Comedies and entractes

Between 1580 and 1587 Miguel de Cervantes wrote more than twenty or thirty comedies, which had some success in their productions. On March 5 1585, the same year that La Galatea was published, Cervantes signed a contract with the comedy writer Gaspar de Porres: Cervantes committed to deliver the comedies Confused and The Constantinople Agreement and the Death of Selín in fifteen days. For both works he would be paid forty ducats, but the texts haven’t survived.

Only the titles are known of his first theatrical pieces, as is the case with The Great Turquesca, The Naval Battle, Jerusalem, The Amaranth, She of May, The Loving Forest, The Only One, and Bizarre Arsinda. Of all these texts only two manuscripts of his tragedies have been preserved: The Treatment of Algiers and The Numantia. One must remember that what happened in the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age was akin to what happened in publishing: writers lost their rights when they sold their work to the ‘comedy author’, that is, to the impresario who had invested his capital in its production in courtyard theatres like the Corral Príncipe or the Corral de la Cruz, which were the most well-known in the city of Madrid.