Recruiting the Literary Tradition: Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna as Cultural Weapon during the Spanish Civil War

Few readers or spectators disagree about the internal dynamics of Lope de Vega's play Fuenteovejuna (1612). The people of Fuenteovejuna rise against a tyrannical, unjust ruler who fails in his duties as a nobleman and represents a threat to the village's loyalty to the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Nonetheless, external factors lead Fuenteovejuna to remain a highly controversial work that has been read and interpreted in wildly divergent ways. This paper examines contradictory approaches to the play during the Spanish Civil War in order to consider how contexts and influences outside the text perform a vital role in its interpretation. Contemporary sociopolitical issues colored Nationalist and Republican approaches to Fuenteovejuna, thereby producing radically dissonant readings of Lope's work that justified each group's ideological position within the civil conflict. The desire to find symbolic or allegorical meaning in the characters and circumstances of the drama opens the way for modern ideologies, politics, social issues, and cultural paradigms to flood the work with new meanings.