ABSTRACT
Lope de Vega's comedy The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus (El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon) from 1598–1603 is the first European play to present a speaking Native American on stage. It is an historical propaganda play, written a hundred years after the discovery of the New World, from the colonial center of power in Spain in order to legitimize the Spanish conquest. Since the Spanish understood the conquest as legitimized by its purpose of converting Native Americans to Christianity, quite unironically, conquest was seen as a humanitarian act, taking place under the auspices of absolute truth. Yet it also vividly imagines the thoughts of the colonized, and it implies that they might also have rights: national rights. The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus is a play about a royal political power that understands itself as an incarnation of universal humanistic principles.
