Treatment of Criminal Justice in Spanish Literature

The purpose of this research is to examine the theme of criminal justice in Spanish literature, particularly in regard to the treatment of women, with an emphasis on Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas that emerge in the action of the play and then to discuss how these ideas articulate an attitude toward the phenomenon and enactment of criminal justice and the social position and role of women in Spain, past and present.

Based on fact, Fuente Ovejuna is set in fifteenth-century provincial Spain, at the moment of history (1476) when the Spanish monarchy was in the sixth year of consolidating its government institutions under Ferdinand of Castile and Isabella of Aragon. In the background of this project were several centuries of war among various feudal kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. When James II came to power in Aragon in 1391, Aragon began to assume a kind of hegemony over all of Spain, "either by aiding the monarchs of Castile [militarily] . . . or by taking advantage of that kingdom's frequent internal difficulties to force it to cede portions of frontier territory" (Vincens Vives, 1970, p. 62).

At the same time, Aragon added other Mediterranean feudatories to its control and also engaged in a few crusades against the Muslims. Some domestic upheaval of the Aragonese and Catalan populations occurred in the process, but Vicens Vives (1970) attributes the continued strength of Aragon to an ever-present commer

s conservative rather than revolutionary: the brutal overlord is removed because he disrupts the harmony of society, failing in his duties to the king above him as well as to commoners beneath him. It is for this reason that he must be removed, and not merely because of his tyrannous repression of the villagers of Fuenteovejuna" (p. 986). The tyranny against which the villagers revolt is not that of the state but that of the feudal lords, and the distinction is important: Fuente Ovejuna is studded with passages that extol obedience to constituted authority, particularly to the monarchy. It is in the name of the Catholic Monarchs that the peasants revolt against Don Fernan, who was not only a petty tyrant but also a traitor to the Spanish crown because he favored foreign intervention by the Portuguese against Isabella of Castile. As Spain evolved from the feudal ideas of the Middle Ages toward the more modern Renaissance concept of monarchy during the fifteenth century, the power of the local nobility in many towns and villages was sternly curbed by Ferdinand and Isabella. . . . This theme--praise for the benign monarch who sides with the people against the nobility--is a favorite of Lope's (Colford, 1969, p. xiv). The text confir

Category: Literature - T