Los mártires de Japón, and: Los coloquios del Alma: Cuatro dramas alegóricos de Sor Marcela de San Félix, hija de Lope de Vega (review)

The need for reliable editions of Lope de Vega's minor works has been an issue in the field for decades, a fact I mentioned in a review for this journal last year (59, no. 1:172–73); and it bears repeating. If a play is not one of Lope's dozen or so recognized masterpieces, the scholar frequently has to revert to a text established by Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo for the oversized Obras volumes published by the Real Academia Española beginning in 1890. Cuesta's Hispanic Monographs series has been publishing critical editions of Golden Age works for more than a decade; now some of those long-neglected plays by Lope are starting to trickle out. Christina H. Lee's critical edition of Los mártires de Japón takes the 1637 manuscript (Biblioteca Nacional Ms. 17365) as its base text. The manuscript is the only extant copy of the play before Menéndez Pelayo's 1895 edition and is of interest as well because it appears to be a theatrical director's working copy. Lee's edition restores lines that were eliminated by Menéndez Pelayo and notes all of the corrections and marginalia visible in the seventeenth-century manuscript. Menéndez Pelayo's was the only other edition of the play available prior to Lee's and so her notes on the 1637 manuscript as well as her departures from the RAE edition (also noted) are especially valuable. These notes may hold clues for future researchers interested in Lope's plays as they evolve from page to stage. Why, for example, even stage a play sixteen years after its composition date? (Most plays had theatrical runs measured in terms of months rather than years and Lope had in fact died in 1635, two years before.) The editorial (directorial?) interventions revealed in the manuscript may hold the answer to that question and Lee's notes provide a reliable guide.

The play itself is not a masterwork, though some elements —the captive prince motif and the humanizing capacity of love —will remind the reader of Calderón's La vida es sueño, which was also more than likely staged in the mid to late 1630s. According to Lee, the play was probably commissioned by the brother of one of the martyrs referred to in the play's title: the Dominican missionary friar Alonso Navarrete, decapitated in Japan on 1 June 1617. Correspondence from Japan frequently went across the Pacific and was routed through New Spain before making the trans-Atlantic voyage to Europe, so Pedro Fernández Navarrete would not have received word of his brother's death until 1619 or 1620. Lee informs us in her introduction of the gruesome reliquary that accompanied this notification: a drop of the martyr's blood, the sword that performed the execution, and a letter from the deceased, along with another Dominican friar's account of the event and peculiar request that the martyrdom be memorialized in a tragic drama. Lee contextualizes Lope's play well with details such as these. Her introduction provides a history of Hispano-Japanese contact and the circumstances that led to the martyrdoms dramatized —mostly terra incognita for literary scholars and therefore helpful. The play is unique in Renaissance and Baroque theater for its portrayal of this Japanese context, but readers expecting the ethnographic precision of Bernardo de Sahagún or the curiosity of Montaigne will be disappointed...