Two Plays from One Source: La Fianza Satisfecha and El Martir de Madrid

TWO PLAYS FROM ONE SOURCE: LA FIANZA SATISFECHA AND EL MÁRTIR DE MADRID Vern G. Williamsen, University of Missouri and Henry A. Linares, Northern State College As studies of Mira de Amescua's theater have become available in recent years, some interesting facts and relationships have come to light. One of these is the obvious kinship existing between Lope de Vega's La fianza satisfecha and Mira's El mártir de Madrid. Lope's play has been the subject of a series of studies and editions; Mira's work, like much else in his theater, remains essentially unknown.1 Because no one has reported the identical nature of the material from which these two plays were built, the search for the source of Lope's comedia continues to bear uncertain fruit even after Mira's source has been successfully identified by José María Bella. The undeniable relationship of the two plays might well tempt one to write about "influences " if only the order of composition for the plays could be more precisely determined.2 Of even more interest, however, is a study of the quite different literary effects achieved by the two poets as they brought the same story to the stage. I. The Rehtionship of the Phys to Their Sources Both plays tell of a young man who turns violently on his family, leaves home, and fights with a band of raiding Moorish pirates. He then decides to renege, committing the gravest of his many sins, denying Christ. He serves the Moorish king, even to the point of imprisoning his own family when he is followed to Morocco by his father. He is courted by a beautiful Moorish princess but refuses her enticements preferring the illicit charms of his own sister (sister-in-law). He attempts to escape, is recaptured, and undergoes a sudden re-conversion. The King orders him put to death. He delivers a moving oration and call to repent, and dies as a Christian martyr. The other Christians ask for and receive his body so that it may be given proper burial. Quite obviously, both La fianza satisfecha and El mártir de Madrid belong to that remarkable genre, the saintlybandit plays that were so popular, as pointed out by Alexander A. Parker, during the first third of the Seventeenth Century.3 As William Whitby and Robert Anderson have indicated in their edition of La fianza (pp. 59-64), these plays have a peculiar fascination for the present age as well. The editors find literary precedents, if not true sources, for La fianza in such works as Mira's El esclavo del demonio (as an early saintly-bandit comedia), Tirso's El condenado por desconfiado (comparing Leonido's bragging speech with that of Tirso's Enrico ) , and a descendant , if not a precedent, in Calderón's La devoción de la Cruz (for the completely evil nature of the protagonist). Except that we now know Mira's play to deal with the story of a contemporary martyr, we might still be searching among such literary materials for the source from which it, and possibly La fianza as well, grew. J. M. Bella has shown that the ultimate source for Mira's play is found in 81 the story of the "Martirio de Pedro, natural de Madrid en Marruecos," an event that took place in the year 1580. Bella reports Mira's source to have been the Segunda parte de la Historia general del Mundo, de XI años del tiempo del señor Rey don Felipe II el Prudente, desde el año MDLXXV hasta el de MDLXXXV by Antonio de Herrera Tordesillas (Madrid: Pedro Madrigal , 1601, pp. 280-81). Herreras work, however, could not have been the source consulted by Mira because he includes, in his rendering of the story, factual elements not contained in Herrera 's history. Data missing from that account are found, for example in the Anales de Madrid desde el año de 447 al de 1658 of Antonio de León Pinelo (ed. Pedro Fernández, Martín, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1951, pp. 125-26). Among these details are: ( 1 ) The month of...