ABSTRACT
In the years after the Conquest, cargoes in the holds of the ships bound for Mexico and Peru included shipments of books and printed pamphlets. The predominant genres in the first shipments from Spain to the New World were printed catechisms, religious tracts, and romances of chivalry. Although at first glance these would seem to be very different sorts of texts, it is understandable that the Conquistadores and their descendants would view the Conquest of Mexico and subsequent Spanish settlement as a kind of romantic religious effort and themselves as knightserrant charging against the windmills of idolatry. However, as Irving Leonard has demonstrated in his study of the colonial book trade, Books of the Brave, different trends in colonial reading habits began to emerge in the decades following the Conquest, with a gradual increase in the importation of dramatic and poetic texts. It was, however, particularly after the publication in 1605 of a collection of Spanish Golden Age dramatist Lope de Vega’s comedies that dramatic literature was consolidated as the favourite literary genre of colonial readers.1 Leonard lists as possible reasons for the enormous popularity of three-act plays printed the brevity and low cost of these texts, and the
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have remarked, however, on the relatively low number of plays dealing with these events. In this chapter, after a brief overview of recent theorization on historiography and the narrative representation of historical events, I look at the ways in which paradigmatic historical moments (Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America, the conquest of Peru by Pizarro, and the conquest of Mexico by Cortés) were staged by sixteenth-century playwright, Micael de Carvajal, and in the following century by three Spanish Golden Age dramatists, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca. I also examine popular performances staged in the Andes of the death of the Inca ruler Atahualpa, and analyse the wonderfully allusive text of a Peruvian writer and artist, Guamán Poma de Ayala. The chapter ends with a brief look at certain scenes of The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, a play written by the English Restoration dramatist Sir William Davenant.
