[Oxford World's Classics 14] • Three Major Plays

Lope de Vega (1562-1635), widely regarded as the architect of the drama of the Spanish Golden Age, was known by his contemporaries as the 'monster of Nature' for his claim to have written more than a thousand plays. His work is notable for its energy, inventiveness, and dramatic power and combines the serious and the comic in striving to imitate real life. Fuente Ovejuna, perhaps his best-known play, is based on Spanish history and reveals how tyranny leads to rebellion, while The Knight from Olmedo is a moving dramatization of impetuous and youthful passion which ends in death. Lope's most powerful tragedy, Punishment Without Revenge, centres on the illicit relationship of a young wife with her stepson and the revenge of a dishonoured husband. These three plays, in vivid and performable translations faithful to the original Spanish, embody the very best of Lope's dramatic art.