Frontera religiosa, de identidad y de género en Dejar un reino por otro y mártires de Madrid

The essay analyzes the comedy Dejar un reino por otro y mártires de Madrid, whose identification and attribution has been longly discussed. The work belongs to the subgenre «comedia de cautiverio» in which events involving Muslims and Christians are represented. The topic is closely linked to the historical reality of the time, in which we see the fight for the Mediterranean domination between Europeans and Ottoman populations; and the consequent increasing number of prisoners both in Europe and in Islamic lands. This explains the great wealth of plays set in Turkey and specially in Constantinople; it also explains the fashion, which gets established between the second half of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th Century, of the «Turkish theme» in Spanish literature during the Siglo de Oro. Dejar un reino por otro y mártires de Madrid is with no doubt a work in which the concept of limes is part of the structure: the action takes place in Constantinople, the connection city between the West and the East. The pièce itself derives from the contamination of the «comedia de cautiverio» code with other subgenres characteristics. One of the main characters Enrique, a young, noble, Spanish in the appearance of a Turkish prince, crosses the threshold of his own identity gathering in his figure, torn between ambition and honor, all the contradictions that separate Christians and Muslims reducing the supposed lack of communication between two so far worlds.