''The Best Mayor, The King'' (''El mejor alcalde, el rey'') is a play by the Spanish playwright
Lope de Vega
Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio ( , ; 25 November 156227 August 1635) was a Spanish playwright, poet, and novelist. He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Age of Baroque literature. His reputation in the world of Spanish literature ...
, written between 1620 and 1623 according to the dating proposed by Morley and Bruerton. It was published in 1635 in the twenty-first part of de Vega's comedies.
The action occurs in the early 12th century
Galicia during the reign of
Alfonso VII
Alphons (Latinized ''Alphonsus'', ''Adelphonsus'', or ''Adefonsus'') is a male given name recorded from the 8th century (Alfonso I of Asturias, r. 739–757) in the Christian successor states of the Visigothic kingdom in the Iberian peninsula. ...
. Sancho de Roelas, a nobleman who has fallen on hard times, announces to his lord Tello de Neira his intention to marry Elvira de Olite, also of impoverished noble lineage. Don Tello offers to be best man at the wedding but on seeing Elvira falls in love with her beauty and kidnaps her. She refuses to have sex with him and Sancho travels to
Leon
Leon, Léon (French) or León (Spanish) may refer to:
Places
Europe
* León, Spain, capital city of the Province of León
* Province of León, Spain
* Kingdom of León, an independent state in the Iberian Peninsula from 910 to 1230 and again f ...
to get Alfonso's help. Alfonso finally comes to Tello's manor-house incognito and – after revealing his identity and finding out that Tello has raped Elvira – forces him to marry Elvira. He then executes Tello, restoring Elvira's honour and endowing her with half of Tello's estate.
It is from the 'villano honrado' (honest villain) genre, which involves a peasant fighting the abuses of a nobleman and the king finally giving him justice, restoring his honour and punishing the nobleman with death. In this play, the villain is Sancho de Roelas and the nobleman is Don Tello or Tello de Neira, who abducts and rapes Sancho's fiancée. It is also a historical drama since (as one character states at the end of the play) it is based on an anecdote told in
Florián de Ocampo's ''Crónica de España'', which was in de Vega's time considered as an edition of the ''
Estoria de España
The ''Estoria de España'' ("History of Spain"), also known in the 1906 edition of Ramón Menéndez Pidal as the ''Primera Crónica General'' ("First General Chronicle"), is a history book written on the initiative of Alfonso X of Castile ''"El S ...
''.
The play was adapted into a movie:
The King is the Best Mayor
''The King is the Best Mayor'' (Italian: ''Il miglior sindaco, il re'', Spanish: ''El mejor alcalde, el rey'') is a 1974 Italian-Spanish historical drama film directed by Rafael Gil and starring Analía Gadé, Simonetta Stefanelli and Ray Loveloc ...
.
External links
*http://www.larramendi.es/i18n/corpus/unidad.cmd?idCorpus=1000&idUnidad=100601&posicion=1
{{DEFAULTSORT:Best Mayor, The King
1623 plays
Plays by Lope de Vega