The Teatro Cervantes in Alcalá: CHAPTER 3 The 1990s:Recovery and Restoration

The author writes: “In the first part of this series on the Teatro Cervantes in Alcalá I expressed my intention to follow it with a series of pieces on that playhouse as well as to publish the material separately in book form in Spanish. Delays in publication of the second piece in the series prompted me to prioritize the Spanish version of the material, which has now appeared in Barcelona, published by TC/12 in Barcelona, with the title La piedra de Rosetta del teatro comercial en Europa. To facilitate accessibility of the material to Elizabethan scholars who do not know Spanish, the editors of Bulletin of the Comediantes have encouraged me to continue the English version here, where I began it. What follows is Chapter 3.”

Juan Sanz Ballesteros, Miguel Ángel Coso Marín, and Mercedes Higuera Sánchez-Pardo had saved the Teatro Cervantes from destruction and blocked implementation of ill-informed and hasty operations that would have obscured the evidence of its successive transformations. The city had sought authoritative guidance for its reconstruction and the advisory commission had fully endorsed the insistence of the three young researchers that the work “not destroy the remains of any of the three main historical phases through which it has passed.” “The policy,” the commission report said, “must not be to restore one specific phase in the evolution of this building but rather to reveal the evidence it offers of this continuous history of theatrical life.” The work of recovery and restoration could now begin.

The first step in moving ahead was to get as clear an idea as possible of the physical arrangements in the initial corral stage of the playhouse. In his history of the Teatro Cervantes, José Antonio Rayón had provided a thorough account of the conversion of the rectangular coliseum into the Romantic ellipse, but what was known of the initial conversion from corral to coliseum? Rayón must have seen the coliseum structure as a single, independent building since, as we have seen, he never fully grasped the nature of the lateral box evolution. This is actually quite puzzling, given that he understood the initial corral conformation of his theater perfectly. As he says, the Teatro Cervantes, “designed on the plan of the Corral de la Cruz in Madrid and similar to it, consisted only of stands at each side of the covered stage, and facing it, windows and boxes” (“habiéndose formado a la traza y semejanza del Patio de la Cruz de Madrid, no constaba más que de andamios a los lados del teatro cubierto y, a su frente, ventanas y aposentos”).¹ This statement makes it clear that he was not misled, as were later investigators, by the collapsed chronology of this process in the Madrid corrales given by Casiano Pellicer. And as we have seen, he knew that rooms on alien property in the inn next door to his own playhouse on the right had been converted to lateral boxes in 1602, when the entrance to the women’s cazuela was opened there. He also knew of a royal decree, to which he alluded in his account, that had prohibited linking theaters like his with neighboring buildings, and consequently he knew that some of his own patrons who had previously accessed their boxes directly from the inn next door were by then no longer allowed to do so.

Since he himself transformed the coliseum into the Romantic ellipse, Rayón obviously also knew exactly what the rectangular coliseum looked like. Given that knowledge of the whole sequence of events prior to 1830, how is it possible that he saw the coliseum structure as a single independent building, dismissing the deal made for the boxes on the north side as an anomaly? It is difficult to imagine that the elements could have come together into what seemed like a single structure before 1746, when the whole property first came under single ownership. And it seems clear that the latest it could have been accomplished was 1769, when the entire set of structures was...