Lope De Vega

A gripping drama of sex, power and passion from the Spanish Golden Age. A peasant wedding. Just as Peribanez and Casilda become man and wife, the Commander of the region is carried dying to their home. His waking sight of Casilda condemns him to a desparate love. Joy turns to despair and then to revolt in this gripping rediscovery of Lope de Vega's 17th-century classic. Tanya Ronder's adaptation of Lope de Vega's Peribanez was first performed at the Young Vic Theatre, London in May 2003.

"Madness in Valencia, in a version by David Johnston, exploresthe thin divide between sanity and madness in a world where no one is quite what they appear to be. Peribanez and the Comendador of Ocana, in a version by Nick Drake, is the tale of a brave peasant, bound to defend the honour of his beautiful wife against a tyrannical overlord intent on seducing her. With an introduction by Isabel Torres."

"A comedy written for the Shakespeare's Globe, telling the story of an insatiably curious young man who, wishing to turn himself into a wise owl, takes the wrong drug and finds himself transformed into an ass. His subsequent travels lead him to encounter the chaos of human desire from the perspective of a servile donkey. The most exquisite tale in this wonderful epic, as originally told by Lucius Apuleius, is the first known account of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, which is perhaps the archetypal myth behind modern psychology. Inspired by The Golden Ass, Peter Oswald has written a riotous erotic comedy of love and desire, which premiered at the Globe Theatre, London in August 2002. This version is true to the original: in the words of C S Lewis is 'a strange compound of picaresque novel, horror comic, mystagogue's tract, pornography and stylistic experiment.'"

This critical, annotated edition and study of a long-neglected work by Lope de Vega reveals the philosophical seriousness that the author in his early maturity, anticipating Cervantes' Persiles y Segismunda by more than a decade, brought to his treatment of the Byzantine novel or novel-of-adventures.