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Abstract:

The article considers one of the most interesting dramatic texts of the 17^th century — a play about the miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe, written for missionary purposes. The author of the play, a monk of the Order of St. Jerome and the monastery of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura, actually turned out to be the person who contributed to spreading the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the lands of Spanish America. The comedy of Diego de Ocaña is a peculiar contamination of genres. Each storyline introduces its own generic pattern into the play, persistent enough to allow neither the victory of any genre, nor their fusion and the emergence of a new genre formation. Whereas the historical line is presented in the form of a legendary drama, the “everyday” storyline brings into the play a genre that is part of a completely different dramatic system, i. e. the medieval miracle. Such fusion of genre forms (legendary drama and the miracle), which had never been employed in the theater of the metropolis before, might be described as an “exercise in synthesis” (A.F. Kofman’s expression), characteristic for the literary process of the Conquista era, when many mythologems, images, and oppositions archetypal for Latin American literature gradually emerged.