Cervantes, Playwright
Universally renowned as the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) also wrote multiple plays. He was eager to prove himself as a playwright and poet, since these were the most established measures of literary worth in his time. Cervantes had some early successes on the Madrid stage in the 1580s, yet his later plays never found an audience. He was less facile in the style of the new comedia, and the complexity and interest of his prose are somewhat flattened in his verse drama. In 1615, shortly before his death, he chose to publish a collection of his new plays, Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados (Eight New Plays and Interludes, Never Performed). This highly unusual venture, in a period where plays were generally published only after having been exhaustively performed, served Cervantes as an alternative to the theatrical success that eluded him.
Cervantes lived through great transformations in European drama. In the Spanish context, he spans the transition between the early, simple theater of Juan del Encina (1469–1529) and Lope de Rueda (1505?–1565), who wrote religious, comic, and pastoral plays, or eclogues, and the more sophisticated productions of the comedia nueva, or new drama, whose most prolific and talented exponent was Félix Lope de Vega Carpio (1562–1635). Had Cervantes’s later plays been performed, they would have been staged in a sophisticated, urban, open-air, public theater—the corral—where audiences of all classes and of both genders mingled. Successful playwrights sold their work to autores, company managers who were a combination of producers and directors. The plays were performed by companies of professional actors of both genders. Hundreds of comedias were produced annually to satisfy the audience’s seemingly infinite demand for them. The plays were introduced by music and racy dances, with farcical interludes (entremeses) performed between the acts.
Gradually, the theater began to acquire some of the accouterments that were missing in the early days. A certain Navarro, Cervantes tells us,
The irony in Cervantes’s tone as he ends his description betrays his chagrin, for he has not climbed that lofty pinnacle. Instead, his theatrical production is located at that earlier, intermediate point, when, he tells us, “the theaters of Madrid showed The Traffic of Algiers, which I composed, The Destruction of Numancia, and The Naval Battle.” The last of these three has been lost, and the two extant plays do not support Cervantes’s claim that he was the first to modernize Spanish drama by reducing five acts to three at this time: both Traffic and Numancia feature four acts and are written in a ponderous, occasionally allegorical style. Nor can we know whether he in fact wrote “twenty or thirty plays at this time, all of which were performed without meriting an offering of cucumbers or other projectiles” (Cervantes 1995, 25–26). The more likely number is somewhere between ten and twenty, including the eight plays Cervantes published much later, some of which may have been reworked from earlier versions.
Yet despite Cervantes’s own bitter assessment of his limited success, there is much to recover in his writings for the theater, some of which incorporate elements of the new style. These include complex love stories, paired characters such as lady and gallant or maid and sidekick, historically precise locations, varied versification, and special effects (McKendrick 134). His best-known dramatic texts are the tragedy La destruición de Numancia, which describes the futile resistance of that Iberian city to Roman colonizers, and the comic interlude El retablo de las maravillas (The Miracle Show), a satire of Spanish obsessions with honor, legitimacy, and “blood purity” that features village notables taken in by picaresque entertainers.
Although the interludes are available in English translation, and Numancia and The Traffic of Algiers were translated in 1870, Cervantes’s other dramatic texts have never been translated. Yet they shed light both on the author’s better known prose oeuvre and on crucial historical dynamics. With their own versions of irony, humor, and pathos, the plays offer another turn of the Cervantine kaleidoscope, demonstrating how whatever ideological forces shaped the author’s corpus were necessarily altered by the constraints of genre, if not performance.
Given that these texts were not often performed, our sense of them does not depend as heavily on a performance history as is the case for the Shakespearean corpus, for example. Nonetheless, it is striking how closely Cervantes’s prologue connects the material and performance history of Spanish drama with the texts produced by its playwrights. One example of this connection is the popularity of cross-dressing on the stage: although, unlike on the English stage, actresses were permitted, dramatists produced countless plays that required actresses to cross-dress, as such risqué plots were hugely popular with audiences. Thus Cervantes’s Bagnios of Algiers includes a minor character, Ambrosio, whose main purpose seems to be the display of a famous actress, “Lady Catalina,” in male attire.
Cervantes’s Mediterranean
The Bagnios of Algiers and The Great Sultana enact the intense imaginative engagement of early modern Spain with the Muslim worlds of the Mediterranean. They also reflect Cervantes’s first-hand experience of captivity in North Africa, which had a crucial impact on his writing. The religious and political rivalries on this “forgotten frontier,” as Andrew Hess terms it (1978), serve as the backdrop to the complex set of relationships and identities explored in the texts.
The historical record indicates a recrudescence in relations between Spanish Christendom and the proximate world of Islam from the late fifteenth century, as Spain strained to consolidate as a “pure” Christian nation. The fall of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 set the stage for an increasingly expansionist Spain in the years following, as the crusading fervor of campaigns on the peninsula was furthered on the coasts of the Maghreb. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, the Spanish conquered and looted a number of sites in North Africa—the Peñón de Vélez, Orán, Bougie, Tripoli—establishing isolated presidios (fortresses) that would become increasingly difficult to defend as the century wore on. Beyond immediate enrichment through conquest, the Spaniards sought to control the piracy based in the Barbary Coast. Repeated corsair attacks, such as the one depicted in The Bagnios of Algiers, devastated Spanish coastal settlements and took a tremendous toll in hostages.
These attacks were often enabled by Muslims who had been forced to leave Spain either during the war on Granada or during the subsequent suppression of Islamic belief. Though compelled to relocate to North Africa, these populations had a minute knowledge of their former homelands in southern Spain, as Cervantes’s corsair Yzuf explains. Spanish speakers could often pass for Christians, which made them even more dangerous to unwitting ships or coastal towns. The situation was exacerbated over the course of Cervantes’s lifetime, as many Moriscos (Muslims forced to convert to Christianity) and their descendants found refuge in North Africa. The years 1609–1614, the period of Cervantes’s greatest productivity, saw the final expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. This new wave of exiles, who had been Christians (however nominally in some cases) for multiple generations, also found its way to the Barbary Coast.
The most famous and successful of the Barbary corsairs were the Barbarossa brothers, who in the first decades of the sixteenth century transformed Algiers into the strongest corsair base in the Mediterranean. Rallying his followers under the banner of Islam against the Spaniards, Ar
j Barbarossa killed the ruler of Algiers and in 1516 proclaimed himself king of the city. He died fighting the Spaniards in 1518 and was promptly succeeded by his brother, Khair ad-D
n, who cannily placed Algiers under the protection of the Ottoman Empire. Now nominally a protectorate, bolstered by Ottoman janissaries (elite infantry) and European renegades, Algiers became a powerful force in the western Mediterranean, launching bold attacks on Italian and Spanish coasts. Spanish control of North Africa became increasingly tenuous. In 1534, Barbarossa succeeded in capturing Tunis from the Spanish, although it was retaken a year later. In 1541, Emperor Charles V, king of Spain, assembled a massive fleet in order to attack Algiers, only to see it destroyed in a terrible storm—an episode that Cervantes possibly alludes to with the mirage of a fleet threatening the city in Bagnios. The balance of power thus shifted to favor the Ottomans and their client states, as conquest followed conquest: Tripoli was captured from the Knights of Malta in 1551, the island of Djerba in 1560, and the Venetian colony of Cyprus in 1570. The new Spanish ruler, Philip II, inherited from his father, Charles V, an increasingly complicated situation in the Mediterranean.
Captivity in Algiers
Cervantes recovered from his wounds in Italy and served on a number of unsuccessful campaigns against the Ottomans. In 1575, he set sail for Spain, with letters of recommendation from Don Juan of Austria and the duke of Sessa to reward him for his heroic service at Lepanto. These would have ensured him a pension, had his voyage not come to a sorry end. Separated from its fellows by a storm, Cervantes’s galley was attacked by Barbary corsairs off the Catalan coast. Along with the other survivors, including his brother Rodrigo, Cervantes was captured and taken to Algiers. There, the letters found on his person ensured that he would be treated with deference, as a cautivo de rescate (ransomable captive)—a valuable prize whose redemption could command a large sum. Given that Cervantes was in fact not a wealthy or well-connected man, his family could not come up with the enormous ransom of five hundred gold escudos demanded for his release.
Unlike the false captives in his Persiles, Cervantes could draw on his actual experience for a wealth of geographical and cultural details on Algiers. His texts reflect the mix of subjects to be found in the city: Muslims from throughout the Ottoman Empire, Moriscos from Spain, Jews, Christians, and renegades of all stripes. When characters in Cervantes’s Algiers refer to “Turks” and “Moors,” these are not imprecise catch-all terms for Muslims, as they often are in other European texts. Instead, they generally reflect a precise understanding of the mix of peoples that populated Algiers in the later sixteenth century. Cervantes also includes central historical figures in the city, many of whom he knew first-hand, such as the powerful Ragusian renegade, Agi Morato (H
jji
Murad, dates unknown) who served as an alcaide (governor) in Algiers and conducted secret diplomatic missions for the Sultan in the 1570s; Muley Maluco (’Abd al-Malik, 1541–1578), who ruled Fez and Morocco from 1576 to 1578, and the renegade beylerbey (ruler) of Algiers himself, Hazán Pasha (Hasan Pasha Veneziano, born 1545; ruled 1577–1581 and 1583–1585).
Despite his captors’ threats, and conscious that he was being held for a ransom much higher than his family could possibly pay, Cervantes attempted escape on no fewer than four separate occasions. Surprisingly, although he did not manage to attain freedom, he was not punished for these attempts. Meanwhile, his family unsuccessfully tried to put together the ransoms for him and his brother through a series of loans. Rodrigo was ransomed first, in 1577, at his brother’s urging. Miguel de Cervantes was finally freed in 1580 with help from the Trinitarians, one of the Spanish religious orders that ransomed captives in North Africa.
A View of “the Turk”
Cervantes’s plot of Sultan Amurates falling hopelessly for a Christian captive corresponds to Venetian ambassadors’ account of Murad III (d. 1595) and his love for the Corfiote captive Safidje. Whereas Bagnios, a play set in North Africa and populated by Spanish captives and renegades, would hold an obvious appeal for his Spanish audience, Cervantes renders his Ottoman fantasy more proximate by making the irresistible captive a young Spanish girl, Catalina de Oviedo. Most striking in the play is the deflation of religious fervor: although the feisty Catalina is ready to become a martyr for her faith, there is no call for her to do so, as the Sultan is quite willing to tolerate her difference and respect her Christian belief. The Ottoman tolerance of religious minorities, even if they were carefully regulated and heavily taxed, would have seemed nothing short of miraculous to post-Reformation European audiences, more accustomed to the violent repression of confessional differences within Christianity as well as to a crusader rhetoric vis-à-vis Islam.
Forbidden Pleasures
Despite the strong disapproval of sodomy in Islamic law, amorous relations between mature men and subordinate boys were common in Ottoman aristocratic circles, as they were, to some extent, in absolutist European courts of the period (El-Rouayheb 3 and passim, Andrews and Kalpakli 17–18 and passim). While the young male beloved was the object of much passionate poetry in the Persian, Arabic, and Turkish traditions, it is by no means clear whether this idealizing rhetoric was connected with lust. Nonetheless, sodomy and pederasty became some of the most common stereotypes in the negative description of “Turks” or Moors by Europeans. Cervantes echoes these stereotypes in both plays with his frequent references to garzones— pageboys presumably available for sexual use by older men at court—and by suggesting that young male captives are at particular risk in both religious and sexual terms.
The plays also return repeatedly to the appeal of exogamous unions between those of different faiths. There is a particular frisson in the representation of Christian men in love with Moorish women, for although exogamous marriage was allowed for Muslim men so long as their wives were people of the book (Qur’an 5:5), it was forbidden for women (Qur’an 2:221). Although intermarriage was not unknown, a male captive’s dalliance with his mistress, or even with a Muslim slave, could cost him his life. In his complex interweaving of romance plots, Cervantes exploits the transgressive appeal of such unions to the fullest.
The Problem with Renegades
Thus although both plays translated here are fundamentally concerned with captivity and the interactions between Christians and Muslims, their settings differ in important ways. While Cervantes had direct experience of Algiers, his notion of Constantinople was mediated by a highly conventional literature on “the Turk.” Algiers represented for Spain a proximate threat, and was populated in part by voluntary and involuntary exiles from Spain, who complicated any notion of national belonging. While the depiction of Constantinople invoked the military threat of the Ottomans, its greater remove allowed for a more sustained exploration of tolerance as a considered imperial policy. Both plays feature a mix of historical specificity and literary license, with ideologically charged material—gender roles and exotic sexual practices, relations between the faiths, conversion to Christianity—clearly heightened.
The Plays
Set almost entirely in Algiers, The Bagnios of Algiers features captors falling in love with their captives, and a lively cast of renegades. It opens with the renegade Hazén, who intends to return to Christianity and to Spain, collecting signatures from Christian captives who will vouch for his sincerity. Hazén’s goodness and desire to reconvert to Christianity are contrasted to the perfidy of Yzuf, who leads a nocturnal attack on his native Spain. Captured in his raid are an old man and his two sons, Francisquito and Juanico; a ribald sexton, Tristán; and the beautiful Costanza, whose lover, Don Fernando, throws himself into the sea to follow her into captivity. The play also recounts the fantastic escape from Algiers to Spain of Zara, the rich daughter of Agi Morato—the plot that reappears in part 1 of Don Quixote.
The story of Zara and Lope the captive is both the most fanciful and the most historically specific in the play. Lope and his companions notice a pole dangling from a window over the bagnio. Attached to this marvelous pole are both money to buy the Spaniards’ freedom and a letter from Zara, who informs Lope that she is Christian and wishes to escape with him to Spain. This munificent benefactor of romance is precisely identified as not only Agi Morato’s daughter but also the intended of Muley Maluco (Abd-el Malik), who became the sultan of Morocco in 1576 and ruled until 1578.
Cervantes presents the life of the bagnio in great detail, including, on the one hand, the cruel punishments meted out to captives and, on the other, the surprising religious freedom they enjoyed, culminating in the representation of a comedia as part of Easter celebrations within the prison. Bagnios combines accurate descriptions of the conditions of captivity with flights of rhetorical fancy, to sometimes jarring effect. The text harnesses age-old romance motifs, often taken from the Byzantine novel, which embellish the workings of Mediterranean piracy and captivity: the travails of lovers separated by unforeseen circumstances, the erotic assault on a virtuous heroine by her captors, the unreliability and opacity of characters who exist between cultures and religions, and the marvelous escapes that ensure a protracted resolution.
The Great Sultana, for its part, enacts an oxymoronic mixture of Turk and Christian in its very title—it is an Eastern tale with a Spanish Old Christian protagonist. The play tells the story of the young Spanish captive Catalina, who grows into a great beauty in the seraglio while hidden by a sympathetic renegade. Cervantes based the plot of The Great Sultana both on historical and on fictional sources. The former describe a Corfiote or Venetian Christian woman of whom Amurates III was enamored. Fictional sources with similar plotlines include the Byzantine novels of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, as well as stories by Italian authors such as Bandello and Cinthio (Cervantes 1998, 15: xiii). Since Cervantes himself never traveled to Turkey, he most likely relied on commonplaces about “the Turk,” or perhaps a textual source such as Viaje de Turquía.
In The Great Sultana, Spanish identity is a constant theme. Catalina holds on to all the trappings of her Spanish self: her name, her dress, and, most important, her religion. The heroine’s high Spanish virtues are matched in the low register by the wily pícaro (rogue) Madrigal, a Spanish captive who pokes fun at Muslims and Jews while trumpeting Spanish superiority. Despite his disdain for non-Christians, Madrigal tarries in Constantinople because of his own dalliance with a Moor, an unlawful adventure that almost gets him executed. Madrigal comes closest to an authorial figure in the play: he recounts Catalina’s adventures in song to entertain the Sultan, and claims that on returning to Madrid he will become a playwright, the better to profit from his exotic experiences.
Meanwhile, a Hungarian captive, Lamberto, has cross-dressed to accompany his beloved Clara into the harem. Presented to the Sultan as a possible mother for his future heir, Lamberto reveals his true sex, to general horror. Yet he claims to have experienced a miracle, converting to Islam as a way to change his sex. Instead of punishing him, the Sultan rewards his blatantly opportunistic embrace of Islam with a military office. The Great Sultana thus resolves the contradictions of Mediterranean identity by, first, making hybridity a permanent condition in the next generation, and, second, underscoring the openness of the Ottoman Empire to those who would join it. The play has received considerable critical attention in the past decade, as scholars come to terms with its surprisingly benign version of Ottoman power. Although the Sultan seems to be completely emasculated by his love for Catalina, his canny appropriation of Spanish virtues and Hungarian manpower suggest an alternative model to Spanish imperial bravado.
The plots of both plays depend heavily on the erotic appeal of the other, nuancing complex questions of religious identity via the characters’ often illicit attachments. Thus The Great Sultana features the striking exogamous union between the Sultan and Catalina but also, in a minor key, that between Madrigal and the anonymous Moor he desires. The Bagnios of Algiers anticipates the union of the captive Lope and his benefactor Zara—the Muslim daughter of a renegade, who herself wishes to become a Christian—while Muslim masters of both sexes lust after their Christian captives. When religion and eros conflict in exogamous unions, love qualifies conversion, just as conversion qualifies love.
Translations and Influence
The Bagnios is also an essential text to read in conjunction with the famous “Captive’s Tale” in the first part of Don Quixote: it tells the same basic story but with important differences in its details, and with the addition of several interesting subplots among the renegades. While “The Captive’s Tale” is the better known text, Cervantes offers in the play a number of alternative solutions, some of which are clearly determined by the dramatic genre. While there are, to the best of our knowledge, no explicit reworkings of The Great Sultana, its titillating vision of “the Turk” and his harem participates in the broader construction of an eroticized Orient in Cervantes’s work and beyond.
This Translation
Since our intention is to provide a text for study rather than for performance, we have opted for a prose translation of the plays, which has allowed us to remain as close as possible to Cervantes’s language. That said, every effort has been made to keep the translations and stage directions faithful to contemporary performance. Our annotation directs the reader to pertinent studies or historical information necessary for a better understanding of the plays.
A Note on Coins
Characters in Cervantes’s plays mention a variety of coins. Though mainly Spanish, there is also mention of the áspero, a coin of lesser value that circulated under Ottoman rule throughout the Levant. As Spanish coinage under the Habsburgs was a somewhat complicated system not based on simple equivalency, we provide a list of coins below. Coin values changed markedly over time, so our list is relative. Denominations are listed in descending order of value. For reference, according to a contemporary reformist writer, a poor man in 1620 would spend 30 maravedís daily (Elliott 2002, 286), or 30 escudos in a year. Cervantes’s ransom was an exorbitant 500 escudos (Garcés 28).