Little is known about the author of the Spanish drama, except that he was a Valencian bookseller and a devotee of the Virgin Mary. Archival records in Valencia attest that Izquierdo was named a councilor of the parish of Santa Cruz in 1585. He dictated his last will and testament on September 20,1596 (Martí Grajales 1927:281). An Izquierdo alluded to in a work by the great Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega may be this Valencian author (Barrera y Leirado 1860:196–97; Pérez Gómez 1976–77:505–6).

Izquierdo’s earliest recorded publishing venture is a work of 1566 entitled Relox de Namorados,...

A copy of Izquierdo’s “Beacon of Our Salvation” traveled to New Spain via one of the biannual fleets that sailed to the Indies, either among the personal effects of an individual passenger or as part of a shipment of books and pamphlets sent from Seville to be sold in the colony. Arriving at the Gulf Coast port of Vera Cruz, it would have been transported inland to the city of Mexico.

The colonial book trade was a flourishing business: during just two months of 1585, 75 cases of books were conveyed by muleback into the capital city. Ecclesiastical and classical...

The following are summary comments based on my comparison of the two plays. The development of these interpretations and their expression in the texts may be traced in more detail in the commentary on the scripts.

For Izquierdo, as for other authors of contemplative Passion literature, the relationship between Mary and Christ is the nexus through which the devout person achieves an empathetic understanding of Christianity’s principal sacred narrative. The portrayal of that relationship acts as a potent model both of and for inter-gender and inter-generational communication and conflict. Mary is the ultimate mother, Christ the supreme son; their interaction...

To facilitate comparison of the two dramas, I have paired the five-line stanzas of the Spanish text with the corresponding segments of the Nahuatl script, numbering them accordingly. Each segment of the Nahuatl play includes all the text that is modeled on the corresponding Spanish stanza plus any additional content without a basis in the Spanish, up to where text based on the following Spanish stanza begins. Since the stanza boundaries in the Spanish nearly always coincide with discursive breaks in the Nahuatl, the pairing of the texts in this manner presents few problems; it is clear that the Nahua...

Throughout the following annotations I make frequent reference to other Nahuatl texts, including those that are excerpted in the Appendix. I will briefly describe these materials before proceeding with the stanza-by-stanza commentary.

The Nahua playwright was surely familiar with some of the Nahuatl literature circulating at the time; even texts not directly known to the playwright may serve as comparative material, since they provide information on how certain subjects were discussed and ideas expressed in Nahuatl. Published Franciscan works such as fray Pedro de Game’s 1553 Doctrina, fray Juan de Gaona’s Coloquios de la paz y tranquilidad Christiana of 1582,...