%VOLVI OSE EN LUTO LA BODA!

: RITUAL,
TORTURE, AND THE TECHNOLOGIES
OF POWER IN LOPES FUENTE OVEJUNA

Whereas for the most part the immediate goal of torture in our era has been
political repression, for the inhabitants of Lope de Vegas Fuente Ovejuna it
is inherent in the judicial process. In the play torture is administered by an
ocer under the direct command of the King and Queen of Spain, Fernando
and Isabel.
The inhabitants submit to torment and this is ocially sanctioned
as a highly organized practice, the purpose of which is to gain knowledge or to
punish by exemple. Following the murder of the Comendador, the King orders
an investigation that is routinely accompanied by torture. The inhabitants of
the village both accept and challenge this authority and his way of enforcing and
demonstrating his power, by willingly submitting to the torture but heroically
disregarding the pain, designed to undermine their integrity. In this way, as this
paper will argue, torture is presented as a ritual that is associated not only with
power but also with other rituals, including the wedding festival and the giving
of gifts. Together, these manifestations contribute to the communitys sense of
collective identity. These points are foregrounded in the play by cultural and
ritualistic practices, which construct a sense of cultural identity that contributes
to the collective ethos that is necessary for the process of social ratication.
In other words, Lopes play revolves around religious and folkloric rituals
that underscore the intimate relationship between politics and ritual in the
construction of a communal identity.
My analysis of the plays rituals shows that the inhabitants of the village
are a communal grouping because they apprehend their past as a coherent
For comments and editorial suggestions, I am grateful to my colleague Christine Arkinstall, to the
Hispanic editor of this journal, Dr David George, and to the anonymous readers who oered so
many invaluable comments.

Strictly speaking, of course, at the date of the action Fernando was the Prince of Aragon and
Isabel Queen of Castile. The play was published in Lopes Dozena parte in 1619. At the end of
the nineteenth century Marcelino Menendez Pelayo armed that se trata de una de las obras mas
admirables de Lope, aunque, por raro capricho de la suerte, no sea de las mas conocidas en Espana ~
(Fuenteovejuna, in Lope de Vega: el teatro II, ed. by Antonio Sanchez Romeralo (Madrid: Taurus,
1989), pp. 1323 (p. 13)). The plays fame has grown considerably during the last hundred years
both in Spain and internationally. Interpretations and adaptations vary and range from that of the
Moscow Art Theatre in Soviet Russia, to Lorcas production for La Barraca, to Radiotelevision
Espanolas
~ lm version and frequent theatre performances. On the Moscow version, see Alberto
Castilla, Teatro Universitario: Fuentovejuna 65, in En torno al teatro del Siglo de Oro: actas de las
jornadas VIIVIII celebradas en Almera, ed. by Heraclia Castellon and others (Almera: Instituto
de Estudios Almerienses, 1992), pp. 3958 (p. 50). On Lorcas version, see Suzanne W. Byrd, La
Fuente Ovejuna de Federico Garca Lorca (Madrid: Pliegos, 1984). Adolfo Marsillach directed
a production of the Compan ~ a Nacional de Teatro Clasico de Espana ~ in 1993. Carlos Bousono ~
adapted the text for this performance. A comprehensive review of the criticism of the play up
to the 1970s is oered in Teresa J. Kirschner, Evolucion de la crtica de Fuenteovejuna, de
Lope de Vega en el Siglo XX, in En torno al teatro del Siglo de Oro, ed. by Castellon and others,
pp. 7797. Previously she had traced the history of translations, adaptations, and productions in
Sobrevivencia de una comedia: historia de la difusion de Fuente Ovejuna, Revista canadiense
de estudios hispanicos, 1 (197677), 25571. For a more recent study, see Enrique Garca Santo-
Tomas, La creacion del Fenix: recepcion crtica y formacion canonica del teatro de Lope de Vega
(Madrid: Gredos, 2000), pp. 31972.
 mercedes camino 383

history and see its present and future as contiguous processes. This continuity
is sharply interrupted by the Comendadors tyranny, which ultimately provokes
the villagers to revolt. His behaviour is presented throughout the play as not
simply evil but also, and perhaps more importantly, breaking the ow of time
and disrupting the life cycle. His presence and deeds disturb a sense of order
and a hierarchical arrangement that the villagers see as natural and wish to
preserve. This order, needless to say, depends not only on the maintenance of
the social status quo, but also on a binary division of gender roles. Such duality
is, however, not based on the association of masculinity with bravado, as is
seen by the hesitant attitude of the men until Laurencia calls them to action in
Act III.
The central role of the villagers as a group is given expression early in the
play when they all welcome the Comendador, presenting themselves as a unied
party in the system of exchange that exists between them and their master. This
social contract is, however, undermined by the Comendador, as seen in the
villagers welcoming song. The lyrics contain a warning about a Comendador
who, for no apparent reason, is presented as a conqueror devoted to rendir
lands and matar men:
Sea bien venido
el Comendadore
de rendir las tierras
y matar los hombres
[. . .]
venciendo moriscos.
(52932, 537)
Ironically, however, as the audience would be well aware, the Comendador
was not returning from ghting against the Moors. Instead, as Victor Dixon
notes, they would know that he was returning from a traitorous venture in
which he was ghting Christians. Moreover, an association between rendir
lands and the abduction and rape of the women of the village is already implicit
in those words. Likewise, this surrendering of women also implies the killing
of men, who are thereby deprived of their masculinity.
On voicing their concern, the people from the village oer the Comendador
gifts of food, pottery, and other goods that their leader, Esteban, describes as
un pequeno~ presente (552). Esteban itemizes the contents of the generous gift
as a way of highlighting that the villagers are trying hard to buy peace from
their master, even if they show not a little displeasure with his rude manners:
Lo primero
traen dos cestas de polidos barros;
de gansos viene un ganadillo entero,
que sacan por las redes las cabecas,
para cantar vuesso valor guerrero.
 Before Laurencias crucial intervention, the ve members of the junta had considered various
options, including the murder of the Comendador, in the dialogue preceding her entry: see 1652
1710, especially 1696 and 1710. (All references are to line numbers in Lope de Vega, Fuente
Ovejuna, ed. by Juan Mara Marn (Madrid: Catedra, 1994).)
 Lope de Vega, Fuente Ovejuna, ed. by Victor Dixon (Warminster: Aris @ Phillips, 1989), p. 91,
note to l. 537.
384 Ritual, Torture, and Power in Fuente Ovejuna

Diez cebones en sal, valientes piecas

sin otras menudencias y cezinas;
y mas que guantes de a mbar, sus cortezas.
Cien pares de capones y gallinas,
que han dexado viudos a sus gallos
en las aldeas que mirais vezinas.
[. . .]
De quesos y otras cosas no excusadas
no quiero daros cuenta: justo pecho
de voluntades que teneis ganadas:
y a vos y a vuestra casa, %buen provecho!
(55565, 57578)
These gifts have an obligation attached to them, for the gift-giving economy
thus initiated by the villagers is nothing but an attempt to support the fragile
social fabric that the Comendador directly threatens. It is interesting in this
context to observe the implications of gift-giving and the reciprocity that is
called for in this process. Marcel Mausss study of the cultural parameters of
gift-giving in traditional societies provides an illuminating context in which
to place this ritual. Especially relevant are Mausss remarks on the implicit
interdependence of gifts of food: The gift is thus something that must be
given, that must be received and that is, at the same time, dangerous to accept.
The gift itself constitutes an irrevocable link especially when it is a gift of food.
The recipient depends upon the temper of the donor, in fact each depends upon
the other.
The sense of community of Fuente Ovejuna is therefore stressed by the food
items contained in the gift. This is especially important because the whole so-
ciety partakes of the production of food, which signies their communal labour
and their triumph over nature. Their collective participation in the produc-
tion and consumption of food symbolizes the villages labour and struggle to
survive, culminating in festivity and collective ratication. Mikhail Bakhtins
comments on festivities and banquets are relevant in that he contextualizes
the communal context of the processes of production and consumption. For
Bakhtin, the image of food often symbolized the entire labor process. [. . .] La-
bor and food represented the two sides of a unique phenomenon, the struggle of
man against the world, ending in his victory. It must be stressed that both labor
and food were collective; the whole of society took part in them. Although
produced collectively, the food contained in this gift is not to be eaten in a
festive banquet. In this case, the village gives and is, in turn, robbed, thereby
breaking the system of exchange on which the social fabric rests. Their gifts are
therefore a form of failed exchange for, in contrast to the gift-giving attitude of
the villagers, the Comendador mercilessly steals from them and proves that he
considers them unequal partners in the exchange. He shows that he believes
them to be not quite fully human when he robs them of what he thinks are their
 See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. by
Ian Cunnison (New York and London: Norton, 1967), p. 58.
 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), p. 281.
 Mauss goes on to stress the type of relationship created by means of this ceremonial gift-
giving as follows: Between vassals and chiefs, between vassals and their henchmen, the hierarchy
 mercedes camino 385

most prized properties as honest men, their women. As Mengo stresses, the
Comendador and his men roban una labradora a esposo y padres honrados
(112425).
The association of women with food and the Comendador with theft of both is
furthered in the next scene. Not satised by the villagers gifts, the Comendador
wishes to take for himself other food without giving anything in return. In
this scene the Comendador also describes Pascuala as hermosa era (601) and
reminds her and Laurencia that he sees them as his own property, to do with
them as he pleases: &Mas no sois? (603). He then roughly invites the women
to walk across the threshold of his palace: Entrad, passad los umbrales (605).
The relationship between the threshold, the umbrales, with the threshold of
the womens bodies, their virginity, is clearly understood by Laurencia, who
asks him whether there was not enough meat in the presents given: &No
basta a vuesso senor
~ tanta carne presentada? (62334). Ortuno ~ answers for
the Comendador when he says that la vuestra es la que le agrada (625).
This disruption signals the Comendadors breach of the will of the commu-
nity, which the union of Laurencia and Frondoso embodies. This is conveyed
in the passages when they arm their sense of unity, of being one, much
as the collectivity of Fuente Ovejuna will be united in the revolt against the
Comendador. Early in the play, when they rst appear by themselves on stage,
Laurencia hints at the words that will become the plays slogan when she says:
En todo el lugar no hay moca
o moco en el prado o soto,
que no se arme diciendo
que ya para en uno somos.
(73538)

Their conversation is interrupted by the shots of the Comendador, whose hunt-

ing spree leads him to identify Laurencia with his prey: tan bella gama (781).
Similarly, a few scenes later, Frondoso emphasizes the he has enacted the col-
lective will of the village by defending Laurencia against the Comendador. The
words he uses, once again, unite the village and its will with their destiny as
husband and wife:

is established by means of these gifts. To give is to show ones superiority, to show that one is
something more and higher, that one is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is
to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister (The Gift, p. 72).
 The Comendador not only steals honest women but he goes so far as to give them to his
servants when he has satised his desire (134550).
 Ortuno~ has previously noted the association of women with the present oered, when he
tells them: Tambien vens presentadas con lo demas (61920). This suggests that he sees the
women as items of an exchange that seal the relationship between the village and its master. The
Comendador further associates women with meat, and, more specically, with the object of the
hunt later on in the play, when he pursues Laurencia as though he were siguiendo un corzillo
temeroso, y topar tan bella gama (77981). Diane Chae-Sorace studies in detail how the animal
imagery of the play separates the two groups of characters, that is to say, the villagers from the
Comendador and his men, in Animal Imagery in Lope de Vegas Fuente Ovejuna, Bulletin of the
Comediantes, 42 (1990), 199214. On women as items of exchange, see especially Gayle Rubin,
The Trac in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, in Towards an Anthropology of
Women, ed. by Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), pp. 157210.
386 Ritual, Torture, and Power in Fuente Ovejuna

Mira que toda la villa

ya para en uno nos tiene;
y de como
a ser no viene,
la villa se maravilla.
(12972000)

Although the Comendador is seen not to have fullled the contractual obli-
gations of the exchange initiated by giving gifts, he is not the only person who
disregards his duties. The villages men are initially reluctant to comply with
their gender obligation to keep and defend their women. It is their wish to
live peacefully with their ruler that prevents them from fullling this duty by
redressing the injustices they suer at the hand of the Comendador. They are
consequently at this point in the play unable or unwilling to contest eectively
the tyranny imposed on them. This is conveyed at the wedding of Lauren-
cia and Frondoso when they are confronted with the submission to power the
Comendador expects from them. This class requirement is, however, chal-
lenged by Esteban (161930), who is subsequently beaten by the Comendador
with the very emblem of his oce. The Comendador asks that the vara be taken
from him and beats him in a demeaning manner, like a horse: Pues con ella
[la vara] quiero dale, como a caballo brioso (163334). Esteban endures the
punishment, indicating that the Comendador is his lord (1635), but Pascuala
points out that Estebans age makes the Comendadors punishment unsuitable,
thereby emphasizing his tyranny: &A un viejo de palos das? (1636).
These events take place when the Comendador interrupts the wedding.

Much as Don Juan Tenorio intrudes in the wedding of Batricio and Aminta so
as to occupy Batricios place, the Comendador robs Frondoso of his ancee.


No seduction however, is so much as pretended by this theft: the Comendador
violently abducts Laurencia and imprisons Frondoso. He leaves the wedding,
a ceremony dedicated to welcoming a new future, shrouded in mourning, with
its protagonists violently taken away from the scene.
 Pascuala sums up the
The women shun solidarity by appealing to their gender in the scene between Pascuala,
Laurencia, Mengo, and the men of the Comendador. When Jacinta requests help, Laurencia
calls her amiga (1187) and Pascuala emphasizes Tuyas lo somos las dos (1188). A moment
later, however, Jacinta explains that the Comendador and his two cronies, Ortuno ~ and Flores, are
chasing her and the other women excuse themselves saying that they need to look after themselves.
Pascuala also adds that she is not a man and that this renders her unable to defend Jacinta: Jacinta,
yo no soy hombre que te pueda defender (119798). In a similar vein, Mengo presents his gender
as a condition that obliges him to act: yo s lo tengo de ser, porque tengo el ser y el nombre
(11991200).


The wedding ceremony,as Mikhail Bakhtin observes, is, like the banquet, an act that marks the
celebration of the renewal of life: the banquet [. . .] is equivalent to nuptials (an act of procreation)
[. . .] a feast and a wedding put together in the nuptial banquet, oer a completed picture: the
potentiality of a new beginning (Rabelais and his World, p. 283).


In Tirsos play, the scene opens Act III and contains the authors overt criticism of the
nobilitys mores. Aminta voices what is taken to be the moral of the play when she tells Belisa that
La desverguenza
~ se ha hecho caballera. A moment before, Don Juan expresses the
en Espana
current notion of the corruption of the city when contrasted with the countryside: Es bien que
se entienda y crea que el honor se fue al aldea huyendo de las ciudades (Tirso de Molina, El
burlador de Sevilla, ed. by Alfredo Rodrguez Lopez-Vazquez (Madrid: Catedra, 1991), 196263
and 193739 respectively).

 Joaqun Casalduero contrasts the attitude of the Comendador with the harmony of true love
 mercedes camino 387

mood created when she indicates that the wedding has changed into a funeral:
%Volviose en luto la boda! (1642).
By disrupting the wedding ceremony and transforming it into a funeral,
the Comendador breaks the rituals associated with dierent life cycles. The
cyclical nature of time that is celebrated in communal rituals, such as weddings,
funerals, celebrations of births, and seasonal festivities, including banquets, has
been sharply interrupted and this is especially relevant for the historical time
of the events in the play, the late Middle Ages. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains, at
this time the feast was designed to give a community a sense of continuity and
to reinforce the status quo:
The ocial feasts of the Middle Ages, whether ecclesiastic, feudal, or sponsored by the
state, did not lead the people out of the existing world order and created no second life.
On the contrary, they sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced it. The
link with time became formal; changes and moments of crisis were relegated to the past.
Actually, the ocial feast looked back at the past and used the past to consecrate the
present. Unlike the earlier and purer feast, the ocial feast asserted all that was stable,
unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political and moral
values, norms and prohibitions.


The disruption of the wedding and the failure to reciprocate the gifts mark
the Comendador as a force of discontinuity and death. He threatens not just
individuals, but the identity of the community, the survival of which he un-
dermines on two fronts. Firstly, he takes from the villagers the purity of their
lineage when he allows his men to take the villagers women; and secondly, he
deprives them of the means to apprehend and celebrate transitions in life. The
coda of the song anticipating the wedding oers a comment on the Comen-
dadors breach of the existing social contract. As the lyrics indicate, his unruly
desire violates the privacy of any house and threatens the chastity of its women:
Mis linces desseos paredes passan (155657). It is therefore suitable to nd
Barrildo asking the village whether there are no men to speak up: &No hay
aqu un hombre que hable? (1643).
 The men of the village, Barrildos ques-
tion implies, are charged with the duty of maintaining and enforcing rules that
would ensure the survival of their social arrangement.
The villagers participation in the wedding feast also highlights the levelling
impulses of this rustic community, for during the feast all participants appear as
equals. This sense of equality is communicated to the audience, and the role of
spectator becomes one of potential participant in the action. It is not necessary
to add that this would be especially the case with the audience of the corrales,
whose proximity to the action made them to some extent participants as well

that pervades the plays dialogue and the encounters of Laurencia and Frondoso. In relation to the
wedding scene, Casalduero remarks that la variacion introducida separa por completo la lujuria
del matrimonio, arrastrando aquella al nivel inferior que le pertenece y elevando e ste a una zona
de armona y plenitud (Fuenteovejuna, in Lope de Vega: el teatro II, ed. by Sanchez Romeralo,
pp. 2553 (p. 42)).

 Rabelais and his World, p. 9.

 In Guerrero Zamoras version for Radiotelevision Espanola,
~ the scene nishes at this point
in an energetic manner by having Barrildo utter this line and break one of the clay pots that were
used for the dance at the feast.
388 Ritual, Torture, and Power in Fuente Ovejuna

as spectators. The audience would identify with the villagers sense of outrage
before someone whose desires break all boundaries.
The lower-class characters in the play possess honour and are cristianos viejos,
features that were viewed by Federico Garca Lorca, for example, as a demon-
stration of popular sentiment against aristocratic hierarchy and as conveying a
sense of human equality. This democratic impulse is certainly underscored
by the dignity Lope gives his rustic characters, which is consecrated in the
famous versions of the play performed by Lorcas La Barraca, where, in the
words of Alberto Castilla, Fuenteovejuna era Espana, ~ y la e poca, cualquiera
de su historia (51).
 The village and the play both stood for the idea of the
nation that was relevant to the ideas Lorca wanted to foreground in pre-Civil
War Spain.

Although collective protagonists, the villagers, the play suggests, should have
dierent roles according to their gender. The emphasis on this split climaxes
in the famous entreaty of Laurencia, desmelenada, when she urges the towns
men to honour the duties of their gender and to defend their women.
 She
rst admonishes her own father, who, she believes, should have opposed the
Comendadors men when she was abducted from the scene of her own mar-
riage ceremony. Laurencia sharply reprimands Esteban, reminding him that
his obligations towards her should have overruled both his concern to keep the
peace and his instinct for self-preservation:
porque dejas que me roben
tiranos sin que me vengues,
traidores sin que me cobres.
Aun no era yo de Frondoso,
para que digas que tome,
como marido, venganca,
que aqu por tu cuenta corre;
que en tanto que de las bodas
no haya llegado la noche,

 The notion of a collective protagonist is also given voice when the discreto Senado is informed
that the play has come to an end. As Leo Spitzer notes, the words Fuenteovejuna da n (2453) are
designed to guide the audience to the realization that el ttulo encierra la esencia de la comedia
(es decir, la solidaridad de la aldea en su espritu de grupo, tal como se desarrollo delante de
nuestros ojos) en forma que apenas poda haberse anticipado al comienzo (Un tema central y su
equivalente estructural en Fuenteovejuna, in Lope de Vega: el teatro II, ed. by Sanchez Romeralo,
pp. 5575 (p. 71)).

 Over a century ago Menendez Pelayo championed the idea that the collective protagonism
of Fuente Ovejuna underlines the democratic and revolutionary principles latent in a sizeable
portion of the Spanish people. For Menendez Pelayo, Fuente Ovejuna is nothing short of the most
democratic work of all Spanish drama: En Fuente Ovejuna lo que presenciamos es la venganza
de todo un pueblo; no hay protagonista individual; no hay mas heroe que el demos, el concejo de
Fuente Ovejuna: cuando el poder Real interviene, es solo para sancionar y consolidar el hecho
revolucionario. No hay obra mas democratica en el teatro castellano (Fuenteovejuna, pp. 1617).
For more recent visions of the democracy invoked by Menendez Pelayo, see especially William
R. Blue, The Politics of Lopes Fuenteovejuna, Hispanic Review, 59 (1991), 295315; also Robin
Carter, Fuenteovejuna and Tyranny: Some Problems of Linking Drama with Political Theory,
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 13 (1977), 31335.

 Julio Baena compares Laurencias monologue with Floress expatiation on the murder of the
Comendador (19662013) in Tener voz y dar voces en una audiencia: dos discursos procesales
en Fuenteovejuna, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 42 (1990), 14354. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano also
analyses this monologue in relation to the contemporary ideas of gender and honour in Feminism
and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1994), pp. 21921.
 mercedes camino 389

del padre, y no del marido,

la obligacion presupone;
que en tanto que no me entregan
una joya, aunque la compre,
no ha de correr por mi cuenta
las guardas ni los ladrones.
(172539)

Laurencia goes on to include the rest of the men in her tirade and merci-
lessly castigates what she identies as their emasculation and cowardice. Her
insults resonate when she calls them cowardly shepherds: La oveja al lobo
dexais como cobardes pastores (174243). Gradually, Laurencia becomes the
embodiment of revolution in an image reminiscent of that of Medusa.
 More
importantly, however, Laurencia stresses how the economies of the code of ac-
tion and gender division that exist in the village do not constitute a sound basis
for a peaceful existence. In fact, the very presence of the tyrant is a sign that
peaceful existence is not possible until he is replaced. This does not mean that
the system or the hierarchy is contested, only that the person of the Comen-
dador appears to be unsuitable to assume the reciprocal duties entailed by his
position.
Nevertheless, one need not assume that Lope necessarily endorses whatever
his characters say or do. As with the brutal murder of the Comendador, Lope
distances the audience at this point from the actions of the villagers by having
them take place o stage. Nevertheless, throughout the play he has worked to
create an atmosphere in which it becomes possible for the audience to under-
stand the drive that leads to these acts. The next step, the justication of the
mob and the brutality that ensues, is partly dependent on a particular produc-
tions choice of, among other things, stage setting and alterations to the play, as
well as the movements and attitudes of the characters. I am suggesting here that
Fuente Ovejuna cannot merely be seen as a defence of the conservative politics
that are displayed in the submission to authority at the plays end. This, and
the excessively mysterious, bucolic image of the unreal rural world portrayed
in the opening scenes, indicates that Lopes attitude towards his characters
may be more complex than is sometimes assumed. In turn, this means that the
hierarchies of class and gender implied in Laurencias speech and the villagers
submission to authority ought not to be taken as if they were unquestionably
the views of their author.
Laurencias words are ultimately eective and set the villagers in motion.
This time, however, their long-suppressed anger overows and they go wild
in their destructive bent, demonstrating the intimate relationship between vio-
lence and the sacred.
Their violence should be seen as a type of language
that uses an elaborate series of conventions and rituals in order to uphold the

 On the (mis)use of Medusa in the anti-revolutionarypropaganda of the FrenchRevolution, see

Neil Hertz, Medusas Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure, Representations, 3 (1982),
161215.

As Rene Girard observes, Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred (Violence and
the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1977), p. 31).
390 Ritual, Torture, and Power in Fuente Ovejuna

existing order.
Marsha Kinder uses these notions to dierentiate between
sacrice and massacre in this play:
One can nd an acknowledgement of this paradoxical duality in Lope de Vegas [. . .]
Fuenteovejuna. Far ahead of its time, this play demonstrates how the meaning of several
acts in a chain of escalating violencewar, rape, corporal punishment, murder, tor-
ture, and executionis uidly transformed by how that violent behavior is represented
verbally and in what political context. [. . .] Although this collective act of revenge is
described to the Spanish monarchs as a regression to primitive savagery, the villagers
consider it a brave act of rebellion that pregures revolutions to comelong after the
play was written.

Kinders ideas are certainly corroborated by the events that follow. Not content
with just killing the Comendador, the villagers literally butcher him and, in a
reciprocal move, they break him into pieces of meat ready to be eaten: tajadas.
With his blood they feed their appetite for revenge in a scene that is, in the
original Chronicle, gory enough to repel most audiences. Lopes description
of the murder is also graphic, though he keeps the action o stage, and it is only
related to the audience via Flores description:
Rompen el cruzado pecho
con mil heridas crueles;
y por las altas ventanas
le hazen que al suelo vuele,
adonde en picas y espadas
le recogen las mujeres.
Llevanle a una casa muerto,
y a porfa, quien mas puede,
mesa su barba y cabello,
y apriessa su rostro hieren.
En efeto fue la furia
tan grande que en ellos crece,
que las mayores tajadas
las orejas a ser vienen.
(197891)
Signicantly, even though the lines here closely follow those of the Chronica,
Lope adds a sign of allegiance to the current monarchs, with the lines: Y a

As Girard has proposed, The sole purpose of ritual is to ensure the immobility, or failing
that, a minimum of disturbance. If the door is opened to admit change, there is always the risk that
violence and chaos will force an entry. Sacrice is, for Girard, the most crucial and fundamentalof
rites (Violence and the Sacred, pp. 284 and 300 respectively). Tzvetan Todorov furthers Girards
ideas to dierentiate between sacrice and massacre. For Todorov, Sacrice [. . .] is a religious
murder [. . .] performed in the name of the ocial ideology [. . .] in public places, in sight of all [. . .]
The victims identity is determined by strict rules. [. . .] The Sacrice [. . .] testies to the power
of the social fabric, to its mastery over the individual. By way of contrast, Todorov believes that
Massacre [. . .] reveals the weakness of this same social fabric [. . .] hence it should be performed
in some remote place where the law is only vaguely acknowledged [. . .] The victims [. . .] are
exterminated without remorse, more or less identied with animals. The individual identity of the
massacre victim is by denition irrelevant (otherwise his death would be a murder) [. . .] Unlike
sacrices, massacres are [. . .] kept secret and denied (The Conquest of America: The Question of
the Other, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Harper @ Row, 1984), pp. 14345).

See Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 145.
 Francisco de Rades y Andrada, Chronica de las tres Ordenes
y Cavalleras de Sanctiago, Cala-
trava y Alcantara (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 1994).
 mercedes camino 391

voces dicen que quieren tus reales armas jar (199394). In this way, he
isolates the Comendador and shows how the villagers implicate the monarchy
in their revolt, thereby associating them with the common people.
The villagers rage subsides when they see the tortured body of their tormen-
tor in pieces. Much as in a scene of martyrdom, the body of the Comendador
is broken up into many relic-size bodily parts, not bigger than the ears, as the
lines quoted above indicate. After this, the villagers realize that one of the aims
of the revolt is to obtain redress and they reverse the failed exchange of their
initial gift by sharing collectively the Comendadors goods: Gozosos entre to-
dos han repartido sus bienes (199899).
Likewise, the villagers realize the enormity of their criminal oence and
Esteban voices their concern over the investigation that is to followan in-
vestigation that, they all know, will be accompanied by the customary torture.
Unity and solidarity, Esteban suggests, are the only way for the village to main-
tain its wholeness. To the question posed by Frondoso, &Que es tu consejo?
(2091), Esteban replies, Morir diciendo Fuente Ovejuna y a nadie saquen de
aqu (209193). Frondoso echoes Esteban and adds a religious undertone to his
words by indicating that this collective answer is the right path to follow: Es el
camino derecho Fuente Ovejuna lo ha hecho (209495). Estebans question
is, nevertheless, unnecessary, for when they all in chorus answer %S! (2096),
they display their anonymous, collective voice. The subsequent torture mirrors
the image of the broken body of the Comendador.
Torture is announced when, in the following scene, the Comendadors man,
Flores, informs the Catholic King Fernando of the brutal murder of Fernan
Gomez. Fernando reassures him that justice is to be done in the following
terms:
Estar puedes conado
que sin castigo no queden.
El triste suceso ha sido
tal, que admirado me tiene;
y que vaya luego un juez
que lo averigue
conviene,
y castigue los culpados
para exemplo de las gentes.
(201421)
Following this scene, we have the enactment of another ritual, the comme-
moration of the victory in the very heart of the village. This scene echoes
the marriage ceremony of Laurencia and Frondoso as well as the arrival of
the victorious Fernan Gomez, and celebrates the royal couple, Fernando and
Isabel. They are made victors and, in a way, absent leaders of the villagers
revolt, when the head of Fernan Gomez, which is carried by the villagers on a
spike, becomes a banner in honour of Isabel and Fernando. As the musicians
and peasants sing in praise of the royal couple, they decide to replace the head
of the Comendador with the symbol of their power, their coat of arms. What
 Interestingly, these scenes are Lopes inventions. The Rades y Andrada Chronicle on which he
based Fuente Ovejuna diers from the play from this moment onwards, especially at the end, with
the scene of the pardon by the King. See Alberto Castilla, Teatro Universitario: Fuentovejuna
65, in En torno al teatro del Siglo de Oro, ed. by Castellon and others, pp. 3958 (pp. 4850).
392 Ritual, Torture, and Power in Fuente Ovejuna

is more, they all emphasize that the placement of the coat of arms signals a
new dawn for the community: Ya comienc a a amanecer, con este sol, nuestro
da (207677). Their revels are, however, halted by the realization that their
crime cannot go unpunished and that torture will be part of the judicial process
to follow. As the audience already knows, Fernando has ordered an inves-
tigation.
The revolt and murder of the Comendador rightly upset the King, who
decides that such violent behaviour ought not to be tolerated so as not to set the
wrong example: Tan grande atrevimiento castigo exemplar requiere (2024
25). The Kings words suggest that, as Foucault remarks, punishment is often
not just aimed at the oence itself but at its possible imitators:
One must calculate a penalty in terms not of the crime, but of its possible repetition.
One must take into account not the past oence, but the future disorder. Things must
be so arranged that the malefactor can have neither any desire to repeat his oence, nor
any possibility of having imitators.

Nevertheless, the torture scenes also take place o stage, and are surrounded
by references to self-sacrice and love, which makes them a sign of social
continuity and of life. This is certainly emphasized by the fact that the scene
is immediately followed by another between Fernando and Isabel that marks
them as the fons et origo of life and social harmony (2290302). Immediately,
they hold a royal audience in which Manrique is reinstated in his position,
while the village shows its loyalty and solidarity to Isabel and Fernando. A
judge provides a summary of the events and the torture (235884), indicating
the choice between killing them all and forgiving them: O los has de perdonar,
o matar la villa toda (238081). Needless to say, this idealized royal couple, who
provided the model for the decadent royals of the seventeenth-century court,
respond in a paradigmatic and magnanimous manner that reincorporates the
villagers into their loyal communities. Fernando speaks for both of them when
he announces that aunque fue grave el delito, por fuerca ha de perdonarse
(244445).
Much like martyrdom, then, the torture of the people of Fuente Ovejuna
can only lead to the rearmation of their faith, both in themselves and in their
principles. The torment inicted on their bodies forms a sort of collective soul
trained by means of physical suering. In this way, this play illustrates that
the meanings of experiences such as torture or pain, are culturally embedded,

 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 93.
 Torture, according to Elaine Scarry, is a process which not only converts but announces the
conversion of every conceivable aspect of the event and the environment into an agent of pain [. . .]
having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece
of compensatory drama (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 28).
 Elizabeth Hansons insight into the relationship of body and conscience in torture is relevant
in this context. Hanson arms that: the ecacy of torture as a method of discovery [. . .] depends
upon the equivalence of body and conscience, the ability of the body to stand in place of the
conscience as the guarantor of speech [. . .] The physicality of the struggle [. . .] imagines the
truth as actually contained in the victims body (Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,
Representations, 34 (1991), 5384 (p. 66)).
 mercedes camino 393

as Susan Fischer has suggested. The tortured bodies of Fuente Ovejuna, its
women and its Comendador, as Foucault has rightly emphasized, are bound up
in a relationship of power:
This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordancewith complex reciprocal
relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is
invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution
as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection [. . .] the
body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.

The villagers of Fuente Ovejuna invest some signicance in the dismem-

berment of their ruler and they rearm their collective soul over and above
extreme pain. Their collective triumph over the experience of torture is, there-
fore, a sort of religious ritual that harks back not only to the dismemberment
of the body of the Comendador but also to the disrupted wedding feast. Their
unity enables them to win over what they see to be the forces of death, so that
their world can now be duly renewed. This is stressed close to the plays end
by Laurencia and Frondoso as they echo the questioning of the villagers. This
time, Laurencia answers Frondosos questions as to who committed the crime:
Fuente Ovejuna, mi bien [. . .] Fuente Ovejuna fue (2285, 2287). Frondosos
last question, Y yo, &con que te mate? (2288), is answered with the eloquent
&Con que? Con quererte tanto (2289). By overlapping their loving relation-
ship, their orgasmic muertes, with the triumph over the forces of discontinuity,
Laurencia and Frondoso mark the death of the Comendador as the beginning
of a new life for the village. The marriage of Laurencia and Frondoso becomes
the sign of social continuity, of birth, and of life.
The inhabitants of Fuente Ovejuna are caught up in a system of power that
rests on their bodies and their productive activity. The domination of their
bodies in the torture scenes produces a knowledge that, even if it is not that
sought by the King and Queen, is bound up with the existing power relations.
This ritual torture is, therefore, not just a judicial resort but also a political and
cultural ritual in which the villagers submit themselves to authority in order to
arm their identity as a collective body. The social fabric of Fuente Ovejuna
has been fabricated by the technologies of power that dominate them. Their
experience of pain is not only public but also shows that torture may be seen as a
form of martyrdom that takes place in the midst of society and is constitutive of
its tenets. Torture, in Fuente Ovejuna, produces realitya reality that belongs
both to the ction of the stage and to the no less ctional community that the
villagers embody.
U
 See Susan Fischer, Fuente Ovejuna on the Rack: Interrogation of a Carnivalesque Theatre of
Terror, Hispanic Review, 65 (1967), 6192.
 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 2526.
 Foucaults now classic study of the relationship between power and knowledge is worth re-
membering in this context. As he remarks, power produces knowledge [. . .] power and knowledge
directly imply one another [. . .] there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of
a eld of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time
power relations (Discipline and Punish, p. 27).