Fuente Ovejuna is probably Lope de Vega's best-known work, perhaps because it can so easily be given an unintended slant: the nature of the central situation, in which the villagers of Fuente Ovejuna join together to kill their tyrannous overlord—the Comendador—and are ultimately pardoned by the King, has made it a favorite with left-wing producers. It is not really a proletarian manifesto, however, and should not be set against a Marxist background: Fuente Ovejuna—like all Spanish Golden Age plays—requires to be seen against the same structuralized vision of Creation as Elizabethan drama. Like so many Elizabethan plays, it is primarily concerned with order and disorder: social disorder seen as cosmic discord, and the restoration of order constituting a reestablishment of cosmic harmony.

In the Spanish drama the most important role, next to that of the homosexually tinged motif of disguise, is that of the love of siblings. Particularly so with Lope de Vega, whose parents died when he was extremely young; since he grew up with his sister Isabel and one brother, it is understandable that the parental complex could be replaced in him to such a dominant degree by the sibling complex. It may be remarked that Lope's first wife was also named Isabel, which will not seem accidental in the light of name-determination, and we may point to the circumstance, certainly significant for the psychic life of the dramatist, that his brother, wounded in a sea fight in 1588, died in his arms.

In Lope's play The Outrageous Saint (La fianza satisfecha) a young Sicilian named Leonido, whose every crime is committed out of the sheer love of sinning, attempts to rape his married sister.

One of the most attractive aspects of our national theatre is that it continually offers the most unexpected surprises. These surprises are multiplied within a dramatic world as extensive as that created by Lope de Vega. Furthermore, these surprises are seen in their fullest clarity when the illuminating light of modern ideas are turned on the art forms of the seventeenth century. This happens when we reread The Outrageous Saint. At first this comedy makes a very unsatisfactory impression. From a normal point of view, the monstrousness of the theme seems explicable only by supposing that Lope, always impulsive, had given way to irresponsible and uncontrolled fantasies. But after reading Freud and the works of other modern psychoanalysts—something that at first sight appears irrelevant to the understanding of an author of the Golden Age—we realize that Lope's play was far in advance of its time.

In the past The Outrageous Saint (La fianza satisfecha) was interpreted solely on religious grounds and as such was considered monstrous and shocking. Leonido's sins took him beyond the limits of repentance and salvation. This wayward prototype of Don Juan should in the end have been destroyed, and since he was not, the work was condemned to the oblivion of remaining unpublished after the seventeenth century. Finally, the play was begrudgingly included in the late nineteenth century in Menendez y Pelayo's academy edition of Lope, still safely unavailable to the common reader. It has not been reprinted since.

Some thirty years ago, Valbuena Prat discovered the play. He found it an excellent pre-Freudian case study of incest, sadism, masochism, and other sexual aberrations. The work was at once of contemporary interest. In this postwar period The Outrageous Saint again adapts with ease to the concerns and anxieties of our day.

The story of Corneille's Horatius (Horace)follows the incidents described in two chapters of Livy's history of the Roman Empire, with only minor modifications. The twin cities of Rome and Alba are so closely linked by marriage and other ties that they decide to settle their long-standing rivalry—which city shall rule the other—by selecting three warriors from each side. Rome chooses Horatius and his two brothers; Alba chooses Curiatus (who is engaged to marry Horatius’ sister, Camilla) and his two brothers. During the contest Horatius’ brothers are slain but Horatius, by a clever stratagem, separates the three wounded Curiatus brothers and kills them in turn. He is welcomed back as the hero of Rome and honored with laurels, but Camilla insults him for having killed her lover, refuses to recognize his victory and calls down curses on Rome. Horatius, in a continuing frenzy of patriotism, kills his own sister.

In 1869, Hendrik Ibsen, then 41, paused in his dramatic labors to compose a short poem. He had left his beloved Rome just one year before to settle in Dresden (he was to remain in exile from Norway until 1891), and he had just completed his first realistic prose play, The League of Youth, after having established his reputation as the author of Brand and Peer Gynt. Since The League of Youth contains strong satire on the hypocritical opportunism of the contemporary Norwegian Liberal, critics were beginning to charge Ibsen with having joined the Conservative faction. The poem—“To My Friend, the Revolutionary Orator”—is addressed to one of these critics, and is a polemical defense against the current charges. In these verses, Ibsen affirms that he is still a perfervid revolutionary—but he then proceeds to distinguish his own revolt from anything in recorded history.

Although Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has recently enjoyed considerable off-Broadway success, critical confusion about the play has not appreciably abated. Reviews of the recent production merely emphasized the conflicting views which have been advanced since Hedda Gabler first appeared in 1890. It seems to be a play about an extraordinary woman—but extraordinary in precisely what way? Is she naturally cruel and malicious, or is she made so by the events one sees on stage? In a review entitled “A Beautiful Snake,” Whitney Balliett in the New Yorker, after admitting that various social problems are dealt with in the play, insists that Ibsen “was primarily interested in exploring ironically the cold depths of that changeless and most fascinating of all women—the bitch.” Alan Pryce-Jones, on the other hand, in Theatre Arts, complained that the New York production made Hedda's bitchiness too immediately apparent.

Arthur Miller is one of those playwrights, like Thornton Wilder, whose reputation rests on a handful of plays. The quality of that reputation changes from year to year, from critic to critic, but now, five years after the production of his most recent play (the revision of A View from the Bridge), it is generally conceded—even by those who persist in not admiring his work—that Miller is one of the two playwrights of the postwar American theatre who deserve any consideration as major dramatists. Tennessee Williams is the other.

There are many ways of approaching Miller's work. In the late Forties, after All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, popular reviewers tended to embrace him enthusiastically while consciously intellectual critics, displaying the carefulness of their kind, hoped that in explaining him they might explain him away.