Fuenteovejuna

Fuenteovejuna is a play by the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, written in Spanish between approximately 1612 and 1614 and first published in Madrid in 1619 as part of a collected volume of his comedias. The play dramatizes real historical events: a 1476 uprising in the Castilian village of Fuenteovejuna, in which the villagers rose up together and killed their abusive military commander, Fernan Gomez de Guzman, a knight of the Order of Calatrava, and then, when royal investigators demanded to know who was responsible, collectively answered that Fuenteovejuna itself had done it, refusing under interrogation and torture to name any individual. Largely unknown outside Spain for centuries and not translated into English until the 1930s, the play has since become one of Lope de Vega's most widely performed and adapted works, prized for its early dramatization of collective resistance to tyranny and its depiction of a community acting, and answering, as one.