A Critical Edition of Juan Bautista Diamante's La reina María Estuarda (PDF)

1. A Brief Biography of Juan Bautista Diamante. (p. 4)

The name Juan Bautista Diamante is unfamiliar to all but the most avid and widely read of the Sigh de Oro scholars. In an age of giants such as Lope de Vega Carpio, Tirso de Molina and Pedro Calderon de la Barca, whose impact on the Spanish theatre remains strong after more than three centuries, Diamante appears as little more than a footnote or an aside in the typical history of Spanish literature.

George Ticknor`s three-volume study of Spanish letters accords him less than two pages of insignificant criticism (II 416-417). As in the case of many of his contemporaries, our dramatist eludes detailed categorization since most of his biographical data is unavailable save in the form of studies by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, Ramon Mesonero Romanes, Karl Kipka and a few others.

Most of his production has been lost in the three hundred years since his death and hence, the little criticism that does appear pertains only to the approximately fifty plays now in existence. Most of these works contain various themes of religious content and show a solid formation in his biblical and hagiographical training.

His most famous play, El honrador de su padre, a rendition of the Cid legend based largely on Pierre Corneille`s Le Cid (Kipka 191-199),2 appeared in 1657 and his La reina Maria Estuarda was first performed three years later.

Who was this Diamante? He was born August 29, 1625 in Madrid of either Greek-Sicilian and Castilian (Cotarelo 272-278) or Portuguese- Spanish ancestry (Mesonero vii). From all accounts, he attended school in Madrid and studied canon law at Alcala de Henares, during many of his student years he found himself in trouble with the law, largely because of his fondness for sword play.

Like Lope, Tirso and Calderon, Diamante entered a religious order, although this vocation did not affect activities or his problems with the law. He eventually entered the Order of St. John

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