potential answers to these questions call for some speculation on the part of the reader, it is precisely these questions that bring to light textual gaps and reveal much about the socio-historical and socio-political context surrounding the drama, particularly as regards gender relations. King Filiberto carries out a series of acts designed to physically isolate the object of his lascivious desires--Armesinda--and entice her to consent to his amorous attentions. His attempts to seduce her escalate from professions of affection to an offer of marriage to the threat of physical violence. First, in an act reminiscent of the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba (Samuel II: 11, 215-216), he sends her betrothed Juan away to war. Juan is not oblivious to the king's ulterior motives but must nevertheless obey as the loyal servant that he is, the king's licit need for military victory belying his illicit need for sexual release with Armesinda. Later, in the hope that Armesinda will emotionally renounce her betrothed, King Filiberto tells her that Juan has married someone else. He does consider actually murdering Juan as a means to physically remove him from her presence. The king tells her that he loves her and wants to marry her. Finally, when all else fails and he cannot have what he wants through persuasion, he threatens to obtain it by force through rape. Despite the fact that Armesinda's efforts to dissuade the king are successful, it is made patently clear that she has no protection. The one who is supposed to be protecting her--the king--in the absence of her betrothed Juan is her greatest threat; she is vulnerable to his amorous attentions. She is trapped between two men--king and betrothed--both of whom believe that she will be unfaithful and consent to sexual relations. The other females present, Princess Celidaura and a female servant Leonora--two extremes of the socio-economic spectrum under the authority of the king--, similarly conspire against the hapless young woman and encourage her to succumb to the king's advances. King Filiberto reveals his lascivious intentions on two previous occasions before he actually threatens to rape her. Puede mucho un rey amante, y como tal, mostrara, ya que tan cruel estas, cual de los dos puede mas. …

Theatre Workshop and the Spanish Drama

In the course of her long career as a director with Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop, Joan Littlewood staged some twenty foreign-language plays, of which three were Spanish: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, while there were also plans to perform Lorca's Blood Wedding. Gwynne Edwards argues in this article that Littlewood's attraction to the Spanish plays was sometimes political but always due to a similarity in performance style which, influenced by the methods of leading European theatre practitioners, sought to integrate the elements of speech, stage design, movement, music, and lighting into a harmonious whole. Indeed, even though Lorca and Littlewood worked independently of each other, their ideas on the nature and function of theatre were very similar, while Lorca's touring company, La Barraca, employed methods very close to those of Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop. Gwynne Edwards was until recently Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca have been published by Methuen Drama, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays. Many of these have also had professional productions.

Portland's Miracle Theatre Group andFuente Ovejuna

Portland's Miracle Theatre Group and<i>Fuente Ovejuna</i>

‘¡Volvióse en Luto La Boda!’: Ritual, Torture, And The Technologies of Power in Lope’s Fuente Ovejuna

'iVOLVIOSE EN LUTO LA BODA!': RITUAL, TORTURE, AND THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER IN LOPE'S FUENTE OVEjfUNA Whereas for the most part the immediate goal of torture in our era has been political repression, for the inhabitants of Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna it is inherent in the judicial process. In the play torture is administered by an officer under the direct command of the King and Queen of Spain, Fernando and Isabel.1 The inhabitants submit to torment and this is ofricially sanctioned as a highly organized practice, the purpose of which is to gain knowledge or to punish by exemple. Following the murder of the Comendador, the King orders an investigation that is routinely accompanied by torture. The inhabitants of the village both accept and challenge this authority and his way of enforcing and demonstrating his power, by willingly submitting to the torture but heroically disregarding the pain, designed to undermine their integrity. In this way, as this paper will argue, torture is presented as a ritual that is associated not only with power but also with other rituals, including the wedding festival and the giving of gifts. Together, these manifestations contribute to the community's sense of collective identity. These points are foregrounded in the play by cultural and ritualistic practices, which construct a sense of cultural identity that contributes to the collective ethos that is necessary for the process of social ratification. In other words, Lope's play revolves around religious and folkloric rituals that underscore the intimate relationship between politics and ritual in the construction of a communal identity. My analysis of the play's rituals shows that the inhabitants of the village are a communal grouping because they apprehend their past as a coherent For commentsand editorialsuggestions, I am grateful tomycolleagueChristineArkinstall, tothe Hispanic editorofthisjournal, Dr David George,and to theanonymousreaderswho ofTered so manvinvahiahleromments 1 Strictly speaking,ofcourse,at thedateoftheactionFernandowas thePrinceofAragonand Isabel Queen of Castile. The play was publishedin Lope's Dozena parte in 1619. At theend of thenineteenth century MarcelinoMenendez Pelayoaffirmed that'se tratade una de las obrasmas admirablesde Lope, aunque,porrarocaprichode la suerte,no sea de las masconocidasen Espana' ('Fuenteovejuna', inLope de Vega:elteatro II, ed. byAntonioSanchez Romeralo(Madrid: Taurus, 1989), pp. 13-23 (p. 13)). The play's famehas grownconsiderablyduringthelasthundredyears bothin Spain and internationally. Interpretations and adaptationsvaryand rangefromthatofthe Moscow ArtTheatre in Soviet Russia, to Lorca's productionforLa Barraca,to Radiotelevision Espanola's filmversionand frequent theatreperformances. On theMoscow version,see Alberto Castilla,'Teatro Universitario: Fuentovejuna 65', inEn torno al teatrodelSiglode Oro: actasdelas jornadas VII-VIII celebradas enAlmeria,ed. byHeraclia Castellonand others(Almeria:Instituto de Estudios Almerienses,1992), pp. 39-58 (p. 50). On Lorca's version,see Suzanne W. Byrd,La (FuenteOvejuna*de FedericoGarcia Lorca (Madrid: Pliegos, 1984). Adolfo Marsillach directed a productionof the Compania Nacional de Teatro Clasico de Espana in 1993. Carlos Bousono adapted the textforthisperformance. A comprehensivereviewof the criticismof the play up to the 1970s is offered in Teresa J.Kirschner,'Evolucion de la criticade "Fuenteovejuna", de Lope de Vega en el Siglo XX', in En torno al teatrodelSiglo de Oro,ed. by Castellonand others, PP-77_97-Previouslyshe had tracedthehistoryoftranslations, adaptations,and productionsin 'Sobrevivencia de una comedia: historiade la difusionde Fuente Ovejuna', Revista canadiense de estudios hispdnicos, 1 (1976-77), 255-71. For a morerecentstudy,see Enrique Garcia SantoTomas , La creaciondel Fenix': recepcion criticayformacion canonicadel teatrode Lope de Vega (Madrid: Gredos,2000), pp. 319-72. MERCEDES CAMINO 383 history and see its present and future as contiguous processes. This continuity is sharply interrupted by the Comendador's tyranny, which ultimately provokes the villagers to revolt. His behaviour is presented throughout the play as not simply evil but also, and perhaps more importantly, breaking the flow of time and disrupting the life cycle. His presence and deeds disturb a sense of order and a hierarchical arrangement that the villagers see as 'natural' and wish to preserve. This order, needless to say, depends not only on the maintenance of the social status quo, but also on a binary division of gender roles. Such duality is, however, not based on the association of masculinity with bravado, as is seen by the hesitant attitude of the men until Laurencia calls them to action...

"!Volviose en luto la boda!": Ritual, Torture, and the Technologies of Power in Lope's "Fuente Ovejuna"

Fuente Ovejuna's foregrounding of religious and folkloric rituals demonstrates the intimate relationship between politics and ritual in the construction of communal identity. The inhabitants of the village apprehend their past, present, and future as contiguous processes and the rituals in which they take part reinforce their notion of community. The Comendador breaks their sense of continuity by disturbing the rituals that they associate with different life cycles, forcing them to revolt. This culminates in the collective torture of the villagers, which, as Foucault has emphasized, is bound up in a relationship of power whose significance is culturally embedded and socially productive.

Nation, empire and local community in Lope de Vega's Peasant Drama and El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón

In the drama of early modern Spain the colonisation of America wasassociated with criticism of the corruption of the religious and chivalricideals of the reconquest of Muslim Spain. In Lope de Vega's early play, El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (c.1598–1603), the greed andlust of Columbus's companions make them prototypes of the tyrannicalnoblemen of Lope's peasant honour plays, which the dramatist producedyears later at the height of his career'! This subgenre, which includes suchfamous works as Fuente Ovejuna (c.1612–14), Peribáñez y el Comendadorde Ocana (1614) and El mejor alcalde, el rey (1620), contributed to arevaluation of hierarchical honour, and specifically questioned the statusand social role of the minor nobility, remnants of the feudal age of theReconquista. Fuente Ovejuna and El Nuevo Mundo destabilised contemporary ideals of national identity through the dramatic constructionof marginalised communal characters—peasants and Native Americans.

Class, Gender and Community in Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna

The following article examines the portrayal of interclass conflict, specifically the favourable treatment of aggressive self-definition by commoners, in two early modern plays, Thomas Dekker's popular citizen drama, The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), and Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (1612-14), which is based on a historical peasant uprising in fifteenth-century Andalusia. While the two plays present class conflict in terms of sexual rivalry and sexualised abuse by social superiors, a factor which allowed both dramatists to appeal to the socially diverse audiences of Elizabethan London and Golden Age Madrid in favour of the plebeian communities at the heart of the plays, there are significant differences between them in terms of their construction of gender difference and a gendered conception of social identity; Fuente Ovejuna ultimately transcends the specifically masculine context of conflict evident in both plays, and, by these means, not only celebrates the communal, gender-subversive heroism of its peasants, but also appeals to the audience in similarly heterosocial terms.