Out of the Wings

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Personal information

Surname: Cervantes Saavedra
First name: Miguel
Commonly known as: Cervantes
Born: 1547, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
Died: 23 April 1616

Biography

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares (not far from Madrid) in 1547. His father, a surgeon, claimed nobility but it is probable that his mother’s side of the family had converted from Judaism (Canavaggio). Little is known about Cervantes’s young life, but he moved to Italy some time before fighting in the battle of Lepanto in 1571 where he was famously injured in his left hand (and this is why he is sometimes affectionately referred to as ‘el manco de Lepanto’). From 1572 he continued his life as a soldier, fighting in various campaigns including Navarino, Corfu, and Tunisia on behalf of Juan of Austria, but on his way home in 1575 he was abducted by Algerians and spent five years captive in Algiers. He was never successful in his many attempts to escape, but was finally ransomed by the religious order of the Trinitarians and sent back to his family in Madrid in 1580. Five years later he published La Galatea, a pastoral novel, and married Catalina de Salazar. During this period of relative happiness in his life, a few of his plays were performed in Madrid; El trato de Argel and El cerco de Numancia are the only plays from this period which survive, unfortunately. (In 1992 Stefano Arata published an edition of La conquista de Jerusalén, which is thought to be the third of Cervantes’s plays from this time). After this period he left for Andalucia, southern Spain, where he lived for ten years, first gathering provisions for the Invincible Armada in 1587 and then as a tax collector. In 1597 he was incarcerated by the government for discrepancies with his funds, but by 1605 he was free in Valladolid, enjoying the literary success that came with the publication of the first part of Don Quixote. From this time Cervantes enjoys literary notoriety, as he wrote and published prolifically over the next ten years. He moved back to Madrid in 1607 and in 1613 published his Novelas ejemplares, followed in 1614 by the publication of his Viaje del Parnaso. In 1615, the second part of Don Quixote came out, and he also published his Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, his eight plays and eight one-act plays, which was an anomalous decision as the fashion for publishing was to do so after the plays had been performed. Cervantes made a special note that these plays were ‘nunca representados’, or ‘never performed’. Cervantes died on 23 April 1616, the same day as William Shakespeare’s death. His final prose work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda, was published after his death, in 1617.

See Miguel de Cervantes, ed. Canavaggio, 1992: 9-28.

Maestro (2003: 757-82)

McKendrick (1989: 62-4)

Canavaggio, Jean. 1997 (Revised edition). Cervantes. Madrid, Espasa Calpe (in Spanish)
Maestro, Jesús G. 2003. ‘Cervantes’. In Historia del teatro español, ed. Javier Huerta Calvo, pp. 757-82. Madrid, Gredos (in Spanish)
McKendrick, Melveena. 1989. ‘The Classicizing Tragedians’. In Theatre in Spain 1490-1700, pp. 57-65. Cambridge, University Press
Miguel de Cervantes. 1992. Los baños de Argel; Pedro de Urdemalas, ed. Jean Canavaggio, pp. 9-28. Clásicos Taurus 17. Madrid, Santillana

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Further information

Because we have to take Cervantes’s own word for it that his plays were well-received onstage during his early writing career, and because of the legendary fame of his novels such as Don Quixote, Cervantes is often thought by critics to be a better novelist than playwright. However in recent years his playwriting has received much more attention than ever before, and the Spanish National Classical Theatre Company has staged several of his plays to critical acclaim. For an overview of Cervantes’s critics from 1749 on, see Smith, 1996: 166-76.

Smith, Dawn. 1996. ‘Cervantes and His Critics’. In Eight Interludes, trans. and ed. Dawn L. Smith, pp. 166-76. London, Everyman

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Themes

Cervantes’s plays reflect the times and places in which he wrote them, often parodying Lope de Vega’s extremely popular style of play, the comedia nueva. Cervantine drama features episodes, characters and settings taken from his own life experiences—the semi-autobiographical Los tratos de Argel, which treats his time kept as a captive in Algiers, is the prime example. His plays are multicultural, including converted and unconverted Christian and Moorish characters; his work is sceptical of a hegemonically-Catholic world-view, and although it works with popular comedy’s themes (honour, love and social rank, etc.) it treats them not so much as ordering principles but as questionable, mutable forces. Perhaps this is why many of his plays reject standard comedia endings (the title character in Pedro de Urdemalas points out directly that his play will not end in marriage, a popular cliché) and characters rarely conform to their typified roles (gypsy girls become noblewomen, sinners become saints, mayors are fools, and married couples petition for divorce). Theatricality and metatheatre emerge persistently in his plays. Personal freedom and standing up to tyranny, whether military or social, is also a recurring theme (down to the last child in Numancia).

See Thacker (2007: 20-1; 57-8), McKendrick (1989: 62-4) and Maestro (2003)

Maestro, Jesús G. 2003. ‘Cervantes’. In Historia del teatro español, ed. Javier Huerta Calvo, pp. 757-82. Madrid, Gredos (in Spanish)
McKendrick, Melveena. 1989. ‘The Classicizing Tragedians’. In Theatre in Spain 1490-1700, pp. 57-65. Cambridge, University Press
Thacker, Jonathan. 2007. ‘Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and The First Generation’. In A Companion to Golden Age Theatre, pp. 56-91. Woodbridge, Tamesis

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Style

Cervantes wrote his plays in an ostensibly classical (Aristotelian) style, claiming in his Prologue to the Ocho comedias to prefer the classic ‘Unities’ (of time, place and action) and to suit his characters to the worlds and situations they inhabit. Yet he did not slavishly or even consistently follow the classical ‘rules’, but adapted his style to the changing currents of his theatrical milieu, though ultimately not far enough to gain success as he did not see the majority of his plays on the stage. He claims to have advanced the groundbreaking changes in structure, reducing the number of acts from four to three, and introducing allegorical and personified abstractions as characters in his plays, but it is probably true that Cervantes was joining an already-growing movement in this direction. His penchant for jokes, wordplay and local slang make Cervantes a challenge for the English translator. The Cervantine luminary Canavaggio (1977) divides the plays into three periods, the first before the rise of Lope de Vega, during which time Cervantes wrote El trato de Argel, Numancia and possibly La conquista de Jerusalén (Arata suggested Cervantes was the author of this play, and published an edition of it in Criticón in 1992). During the second period Cervantes is documented to have signed contracts with the theatre company manager Rodrigo Osorio, in which some of his oldest comedias were commissioned for performance. Yet in the final phase of his work, his plays seem not to have conformed enough to the overriding popular style of the Lopean comedia nueva, and Cervantes published his Ocho comedias and ocho entremeses, with the subtitle ‘Never performed’, in 1615.

See Thacker (2007: 20-1; 57-8), McKendrick (1989: 62-4) and Maestro (2003)

Canavaggio, Jean. 1977. Cervantès dramaturge: un théâtre à naître. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (in French)
Maestro, Jesús G. 2003. ‘Cervantes’. In Historia del teatro español, ed. Javier Huerta Calvo, pp. 757-82. Madrid, Gredos (in Spanish)
McKendrick, Melveena. 1989. ‘The Classicizing Tragedians’. In Theatre in Spain 1490-1700, pp. 57-65. Cambridge, University Press
Thacker, Jonathan. 2007. ‘Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and The First Generation’. In A Companion to Golden Age Theatre, pp. 56-91. Woodbridge, Tamesis

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Plays in the database

Other works

Cervantes, Miguel de. 1987. Entremeses, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini. Madrid, Cátedra (in Spanish)
Cervantes, Miguel de. 1998. Entremeses, ed. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo and Anonio Rey Hazas. Cervantes completo 17. Madrid, Alianza (in Spanish)
Cervantes, Miguel de. 1996. Eight Interludes, trans. and ed. Dawn L. Smith. London, Everyman
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1984. El cerco de Numancia, ed. Robert Marrast. Madrid, Cátedra (in Spanish)

Useful reading and websites

Canavaggio, Jean. 1977. Cervantès dramaturge: un théâtre à naître. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (in French)
Canavaggio, Jean. 1997 (Revised edition). Cervantes. Madrid, Espasa Calpe (in Spanish)
Canavaggio, Jean. 2000. ‘En torno al teatro’. In Cervantes entre vida y creación, pp. 97-186. Alcalá de Henares, Biblioteca de Estudios Cervantinos (in Spanish)
Casalduero, Joaquín. 1966. Sentido y forma del teatro de Cervantes. Madrid, Gredos (in Spanish)
Friedman, Edward H. 1981. The Unifying Concept: Approaches to the Structure of Cervantes’ Comedias. York, South Carolina, Spanish Literature Publications Company
Maestro, Jesús G. 2003. ‘Cervantes’. In Historia del teatro español, ed. Javier Huerta Calvo, pp. 757-82. Madrid, Gredos (in Spanish)
For La Numancia see pp. 758-63, ‘La tragedia Numancia’.
Martin, Vincent. 2000. ‘Cervantes’s Critique of Verisimilitude as Intertexte for the “New Comedy”’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 52, 2, 53-66
McKendrick, Melveena. 1980. Cervantes. Boston, Little, Brown and Company
McKendrick, Melveena. 1989. ‘The Classicizing Tragedians’. In Theatre in Spain 1490-1700, pp. 57-65. Cambridge, University Press
Predmore, Richard L. 1973. Cervantes. London, Thames and Hudson
Reed, Cory. 1993. The Novelist as Playwright. Cervantes and the Entremés Nuevo. New York, Peter Lang
Thacker, Jonathan. 2007. ‘Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and The First Generation’. In A Companion to Golden Age Theatre, pp. 56-91. Woodbridge, Tamesis
Wardropper, Bruce W. 1955. ‘Cervantes’ Theory of the Drama’. Modern Philology, 52, 217-21.
Wardropper, Bruce W. 1973. ‘Comedias’. Suma Cervantina, pp. 147-169
Zimic, Stanislav, 1992. El teatro de Cervantes, Madrid, Castalia (in Spanish)

Entry written by Kathleen Jeffs. Last updated on 7 May 2012.

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Out of the Wings

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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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