Class, Gender and Community in Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna

The following article examines the portrayal of interclass conflict, specifically the favourable treatment of aggressive self-definition by commoners, in two early modern plays, Thomas Dekker's popular citizen drama, The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), and Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (1612-14), which is based on a historical peasant uprising in fifteenth-century Andalusia. While the two plays present class conflict in terms of sexual rivalry and sexualised abuse by social superiors, a factor which allowed both dramatists to appeal to the socially diverse audiences of Elizabethan London and Golden Age Madrid in favour of the plebeian communities at the heart of the plays, there are significant differences between them in terms of their construction of gender difference and a gendered conception of social identity; Fuente Ovejuna ultimately transcends the specifically masculine context of conflict evident in both plays, and, by these means, not only celebrates the communal, gender-subversive heroism of its peasants, but also appeals to the audience in similarly heterosocial terms.