Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation

Religious Drama (Spanish America)--Louise M. Burkhart

 Religiou< Drama  Louise M. Burkhart I n the early 1600s the Nahua annalist Chimalpahin penned an entry recalling what may have been the earliest Christian-­ themed theatrical production performed in his language: an enactment of Judgment Day that inspired wonder and astonishment among the Mexica. Chimalpahin placed this event in the year Two House, or 1533, twelve years after the Mexica emperor Cuauhtemoc surrendered to Hernán Cort és.1 The Franciscan friars who dominated the early missionization effort chose to evangelize in Nahuatl—the principal language of the Mexica and related central Mexican ethnic groups—and other indigenous languages and to attract people to Christianity with music and theater. Had they not, they probably would have made little headway against the elaborate ritual traditions of their new charges. Nahuatl theater, always a theater a lo divino, grew into a standard element of public devotional life in the indigenous corporate communities. Early Nahuatl-­language plays wereone-­act autos. Deriving from late-­ medieval and sixteenth-­ century European models, they are of two general types. Some plays present a narrative from the Bible or the legends of the saints. The others are moral fables in which ordinary humans, dwelling amid wearyangels and slydevils, either resist or—more often—succumb to temptation and enter heaven or hell as a result, at their death or at the time of the Final Judgment . Some surviving scripts of these plays date to the mid-­ eighteenth century, indicating that they continued in use through most of the colonial era. The new dramatic genres that began to take shape in late-­sixteenth-­century Spain—the comedia, the auto sacramental , the comic intermezzo—crossed the Atlantic to delight and enlighten audiences composed not only of Spanish-­speakers. At least a fewof these plays were adapted directly into Nahuatl.The comedia’s three-­act structure and stock comic characters also found their way into locally composed Nahuatl plays. Baroque Nahuatl theater finds its fullest expression in the work of Bartolomé de Alva, the priest who in 1640 adapted Lope de Vega’s La madre de la mejor, an early version of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El gran teatro del mundo, Antonio Mira de Amescua’s El animal profeta y dichoso patricida, and a comic intermezzo with no known source. Alva descended on his mother’s side from the royal family of Tezcoco, the second most powerful polity in the Aztec Empire. Elite Nahua families made strategic marriages with Spaniards while clinging to traditional titles. Alva’s mother and then his oldest brother held dynastic office in San Juan Teotihuacan, even though Alva’s father and maternal grandfather were Spaniards. Bilingual, educated , and experienced in ministering to Nahua communities , Alva was well situated to open Nahuatl theatrical conventions to new influences from Spain. Alva’s version of Calderón is the only Eucharistic drama surviving in Nahuatl. Calderón’s piece presents the allegorical conceit that life on earth is a play, with God as the director (autor). People play their assigned roles then shed these identities as they pass offstage to hell, to purgatory, or to a heavenly Eucharistic feast. Nahuatl theater had no precedent for this kind of allegory, and Nahuatl lacked the theatrical terminology needed to construct and sustain this world-­as-­stage trope fully. Alva responded by downplaying the allegorical fancies: for example, the “director” becomes simply the Savior; the characters’ final exits are treated unambiguously as their deaths. Alva partially assimilates the drama to the established Nahuatl genre of morality play by having his characters speak more frequently and more directlyabout sin—or, to be more precise, about the immoral and dangerous behaviors designated by the term that Spaniards considered equivalent to pecado. Despite the absence of angels and demons, the dispatch of souls to afterlives at the play’s end resembles the final scenes of morality plays. Alva also considerably shortened Calderón’s play, bringing it within the size range of extant Nahuatl morality plays. For Lope’s La madre de la mejor, Alva solved the length problem by ending his play early in Lope’s second act, shortly after the Virgin Mary’s birth. This left him with a coherent and manageable saints’ play, centering on Saints Joachim and Anne as they long for a child and are finally rewarded with a very special daughter. Alva departs from the typical one-­act Nahuatl auto by retaining Lope’s comic low characters: a serving maid and a quartet of shepherds. Pastoral philosophers and rowdy foils for the sedate saints, these earthy characters add humor and allow low-­ status audience members to identify more readily with thedrama. Alva may well have considered this a useful innovation for enhancing Nahuas’ interest in the dramatized narrative. Alva mellows the somber tone of his Calderón adapta- religious drama (Spanish America) 285 tion by translating some references to natural beauty into the linguistic register of the Nahuatl flower-­world: a sacred domain of solar heat, light, and iridescent color embodied in flowers and tropical birds and invoked in ritual chants and accouterments. Nahua Christianity attached this symbolism especially to Mary. Alva in his adaptation of Lope heralds Mary’s birth by having Joachim, Anne, Joseph, and the archangel Gabriel speakof Mary in poetic flower-­world terms. Lope’s pastoralism, voiced by the shepherd Bato, also slips into this register as Alva transposes it to Mexican flora and fauna. Baroque dramatic forms are here infused with a Native American view of sacred animating forces immanent in nature. From El animal profeta y dichoso patricida Alva created a full-­length, three-­act comedia in Nahuatl and, by giving some characters Nahuatl names and deleting European place-­names, moved the action to New Spain.The stag who foretells Julian’s unintentional slaying of his parents now references indigenous culture: animal omens and associations of deer with moral danger and hunting with uncivilized peripheries.The play mirrors Alva’s own social milieu, in which Nahua and mestizo elites adopted trappings of Spanish culture while enduring domination by powerful Spaniards. Alva’s Julian spurns a Nahua girlfriend, daughter of a lord, who shares her name with Cortés’s most famous indigenous mistress, Malintzin. Julian’s parents speak in an old-­ fashioned elite Nahuatl register, while he does not. He weds the daughter of a dead tlatoani (native ruler) whose speech patterns show her to be more Hispanicized than the rejected Malintzin. Julian’s fortunes depend on the patronage of a (Spanish) duke. The duke’s brother threatens Julian’s honor by plotting to rape his wife. In Alva’s play this subplot alludes to Spanish sexual exploitation of indigenous women, vigorously resisted when Julian murders the would-­ be rapist. Julian’s gracioso sidekick, Vulcan in the Spanish, becomes Tizoc, a semipagan, pulque-­ guzzling Nahua man named after a famously ineffectual Mexica emperor. One of Tizoc’s funny moments comes when he tries to administer medicine through the rectum—an indigenous medical technique—to a patient in Julian’s hospital who is a demon in disguise. Vulcan’s lines read: “Poor man, you look like a sorcerer. / Get ready!” For bruxo Alva substitutes tlahuipochin , a native sorcerer believed to go about at night blowing fire onto victims; if Tizoc were a good Christian he would know nothing of such sorts. Tizoc rudely tells the demon, “Sickly tlahuipochin, roll over! Hurry up! I’m going to give you a rectal medicine.” About to swallow the devil’s eggs, Tizoc says that this will “comfort my soul,” irreverently mocking conventions of Christianized Nahuatl.2 The comic low characters that Alva introduced into Nahuatl theater found enough welcome that similar characters enliven some later plays. Two surviving dramas that stage the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s apparitions to the Nahua convert Juan Diego add content that is surprisingly a lo humano. One of these, from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, is the only surviving Nahuatl playotherthanAlva’sElanimalprofetastructuredintothree acts. In this play Bishop Zumárraga employs two pages who joke and squabble; one is a bit sanctimonious, and the other worries onlyabout keeping his belly filled. More rowdiness surrounds a quack physician on whom Juan Diego’s father and neighbors avenge themselves by beating him with bulls’ bladders. The other Guadalupan drama, composed bycriollo priest Joseph Pérez de la Fuente in theearly 1700s, staffs Juan Diego’s home with bantering servants: a woman named “Cocoa Bean” and a lazy, pulque-­ swilling man named “Toast.” Two roughhousing, big-­ talking lackeys , who broach such provocative topics as cannibalism and flaying, attend the Emperor Constantine in a 1714 play written or reworked by a Nahua priest and nobleman. Nahua fondness for low humor spread to the portrayal of Judas in Passion plays, to the consternation of some eighteenth-­ century churchmen and Inquisition officials. Some surviving Nahuatl Passion plays present a Judas who is serious and deliberative. At least one, however, confirms the inquisitorial displeasure. At the Last Supper Judas begins to eat before Jesus has said the blessing, and after the meal he slips the leftover food under his cloak.3 Judas pleads poverty to justify his betrayal of Jesus, but surely these scenes were played for laughs. Such antics were one of several pretexts forconfiscating and suppressing Nahuatl Passion plays as the exuberance of the Baroque era yielded to the rationalism and restraint of the Enlightenment. Notes 1. Chimalpahin’s Nahuatl is reproduced in Fernando Horcasitas, El teatro náhuatl: Épocas novohispana y moderna (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1974), 562. 2. Barry D. Sell, Louise M. Burkhart, and Elizabeth R. Wright, eds., Nahuatl Theater, Volume 3: Spanish Golden Age Drama in Mexican Translation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 282–283, 293. 3. This unpublished Passion play is in the Berendt-­ Brinton Collection , University of Pennsylvania Museum Library. Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque 286 Suggested Further Reading Burkhart, Louise M. “Humour in Baroque Nahuatl Drama.” In Power, Gender, and Ritual in Europe and the Americas: Essays in Memoryof Richard C.Trexler, ed. Peter Arnade and Michael Rocke, 257–272. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, 2008. Leyva, Juan. La Pasión de Ozumba: El teatro religioso en el siglo XVIII novohispano. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001. Ramos Smith, Maya, Tito Vasconcelos, Luis Armando Lamadrid, and Xabier Lizárraga Cruchaga, eds. Censura y teatro novohispano (1539–1822): Ensayos yantología dedocumentos. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Centro Nacional de Investigación e Información Teatral Rodolfo Usigli, and Escenología, A.C., 1998. Sell, Barry D., and Louise M. Burkhart, eds. Nahuatl Theater, Volume 4: Nahua Christianity in Performance. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Sell, Barry D., Louise M. Burkhart, and Stafford Poole, eds. Nahuatl Theater,Volume 2: Our Ladyof Guadalupe. Norman: Universityof Oklahoma Press, 2006. ...