Cervantes’ comedy reviled for 400 years has been resurrected on stage

The play by Miguel de Cervantes has never been performed, at least professionally, and 400 years later it will have its premiere in Spain. This is the last of his eight comedies under the title House of Jealousy and Ardenia Junglethat he is the author Quixote published even before the installation, in 1615, contrary to the norms of its time. For a year now, playwright Brenda Escobedo, together with director Ernesto Arias, has dedicated herself to researching what happened to this play and why it was met with so much scorn.

With an exhaustive search of the archives and newspaper libraries of the National Library of Spain and other institutions, comparing yellowed papers and old microfilms, they concluded that no company or professional actor had ever embodied the characters of this “fiction of fictions, which translates everything from the fantastic imaginary to the material reality of the theater. So that defines Escobedo who was looking for news, comment, criticism “or something in the newspaper”.

“Cervantes is a great dramatist, because of the way he puts magic on the stage, makes the characters disappear and presents a theater within a theater with a brilliant structure”, although for centuries famous critics like Menéndez Pelay called the work “nonsense”, “lazy”, “without lyrical ground” or “separated from reality”.

But Escobedo, who conducted his research as part of the Juan March Foundation program, assures that once the argument is understood, which is very difficult to imagine by reading alone, the epiphany comes: “Cervantes is a revolutionary.” So you’re not just inaugurating a modern novel with Don Quixote? “His theatrical vision is very avant-garde. To understand this, we cannot refer to Lope de Vega or Shakespeare, for example, but to Bertolt Brecht and Euripides,” he says.

The work contains two surfaces that serve as mirrors. In the jungle of Ardenia, two knights, Roldán and Reinaldos, fight for the love of a princess and neglect their duties to their king, while a magician tries to bring them back into the fold. At the same time, two shepherds, Lauso and Corinto, also want the same woman, who prefers a rich man. These characters match a heroic paladin and a warrior dressed as a knight, named Marfisa.

“These are triangular structures that are combined and where a third party always complicates things,” explains Escobedo. “There are no antagonists, they are all protagonists and interrupt each other in their struggles and adventures. There are intersections and the work is solved by untangling the roads.

A year after Cervantes himself published this comedy that mixes the world of chivalry with the pastoral – “something unusual in literature” – he dies. “The work was not unknown, nor was it a lost manuscript,” explains Escobedo. “We were interested in the reasons why it was neglected in the stage field, although it has always been studied at the literary and academic level”.

First performance

After a year of historical research and actors, Escobedo and Arias decided not to remove characters, to respect the lyrics as much as possible, not to adapt, modernize or update it, and not to change its structures. They also intended to maintain the stage as envisioned by Cervantes, despite the structural differences between the current settings and those of the Golden Age, with “a revolving pyramid in which the actor entered and disappeared”.

“Without vanities, we contribute the only possible: to make it known,” continues Escobedo. “To say that it is not nonsense and that it is possible to show it, is already a contribution to the history of theater”. With ten actors on stage, the show under Arias’ direction opens the Clásicos Festival in Alcala on June 29. The next performances will take place in July, at the Madrid headquarters of Juan Marcha from the 12th to the 16th, at the Peñíscola Castle Festival on the 18th and at the Almagro Classic Theater Festival on the 21st and 22nd.

“Cervantes reveals that theater is a trick and that you only see what you want to see, for better or for worse,” thinks Escobedo. “This awareness of how to manipulate the contract with the viewer is at work, something never seen before. The difficulty in reading it does not go away, but once it is displayed, it is very clear. Viewers in 2023 will no doubt understand that.”