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.

It is of course only the playwrights who can show us the next phase in our theatre, and even they can't tell us about it in advance. They have to work it out according to their own temperament, experience, and taste, taking what advantage they can of the shifting sanctions of fashion. The by-stander can neither prophesy, nor tell the playwrights what to do. So, these remarks are offered as remote wishful thinking.

If there is a dominant fashion in playwrighting now, it consists in exploiting the mentally and morally underprivileged, the lonely, frustrated, and pathological, to express the playwright's own desperate feelings about “our times.” As Mr. Martin Esslin says in his excellent Theatre of the Absurd, “A feeling of helplessness when confronted with the vast intricacy of the modern world, and the individual's impotence in making his own influence felt on that intricate and mysterious machinery, pervades the consciousness of Western man today…. The convict who is being physically separated from the outside world has literally been deprived of any means to make his presence felt, to make an impact on reality; and in that sense the convict experiences the human condition in our time more intensely and more directly than any of us.” What Mr. Esslin is saying here about Genet's convict applies to countless other lost figures in the contemporary theatre. And our American playwrights, whether Absurd, Beatnik, Freudian-day-dreamy, or reportorial-realistic, are portentously dredging up sad-sacks of every description as the real low-down on “the chaos of the modern world.”

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.

The spirit of an age is known to reveal itself in everything that the age conspires to say about its engagements with itself. We have spoken about ourselves, which really means that we have spoken to ourselves, more characteristically, more obliquely, more problematically, in painting and sculpture than in the other arts. Here our dialogue has been driven by a greater underground fury, frustration in apparent freedom; here we find the aggressive jest and the sense of exhausted yet tenacious conventions still to be overcome. The novel and the film are only occasionally used for their proper purposes, and when they are they approach the graphic arts and become our autobiography. The rest is noise. It used to be that the other arts aspired towards the condition of music, but it is more nearly true to say that they now wish to reach the condition of painting and sculpture.

Has the avant-garde of drama in the Western world today reached a dead end? And where will the next development lead to? While it is clearly futile to try to predict the future, some speculation about likely trends might well help to put the present into perspective and, at the same time, clear our minds of some prevailing misconceptions.

Above all, where does today's vanguard stand? It has more than just one spearhead. In the Anglo-Saxon countries and in France one wing of the avant-garde represents a trend that goes back to the early nineteen thirties and Brecht's Epic Theatre, which could only make its full impact felt after the downfall of Hitler (whose accession to power thirty years ago put an end to any creative experiment in Germany). The other main wing of today's avant-garde has equally remote origins. The Theatre of the Absurd is the culmination of a movement which, in surrealist painting or in the writings of Kafka and Joyce, reaches back into the nineteen twenties.

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.

Genet is related to that family of people who are nowadays referred to by the barbaric name of passéistes. An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant; he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this “break” is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual that the memory condenses into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual re-beginnings of an individual history.