Overt Power In The Play Fuenteovejuna

Fuenteovejuna shows that everyone has some sort of power no matter what a person’s social status or gender is. Standing up for yourself and not letting someone with overt power abuse their power is something important that is shown in this play. The commander has the overt power in this play. He has the open or official and visible power given by society and is a respected person. Laurencia and the townsfolk have the covert power in this play. They have hidden unofficial power, and because they are lower class they are not respected people of power like a King or the commander would be. The commander shows his power and abusing it throughout the play. When he first returns from battle he tries to use his overt power by getting two female town folks to stay but when they politely decline this sexual advances he gets angered. He also uses his power when he breaks up Laurencia’s wedding day and arrests her fiancé Frondoso for pointing a crossbow at him when he was trying to protect Laurencia from the commander. He believes that because he is commander
and has this official power that people should just do whatever he wants and attend to his every whim. Laurencia and the townsfolk show their covert power when they kill the commander in vengeance of Laurencia’s dishonor and all the offenses he has committed against them. In the end the covert power of the townsfolk win because when a judge is sent to punish someone for the crime they stick together. No one admits to the murder and everyone even when tortured all say the same thing “ Fuente Ovejuna did it”. They use their unofficial power to defeat the commander and to save themselves. Fuente Ovejuna was written during the Golden Age, a time where playwrights needed to follow specific guidelines and structure their plays in a certain way.
“To support verisimilitude, the Italians recommended that playwrights follow three unities – place, time, and action – in constructing their dramas. In brief, a play should occur in a single setting, its fictitious time should last no more than a single day, and its plot should encompass only one major action” (Zarrilli, 183). Playwright Lope De Vega was however was known for contributing to fix these norms of theatre. His plays were divided into three acts instead of five. He disregarded the unities of time and place, however, kept the unity of action in his performances. Lope also went against the Golden Age’s classical decorum by mixing elements of comic and tragedy. He defied decorum by having peasants appear on stage with nobles and even sometimes
royalty. Lope’s Fuenteovejuna does indeed push back against Golden Age values. The unities of time, place, and action were a very important aspect to theatre because at the time they wanted to keep it simple for the audiences, who the playwrights thought of as dumb. “ Educated scholars and aristocrats whose imaginations had been stretched and tested by books might be able to understand plays that violated verisimilitude, according to the sixteenth-century humanists, but the “ignorant multitude,” with only their “senses” to guide them, would be lost” (Zarrilli, 183). The Italians recommended the unity of place was important because the audience knew the stage was in front of them and could not really be changed to represent several different locations. To reach verisimilitude in the plays, they underestimated the imagination capabilities of the audience.