Three Major Plays (2 page)

Lope Félix de Vega Carpio was born in Madrid on 25 November 1562, the
son of Felices de Vega Carpio and his wife, Francisca, both from the
area around Santander. From his father Lope seems to have inherited an
impulsive nature, a combination of erotic and religious tendencies,
and a capacity for writing verse, for it is said that he dictated
verses before the age of 5 and was writing plays at the age of 12. He
received his early education at a Jesuit school in Madrid and later at
the University of Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, where he was a
student until about 1582. His impulsive nature is revealed by the fact
that at the age of 12 or 13 he ran away from school with a friend,
but was eventually caught and sent home. His early twenties also saw
the beginning of his involvement in amorous affairs which would
greatly complicate his life.
³

Around 1583 Lope fell passionately in love with Elena Osorio, the
daughter of an actor-manager for whom he had agreed to write plays.
The relationship lasted until 1587, when Elena began to show her
affections for someone else, a betrayal which Lope attempted to avenge
by publishing libellous attacks against her and her family. Tried for
libel in 1588, he was banished from Madrid for eight years and from
Castile for two. Defying the sentence, despite the threat of
execution, Lope returned to Madrid in order to elope with Isabel de
Urbina Alderete y Cortinas, daughter of the King at Arms, whom he
married without her parents' permission before joining his brother on
the
San Juan
, a ship which was part of the Spanish Armada bound
for England. After his return he lived in Valencia until 1590 when,
his banishment from Castile over, he moved to Toledo and then to Alba de
Torres, near Salamanca, where he entered the service of the Duke of
Alba. After the death of his wife in 1595 he began a series of
relationships with various women: an involvement with Antonia Trillo
de Armento in 1596 led to his appearance before the courts; in 1598 he
married Juana de Guarda, the daughter of a wealthy Madrid butcher;
and shortly afterwards he embarked on

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an extramarital affair with Micaela de Luján, a beautiful and wellknown
actress whose husband was out of the country. The relationship lasted
for some eight years and produced a large number of children.

During these years Lope worked in the service of various noblemen and,
when his second wife died in 1613, he became a priest. Despite this,
his amorous exploits continued, for two years later he began an affair
with Marta de Nevares Santoyo, a married woman living with her
husband in Madrid. Lope took her to live with him but she later became
blind and insane, dying in 1632. It was one of several tragedies
which clouded Lope's last years. In 1634 his 16year-old daughter,
Antonia, ran off with an influential courtier, and in the same year
his son Lope was drowned in the Caribbean. Lope himself died one year
later, on 27 August 1935.

Lope de
Vega's amorous drive was surpassed only by his energy as a writer, for
his literary works embraced prose and poetry, as well as drama. A
pastoral novel,
Arcadia
, appeared in 1598, while his last work was a prose piece in dialogue form --
La Dorotea
-- which drew on his early love affair with Elena Osorio. He also
wrote several epic poems and various volumes of shorter poems. But it
was, of course, as a dramatist that he was most prolific, the phrase
used by Cervantes to describe him --
monstruo de naturaleza
(monster of Nature) -suggesting his amazing productivity. Lope boasted
of writing a play a day, and one of his contemporaries, Juan Pérez de
Montalbán, claimed after Lope's death that 1,800 secular plays and 400
religious plays had been performed. Modern scholarship points to
around 340 extant plays -- many have disappeared -- which are
definitely by Lope. These alone are ten times as many plays as
Shakespeare wrote, and as many as all the works of the other
Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists put together.

More than any other dramatist, Lope gave the theatre of the Golden
Age its definitive form, paving the way for younger dramatists such as
Tirso de Molina and Calderón. Its principal characteristics,
demonstrated in the plays and set out in his poetic essay,
The New Art of Writing Plays
(
Arte nuevo de hacer comedias
),
consisted of: mixing the comic and the serious; breaking the
classical unities of action, time, and place; making the characters
speak in an appropriate style; and combining entertainment with a moral
purpose. As far as subject matter is concerned, Lope's range was very
great

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indeed.
⁴
Many of his plays belong to the tradition of the
comedia de capa y espada
(cloak-and-dagger plays): light comedies of love and jealousy in
which the characters belong to the lower nobility. Many other amorous
comedies, however, fall outside this category, for their characters
come from a higher social class, one of the bestknown being
The Dog in the Manger (El perro del hortelano)
( 161315), its characters well drawn and its plot cleverly managed.
Another fertile source for Lope's imagination was the Bible, which
provided him with material for two kinds of play extremely popular at
the time:
comedias a lo divino
(religious plays) and
comedias de santo
(plays about saints). An example of the former is
The Beautiful Esther (La hermosa Ester)
( 1610). History also yielded many powerful stories. From ancient history came
Against Bravery there is no Misfortune (Contra valor no hay desdicha)
( 1625-30), which dramatizes the rise of Cyrus of Persia, while from
more recent Spanish history Lope fashioned plays which had lessons for
the present. Such is
The Duke of Viseo (El Duque de Viseo)
(
1608-9), in which the innocent Duke becomes the victim of a suspicious
king, of envy, and of circumstances, the play serving as a warning
for those who rule and administer justice. Lope's most famous
'historical' play is, though,
Fuente Ovejuna
( 1612-14), its
action set in the fifteenth century during the reign of Ferdinand and
Isabella. Within this historical context, Lope focuses on the abuses
perpetrated upon the inhabitants of the village of Fuente Ovejuna by
Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, their overlord and Commander of the Order of
Calatrava.

Lope also wrote a number
of powerful tragedies, some inspired by historical stories, others
based on popular or literary sources. Two of the very best of these --
justifying their inclusion here -- are
The Knight from Olmedo (El caballero de Olmedo)
( 1620-5) and
Punishment Without Revenge (El castigo sin venganza)
( 1631). The former is the story of two young lovers, Inés and
Alonso, who foolishly conduct their love affair through the
machinations of a cunning go-between, Fabia.
Punishment Without Revenge
is a still darker piece, its action centred on the womanizing Duke of Ferrara, his illegitimate son Federico,

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and the Duke's young bride Casandra, who, abandoned by her husband, engages in a fatal affair with her stepson.

Fuente Ovejuna
was first published in Madrid in 1619 in the
Docena parte de las comedias de Lope de Vega
(volume
12 of his collected plays). As far as the date of composition is
concerned, S. Griswold Morley and C. Bruerton have suggested, on the
basis of their study of Lope's metres and rhyme schemes, that it was
written between 1611 and 1618, and probably between 1612 and 1614.
⁵

The action of
Fuente Ovejuna
is set in 1476, roughly 150 years before its composition, and is
based to a large extent on historical events. In 1469 Princess
Isabella of Castile had married Ferdinand of Aragon, joining the
destinies of the two great kingdoms and paving the way for Spain's
great achievements in the years ahead, in particular the completion of
the Reconquest of Spain from the Muslims and the discovery and
conquest of the New World. Although Isabella did not succeed to the
throne of Castile until the death of her half-brother, Enrique IV, in
1479, 1476 proved to be an important year in several ways. First, in
March of that year the forces of Isabella and Ferdinand defeated in
the Battle of Toro the troops of Juana la Beltraneja and her husband,
Alfonso of Portugal, claimants to the throne of Castile, and thus
consolidated Isabella's position. Secondly, in support of the claims
of Juana and Alfonso to the crown of Castile, the 17-year-old Rodrigo
Téllez Girón, Grand Master of the Military Order of Calatrava,
attacked and seized the town of Ciudad Real, important for its
strategic position near the border of Castile. And thirdly, 1476 was
the year in which the citizens of Fuente Ovejuna, a town in the
province of Cordoba, rebelled against their overlord, Fernán Gómez de
Guzmán, a Commander of the Order of Calatrava under the authority of
Rodrigo Téllez Girón, killing him in revenge for his cruel and brutal
behaviour towards them. When the incident was subsequently investigated
by an emissary of the royal authorities, and the villagers were
interrogated and even tortured in an attempt to discover the guilty

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parties, the only response proved to be a communal one: 'Fuente
Ovejuna killed him'. Consequently, no individual guilt could be
established and no one was punished.

Various sources have been suggested for the play: in particular, Francisco de Rades y Andrada
Chrónica de las tres Ordenes y Cavallerías de Santiago, Calatrava y Alcántara
,
published in Toledo in 1572, and two works by Sebasti n de Covarrubias Horozco: the
Emblemas morales
of 1610, and the
Tesoro de la lengua castellana
of 1611. In the
Emblemas morales
Covarrubias described the confusion of the judge sent to investigate
the incident at Fuente Ovejuna when he is confronted by the solidarity
of the inhabitants. In the
Tesoro de la lengua castellana
he
provided a more detailed account of the villagers' rebellion against
their overlord, drew attention to the latter's alleged offences
against his vassals, and explained the origin of the subsequently
popular phrase 'Fuente Ovejuna lo hizo' ('Fuente Ovejuna did it').
Nevertheless, the information provided by Covarrubias is relatively
limited in comparison with the detailed account presented by Francisco
de Rades y Andrada in the
Chrónica
, and there can be no doubt that this became the principal source of Lope's play.
⁶

In general, Lope followed Rades
Chrónica
quite closely, but also introduced significant changes. One of the
most important concerns the attack on Ciudad Real by Rodrigo Téllez
Girón. In the
Chrónica
he is persuaded to seize the town by his
cousin and his brother, but in the play it is Fernán Gómez who urges
him to do so. Fernán Gómez is thus presented as an even greater
villain, for he is responsible both for the atrocities against the
citizens of Fuente Ovejuna and for an act of treachery against the
Catholic Kings. The play's main plot -- the events of Fuente Ovejuna
-- has a local significance which, through the events of the sub-plot
-- the attack on Ciudad Real -- acquires a much more national,
political dimension, underlining the fact that it is in part a play
about the abuse of political power. Writing it between 1612 and 1614,
when Spain was ruled by Philip III, Lope knew that power was
effectively in the hands of a royal favourite, the Duke of Lerma.
Lope's play is thus a comment

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on contemporary events, a lesson both for kings and their ministers.
In contrast to the essentially weak Philip III, the Catholic Kings are
presented as model rulers, eager to bring peace and justice to a
previously unruly Castile. When they are informed of wrongs and
injustices, they send their representatives to investigate and seek the
truth, and, in consequence of the findings, act fairly and justly.
Moreover, they inspire a loyalty in most of their subjects which is
emphasized throughout the play. In this respect Lope's idealization of
the Catholic Kings is little different from his presentation of royal
figures in other plays in which the stability of society is an
important theme, nor indeed is it very different from the treatment of
kings in some of the plays of Shakespeare. In order to draw attention
to his political theme, Lope had no reservations about distorting
historical truth, in accordance with the Aristotelian doctrine that
fiction is superior to history. The fact that
Fuente Ovejuna
depicts the triumph of the oppressed over an evil overlord should not,
however, be taken to signal Lope's approval of revolution. Rather, he
shared the desire of his contemporaries for the continuity of
established social structures, ending the play, therefore, not with the
victory of the citizens but with the restitution of order by the
Catholic Kings.
⁷

The moral dimension embodied in the evil behaviour of Fernán Gómez
towards essentially good peasants lies too at the heart of another of
the play's principal themes: the contrast between court and country.
Praise of the countryside and condemnation of city life -- a
preoccupation of Classical authors such as Horace -- later found
expression in European writers of the Renaissance, and in Spain, for
example, in Antonio de Guevara influential
Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (Contempt for the Court and Praise of the Village)
of 1539. Praise of country life was based in part on aspects of the
countryside -- freedom, fresh air, cheap and wholesome food and drink
-- which were not to be found in the city or at Court. But equal, if
not more, importance was attached to the moral superiority of country
people, who were thought to lack the cunning and deviousness of those
who lived in cities. As presented by Guevara and others, such a view
was clearly both an idealization and an over-

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