Fuente Ovejuna Research Articles

Three Major Plays [Fuente Ovejuna; The Knight from Olmedo; Punishment Without Revenge] (review)

182 Reviews De Vega, Lope, Three Major Plays [Fuente Ovejuna; The Knight from Olmedo; Punishment Without Revenge], trans., intro. and notes by Gwynne Edwards (World's Classics), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; paper; pp. xii, 300; R R P £7.99; ISBN 0-19-283337-5. Renown for his prolific output as a professional writer, Lope de Vega (15621635 ) was largely responsible for the creation of a new style of drama for the public theatres of Golden Age Spain, a drama characterized by its fidelity to the imperatives of plot, its freedom from a classicism which would have stifled it, its sheer inventiveness, and its awareness of the audience and the immediacy and power of the theatrical medium. In this Oxford World's Classics paperback, Gwynne Edwards provides the reader with a fresh,first-ratetranslation of three of Lope de Vega's most famous plays and a more than satisfactory introduction to the stage practices and major dramatic conventions of the period. The critical overview ofthe plays is necessarily brief, but offers general readers and new students alike valuable guidance and insight into major cultural issues and critical responses to the plays. Edwards furnishes the reader with a vivid picture ofthe age of Lope de Vega and the social position he occupied, and includes consideration ofthe author's literary theory, his prolific output and his use of a wide range of sources and ideas. The three plays gathered in the volume are also discussed separately, providing a good overview of historical background, and social and political implications of the plays for contemporary audiences. Edwards points to some major themes addressed by scholars, such as the ideals of honour, justice, and the ruler's proper exercise of power; he also notes Lope's complex treatment of traditional topoi, like the 'menosprecio de corte, alabanza de aldea' (the contrasted praise of the countryside and dispraise of court life). Not to detract from Edwards' capacity to refer to an enormous range of scholarly material on what are some of the most widely discussed examples of Spanish literature, his introduction to the plays is particularly impressive from the point of view of a structuralist criticism. It includes ample discussion of their richness of imagery and symbolism, and their interaction of allegorical structures and sometimes finely developed characterization; he discusses the prevalence of conventional dramatic figures and plot-motifs, while stressing Lope's capacity to add an extra layer of depth or complexity. I have one minor qualm about Edwards' critical apparatus. Though his bibliography is necessarily concise, and does, moreover, provide reference both Reviews 183 to major editions of the plays and to the work of other scholar-translators, as well as to a range of critical practices, it could have included some reference to recent examples of feminist criticism which is reshaping contemporary understanding of these plays. Edwards notes that Lope alternated between a range of verse forms and rhyme patterns, while primarily using an octosyllabic verse, which offered more fluidity and speed than didblank verse. In translating these plays, he comments that one ofhis priorities was to preserve the 'sense of flow and rhythm' ofthe original (p. xxxv). Indeed, having examined Edwards' translation of The Knight ofOlmedo in this volume, alongside Willard F. King's version of 30 years ago, I have no hesitation in recommending Edwards' as more faithful to the style, and, ultimately, the sense, ofLope's work. While King turned the text into prose, Edwards translates flie play into an elegant, octosyllabic metre which gives way to occasional lines of 9-10 syllables where required. T m e enough, King can, in places, come closer to a literal sense of the words, but the grace of the original form, which ultimately contributes to its tone and hence some of its meaning or significance, is lost. This is, ofcourse, particularly evident in the play's soliloquies and other key speeches. In similar terms, Edwards does not refrain from creating a sense of the estrangement of a foreign and historically distant text, by reproducing the archaic, sometimes metaphorical, idiom in which it was written—in such instances, the endnotes provide clarification. King, by contrast, modernized the form, making the direct meaning...

Fuente Ovejuna : History, Historiography, and Literary History

Understanding the discovery of Fuente Ovejuna by Menéndez Pelayo and the various receptions of Lope's comedia over the past one hundred years as they relate to the historical and political developments of the twentieth century is key to understanding the diversity of Fuente Ovejuna 's readings, interpretations, and productions. Its fame in literary and academic circles as Lope's most important play is closely linked to the ebb and flow of the political tides that have swept across this century. This brief history of the modern receptions of Fuente Ovejuna demonstrates that the play's continuing popularity can be tied to the social and political interests that have informed literary criticism for the last century. The issue of understanding the play's central action—the killing of the Comendador and the liberation of the village from his tyranny—is not only one of modern interpretation but of the evolution of a conservative seventeenth-century adaptation (of fifteenth-century history) to the radically modern reading of the play as a commentary on contemporary political issues. Without a doubt, it is the play's twentieth-century reception, four centuries removed from the play's origin, which makes it the so-called "queen of Spanish drama." Debate about the play's content—either pro-monarchy or pro-revolution—has made Fuente Ovejuna both popular and polemical.

Fuente Ovejuna on the Rack: Interrogation of a Carnivalesque Theatre of Terror

relation has been established between the theatricalization of punishment and terror and the torture scene in Act 3 of Fuente Ovejuna, when the pesquisidor comes, in the name of the Catholic Monarchs, to discover the identity of Fernin G6mez's killers: Monarchs, or in this case the pesquisidor, serve as the 'dramatist,' the torturer or executioner and the villagers become the 'actors,' and the rack the 'stage' (Blue 307). The carnival of terror, however, does not dominate solely the climactic offstage representation of public torture and collective resistance; it permeates the entire performance experience of Marsillach's rendition of the play, from the moment of the audience's entry into the theatrical space until its final exit some one hundred thirty

Confounding Convention: 'Women' in Three Golden Age Plays

While it is a truism that the Renaissance was not a renaissance for women, three canonical Spanish plays —El burlador de Sevilla, La vida es sueño , and Fuente Ovejuna — provide a number of disturbances to the conception of complete male dominance and female subjugation during the Golden Age. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this essay examines how sexed and gendered indentities are conventionalized in the plays as naturalized, "regulatory" constructs. Attention will be paid to those moments in which these identities betray the very conventions that aim to contain them as meaningful. The analysis of El burlador focuses on the responses of the play's women to Don Juan's unsettling of gender and class relations. The women's readiness to surrender to their desires, and their actions to seek redress for perceived wrongs, reveal a range of imaginative and counter-conventional responses. In the analysis of Fuente Ovejuna , the role of Laurencia is regarded as transgressing a male preserve: the violent avenging of women's lost honour and the recuperation of sullied reputation. Laurencia's discursive transvestism succeeds in disturbing both the performative operations of gendered identities, and the regulatory uses to which those identities have been put. Transvestism and role-changing identities in La vida provide the essay's final focus. Rosaura's conscious adoption of fictive personas and genders, and her destabilization of Segismundo's ontological and erotic security, challenge the idealized passivity prescribed for women. Despite the powerful constraints that circumscribed social and erotic opportunities for women, both on and off the stage, women in each of these plays sometimes slipped through conventional constraints to embody new possibilities.

Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, Protagonist of Fuenteovejuna

The long-standing critical view that there is a collective protagonist in Fuenteovejuna is reexamined with the intention of proving that this viewpoint disregards important aspects of the play and the so-called sources. When such details are considered the evidence leads to the conclusion that Fernán Gómez de Guzmán is the protagonist. Lope falsifies certain historical facts and expands upon some vague statements found in the "sources" in order to highlight the rôle of the comendador and the theme of peasant honor. The expression "Fuente Ovejuna lo hizo" is simply a ruse thought up after the revolt in order to ensure the failure of the king's investigation. In addition, the attribution of certain speeches during the peasant rebellion to Todos or Todas refers to specific people. Esteban decides to act alone to regain his lost honor and the other peasants join the revolt because of the affronts they had suffered. But it is Esteban who deals the death blow to the cowering comendador . The realization that there is a single protagonist also attests to Lope's skills as a playwright because the comendador generates all of the action in both plots, thus unifying them into a harmonious unit. Fernán Gómez de Guzmán is a significant dramatic figure and not a transplant from a chronicle. He controls the action in both plots even after his death and when, at the end of the play, the king decides that he cannot punish the peasants he is accepting the concept of peasant honor and not rewarding them for protecting the monarchy. (MJR)

Spanish Working-Class History

Spanish history has consistently contrasted the vigor of the working classes with the torpor and ineptness of the upper classes. One sees traces of this in Golden Age dramas, where the servant is often livelier than his master and where, as in Fuente ovejuna, the poor collectively display great dignity and strength. That treatment becomes commonplace during the War of Independence, when in many localities common people forced their betters to join the initial revolt and, once the epic struggle was joined, carried out guerrilla war against the French invader. This dynamism, this capacity to assume unexpected forms, to suddenly erupt on the historical stage in decisive ways, has also characterized the Spanish working classes during the past two centuries. Their uniqueness in supporting anarchism so massively and for so long is well known. So, too, is the role they played during the Spanish Civil War, greater even than that of their ancestors against Napoleon in 1808-14, or of the Russian working classes in 1917-21. The English-speaking scholarly world has long been aware of the distinctive ness of the Spanish working classes. That awareness was born during the Civil War, when they were at their peak, and has been sustained by the continued popularity of such wonderful works as Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth. For many decades, however, this awareness did not lead to an effort to deepen and

Animal Imagery in Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna

The major contribution that animal imagery makes to Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna has not been thoroughly explored by critics. Lope was inspired by such imagery found in works by his predecessors and contemporaries when he composed this masterpiece. The dramatist utilized animal references from bestiaries, folktales, ancient myths, and books by renowned authors as a point of departure for creating an allegorical dimension in the characters of his great play. This paper studies Lope's employment of animal imagery in Fuente Ovejuna and the effects produced by the resulting allegorical dimension of his characters. These effects are: 1) the development of an intense contrast between the forces of good (the noble peasants) and evil (the villainous Fernán Gómez and his men), 2) the vivid and in-depth portrayal of the main characters, and 3) the entertainment of both the educated reader of Lope's day with recognizable allusions to ancient, medieval, and Golden Age literature and the less cultured reader with references to folklore. Although there are animal references in other plays by Lope, the large number of bestial comparisons in Fuente Ovejuna and the well-developed allegorical dimension that they add to his characters shed light on Lope's creative talent and enhance the reader's understanding of the play.

Sententiousness in Fuente Ovejuna

Fuente Ovejuna is probably Lope de Vega's best-known work, perhaps because it can so easily be given an unintended slant: the nature of the central situation, in which the villagers of Fuente Ovejuna join together to kill their tyrannous overlord—the Comendador—and are ultimately pardoned by the King, has made it a favorite with left-wing producers. It is not really a proletarian manifesto, however, and should not be set against a Marxist background: Fuente Ovejuna—like all Spanish Golden Age plays—requires to be seen against the same structuralized vision of Creation as Elizabethan drama. Like so many Elizabethan plays, it is primarily concerned with order and disorder: social disorder seen as cosmic discord, and the restoration of order constituting a reestablishment of cosmic harmony.

Fuenteovejuna: Form and Meaning

One of the leading Spanish scholars of the past hundred years, Menéndez y Pelayo, had this to say of Fuenteovejuna: “Peribáñez and El mejor alcalde, el rey . . . have to do with personal justice or private vengeance. In Fuente Ovejuna what we witness is the vengeance of a whole town; there is no individual protagonist; there is no hero but the demos, the town council of Fuente Ovejuna: when the Royal power intervenes, it is only to sanction and consolidate the revolutionary deed. There is no more democratic play in the whole Castilian theatre” (Vol. V, p. 198). “A drama which is reality itself, brutal and throbbing, but magnified and exalted by the historical genius of the poet… . In Fuente Ovejuna the soul of the people found expression without danger, thanks to the.happy state of political unconsciousness in which the poet and his public lived.

The Historical Elements of Lope De Vega's Fuente Ovejuna

Probably no play of Lope de Vega could claim structural perfection. Nevertheless, in his Fuente Ovejuna, universally accepted as a masterpiece, one marvels that the dynamic sweeping main plot—the stirring recital of this town's rebellion against its tyrannical overlord, the Grand Commander of Calatrava—should have been joined to a secondary plot apparently so irrelevant simply to give an account of a young Grand Master's unsuccessful attack on Cuidad Real. The historical background afforded by this episode in the life of the dashing Maestre, don Rodrigo Téllez Girón, does contribute to our understanding of the troubled first years of Ferdinand and Isabella and, to some extent, to the subtly created mediæval atmosphere. But even as milieu, it is far from essential to the epic account of Fuente Ovejuna's uprising. The Reyes Católicos, accorded attention quite out of proportion to their minor function in the drama—the administration of justice from the horizon—are themselves a distracting element.