Lope de Vega: Fuente Ovejuna

Fuente Ovejuna (c. 1613) is the most famous and frequently performed play by the creator of the Spanish classical theatre, Lope de Vega. Astonishingly for its period, it celebrates the murder in 1476 of a nobleman, the Grand Commander of the Military Order of Calatrava, by the peasants he had oppressed, and their subsequent solidarity under torture. Fuente Ovejuna, however, is less a history lesson or a political tract than an optimistic moral fable.