The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama

3. Resistance: Waiting for Power in Fuenteovejuna

Lope de Vega's famous play about a popular uprising and revolt throws the "organ transplant" logic of sovereignty into crisis. Here, the conceptual and representational operations of transfer and transplant that effectively restored sovereignty in Measure for Measure are confronted with a dual resistance to the law's desire to "have the body," as the structures of sovereignty protection turn on themselves in an act of political and philosophical autoimmunity.