Fuente Ovejuna

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price

A masterpiece by one of the greatest writers of the Spanish Golden Age.

When the people of the town of Fuente Ovejuna revolt against their tyrannical overlord and murder him, the authorities attempt to find out who is responsible, leading to one of the most memorable acts of resistance in world drama.

First published in Madrid in 1619, Lope de Vega's play Fuente Ovejuna is believed to have been written between 1612 and 1614.

This edition in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series is an English translation by Laurence Boswell.

'Thrilling and moving, accessible and unusual, raw and intensely sophisticated' - Chicago Tribune

Auteur

Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was Spain's first great playwright. The most prolific dramatist in the history of the theatre, he is believed to have written some 1500 plays of which about 470 survive. He established the conventions for the Spanish comedia in the last decade of the 16th century, influenced the development of the zarzuela, and wrote numerous autosacramentales.The son of an embroiderer, he took part in the conquest of Terceira in the Azores (1583) and sailed with the Armada in 1588, an event that inspired his epic poem La Dragentea (1597). Among his many notable works are Fuenteovejuna (c. 1614) in which villagers murder their tyrannous feudal lord and are saved by the king's intervention, and El castigo sin venganza, in which a licentious duke maintains his public reputation by killing his adulterous wife and her illegitimate son.