NAHUA THEATRE
Clay Performance Mask, unknown Aztec artist, 1500
Historiography
The research of historians attributes to the historiography of the plays and their acculturation into Nahuatl society. More plays have slowly surfaced over the last century. The early work of Fernando Horcasitas, who put together a two-volume work in 1974 in Mexico, marks the beginning of the historiography. The plays remained mostly unedited and unstudied until the work of Horcasitas. He spent much time translating the plays from Nahuatl to Spanish. The next historians who committed their time to these plays were Miguel Leon-Portilla of Mexico, Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz, James Lockhart, Barry Sells, and finally, Louise Burkhart of the United States. Lockhart and Burkhart focused on the Spanish-to-English translation. The study thus far has focused on the similitudes of Nahuatl pre-colonial religion as it mixed in with Catholic religion during the translation and presentation of these plays for Nahua people. The current trajectory of the discipline reveals the joining of Nahua culture and the monk’s translation of these plays serving many meanings to the actors, the audience, and the colonizers in the Americas during this time.
Book 1, Chapter 1, page 1 of the Florentine Codex (Spanish, left, Náhuatl, right)
Overall, the literary sources mentioned above provide the foundation in the current research of what came across to the Nahua audiences during the religious plays that were performed by their fellow brothers and sisters. The historiography over time in relation to Nahua theatre has been that of how the plays were translated, and to what extent they successfully educated the specific message of the Catholic missionaries wanting to convert the Nahuas. The majority of historians agree that misinterpreted meanings or lack of verbatim translation left the Franciscan missionaries accepting the best form of conversion they could from the Nahuas. What remains to be questioned, and therefore answered, is what the Nahuatl people really understood from viewing these morality plays, what they honestly believed, or merely adopted to survive during their lifetime.
Louise M. Burkhart, courtesy of Mark Schmidt
Miguel Leon Portilla, courtesy of http://snn.imer.gob.mx/
James Lockhart, courtesy of Ida Altman
Thanks to these historians who dedicated much of their life to research of the Nahuas in theatre and translation of plays.