Fuente Ovejuna (1619)

Uma leitura que continua emocionante após quatrocentos anos. E continua utópico pensar que todo mundo agiria da forma que é melhor para todos. Infelizmente. ( )

Fuenteovejuna is an excellent complement to Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña due to the fact that they share a common conflict: an unjust Comendador who abuses his power over his vassals. This Comendador, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, is much worse than Casilda and Peribáñez's enemy. He abducts and rapes women, demeaning the men who try and stand up to him by ordering them to be beaten or threatening to have them killed. The townspeople beg him to be honorable and to stop abusing his power, but the Comendador is totally, completely out of control and will not change his ways. There's romance here too, between Frondoso and Laurencia, but their courtship and marriage is subordinated and incorporated into the main plot, wherein the townspeople slowly get fed up and decide they can't take the Comendador's abuses anymore. The suspense lies not only in whether they'll be able to topple the tyrant, but also in whether King Fernando (who with Isabela would later send Columbus on his fateful voyage) will tolerate the commission of a just crime that violates the rigid social hierarchy of fifteenth century Spain. Even if the vassals assassinate the lord, will they be allowed to get away with it?

As I read Peribáñez, I started wondering about the audiences who viewed these plays by Lope. I read an article about the theater scene in Madrid in Lope's time and learned that these plays were written to be performed in Madrid's two Corrales de comedia, one of which was on the Calle de la Cruz and the other on the Calle del Príncipe. In some ways, they were similar to the Globe theater where Shakespeare's plays were performed (except that Lope wasn't part-owner of the theater and only got paid for the scripts, which in part explains his constant creation of new works over the course of his life). The audience represented a cross-section of society, with the lower class men occupying the floor (the "Mosquetero"), the women in their own special section (the "Cazuela"), the nobles in box seats, and special seating for the clergy and the King if he chose to attend. The thing that stood out to me the most was the general rowdiness attributed to the crowd: they were ready to hate a play and let their opinion known with catcalls and projectiles. Thus Lope's insistence on constant action: a bored crowd is an adverse crowd. In the context of this play, though, I wondered about the opposite phenomenon: what happens when the crowd gets too enthusiastic? The action in this play rises and rises and rises, with the town's men and women meeting separately to debate what they're going to do about this evil Comendador. Then the crime is committed, and eventually two of the townspeople are listening to their friends and neighbors being tortured as the authorities are trying to get to the bottom of what happened in Fuenteovejuna. I imagine the crowd to be wholly invested in the action at this point of the play, and I imagine the theater owners and employees to be very nervous. At a certain point an out of control crowd becomes destructive, whether it's a happy crowd or an angry one.

Maybe that's why Lope brings the King at the end of so many of his plays: to bring order not only to the story, but also to the audience. After action-packed plays where characters' honor is upheld in violent and often somewhat subversive ways, the crowd probably needed some cool-down time. I imagine that the sight of the King onstage reminded them of their place in the social hierarchy, and that even though they'd just watched normal people like themselves take out their pent-up aggression on their unjust ruler, they were still subjects of the King of Spain and it was time for them to settle down and exit the theater in an orderly fashion. ( )