Nahuatl Theater, Volume 1: Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico (review)

The University of Oklahoma Press is attempting to fill an important gap in scholarship with its new series on Nahuatl theatre. This ambitious interdisciplinary project will hopefully bring a neglected area to the attention of theatre scholars. The first volume is a good example of the wealth and complexity of the subject matter, which has so far invited approaches drawn from anthropology, history, linguistics, and postcolonial studies.

Any attempt to represent this first volume has to focus on its hybrid nature. Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico contains several different texts that will be equally critical to different readers. The bulk of the book (almost two hundred pages) is occupied by parallel translations of eight Nahuatl plays composed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While some of these have been previously available in English, the authors have chosen to give us entirely new translations that are often significantly different from previous variants. The typed Nahuatl text tries to maintain an impression of the original typography, even including text that was crossed out in the manuscripts (appropriately marked). The way the text is presented makes it a useful resource even for those of us who do not read Nahua. Spanish loanwords are easily recognizable, and the stylistic differences among the texts (particularly in their different integration of stage directions) are made clear. The translations might not be what critics call "stageworthy"—the emphasis is on faithful representation of the original. In fact, if considering a staging of, for example, The Three Kings or Souls and Testamentary Executors, the earlier translations available in Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz's Early Colonial Religious Drama in Mexico (1970) might be more appropriate. Sell and Burkhart, who share credit for translating the plays, do not attempt to naturalize the texts and make them conform to a current theatrical aesthetic, nor to translate them into an archaic English idiom to lend them a sacramental air.

The plays are introduced by four critical essays contributed by (in addition to the editors) Hispanists Daniel Mosquera and Viviana Díaz Balsera, which serve to both contextualize the texts and provide some understanding of their importance as historical sources. Sell's essay, for example, after introducing the existing manuscripts and their history, places the performance of the plays within the altepetl, a political unit peculiar to the period and tentatively rendered as an "ethnic city-state" (16). Focusing on the play The Merchant, however, Sell goes on to demonstrate the wealth of information about this system of government present in the drama itself, and compares it to the information made available to us by nondramatic texts of the period.

Burkhart's essay deals more directly with the specific theme of the first volume, focusing on examining the use of drama as a means of teaching a European (Roman Catholic) perspective on death and the afterlife, not as a means of spiritually enlightening the native population, but as an attempt to politically integrate them into the new colonial order. "Colonizing death helped to colonize the living as well," but, as Burkhart goes on to note, "Nahuas manipulated the new ways of dying for their own purposes" (29). Burkhart's essay is of particular interest to theatre scholars, as it deals specifically with issues of representation (for example, the portrayal of the supernatural). The essay uses several visual sources from the period (murals, sculptures, and engravings) in a way that almost compensates for the historical lack of visual records of the actual productions. Burkhart also uses surviving wills and testaments from the period, which (like the dramas) serve as a link between the spiritual understanding of death and mortality and everyday material practice.

Mosquera's essay begins from a point with which theatre scholars are certainly familiar: the marginalized position of theatre as an academic field. The author was confronted with the argument that "histories, treatises, relations, religious doctrine and teachings, and heaps of...