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Three Major Plays
Lope de Vega (1562-1635), widely regarded as the architect of the drama of the Spanish Golden Age, created plots and characters notable for their energy, inventiveness, and dramatic power. This unique edition includes his most famous play, Fuente Ovejuna , as well as The Knight from Olmedo and Punishment without Revenge . Presented here in superb translation, these plays embody the very best of Lope's dramatic art.
352 pages, Paperback
First published May 6, 1740
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Lope de Vega
1,979Ìýbooks237ÌýfollowersLope de Vega was a Spanish Baroque playwright and poet. His reputation in the world of Spanish letters is second only to that of Cervantes, while the sheer volume of his literary output is unequaled: he is estimated to have written up to 1,500 three-act plays â€� of which some 425 have survived until the modern day â€� together with a plethora of shorter dramatic and poetic works.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 22, 2021
"May heaven protect me from such thoughtsThis collection of three of Lope de Vega's plays includes Fuente Ovejuna, The Knight from Olmedo, and Punishment without Revenge. Overall, the plays were intriguing if not spectacular, with the last play probably being the best.
And dreams that, though I am awake,
Refuse to let me rest! How can it be
That longings such as these possess
Me so entirely? I can explain
It only as some form of utter madness." (201)
August 20, 2017
There will always be a deficiency in any translation from the original language. (I can't imagine how bland Shakespeare would seem in Italian!) Lope de Vega is one of the great Spanish playwrights and fortunately this translation does him good service. Although "Fuente Ovejuna" was not that impressive, I found The Knight from Olmedo excellent. The humor was outstanding and well paced considering the tragedy at the end. A gem of a play and reminiscent of Plautus. "Punishment Without Revenge" was an Aeschylian Greek tragedy with fate as the unmentioned principle actor. Another good drama. This selection was worthwhile and I look forward to reading more of de Vega's work. A prolific master.
November 1, 2021
A celebrated and respected playwright who claimed to have written more than 2000 plays. These 3 are really good, each better than the last. Fuente Ovejuna reveals how tyranny leads to rebellion, The Knight from Olmedo is about youthful passion that can lead to death and Punishment Without Revenge is about a young wife's relationship with her stepson and the revenge of a dishonoured husband.
February 26, 2022
Vega became identified as a playwright with the comedia, a comprehensive term for the new drama of Spain’s Golden Age. Vega’s productivity for the stage, however exaggerated by report, remains phenomenal. He claimed to have written an average of 20 sheets a day throughout his life and left untouched scarcely a vein of writing then current. Cervantes called him “the prodigy of nature.� Juan Pérez de Montalván, his first biographer, in his Fama póstuma (1636), attributed to Vega a total of 1,800 plays, as well as more than 400 autos sacramentales (short allegorical plays on sacramental subjects). The dramatist’s own first figure of 230 plays in 1603 rises to 1,500 in 1632; more than 100, he boasts, were composed and staged in 24 hours. The titles are known of 723 plays and 44 autos, and the texts survive of 426 and 42, respectively.
The earliest firm date for a play written by Vega is 1593. His 18 months in Valencia in 1589�90, during which he was writing for a living, seem to have been decisive in shaping his vocation and his talent. The influence in particular of the Valencian playwright Cristóbal de Virués (1550�1609) was obviously profound. Toward the end of his life, in El laurel de Apolo, Vega credits Virués with having, in his “famous tragedies,� laid the very foundations of the comedia. Virués� five tragedies, written between 1579 and 1590, do indeed display a gradual evolution from a set imitation of Greek tragedy as understood by the Romans to the very threshold of romantic comedy. In the process the five acts previously typical of Spanish plays have become three; the classical chorus has given way to comment within the play, including that implicit in the expansion of a servant’s role to that of confidant; the unities of time, place, and action have disappeared, leaving instead to each act its own setting in time and space; and hendecasyllabic blank verse has yielded to a metrical variety that, seeking to reflect changing moods and situations, also suggests the notable degree of lyricism soon to permeate the drama. The Spanish drama’s confusing of tragic effect with a mere accumulation of tragic happenings has deflected the emphasis from in-depth character portrayal to that of complexity of plot, action, and incident, and the resulting emphasis on intrigues, misunderstandings, and other devices of intricate and complicated dramatic plotting have broken down the old divisions between dramatic genres in favour of an essentially mixed kind, tragicomedy, that would itself soon be known simply as comedia. Finally, from initially portraying kings and princes of remote ages, Virués began to depict near-contemporary Spain and ordinary men and women.
There can be no claiming that Vega learned his whole art from Virués. Bartolomé de Torres Naharro at the beginning of the 16th century had already adumbrated the cloak and sword (cape y espada) play of middle-class manners. A decade before Virués, Juan de la Cueva had discovered the dramatic interest latent in earlier Spanish history and its potential appeal to a public acutely responsive to national greatness. In the formation of the comedia this proved another decisive factor on which Vega fastened instinctively.
It was at this point that Vega picked up the inheritance and, by sheer force of creative genius and fertility of invention, gave the comedia its basic formula and raised it to a peak of splendour. The comedia’s manual was Vega’s own poetic treatise, El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, in which he firmly rejected the Classical and Neoclassical “rules,� opted for a blend of comedy and tragedy and for metrical variety, and made public opinion the ultimate arbiter of taste.
The comedia was essentially, therefore, a social drama, ringing a thousand changes on the accepted foundations of society: respect for crown, for church, and for the human personality, the latter being symbolized in the “point of honour� (pundonor) that Vega commended as the best theme of all “since there are none but are strongly moved thereby.� This “point of honour� was a matter largely of convention, “honour� being equivalent, in a very limited and brittle sense, to social reputation; men were expected to be brave and proud and not to put up with an insult, while “honour� for women basically meant maintaining their chastity (if unmarried) or their fidelity (if married). It followed that this was a drama less of character than of action and intrigue that rarely, if ever, grasped the true essence of tragedy.
Few of the plays that Vega wrote were perfect, but he had an unerring sense for the theme and detail that could move an audience conscious of being on the crest of its country’s greatness to respond to a mirroring on the stage of some of the basic ingredients of that greatness. Because of him the comedia became a vast sounding board for every chord in the Spanish consciousness, a “national� drama in the truest sense.
In theme Vega’s plays range over a vast horizon. Traditionally his plays have been grouped as religious, mythological, classical, historical (foreign and national), pastoral, chivalric, fantastic, and of contemporary manners. In essence the categories come down to two, both Spanish in setting: the heroic, historical play based on some national story or legend, and the cloak and sword drama (q.v.) of contemporary manners and intrigue.
For his historical plays Vega ransacked the medieval chronicle, the romancero, and popular legend and song for heroic themes, chosen for the most part as throwing into relief some aspect either of the national character or of that social solidarity on which contemporary Spain’s greatness rested. The conception of the crown as fount of justice and bulwark of the humble against oppression inspires some of his finest plays. Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocaña), El mejor alcalde, el rey (The King, the Greatest Alcalde), and Fuente Ovejuna (All Citizens Are Soldiers) are still memorable and highly dramatic vindications of the inalienable rights of the individual, as is El caballero de Olmedo (The Knight from Olmedo) on a more exalted social plane. In Fuente Ovejuna the entire village assumes responsibility before the king for the slaying of its overlord and wins his exoneration. This experiment in mass psychology, the best known outside Spain of all his plays, evoked a particular response from audiences in tsarist Russia.
Vega’s cloak and sword plays are all compounded of the same ingredients and feature the same basic situations: gallants and ladies falling endlessly in and out of love, the “point of honour� being sometimes engaged, but very rarely the heart, while servants imitate or parody the main action and one, the gracioso, exercises his wit and common sense in commenting on the follies of his social superiors. El perro del hortelano (The Gardener’s Dog), Por la puente Juana (Across the Bridge, Joan), La dama boba (The Lady Nit-Wit), La moza de cántaro (The Girl with the Jug), and El villano en su rincón (The Peasant’s House Is His Castle) are reckoned among the best in this minor if still-entertaining kind of play.
All Vega’s plays suffer from haste of composition, partly a consequence of the public’s insatiable desire for novelty. His first acts are commonly his best, with the third a hasty cutting of knots or tying up of loose ends that takes scant account both of probability and of psychology. There was, too, a limit to his inventiveness in the recurrence of basic themes and situations, particularly in his cloak and sword plays. But Vega’s defects, like his strength, derive from the accuracy with which he projected onto the stage the essence of his country and age. Vega’s plays remain true to the great age of Spain into which he had been born and which he had come to know, intuitively rather than by study, as no one had ever known it before.
Vega’s nondramatic works in verse and prose filled 21 volumes in 1776�79. Much of this vast output has withered, but its variety remains impressive. Vega wrote pastoral romances, verse histories of recent events, verse biographies of Spanish saints, long epic poems and burlesques upon such works, and prose tales, imitating or adapting works by Ariosto and Cervantes in the process. His lyric compositions—ballads, elegies, epistles, sonnets (there are 1,587 of these)—are myriad. Formally they rely much on the conceit, and in content they provide a running commentary on the poet’s whole emotional life.
Among specific nondramatic works that deserve to be mentioned are the 7,000-line Laurel de Apolo (1630), depicting Apollo’s crowning of the poets of Spain on Helicon, which remains of interest as a guide to the poets and poetasters of the day; La Dorotea (1632), a thinly veiled chapter of autobiography cast in dialogue form that grows in critical esteem as the most mature and reflective of his writings; and, listed last because it provides a bridge and key to his plays, the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo. This verse apology rested on the sound Aristotelian principle that the dramatist’s first duty is to hold and satisfy his audience: the comedia, he says in effect, had developed in response to what the Spanish public demanded of the theatre. The treatise provides a clear picture of the principles and conventions of a drama entitled to be called national in its close identification with the social values and emotional responses of the age.
The earliest firm date for a play written by Vega is 1593. His 18 months in Valencia in 1589�90, during which he was writing for a living, seem to have been decisive in shaping his vocation and his talent. The influence in particular of the Valencian playwright Cristóbal de Virués (1550�1609) was obviously profound. Toward the end of his life, in El laurel de Apolo, Vega credits Virués with having, in his “famous tragedies,� laid the very foundations of the comedia. Virués� five tragedies, written between 1579 and 1590, do indeed display a gradual evolution from a set imitation of Greek tragedy as understood by the Romans to the very threshold of romantic comedy. In the process the five acts previously typical of Spanish plays have become three; the classical chorus has given way to comment within the play, including that implicit in the expansion of a servant’s role to that of confidant; the unities of time, place, and action have disappeared, leaving instead to each act its own setting in time and space; and hendecasyllabic blank verse has yielded to a metrical variety that, seeking to reflect changing moods and situations, also suggests the notable degree of lyricism soon to permeate the drama. The Spanish drama’s confusing of tragic effect with a mere accumulation of tragic happenings has deflected the emphasis from in-depth character portrayal to that of complexity of plot, action, and incident, and the resulting emphasis on intrigues, misunderstandings, and other devices of intricate and complicated dramatic plotting have broken down the old divisions between dramatic genres in favour of an essentially mixed kind, tragicomedy, that would itself soon be known simply as comedia. Finally, from initially portraying kings and princes of remote ages, Virués began to depict near-contemporary Spain and ordinary men and women.
There can be no claiming that Vega learned his whole art from Virués. Bartolomé de Torres Naharro at the beginning of the 16th century had already adumbrated the cloak and sword (cape y espada) play of middle-class manners. A decade before Virués, Juan de la Cueva had discovered the dramatic interest latent in earlier Spanish history and its potential appeal to a public acutely responsive to national greatness. In the formation of the comedia this proved another decisive factor on which Vega fastened instinctively.
It was at this point that Vega picked up the inheritance and, by sheer force of creative genius and fertility of invention, gave the comedia its basic formula and raised it to a peak of splendour. The comedia’s manual was Vega’s own poetic treatise, El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, in which he firmly rejected the Classical and Neoclassical “rules,� opted for a blend of comedy and tragedy and for metrical variety, and made public opinion the ultimate arbiter of taste.
The comedia was essentially, therefore, a social drama, ringing a thousand changes on the accepted foundations of society: respect for crown, for church, and for the human personality, the latter being symbolized in the “point of honour� (pundonor) that Vega commended as the best theme of all “since there are none but are strongly moved thereby.� This “point of honour� was a matter largely of convention, “honour� being equivalent, in a very limited and brittle sense, to social reputation; men were expected to be brave and proud and not to put up with an insult, while “honour� for women basically meant maintaining their chastity (if unmarried) or their fidelity (if married). It followed that this was a drama less of character than of action and intrigue that rarely, if ever, grasped the true essence of tragedy.
Few of the plays that Vega wrote were perfect, but he had an unerring sense for the theme and detail that could move an audience conscious of being on the crest of its country’s greatness to respond to a mirroring on the stage of some of the basic ingredients of that greatness. Because of him the comedia became a vast sounding board for every chord in the Spanish consciousness, a “national� drama in the truest sense.
In theme Vega’s plays range over a vast horizon. Traditionally his plays have been grouped as religious, mythological, classical, historical (foreign and national), pastoral, chivalric, fantastic, and of contemporary manners. In essence the categories come down to two, both Spanish in setting: the heroic, historical play based on some national story or legend, and the cloak and sword drama (q.v.) of contemporary manners and intrigue.
For his historical plays Vega ransacked the medieval chronicle, the romancero, and popular legend and song for heroic themes, chosen for the most part as throwing into relief some aspect either of the national character or of that social solidarity on which contemporary Spain’s greatness rested. The conception of the crown as fount of justice and bulwark of the humble against oppression inspires some of his finest plays. Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocaña), El mejor alcalde, el rey (The King, the Greatest Alcalde), and Fuente Ovejuna (All Citizens Are Soldiers) are still memorable and highly dramatic vindications of the inalienable rights of the individual, as is El caballero de Olmedo (The Knight from Olmedo) on a more exalted social plane. In Fuente Ovejuna the entire village assumes responsibility before the king for the slaying of its overlord and wins his exoneration. This experiment in mass psychology, the best known outside Spain of all his plays, evoked a particular response from audiences in tsarist Russia.
Vega’s cloak and sword plays are all compounded of the same ingredients and feature the same basic situations: gallants and ladies falling endlessly in and out of love, the “point of honour� being sometimes engaged, but very rarely the heart, while servants imitate or parody the main action and one, the gracioso, exercises his wit and common sense in commenting on the follies of his social superiors. El perro del hortelano (The Gardener’s Dog), Por la puente Juana (Across the Bridge, Joan), La dama boba (The Lady Nit-Wit), La moza de cántaro (The Girl with the Jug), and El villano en su rincón (The Peasant’s House Is His Castle) are reckoned among the best in this minor if still-entertaining kind of play.
All Vega’s plays suffer from haste of composition, partly a consequence of the public’s insatiable desire for novelty. His first acts are commonly his best, with the third a hasty cutting of knots or tying up of loose ends that takes scant account both of probability and of psychology. There was, too, a limit to his inventiveness in the recurrence of basic themes and situations, particularly in his cloak and sword plays. But Vega’s defects, like his strength, derive from the accuracy with which he projected onto the stage the essence of his country and age. Vega’s plays remain true to the great age of Spain into which he had been born and which he had come to know, intuitively rather than by study, as no one had ever known it before.
Vega’s nondramatic works in verse and prose filled 21 volumes in 1776�79. Much of this vast output has withered, but its variety remains impressive. Vega wrote pastoral romances, verse histories of recent events, verse biographies of Spanish saints, long epic poems and burlesques upon such works, and prose tales, imitating or adapting works by Ariosto and Cervantes in the process. His lyric compositions—ballads, elegies, epistles, sonnets (there are 1,587 of these)—are myriad. Formally they rely much on the conceit, and in content they provide a running commentary on the poet’s whole emotional life.
Among specific nondramatic works that deserve to be mentioned are the 7,000-line Laurel de Apolo (1630), depicting Apollo’s crowning of the poets of Spain on Helicon, which remains of interest as a guide to the poets and poetasters of the day; La Dorotea (1632), a thinly veiled chapter of autobiography cast in dialogue form that grows in critical esteem as the most mature and reflective of his writings; and, listed last because it provides a bridge and key to his plays, the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo. This verse apology rested on the sound Aristotelian principle that the dramatist’s first duty is to hold and satisfy his audience: the comedia, he says in effect, had developed in response to what the Spanish public demanded of the theatre. The treatise provides a clear picture of the principles and conventions of a drama entitled to be called national in its close identification with the social values and emotional responses of the age.
April 24, 2024
Spain's greatest Golden Age playwright, Lope de Vega (1562-1635), claimed to have written nearly 2,000 plays during his lifetime. Historians think 500 is probably more accurate, though still an absolutely insane number to have been written by a single individual.
Here we have three: Fuente Ovejuna (about a group of peasants banding together to overthrow their villainous lord; de Vega's most famous play outside of Spain), The Knight from Olmedo (about a doomed love affair, wherein a spurned suitor murders his rival for a woman's attention), and Punishment Without Revenge (about a Duke who decides to disinherit his bastard son by marrying a woman; unfortunately, she falls in love with the son instead of the father, and things do not end well).
All three plays had a similar vibe to Lope's contemporary playwright, Shakespeare, but in a shorter and more rushed form. Imagine Macbeth rewritten as a 30-minute sitcom and you'll get the idea. Lope claimed that he wrote many of his plays in 24 hours or less, rushing to meet a voracious demand for new plays, so honestly weekly sitcom probably isn't far off from the reality.
I read this as part of my general investigation into Early Modern Spain, as background to Don Quixote, and it's pretty fascinating in that regard. You can see many similar themes popping up in both Cervantes's and Lope's works –Ìýthe question of what is honor, the role of women in a strongly patriarchal society, the ideals of courtly love placed into more realistic settings and personalities, an attachment to twisty plots and sudden reveals â€� though Lope tends to have a more straightforward, shallower treatment of them. Of course, Lope only has about 70 pages per play to work with, compared to Cervantes's 1000 pages of Don Quixote, so it's hard to blame Lope for not delving as deeply.
Would I recommend this if you're not comparing it to Don Quixote? Eh. It's an intriguing little time capsule, but there weren't any lines I found memorable, nor any plots or characters that aren't fairly cliche. Worth far more for its historical than its literary value.
Here we have three: Fuente Ovejuna (about a group of peasants banding together to overthrow their villainous lord; de Vega's most famous play outside of Spain), The Knight from Olmedo (about a doomed love affair, wherein a spurned suitor murders his rival for a woman's attention), and Punishment Without Revenge (about a Duke who decides to disinherit his bastard son by marrying a woman; unfortunately, she falls in love with the son instead of the father, and things do not end well).
All three plays had a similar vibe to Lope's contemporary playwright, Shakespeare, but in a shorter and more rushed form. Imagine Macbeth rewritten as a 30-minute sitcom and you'll get the idea. Lope claimed that he wrote many of his plays in 24 hours or less, rushing to meet a voracious demand for new plays, so honestly weekly sitcom probably isn't far off from the reality.
I read this as part of my general investigation into Early Modern Spain, as background to Don Quixote, and it's pretty fascinating in that regard. You can see many similar themes popping up in both Cervantes's and Lope's works –Ìýthe question of what is honor, the role of women in a strongly patriarchal society, the ideals of courtly love placed into more realistic settings and personalities, an attachment to twisty plots and sudden reveals â€� though Lope tends to have a more straightforward, shallower treatment of them. Of course, Lope only has about 70 pages per play to work with, compared to Cervantes's 1000 pages of Don Quixote, so it's hard to blame Lope for not delving as deeply.
Would I recommend this if you're not comparing it to Don Quixote? Eh. It's an intriguing little time capsule, but there weren't any lines I found memorable, nor any plots or characters that aren't fairly cliche. Worth far more for its historical than its literary value.
January 12, 2019
I particularly enjoyed Feunte Ovejuna by Vega, this is my first interaction with Spanish literature from the Golden Age (the equivalent to the English Renaissance period). The vivid imagery and engaging language enable the play to come alive in front of your eyes, you feel as if you are a participant in the play. I also champion Vega’s criticism of the aristocracy and gentry through the horrible characterisations of the Commander, the Master and the King and Queen. Vega moves away from the common idea that those who belong to the ‘upper� classes are inherently good or pure due to their social ranking and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the comical episodes throughout the play, take away from the sombre central message and allow the reader to enjoy the play. Lastly, as the play concluded I liked the creation of the women’s army by Laurencia, Vega’s depiction of women deviates from the convention of the time and is quite modern in some sense; through the characterisation of Laurencia, Vega shows that women can be physically strong, intimidating and have agency. I would read this play again.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 15, 2024
Perfectly serviceable teaching edition. Most folks will be grabbing this for Fuente Ovejuna, I suppose. It's too small for a standalone volume for Oxford, apparently, so we get the other two plays as make weights. The Knight From Olmedo is okay but the more interesting addition is Punishment Without Revenge, a sturdy little morality tale whose worst violence takes place off stage. It is nevertheless right up there with some of nastier Jacobean dramas in English for sheer perversity. The introduction is readable and clear with a decent bibliography. As is usually the case with these volumes, the end notes are thin but cover most of the most obscure points a general reader might need addressed. Translations don't attempt to reproduce the rhyme scheme of Lope de Vega, though a rough and ready octosyllabic line seems to be the norm. Occasional rhymes keep the briskness of the original in mind, at least.
January 19, 2025
Overall, a good collection of plays that I'm glad to have read, even if I didn't always enjoy the stories themselves (such is the nature of tragedies).
A Knight from Olmedo is in many ways the simplest of the three plays, at least from what I drew from it. The story is told well, but I'm not sure how much I had to reflect on the story--or how much I'll remember it.
My thoughts on Fuenteovejuna can be found here: /review/show...
My thoughts on Punishment without Revenge can be found here: /review/show...
A Knight from Olmedo is in many ways the simplest of the three plays, at least from what I drew from it. The story is told well, but I'm not sure how much I had to reflect on the story--or how much I'll remember it.
My thoughts on Fuenteovejuna can be found here: /review/show...
My thoughts on Punishment without Revenge can be found here: /review/show...
Shelved as 'read-an-excerpt'
January 23, 2022Read for HUMS3200 at Carleton University. Read only the first half of Act 1.
July 14, 2015
A little too easy to read - I suspect that a lot of the poetry of the original Spanish was diluted down in this translation. It affects the first two plays - "Fuente Ovejuna" and "The Knight from Olmedo" - the most, making them lack the emotional depth or punch that they otherwise might have. "Punishment Without Revenge" is still really good (I feel like the translator puts more effort into saving the poetry in the longer soliloquies and in the interactions between the duchess and her stepson), but the ending is just so easy to zoom past quickly that it loses the huge impact it would otherwise have if you were challenged to sit with the dialogue more, to actually engage with what is being said. As it is, it's fine, but if a modern English re-enactment of the play used this translation for its lines, the actors would need to be near-perfect in order to actually sell some of the pedestrian passages.
May 27, 2012
This is a very bland modern translation that strips all poetry and musicality out of de Vega's language. I found it difficult to get much pleasure out of the versions of the plays in this collection. And the book has a surprising number of typos - 'chose' for 'choose,' 'its' for 'it's,' etc. I've been unimpressed with the quality of paper and especially the cover material of recent Oxford paperbacks, but usually it seems like the content is at least better prepared and edited.
February 18, 2008
i read Fuente ovejuna, which is based on a true story. This is the only translation i have read, and it was rather comedic, though the story is a dramatic one. I was reminded of Shakespeare a little bit, what with the dirty jokes and puns. I enjoyed it, i'd like to read another translation.
October 29, 2016
Read Fuente Ovejuna
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April 15, 2022Fuente ovejuna 1612/14
The Knight of Olmedo 1620/5
Punishment without revenge 1631
The Knight of Olmedo 1620/5
Punishment without revenge 1631
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