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Simon Aguado's Entremés de los negros: Text and Context Edward J, Mullen Although it is a critical commonplace to trace the florescence of interest in forms of neo-African writing back to Peninsular Spanish origins, surprisingly little scholarship has been done to study the black presence in the Iberian peninsula. Unfortunately, many older studies are posited on ill-defined notions of race and genotype. The terms 'Moor' and 'black' are used interchangeably, and references to blacks in major works of literature are often made without specific documentation.! A review of the literature would seem to indicate, however, that many of the folkloric, linguistic, and stylized features associated with the black presence in the Americas had their origins in Spain.2 Although some recent scholarship has revealed a considerable corpus of works dealing with blacks in Spanish literature from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, many of the texts have not been the object of any detailed study.3 In her very useful "Black Heroes in the Theater of Early Spain," Annette Ivory has observed a significant shift in the way blacks were presented in the imaginative literature of Spain: "Whereas in the 16th Century, the mockery of anonymous mojigangas, La negra lectora, Mojiganga de la negra, the anonymous entremés, Los negros de Santo Tomé, and the farces of Sánchez de Badajoz dominate the theater of period; in the 17th Century, the exaggerated sincerity of the comedias provides a contrasting view of the Black on Spanish soil."4 EDWARD J. MULLEN, Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has published in such journals as Comparative Literature Studies, Latin American Theatre Review, Hispania, and Latin-American Literature Review; his most recent book-length publication is Critical Essays on Langston Hughes (Boston : G. K. Hall, 1986). 231 232Comparative Drama A careful reading of Simón Aguado's Entremés de los negros would seem to corroborate this formulation.5 This text, which appeared very early in the seventeenth century,6 is an important document in the history of Afro-Hispanic letters demarcating as it does a transition between earlier fragmented views of blacks in the works of Rodrigo de Reinosa, Gil Vicente, Lope de Rueda, Diego Sánchez de Badajoz, on the one hand, and the more artistically complete depictions in the obra of Lope de Vega, Andrés de Claramonte, Calderón de la Barca, and Diego Ximénez de Enciso. Although Aguado's brief entremés has long been available to scholars and has received scholarly commentary for well over a hundred years, it has consistently been treated only to piecemeal criticism. Thus Emilio Cotarelo y Mori limited his observations to the author's use of the Zarabanda , a lascivious dance of African origin which had been prohibited by authorities. The Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz alluded in his Los negros esclavos (1916) to the play, which he saw as having value as an example of the mistreatment of slaves, while José Juan Arrom and Emilio Ballagas viewed it as a precursor to Afro-Cubanism.7 In an extremely valuable essay, Juan R. Castellano related Aguado's Los negros to other works of similar theme and execution and offered a summary of its contents.8 Perhaps the most convincing evaluation to date is that of Lemuel Johnson, who viewed the work as but one of the constitutive elements in a tradition which made of the black man in Spain a buffoon-Orpheus: "The same buffoonery is seen in Simón Aguado, a contemporary of Shakespeare. He describes a Negro wedding using a bembon's voice. The jitanj áfora sequence is rather interesting here as it provides an extension of the meaning of the term."9 While some of Johnson's comments can be validated by a reading of the play, he fails to take into account a number of important issues related to the nature of the genre, the originating conditions of the work's production, and the role that music and dance played in lives of blacks in seventeenthcentury Spain. I would argue that Aguado's Los negros is far more complex than has been suggested by criticism thus far. More than an...
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