"La esclava del cielo, Santa Engracia", a forgotten comedy of Andrés de Claramonte

Abstract

Two are the objectives of this paper: in the first place, to elucidate the relationship that exists between the manuscript copy that has been preserved of a play entitled La esclava del cielo, Santa Engracia and the play of the same title that is mentioned in several documents of the 17th Century related to the professional companies of the autores Cristóbal Ortiz, Juan Bautista Valenciano and Juan Jerónimo Valenciano. In the second place, to critically analyze the attribution of La esclava del cielo, Santa Engracia to the playwright Andrés de Claramonte that appears in several of these documents, both by assessing the validity of the information present in these documents and by taking into account metric and dramaturgical criteria in order to establish the authorship of the play. As I will prove, the preserved manuscript is the same play by the Murcian playwright that was considered lost until now.