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Spanish Golden Age Theatre Production Essay

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Close your eyes and imagine a town of lower class citizens that have been mistreated and are stuck where they are due to the class system of the time. There is a leader that abuses the power of his position and acts smug, arrogant and entitled to those of “lesser value” around him. This leader, the Commander, creates chaos or disorder in both the upper and lower classes. The only way to bring order back is to bring this commander down, or hope he recognizes the error of his ways. Open your eyes. Does this sound like 1475 Spain, or 2016 America? The fact of the matter is that it is both. In Lope de Vega’s play, Fuenteovejuna, this injustice is the exact subplot of his Spanish Golden Age Theatre production. This subplot’s subtext and contextual themes such as, questioning of loyalty, trust, honor, sovereign governing, economic status, and justice transcends time and location. Lope de Vega was revolutionary for his time, writing plays that included both comedic and tragic elements and overturned the “norm” of a dramatic outline. He also went as far as to put both lower class and upper class characters on stage at the same time. Furthermore, he was very much a feminist, or as much as he could have been for his day in age, writing strong with empowered female roles such as Laurencia. Female roles such as these had not been written in previous centuries, not even in London. Shakespeare was still having men play and dress as women. But in Spain, Lope and other writers such as

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