Cervantes on the European Stage

—a conference organized by Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles

2013 marks 400 years since the publication of Cervantes’ hugely influential novella collection, the Novelas ejemplares, while 2015 is the anniversary of the publication of his plays, Ocho comedias y entremeses, which are far less well known. Although Cervantes’ own plays were not a great success in his own time, his novellas had a huge influence on European theater, particularly in France and England, where playwrights adapted them liberally and repeatedly. This conference considers the reception of these collections within Spain and across Europe, reexamining the legacy of Cervantes in a transnational context and juxtaposing aspects of his corpus that have rarely been considered together. Scholars of Cervantes will explore his broad legacy across the traditions, while specialists in European drama delve into a Cervantes who is more than just a source for the plots of English or French plays.

Session 1: Cervantine Theatricality
Chair: Christopher D. Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles

Sonia Velázquez, University of Pennsylvania
“Staging the Unbelievable: Cervantes, Hardy, and the Matter of Religion”

Michael Armstrong-Roche, Wesleyan University
“The Matter of France on the Stage: Cervantes’ La casa de los celos (The House of Jealousy)

Jacques Lezra, New York University
“Singular Examples: El licenciado Vidriera”

Session 2: English Cervantes, from the Jacobean to the Contemporary
Chair: Nicolas Wey-Gomez, California Institute of Technology

Alexander Samson, University College London
“Staging Cervantes in Jacobean England”

Maryrica Ortiz Lottman, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
“Equestrian Virility in the RSC’s Cardenio”

Session 3: Cervantes à la française
Chair: Malina Stefanovska, University of California, Los Angeles

Karen Newman, Brown University
“La Gitanilla Translated and Hardy’s La Belle Égyptienne”

Ellen R. Welch, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Cervantes and the Domestication of Romance in Seventeenth-Century French Theater”

Javier Irigoyen-García, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“’Mais que je sçache encor sa genealogie’: Flying Horses and Transnational Orientalism in Guérin de Bouscal’s Dom Quixot de la Manche (1640)”