Your Review: Ollantay

Finalist #9 in the Review Contest

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru doing it. If nothing else, it’s popular in Peruvian high schools as a way to get students to connect with Quechua history. It’s not a particularly long play; a full performance of Ollantay takes around an hour.¹

Also, nobody knows where Ollantay was written, when it was written, or who wrote it. And its first documented performance led directly to upwards of a hundred thousand deaths.

Macbeth has killed at most fifty people,² and yet it routinely tops listicles of “deadliest plays”. I’m here to propose that Ollantay take its place.

The Meta-Story

When Ollantay was first performed, Peru was around two hundred years removed from Pizarro’s apocalyptic conquest. The population was finally starting to recover, so that in 1770 it sat at around 1.2 million people. The vast majority of those 1.2 million people were indigenous,³ and the vast majority of those 1.2 million people did not have great lives. Peru was oriented almost exclusively towards extracting mineral wealth from the mountains and moving it to Spain.

Here’s how they did it.

Peru was divided into around fifty provinces called corregimientos, each of which was run by a single corregidor. The corregidor held a monopoly on trade with all the Indians in his province, and he was also in charge of collecting taxes. If that sounds like a position which lends itself pretty easily to corruption and abuse, that’s because it was; the corregidores were uniformly fabulously wealthy and fabulously hated. And in addition to having to pay taxes, all the Indians were obligated to provide free labor to factories and public works projects - public works projects which were used not to improve living conditions of the Indians or provide them with roads between their villages, but to enable moving silver from the mines in the mountains down to the coast for shipping abroad. The Spanish crown expected that around 15% of the population of a district should be providing free labor at any given time. The actual number was usually much higher.

The sole representative from the Indian villages to the viceroyalty was the curaca, the highest office that an Indian could reach. Like the corregidores, there was one curaca for each province. This guy was responsible for ensuring that the Indians paid their taxes and delivered their free labor, and he was the only one authorized to lodge complaints to the corregidor on behalf of the villages. This was a position designed to make the curaca identify more with the Spanish and less with the Indians. Like the position of corregidor, it was also a way to get very rich.

José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a curaca, and he was indeed very rich. He became curaca by virtue of his father having been curaca; when he was eighteen his father died and he inherited the title. José Gabriel married well, going from rich to richer. He seems to have been a devout Catholic and he got along well with all the local priests, up to and including the bishop of Cuzco - the ancient capital of the Inca empire and the most important city of inland Peru. José Gabriel was of course friendly with the local corregidor, a very rich Spaniard named Antonio Arriaga.

That isn’t to say that José Gabriel was particularly corrupt; on the contrary, he seems to have had a desire to help his people in ways that most other curacas did not. He used those friendships to get actual material concessions - lower taxes, less free labor, public works projects that actually helped the public. All of these didn’t go nearly far enough, but he at least tried. And he complained a lot. One of the people he complained to was a parish priest named Antonio Valdez.

Don Antonio Valdez was a parish priest in Tinta, and he fancied himself a Man of Culture. Priests were an important part of the Spanish colonial enterprise, and so Don Valdez was on good terms with both the curaca and corregidor. His name was well-known in Cuzco; he came from a family with long ties to the region and had established himself quite well. Around 1775, he invited José Gabriel and some other honored guests to a performance of a play he had finished putting together. Set in Cuzco in the 1400s, Valdez told his assembled audience that Ollantay was a Castilian version of a Quechua play.⁴

After seeing the play, something changed in José Gabriel’s life. It began with his name. He started claiming that he was a direct descendant of Túpac Amaru, the last Incan emperor,⁵ and so he took the name Túpac Amaru II. On his next tours of the local villages he told them all his true name and his true lineage, and let them know that the days of minute changes in tax policy were soon to be over. Things were going to change. He was going to go to Lima to tell the king’s representatives what was what.

He traveled to Lima to press his claims. Specifically, he asked the viceroy to recognize his claim to the Marquessate of Oreposa, which was a noble title originally granted to the grandson of Emperor Túpac Amaru. Apparently he was persuasive enough that the government in Lima recognized the claim, and so he returned to Tinta as Túpac Amaru II, Maruqess of Oreposa. If anyone in the viceroy’s government was nervous about acknowledging the direct descendant of the last Incan emperor, they didn’t make their feelings known.

They should have. Because after his Ollantay-inspired transformation, Túpac Amaru II, Marquess of Oreposa and defender of the Quechua, was now on a mission. Back in Tinta, he ratcheted up his agitation against the constant overtaxing, overcharging, and abuse of the free labor system. He was so persuasive in this effort that he (and Valdez the priest/playwright) convinced the bishop of Cuzco to send a delegation back to Madrid, led by Túpac’s uncle, to argue in front of King Charles III.⁶ On the whole, everything was working out quite well for Túpac. He was now recognized as an Inca chief by the government in Cuzco; he knew the bishop well enough that the king would soon hear his grievances. He had every expectation that Charles would agree with him. So why bother waiting for Charles to answer?

On November 4th, 1780, a parish priest held a feast at his house in honor of King Charles’s birthday. Túpac was present, along with Antonio Arriaga, the aforementioned corregidor. It is not said whether or not Don Antonio Valdez was at this dinner, when Túpac proclaimed that Arriaga was under arrest for abuse of power. Túpac let it be known that the king had agreed with him that the Quechua should no longer be taxed, but that Arriaga had refused to enact this royal order.⁷ The punishment for this insubordination was death. Then he set up a scaffold in the center of town, waited for a suitable crowd to arrive, and publicly executed Arriaga. Thus began the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II.

Túpac recruited from the disaffected Quechua quite easily. With an army of locals mostly armed with slings and stones, he easily dispatched the initial force sent from Cuzco to stop him, killing nearly the entire force while losing only fifteen of his own men. News of this victory spread rapidly and he amassed an army 60,000 strong. But rather than pressing his advantage and immediately attacking Cuzco, he just wandered around southern Peru, allowing the army to pillage at will. His advisors - chief among them his wife - couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t attack. And in these crucial months, a new Spanish army assembled in Lima.

After two months of confused looting, Túpac’s advisors finally convinced him to attack Cuzco. But the city was by now well prepared for him, and his efforts were half-hearted at best. The attempt failed and the army withdrew to the south, where any remaining cohesion fell apart. January and February were spent holed up in the mountains, waiting for the hammer to fall.

It fell in March. That army from Lima arrived and proved too strong for Túpac’s stone-throwers. On April 6th the indigenous army was smashed; Túpac was captured alive, along with his wife and two of his sons. The entire rebellion had lasted just five months.

They were all brought to Cuzco in chains, where the general who led the Spanish army pronounced his opinion on what should happen to Túpac. This sentence was carried out. On May 18th, 1781, Túpac Amaru II was forced to watch as his wife and children were tortured and executed in front of him. Then they cut out his tongue. Then they gathered four horses, tied one to each of his limbs, and sent them running in opposite directions. Túpac Amaru II was pulled apart and he bled out in the plaza of Cuzco.⁸

The Spanish army then spent the remainder of 1781 pacifying Peru. The indigenous army did not exist anymore, so this was not so much a war as a series of massacres. Anybody who might conceivably offer resistance was killed. And though it wasn’t officially called this, in practice Peru was decimated; from a 1780 population of 1.2 million, 100,000 people were killed.

Then the viceroy banned all Quechua theater. He knew what had started this.

---

Don Antonio Valdez was not killed in the purges. He was well-connected enough, and he was Spanish enough, to avoid the fate of all his Indian friends. Ollantay, though, was to be destroyed.

Yet Valdez kept a copy of his play hidden in his parish, and then he lived another 35 years. Those 35 years saw the destruction of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar and the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy by Napoleon, events which combined to undermine and ultimately destroy Spanish authority in the Americas. And while José de San Martín wouldn’t liberate Peru until 1820, by the time of Valdez’s death the interior of Peru had fallen well outside the viceregal jurisdiction. Holding Cuzco was hard enough; the viceroy wasn’t in any position to prevent a parish priest from making a copy of a decades-old play.

He made two copies, and gave each one to a priest. One of these priests brought a copy to a convent in Cuzco, where it sat in the library. The other priest kept his copy, and the original remained with Valdez. In 1835, a relative of Valdez’s wrote an article in a Cuzco periodical where he made reference to the fact that copies of Ollantay yet existed. This article came to the attention of a certain Johann Moritz Rugendas, a German artist who had recently been booted out of Mexico for trying to overthrow the government there and was presently touring South America.

El Marcado de la Independencia, by Rugendas in 1843. He did some nice paintings of Lima while on tour.

Rugendas asked the monks in the convent to make a copy of Ollantay for him. This copy was rather damaged, having sat in a damp convent for eighty years, but the monks obliged and did the best they could. Rugendas brought this copy back to Germany when he returned to Europe in 1846, where it became a curiosity as an example of the Quechua language. He also brought back word that an undamaged copy existed in some priest’s rectory.

An Englishman with an interest in Inca history decided that he was going to find this undamaged version and write an English translation, and so in 1853 Sir Clements Markham⁹ added “find and translate Ollantay” to his agenda for an upcoming expedition to the Andes. He succeeded, finding that other priest who held that other copy and meticulously copying every word of Ollantay in both Quechua and Spanish, then translating that to English.

And so we can read, watch, and perform Ollantay, the play that launched a thousand ships.

The Story

Ollantay is a love story.¹⁰ The lovers are the titular Ollantay and Cusi Coyllur Ñusta - he the chief of the Anti people (to be clear, Anti is the Quechua name of the clan; they’re not anti-people) and she the daughter of the Inca emperor. As the play begins, they have already been clandestine lovers for quite some time and the princess is secretly pregnant by Ollantay. But Ollantay, being simply a regional warlord, is not a suitable match for a princess. The play begins with Ollantay pining to his page - who fills the only role of “comic relief”¹¹ - that he must marry Coyllur:

Have I not already said
That e’en if death’s fell scythe was here,
If mountains should oppose my path
Like two fierce foes who block the way,
Yet will I fight all these combined
And risk all else to gain my end,
And whether it be life or death
I’ll cast myself at Coyllur’s feet.

The two run into the high priest, whose introductory soliloquy is a paean to the blood of llamas:

O giver of all warmth and light
O Sun! I fall and worship thee.
For thee the victims are prepared,
A thousand llamas and their lambs
Are ready for thy festal day.
The sacred fire’ll lap their blood,
In thy dread presence, mighty one,
After long fast thy victims fall.

The priest and Ollantay then discuss how Ollantay can definitely not marry the princess and it’s a really bad idea for him to try. Ollantay reiterates his desires, to which the priest can only give one final warning:

Put a seed into the ground,
It multiplies a hundredfold;
The more thy crime shall grow and swell,
The greater far thy sudden fall.

Ollantay then approaches the emperor and asks for the hand of his daughter with a long soliloquy. The emperor waves him off in four lines:

Ollantay, thou dost now presume.
Thou art a subject, nothing more.
Remember, bold one, who thou art,
And learn to keep thy proper place.

And so in the next scene, Ollantay swears vengeance:

When flames rise to the heavens.
Cuzco shall sleep on a bloody couch,
The King shall perish in its fall;
Then shall my insulter see
How numerous are my followers.
When thou, proud King, art at my feet,
We then shall see if thou wilt say,
‘Thou art too base for Coyllur’s hand.’

He returns home and gathers an army. The emperor then dispatches his own army to go hunt down Ollantay, but Ollantay’s men successfully ambush them in a mountain pass and destroy the Inca army without losing a man:

A rain of stones both great and small
Down on the crowd of warriors crashed,
On every side destruction flashed,
Thy heart the slaughter did appall.

Like a strong flood the blood did flow,
Inundating the ravine;
So sad a sight thou ne’er hast seen—
No man survived to strike a blow.

Ollantay doesn’t press his advantage, though, and is content instead to build up his base of power in his home province. This proves to be a mistake. General Rumi-Ñaui, the general who lost the battle in the mountain pass, comes up with a different, better plan. He begs the emperor for another chance, and the emperor grants it.

Rumi-Ñaui shows up to Ollantay, beaten and bloody, and spins a tale of betrayal by the emperor. Ollantay takes the bait and invites him into his capital, then tells him that they will shut the gates and party for three days straight:

It will be so. For three whole nights
We drink and feast, to praise the Sun,
The better to cast all care aside
We shall be shut in Tampu fort.

Rumi-Ñaui waits for Ollantay’s whole army to be passed-out drunk. Then he opens the gates and invites his army to come in and kill or capture the lot of them. Ollantay is brought back to Cuzco in chains. Things are looking bad for him.

I’ll let the play take it from here (Túpac Yupanqui is the emperor, and tocarpus are execution stakes):

TÚPAC YUPANQUI:
Know that tocarpus are prepared.
Remove those traitors from my sight,
Let them all perish, and at once.

RUMI-ÑAUI:
Take these three men without delay
To the dreaded execution stakes;
Secure them with unyielding ropes,
And hurl them from the lofty rocks.

TÚPAC YUPANQUI:
Stop! Cast off their bonds.

(The guards unbind them. They all kneel.)

(To Ollantay, kneeling).
Rise from thy knees; come to my side.

(Rises.)

Now thou hast seen death very near,
You that have shown ingratitude,
Learn how mercy flows from my heart;
I will raise thee higher than before.
Thou wert Chief of Anti-suyu,
Now see how far my love will go;
I make thee Chief in permanence.
Receive this plume as general,
This arrow emblem of command.

That’s right! Ollantay swore eternal vengeance on the emperor, seceded, set himself up as a king, destroyed an entire Inca army, and is rewarded for his betrayal by being made viceroy. Rumi-Ñaui has no problem with this, saying:

Prince Ollantay! Incap Ranti!
Thy promotion gives me joy.

As the play concludes, Ollantay mentions that he would still very much like to marry Coyllur.¹² The emperor of course thinks this is a marvelous idea, and so the two are reunited for the first time in ten years and, oddly enough, the first time in the play. Ollantay is the kind of love story where the lovers only actually speak to each other once, at the very end.

And so the play concludes with these words from the emperor:

Thy wife is now in thy arms;
All sorrow now should disappear,
Joy, new born, shall take its place.

Which is the Inca version of “and they all lived happily ever after”.

---

Ollantay is not a particularly good play. There’s a reason it has only entered the repertoire of Peruvian high school drama. The whole premise that Ollantay is trying to get back to his lover is dropped in Act II and only resurfaces at the very end of the play, almost as an afterthought. None of the characters evolve; Ollantay is the exact same person at the end of the play that he was at the start. And the resolution is comically abrupt. All the foreshadowing, and there is foreshadowing, implies that both Ollantay and Coyllur will end up dead, but instead they end up married and with a ten-year-old daughter. Turns out the priest was wrong! The seed put in the ground that multiplies a hundred fold won’t precipitate a sudden fall after all!

Thematically, Ollantay is not thematic. Ollantay acts virtuously and is rewarded for it. Rumi-Ñaui acts wickedly and is rewarded for it. Coyllur acts…well she doesn’t really act, she just bemoans her fate in Act I and then spends the rest of the play literally hidden behind a stone wall.

And it’s not like Ollantay tells us anything about Incan society that would make it valuable from an anthropological perspective. Valdez may have been adapting a traditional Quechua play, but his own Spanish and Catholic background definitely seeped in. As we’ll see, there’s an ongoing debate as to how much of the play is Quechua and how much is Valdez.¹³

The Same Story

But even if Ollantay is not that valuable from an artistic perspective or an anthropological perspective, it is valuable from a historic perspective.

You may have noticed some similarities between the plot of Ollantay and the story of Túpac Amaru II. By which I mean that it’s beat-for-beat the same story. A powerful local chief despairs of his inability to <marry a princess / lighten the free labor burden>. After consulting with a local priest, he launches an armed rebellion against the imperial authorities in Cuzco from his home base in the mountains, and quickly raises a large army. He easily defeats the initial army sent to capture him, but instead of marching on Cuzco he focuses on building up his own local power base. This proves to be an error, and he loses control of his own army, leading to military defeat and his own capture. He is taken to Cuzco in chains and <forgiven and made viceroy / brutally tortured and executed>.

Pretty much all of the questions surrounding the Túpac Amaru rebellion vanish if you assume that Túpac was not fighting a rebellion but following a script. Why did Túpac not immediately attack Cuzco? Because Ollantay didn’t. Why was he seemingly okay with his army losing its discipline? Because Ollantay was. Why did he put his army in a position to lose? Why was he okay with being taken alive, knowing how the Spanish dealt with rebels? Because Túpac was following the path set by Ollantay:

• First, declare yourself in rebellion.

• Second, win a quick and easy victory with the help of stone-throwers.

• Third, amass a giant army.

• Fourth, hunker down at your base in the mountains and wait to be defeated by the new army sent from the capital.

• Fifth, be brought to Cuzco and given authority over all of inner Peru.

• Finally, use your new authority to improve the lives of all indigenous people and be remembered forever as a great ruler.

He made it all the way to step five before things went awry.

Ollantay was a cognitohazard designed exclusively for José Gabriel Condorcanqui. It led him to embrace his destiny as the liberator of his people, and it led him to believe that he would be vindicated in the end rather than tortured and executed. It led him to make crucial military mistakes. It led one hundred thousand people to their deaths.

The Author

The first time I read Ollantay, I was sure that there was some mistake; that Antonio Valdez had written the play after the rebellion as a way to try and redeem Túpac. A way to recast his story as a romantic tale of heroism and end up with him on top. Maybe he felt bad for his role in the decimation of Peru, and writing (or re-writing) Ollantay was his way of making up for it. But Valdez, and his family, and those priests with those copies, and the Spanish military officers burning down ancient villages, they all said that no this really was the Ollantay that drove José Gabriel to become Túpac Amaru.

So how much should we blame Don Antonio Valdez? Here are the theories I’ve seen of where Valdez’s version came from. All of these theories have their vigorous defenders.

1. Valdez came up with the whole play himself.

2. Valdez took an existing Quechua oral tradition and set it in the form of a Castilian play.

3. Valdez took an existing Quechua drama that had been acted for centuries and wrote it down.

4. Valdez took an existing Quechua drama that had been acted for centuries, changed the ending so as to fit with his more romantic notions, and wrote it down.

5. Valdez found a play that had already been written down in Castilian verse; all he had to do was hire actors to stage it.

It must be reiterated that scholarship on this point is incredibly varied. To quote one article that tries (and fails) to come to any sort of conclusion, “Certain scholars have said that the Ollantay tradition, which exists yet today in Peru, is the source of the play; and others say that the play is the source of the tradition.” Which is to say that yes there are folk stories around Ollantay, and we have no idea whether they spawned the play or the play spawned them.

Some Inca historians maintain that Ollantay must be a 16th-century original. Others put it in the 15th, others claim that Valdez just made it all up himself. An Argentinian claimed that his father was a friend of Valdez and that Valdez didn’t know anything about writing plays. A Peruvian¹⁴ countered that Valdez was the greatest linguist, philosopher, and playwright in all of 18th-century South America. Then there’s the racial component - white Peruvians are more inclined to say that Valdez wrote the whole thing himself, and indigenous Peruvians are more inclined to say that he simply adapted it from the Quechua.

I am left without an opinion as to which sections of Ollantay are a Valdez original. But I’m also convinced that Valdez does not play an innocent role here. In Ollantay, the priest figures heavily in the opening and closing of the play. He begins with a statement of his powers:

’Tis well. Now listen, warlike. Chief:
My science has enabled me,
To learn and see all hidden things
Unknown to other mortal men.
My power will enable me
To make of thee a greater prince.

He goes on to warn Ollantay of the path he will go down if he insists on making trouble with the emperor. It’s a long back-and-forth, but the priest finishes with this flourish:

How oft we mortals heedless drink,
A certain death from golden cup
Recall to mind how ills befall,
And that a stubborn heart’s the cause.

And having failed to convince Ollantay, he departs with the lines:

Be it life, be it death that you find,
I will never forget thee, my son.

And he means it. He stays with the emperor and advises mercy towards Ollantay at every step.

Finally, in the climactic scene when the defeated Ollantay is brought before the emperor, we have this moment:

TÚPAC YUPANQUI:
(to the Uillac Uma).
Pronounce their sentence, great High Priest.

UILLAC UMA:
The light that fills me from the Sun
Brings mercy and pardon to my heart.

It is this sentiment, we are meant to infer, that causes the emperor to show mercy to Ollantay.

Don Antonio Valdez did none of this. He did not attempt to talk down Túpac from his course. He did not go to Cuzco to plead clemency. And when Túpac was captured and brought to Cuzco, when he had his tongue torn out and his limbs tied to horses and his body ripped apart in the plaza, the priest was nowhere to be found. Instead, he was hiding in his parish, hoping nobody would come around asking about a play.

Antonio Valdez lived for another thirty-five years after the brutal suppression of the rebellion and the public execution of his friend. In all the chaos that would subsume Peru as South America broke away from Spain and fell into near-constant civil war, Valdez never made another public appearance. He advised neither San Martín nor Bolívar.

But he did make a copy of his play.

Trying to Make Sense of It All

I have come to a conclusion. It is my firm belief that Ollantay was not created by Don Antonio Valdez. Whether or not Valdez adopted an existing Quechua story is irrelevant; we cannot put the deaths of a hundred thousand people onto the shoulders of a single priest. Ollantay must remain without an author. That is good and right.

Because the best explanation I can offer for the Túpac Amaru rebellion is that José Gabriel Condorcanqui was taken in by something beyond his control. You and I can read or watch Ollantay and be mildly amused for an hour without wanting to go overthrow the Peruvian government. But that’s not because we’re more clever than José, or more rational than José, or more media-savvy than José. It’s because Ollantay wasn’t for us. It was for him.

But maybe something else is for you and for me. Maybe there’s a book out there, or a painting, or a song or a play that is just waiting for you to activate your destiny. Maybe every artwork out there exists for a specific person, and every once in a while the art finds the person and they change the world. Maybe we just have to hope that ours never finds us.

After all, Ollantay is far from the only example of this. Mark David Chapman read Catcher in the Rye and knew he had to kill Lennon. John Hinckley Jr. saw Taxi Driver and knew it was talking about him; knew that Jodie Foster needed somebody to follow the script and shoot the president.

And in 1992, Ronald Ray Howard was pulled over outside of Houston while listening to “Soulja’s Story”, a song with these lyrics:

Only fifteen and got problems
Cops on my tail, so I bail 'til I dodge 'em
They finally pull me over and I laugh
"Remember Rodney King?" And I blast on his punk ass

Howard followed the script.

And when he was arrested and when he was charged with murder of a police officer and when he faced the death penalty and thirteen years later when he sat in the chair and watched the lethal injection cocktail enter into the IV drip, each time he swore that he didn’t want to kill the officer, but that something came over him. He couldn’t control it. It was the song.

That song was written, of course, by Tupac Amaru.

1. I’m relegating a video of an actual performance of Ollantay to this footnote, mainly because I’m reviewing the play in general and not a particular performance. There are quite a few on YouTube, most of pretty similar quality to this one. Performed in Quechua with Spanish subtitles, but English viewers will pretty easily figure out what’s going on. Nothing about this play is subtle.

2. 22 dead in one particular riot, and a handful of actors’ deaths over the four hundred years since it was written.

3. Throughout this review I’ll be alternating between “indigenous”, “Indian”, and “Quechua”, but for our purposes they all mean the same thing.

4. Meaning that it was refitted to be in octosyllabic verse, which was a popular style for Spanish theater at the time.

5. This is actually not as implausible as it might seem. Túpac Amaru I had a lot of children, and Condorcanqui was wealthy enough that his lineage could be traced back to royalty. And we’re not talking like 2,000 years here - Túpac Amaru I was executed in 1572. This would be akin to a rich Virginian claiming to be a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson.

6. Said uncle was poisoned to death in Madrid. This story has no happy endings.

7. This was very much Not True. Túpac had not heard anything from Madrid.

8. Later sources claimed that Túpac was too strong for the horses and they failed to execute him this way, ending up cutting his head off instead, but that seems to be a later fabrication meant to impart some divinity onto him. Either way, not a good way to go.

9. More well-known for bringing quinine to India and organizing the first British expeditions to reach the South Pole. But he also dabbled as a translator.

10. Here I’ll be quoting from Markham’s 1863 English translation. Markham tried to preserve the Castilian style of Valdez, and because he did not speak Quechua his version is an English translation of a Spanish translation. But it’s the best we’ve got.

11. For example:

PIQUI CHAQUI.
(jumping up).
I was asleep, my master,
And dreaming of evil things.

OLLANTAY.
Of what?

PIQUI CHAQUI.
Of a fox with a rope round its neck.

OLLANTAY.
Sure enough, thou art the fox.

PIQUI CHAQUI.
It is true that my nose is growing finer,
And my ears a good deal longer.

12. She does have her own subplot, which I’ll tell in this footnote. The princess is confined to a prison within a religious order. She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin. We then jump forward ten years, as Ollantay builds his kingdom in the mountains. Yma does not know that she is secretly Inca royalty, and she despairs at the life set before her. She also is very interested in learning why there is a crying woman behind the walls at the convent. This plot is resolved when Yma’s friend tells her everything and brings her to her mother. Yma then goes to tell the emperor, completely unaware of the events surrounding Ollantay. The emperor sends Yma to fetch the princess and bring her back to Ollantay. At no point do Yma or Ollantay acknowledge that she is his daughter.

Wait, you say, wouldn’t it make more sense if Ollantay went to go rescue his wife and daughter after being made viceroy? If he had nothing to do with Yma’s discovery of her true parentage, then why did Yma have to wait ten years before peeking behind a wall to find her mother? These are all good questions! The answer is that Ollantay has anticipated the Bechdel test by two hundred years and so is absolutely determined that any time there are two women in a scene together they must 1) have a conservation with each other that 2) is not about a man.

13. There’s also a good argument to be made that he changed the original ending, turning it from a tragedy to a triumph. That would explain the presence of this song in Act I, sung by a passing child to Coyllur:

“She wanders forth from stone to stone,
She seeks her mate in vain;
‘My love! my love!’ she makes her moan,
She falls, she dies in pain.”

14. Not just a Peruvian, but the Peruvian Minister of Foreign of Affairs.