The Politics of Agriculture: Dramatizing Agrarian Plight in Lope's Fuenteovejuna

Among the numerous socio-historical subtexts that inform the plot of Lope's Fuenteovejuna is an often-overlooked economic subtext that is related to agrarian issues that were of great importance in Golden Age Spain. For the purpose of this study, Fuenteovejuna is resituated within the economic and political climate of early seventeenth-century Spain to show how many notorious agrarian dilemmas known to exist during Lope's time also appear in his play in references to farming, shepherding, crop production, grain storage, and famine. Such a recontextualization of the play likewise shows that the assorted allusions to agriculture are actually relevant to Lope's epoch and not to the time of the dramatic action, 1476. The study then explores how these agrarian problems are generally attributable to the Comendador in the play whose murder symbolically resolves the play's agrarian dilemmas and, similarly, acts as a symbolic resolution for early seventeenth-century agrarian problems that ground the play. (CMG)