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of the country. This included above all the writing of history and of lyrical poetry. Besides the old genres, however, new ones were added: psalms, such as this one, composed by the Nahuatl encyclopedist, Fray Bernardo de Sahagún: ‘The precious jades that I also shape with my lips, that I also have scattered, that I have uttered, are a fitting song. Not only are all these a gift for you, beloved son, you who are a son of the holy Church; even more are your due … if you follow Christianity well as a way of life…’,40 and the auto, or religious play, which continued the Mexican dramatic tradition in the service of the Christian faith. Motolinía, one of the heroic group of twelve missionaries first sent to convert Mexico,* recounts with gusto a number of such plays performed in 1538 and 1539, including the Annunciation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Crusaders’ Capture of Jerusalem, presumably all scripted and directed by friars, but performed exclusively by Indians.41 Seven generations later the tradition was still alive: in 1714 the Tlaxcalan writer Juan Ventura Zapata wrote a somewhat more imaginative work, the Invention of the Holy Cross, which contains a scene where the Aztec god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, confronts the Roman emperor Constantine.42 To this day, in the town of Tepoztlán, a pageant of Christian conversion is presented every year on 8 September:

TLACAPAYAN: Mountain-dweller! Tlacapayan seeks you. Now I have come. I come to reduce you to earth and dust, and to earth and dust I will turn you. What do you now fear when you hear of my fame and my words? Where have you abandoned our revered gods? You have given yourself over to foreigners, those bad priests. Know what it is that Tlacapayan desires. He had never lost his vision. You will be destroyed and you will perish. And stout is my heart.

TEPOZTECO: HOW is it that right at this time, why is it that right now you have come, when I am enjoying myself, resting, rejoicing, commemorating the eternal Virgin, the Mother of God, and our precious Mother? … Truly exalted is our precious Mother the lady Virgin as says the divine author in the book of the wise. There it is said in the holy songs that twelve stars circle her head and that with the luminous moon her feet are supported, thus over all earth and heaven it spreads forth.43

In Peru, attitudes to the lengua general were more complex. Quechua, like Nahuatl, was widely used to preach the gospel, and at the same time became the vehicle for a nostalgic literature harking back to life before the conquest. But it was also taken up by the criollo landowning class, not themselves descendants of Indians, as a symbol of local legitimacy: at once it distinguished them from the Spanish-speaking urban elite in Lima, but also denied the country people a linguistic means to keep their landlords at a distance. Nevertheless, over the two and a half centuries after the conquest, Quechua came increasingly to represent the dissatisfaction of the Peruvian peasants; this exploded into open uprisings in the last half-century, culminating in the general rebellion in 1780 under the self-styled Tupac Amaru II (’Royal Serpent’). It is said that, before the rebellion was crushed, the drama Ollantay had been staged before the leaders. This is known as the finest work of the Quechua theatre, and tells the tormented love story of an Inca princess and a warrior commoner, in the heyday of the great Incas Pachacutec and Tupac Yupanqui (mid-fifteenth century). Here is the section where the Inca, somewhat abruptly, shows the quality of his mercy.

INCA YUPANQUI: Choose your penalties. Speak, Willac Umu.

WILLAC UMU: To me the Sun gave a merciful heart.

INCA YUPANQUI: Rumi, then you must speak.

Rumi ŇAwi: The price of the misdeed must be a cruel death Inca, such is the desert of the man of the greatest sin…

INCA YUPANQUI: Have you heard the stakes being prepared? Take these rebels there! Kill these evil men!

…

Release the prisoners: stand up before me. You are saved from death: escape now, mountain stag. You are fallen at my