Supersession, the Comedia nueva, and Tirso's La mejor espigadera

Supersession is a familiar concept in the history of the rise of Christianity at the expense of the Jews, who found themselves displaced as the People of the Covenant. The history of Spain is also one of supersession accomplished not entirely by means of eradication of the former regime or faith but in addition by taking on the mantle of cultural and religious dominance and essentially inhabiting the space of power and privilege previously occupied by others. As an adjunct to empire, Spaniards adopted the idea that they were God's real chosen people, not just by expelling the Jews from the peninsula but by taking upon themselves markers of special status traditionally used by Jews; even the term "gentiles" was appropriated to refer to non-Spaniards. Thus, at the same time that Jews were exiled from Spain and conversos were actively persecuted, figures from the Hebrew Bible continued to be exalted in Spanish literature. Tirso's La mejor espigadera is a useful case study, not only because it presents the story of one of the righteous women of the Bible, but how a non-Jewish figure can rise to become not just revered by the Israelites but an ancestor of King David and, eventually, Jesus Christ. If we then expand the focus of the notion of supersession to the theatrical genre of the comedia itself, we see how the playwrights, especially as documented in Lope's "Arte nuevo," consciously set out to establish the new comedia nueva as the model destined to supersede Aristotelian precepts of what constitutes a proper play.