Volume 2 Nahuatl Theater

Home	Project Overview	Volume 1	Volume 2	Volume 3	Volume 4

Nahuatl Theater Volume Three: Spanish Golden Age Drama in Mexican Translation

Edited by Barry D. Sell, Elizabeth R. Wright, and Louise M. Burkhart; translations by the editors, John Bierhorst, and Daniel Mosquera

Published 2008, University of Oklahoma Press

In 1640-41 don Bartolomé de Alva adapted four Spanish Golden Age dramas into Nahuatl: two comedias, an auto sacramental, and a farcical entremés. This work was a contribution to the Jesuit Father Horacio Carochi's investigations of Nahuatl language; the dramas were also probably intended for performance at Jesuit establishments or Nahua churches. Alva was a parish priest who worked in Nahuatl-speaking communities, and the author of a 1634 bilingual confession manual (see Barry Sell and John Frederick Schwaller's 1999 edition). He was also a descendant, on his mother's side, of the royal line of Tetzcoco, and spoke fluent Nahuatl, although his father and his maternal grandfather were both Spaniards. His older brother Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a professional court interpreter, wrote Spanish-language histories of the Aztec Empire and the Tetzcocan royal lineage.

Alva's theatrical works survive in one copy, which is housed in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Mexican Manuscript 462).

These are the only surviving Nahuatl plays based directly on Golden Age texts. They provide a wealth of information on mid-seventeenth-century Nahuatl usage. In cultural and historical terms, they reveal in detail how a bilingual and bicultural interpreter made sense of Spanish literary products and recast them for use among indigenous Mexicans. Alva's use of religious imagery evocative of pre-Columbian devotions and his representations of social relations in colonial Mexican society are just two of many fascinating facets of this work.

Our book is designed to foster direct comparison between Alva's plays and the Spanish texts on which they were modeled. It is printed in a four-column format, with the original Spanish text in the first column, its English translation in the second, Alva's Nahuatl in the third, and its English translation in the fourth.

"The Great Theater of the World" (El Gran Teatro del Mundo)

The Spanish play is a famous auto sacramental, or one-act religious drama centered on the concept of the Eucharist (the consecrated host; that is, the communion wafer believed to be converted into the body of Christ through the ritual of the Roman Catholic mass). It was written by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who invented this dramatic genre. What is particularly important about Alva's version is that it predates all known copies of Calderón's play, the earliest of which dates to 1655. Alva worked from an earlier version that is now unknown in Spanish. This early version excluded one character, a rustic farm laborer, who plays an important role in Calderón's surviving text.

The drama is based on an allegorical identification between life on earth and the performance of a play. God, in the persona of a theater director, brings human characters out into the "theater of the world," where they are obliged to play their roles as best they can, with no rehearsal. The characters represent a range of social types and moral values: King, Rich Man, Pauper, Beauty, Discretion, and Child (and in Calderón's finalized text, Plowman). They are costumed according to their roles, and also act accordingly: Beauty is vain, Rich Man is greedy, Pauper is miserable, and so forth. One by one they are then summoned offstage; this represents their deaths. They are then consigned to heaven, hell, limbo, or purgatory, depending on their merits. King, Pauper, and Discretion are rewarded with an invitation to the Director's banquet, which consists of the Eucharist. Rich Man goes to hell, Beauty to purgatory, and Child, who died without baptism, to limbo.

Alva's adaptation reflects his own background as a parish priest and confessor. Writing for an audience less familiar with this "all the world's a stage" conceit, and in a language that did not have specific parallels for many theatrical terms, he emphasizes the play's moral messages about avoiding sin and following God's commands.

Intermezzo

Accompanying Alva's version of "The Great Theater of the World" is a brief, untitled farce. Alva probably modeled it on a Spanish original, but this Spanish text is currently unknown. This is an irreverent text that pokes fun at elderly people, town officials, and the Church. The characters are an elderly couple, a young boy who may be the old woman's lover, the town's judge and notary, and a couple of sacristans (minor church officials). Comedy revolves around sexual innuendo, false accusations of wife abuse, beard-plucking and bribe-taking, the judge's itchy lice problem, and a sacristan's comical Latin singing.

"The Animal Prophet and the Fortunate Patricide" (El Animal Profeta y Dichoso Parricida)

This three-act comedia by Antonio Mira de Amescua dramatizes the medieval legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler. According to the legend, Julian, a young nobleman, shoots a deer that then speaks to him, telling him that he will murder his parents. To avoid this fate, Julian leaves home and settles in another territory, where he marries. His bereft parents, seeking him, eventually arrive at Julian's new home, while he is away. His wife invites them to rest in the couple's own bed. Julian, returning at night, sees the two figures in his bed and, thinking his wife is sleeping with another man, draws his sword and kills them both. When he finds that he has inadvertently fulfilled the deer's prophecy, he embarks on a long period of pilgrimage and penitence, eventually running a hospital for the poor. Jesus himself visits Julian at the hospital to convey the news that he has been forgiven for his sin.

Mira de Amescua embroidered this legend with additional characters and intrigue: a hometown sweetheart who curses Julian when he abandons her, a duke's younger brother who is determined to seduce or rape Julian's wife, and a devil who tests Julian's faith while posing as a patient in his hospital, seeking to make him despair of ever being forgiven for his sin. Julian also has a loyal comic sidekick, or gracioso, who adds much humor to the play, especially by harassing the devil. Julian challenges his loyal wife's would-be lover to a deal and later murders him. The wife, Laurencia, along with the sidekick, accompany him through his penances. At the end, the Christ child comes to visit and allows Julian to see the souls of his parents advancing from purgatory into heaven.

Alva further complicated this play's class and sexual intrigue by placing it in his own colonial Mexican social context and introducing ethnic variation. Some of the characters are given Nahua names and identities; some are clearly Spanish. Julian and Laurencia appear to be Hispanicized Nahuas (or possibly mestizos like Alva himself), elite but still subject to the whims of powerful Spaniards.

This is Alva's longest and most complex work. The overall message of the play is religious: the Christian should never despair of forgiveness and salvation, however terrible his or her sins might be. But it also devotes much of its dialogue to mundane social interactions between masters and servants, sweethearts or spouses, parents and their adult children, elite male rivals, and impoverished hospital patients. Thus, it gives many examples of how seventeenth-century Nahuas spoke about a wide range of subjects. This may be why it was of particular interest to Father Carochi. Of Alva's plays, this is the one that Father Carochi most heavily edited, adding linguistic notes and diacritics that indicate vowel length in the Nahuatl. He even quotes a few passages from the text in his 1645 grammar of Nahuatl.

"The Mother of the Best" (La Madre de la Mejor)

Here Alva took on the most famous Spanish dramatist of all, Lope de Vega Carpio. The title refers to Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, and the play recounts the story behind Mary's conception and birth. Lope drew on apocryphal gospels that tell how Anne and her husband, Joachim, suffered a long period of childlessness, leading to Joachim being barred from the Jerusalem temple for his sterility. But, like various Old Testament couples who are long childless, they are rewarded with a very special babe.

The play begins as Joachim and Anne prepare to bring offerings to the temple at Hannukah. Once there, however, Joachim is scolded and humiliated by the priest. He then retreats into the countryside to live with his shepherds, allowing for pastoral scenes of a sort that Lope was fond of. The archangel Gabriel appears to Joachim, telling him to reunite with Anne and prepare for the birth of Mary. The couple reunite and return to Nazareth at the end of Act 1. As Act 2 begins, Anne is far along in her pregnancy. Joachim's nephew Joseph, Mary's future husband, brings a cradle he has made for the baby. Soon the child is born, and Gabriel returns with a choir of angels to celebrate the event.

Lope then introduces a wide range of characters including gypies, Africans, and, ironically, Indians, who cpmment on and celebrate the VIrgin's birth. Alva left all this out, choosing to stay with the basic narrative from the apocryphal gospels, keeping his work to a length more typical of Nahuatl dramas. His treatment of the Virgin Mary is similar to that found in other Nahuatl Marian literature (anthologized in Burkhart's Before Guadalupe, 2001).

Photograph by Philip Maye, from the Saint Julian the Hospitaler window at the Cathedral of Our Lady, Chartres, France. Reproduced with permission. The scene depicts Julian and his wife standing over the murdered bodies of Julian's parents. This occurs in Act 2 of "The Animal Prophet and the Fortunate Patricide." To view Maye's other images of this window, which represents the entire Julian story, click here for a link to the University of Pittsburgh's Medieval Art and Architecture site.