Cervantes's Eight Interludes

By Miguel Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is Spain's most famous author, primarily because of his celebrated novel Don Quixote. His first love, however, was the theater, for which he wrote extensively. His Interludes, published 400 years ago in 1615, are short, comic plays that explore the underbelly of Renaissance Spanish society. Their characters include hillbillies and con artists, pimps and prostitutes, adulterous wives and jealous husbands, and an array of other comical figures. Cervantes's treatment of them is simultaneously critical and sympathetic. Although interludes tend to be works of light comedy, Cervantes often imbues his with deeper themes.

Charles Patterson, a scholar of Hispanic theater, has created translations of the Interludes that are true to the earthiness of the originals but designed to be readily playable for today's actors and accessible to modern audiences. This book includes an introduction that places the plays in context, briefly describing the life of Cervantes, theater in early modern Spain, Cervantes's interludes, and Patterson's approach to translating them. Casual readers, theater and literature students, and professional actors alike will delight in these comedic gems that reveal a less familiar side of one of history's greatest writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Jan 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9781495049699

Book preview

Frontispiece: Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616). Engraving by E. Mackenzie, published in The Gallery of Portraits with Memoirs, vol. IV (London: Charles Knight, 1835), and based on a 1791 print by Gregorio Ferro and Fernando Selma. No known portraits of Cervantes were made during his lifetime. (Georgios Kollidas/Shutterstock.com)

Copyright © 2015 by Charles Patterson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2015 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

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Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Kristina Rolander

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616.

[Entremeses. English]

Cervantes's eight interludes / Miguel de Cervantes ; edited and translated by Charles Patterson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4950-1303-4

I. Patterson, Charles, 1980- editor, translator. II. Title.

PQ6329.A7P38 2015

862'.3--dc23

2015029891

www.applausebooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Divorce Court (El juez de los divorcios)

The Grieving Pimp (El rufián viudo llamado Trampagos)

The Daganzo Municipal Elections (La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo)

On Guard! (La guarda cuidadosa)

The Basque Deception (El vizcaíno fingido)

The Stage of Wonders (El retablo de las maravillas)

The Cave of Salamanca (La cueva de Salamanca)

The Jealous Old Man (El viejo celoso)

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While working on this project I had the opportunity to teach a special topics course for Spanish majors, which I titled Cervantes Night Live. The students and I studied and laughed over Cervantes’s eight interludes for ten delightful weeks. Some of the lectures that I prepared for that course served as a rough draft for the introduction to this book, and our class discussions certainly shaped the way I think about the plays and their context. I am grateful to the students in that class for being an enthusiastic sounding board.

My wife, Dayna Patterson, who is an accomplished poet, read every word of this book. She was even kind enough to perform the plays aloud with me multiple times so that I could test out their speakability. She has a poet’s ear for language, and I am grateful to her for her many insightful suggestions for improvement.

I appreciate the Hal Leonard team for guiding me through this process. Thanks to John Cerullo for seeing potential in the project and shepherding it along. I am deeply grateful to my editor, Jessica Burr, for her attention to detail. She made me aware of scriptwriting conventions and helped me to fine-tune my language. I am also thankful to my copyeditor, Colleen Coyne, who was extremely thorough and patient in correcting my numerous oversights.

As helpful as all of these individuals have been, I alone am responsible for any errors or infelicities that these pages may contain.

INTRODUCTION

In 2002, the Norwegian Book Clubs organized a poll asking prestigious living authors to vote for the best books ever written. The winner, by a landslide, was Don Quixote by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616).¹ This tragicomic novel about the mad knight Don Quixote and his simple squire, Sancho Panza, is widely acclaimed as the first modern novel. But while the average person on the street has likely heard of Cervantes’s masterpiece, few realize that his first love was theater. Not many of his plays have survived to modern times, but the handful of his tragedies, comedies, and interludes available today sparkle with inventiveness, even by modern standards. It is my hope that this new translation of the interludes will allow English-speaking audiences to delight in their irony, wit, and ambiguity.

Cervantes’s Life and Times

Cervantes was born in 1547, toward the end of the reign of Charles I of Spain, better known as Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. In less than a century, Spain had transitioned from being a group of disparate Christian and Moorish kingdoms to forming part of the largest empire that had ever existed. Charles reigned over not only a united Spain, but also the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire (mostly modern Germany), much of Italy, several territories around the Mediterranean, and practically all of the newly discovered Western Hemisphere. This internationalization allowed for the flow of Renaissance ideas into Spain.

Cervantes’s birthplace, Alcalá de Henares, a university town near Madrid, was very much the epicenter of the Spanish Renaissance. Cervantes, however, did not live there for long. His father was a surgeon, which, unlike today, was neither a prestigious nor a lucrative profession, so the family struggled constantly with financial problems. As a result of his father’s frequent moves in search of better business, the young Miguel became acquainted with some of the most important cities in Spain at the time, such as Valladolid, Seville, and Córdoba. Little is known about his early education, but he would have learned much in these bustling centers of politics, commerce, and culture.

Cervantes turned up in Italy as a young man and shortly thereafter joined the Spanish military. By this time, King Charles’s son, Phillip II, was on the throne of Spain and inherited all of his father’s territorial possessions except the Holy Roman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, had unified the Muslim world and was expanding westward, encroaching upon the interests of Spain and its allies, Venice and the Papal States. These three Catholic powers created an alliance called the Holy League in an effort to prevent Ottoman domination of the Mediterranean. With King Phillip’s half brother, Don John of Austria, at its command, the Holy League chose to attack the Ottoman fleet anchored in the Bay of Lepanto in Greece. In what became his most glorious moment (in his view), Cervantes fought in this battle, receiving bullets in the chest and left hand. He recovered well enough to participate in other military campaigns, but forever lost the use of his hand, earning him the nickname el manco de Lepanto (manco means one-handed, although he actually only lost the use of his hand, not the hand itself). The Holy League was victorious and was able to put a check on Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean.

After a few more years of military service, Cervantes headed back to Spain in 1575 with letters of recommendation in hand from Don John himself and another military commander. His plan was to seek a commission as captain and secure a steady career in the military, but it was not to be. The ship on which he traveled was attacked by Algerian pirates, who took him back to Algiers as a captive. It was common practice in the sixteenth century for Muslim pirates to make a living capturing Christian sailors and holding them for ransom, and Christian pirates were quick to return the favor. Unfortunately for Cervantes, those letters of recommendation he was carrying led his captors to believe that he was a gentleman of importance. They therefore demanded a high ransom, much higher than the going rate for Spanish soldiers, making it nearly impossible for his impoverished family to pay for his release. He spent, as a result, five years as a captive in the intriguing pirate city of Algiers, which at the time was a melting pot of Moors, Arabs, Turks, and renegades (Christians who had converted to Islam, often in order to gain release from captivity). Knowing that his release was unlikely, Cervantes made four failed escape attempts. Eventually a friar from an order dedicated to freeing captives was able to supplement the Cervantes family contributions with other donated funds and obtain Cervantes’s release. The experience obviously marked him in a profound way. The theme of captivity, particularly Algerian captivity, appears repeatedly in his works.

Now thirty-three years old, Cervantes returned to a different country than he had known as a child. The rise of Protestantism in northern Europe had led Spain to close its doors to Renaissance thinkers. Although the Inquisition had been established there the century before, its power and activity began to increase as a response to Phillip’s desire to be Catholicism’s defender. Protestantism was not the only perceived threat to Catholic purity: In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabel had given Spain’s large Jewish population an ultimatum to either convert to Christianity or leave. Many chose the latter, but a large number allowed themselves to be baptized in order keep their homes. In the sixteenth century, the Church and state became obsessed with rooting out insincere converts, which led to widespread discrimination against former Jews and their descendants, known collectively as New Christians. Old Christians—those who could prove a Christian-only ancestry—had exclusive access to many ecclesiastical and government positions. For this reason, it became important for everyone, whether New Christian or not, to make a point of appearing Old Christian to others. It became common to publicly eschew things associated with Jews and New Christians, such as intellectualism and the avoidance of pork.

The fact that New Christians needed to hide their ancestry in order to thrive in sixteenth-century Spain makes it difficult for historians today to identify them. Cervantes often ridiculed the obsession with blood purity in his works, including some of the interludes in this volume, which indicates that at the very least he empathized with their plight, but there is no conclusive proof that he was one of them. If he was a New Christian, however, it would help explain the difficulties he encountered returning to Spain as a thirty-three-year-old veteran and former captive. In spite of his impeccable service record, and even after repeated requests, he found it impossible to obtain a position in King Phillip’s administration. It was during this limbo period after his captivity, then, that he turned his hand to writing. Up to that point he had written a smattering of