American pre-Columbian drama : the Rabinal-Achi

Rablnal-Achi is a pre-Columbian drama created by the Eastern Quiche of Guatemala, a branch of the Maya, in the 15th century. It was preserved orally due to an unusual set of circumstances, and written down in colonial times. The Quiche play is the only autochthonous American drama to have survived the Spanish conquest.

This dissertation situates Rablnal-Achi among other surviving pre-Columbian literary works and examines the historical background, character, and reliability of its controversial discoverer Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg. Through scrutiny of the text it identifies the locale of the original production and unveils consequential mythical elements in the play. It also provides the first extended literary and linguistic analysis of the drama and compares it with other classical and ancient literatures.

An important appendix to the dissertation contains the first complete and literal translation of the Quiche drama from the faithful French version left by its discoverer. The facing Quiche text was frequently consulted in order to rectify some words or phrases in Brasseur's version.

Rablnal-Achi has not yet attracted the attention it deserves, probably owing to its unavailability in English and to the questionable character of its discoverer. The present study solves both these problems and makes Rablnal-Achi available to Maya specialists as well as to experts in other fields such as archaeology, anthropology, comparative literature, and studies on the origin of drama.