ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an early modern and specifically baroque perspective on the question of closet drama. Locating a key moment in its theoretical elaboration in an author not usually associated with the form: Miguel de Cervantes, the chapter asks what and where does drama lie, both in general, and also in relation to the emerging administrative public sphere of seventeenth-century Spain, in particular. Cervantes’ answer has to do with changing notions of theatricality at a crucial moment in the concept’s history.
Cervantes’ relation to drama could be described as an unrequited love story. Undoubtedly one of the period’s greatest writers, Cervantes was unable to break into the world of popular commercial theatre dominated by the successful formulas of Lope de Vega that was thriving all around him. Partly in response to this failure, Cervantes developed a narrative form that is today often characterized precisely by its theatrical and meta-theatrical qualities. While an early group of his plays was performed to some degree of positive reception, the late plays, written near the end of his life, met with such little professional and popular interest that Cervantes turned to what was at the time the very novel idea of publishing them in the hope that someday “people would see, with intelligence and in time, what they don’t understand when it is acted rapidly on the stage.” That time would be long in coming, lasting largely until the twentieth century, when a somewhat modernist and international vogue for Cervantes’ “never represented” plays reappears. In his own lifetime, however, Cervantes’ love of drama would remain unrequited and lead him ultimately to “pack away his plays in a chest and condemn them to perpetual silence” [las arrinconé en un cofre y las consagré y condené al perpetuo silencio].
Cervantes’ “never represented” theatre thus presents us with an early modern way of thinking about this dual movement. Both movements emerge in resistance to the idea of the (political or commercial) stage dependent on the personalized sovereignty of the actor. The untimely closet drama of Cervantes captures the double movement of drama and power as both move into a new “home theatre.”
