“The Bagnios of Algiers” and “The Great Sultana”: Two Plays of Captivity by Miguel de Cervantes (review)

REVIEWS 236 Miguel de Cervantes, “The Bagnios of Algiers” and “The Great Sultana”: Two Plays of Captivity, ed. and trans. Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) 208 pp. Near the end of his life, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra published a work entitled Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados (1615), capitalizing on his great success as a novelist and very modest one as a playwright . This edition contains a translation from Spanish into English of two plays from this volume, using as its base text the critical edition of the plays coedited by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo and Antonio Rey Hazas (Alcalá 1993), along with a useful introduction and bibliography. The plays are set in two contrasting Mediterranean locales, Algiers in North Africa and the Ottoman court at Constantinople. As Fuchs and Ilika note, “The Bagnios of Algiers and The Great Sultana enact the intense imaginative engagement of early modern Spain with the Muslim worlds of the Mediterranean” (xiii). The vigorous topicality of the plays is enriched by Cervantes’ own experience in naval engagements (most famously at the Battle of Lepanto) as well as his captivity in Algiers; the playwright interlaces the generic tropes familiar from romance with allusions to historical individuals: “Both plays figure a mix of historical specificity and literary license, with ideologically charged material —gender roles and exotic sexual practices, relations between faiths, conversion to Christianity—clearly heightened” (xxii). The plays’ interrogations into early modern cultural dialogues surrounding racial, religious, and national identity, and the intersections of these with sexual practices, offer fascinating counterpoints to other contemporary dramatic and prose texts grappling with similar cross-cultural issues. The edition’s introduction offers an interesting discussion of the status of “renegades” in the early modern Mediterranean world and on stage: “The large number of characters whose religious alliances are ambiguous suggests the impossibility of essentializing difference in a world full of renegades and counterrenegades” (xxiv). The slipperiness of the renegades , their resistance to clearly-defined religious affiliations, renders them a fundamentally theatrical category by implicating their performative identities in the mimetic spectacle of dramatic production. Cervantes’ plays dramatize the fluidity—and even elusiveness—of confessional identities in the era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation through their treatment of conversion, apostasy, and martyrdom, often in ways that reveal the inextricably united experiences of devotion and romantic eroticism. As the editors write, when “religion and eros conflict in exogamous unions, love qualifies conversion, just as conversion qualifies love” (xxvi). The teleological pressure of marriage plots leads to a foregrounding of the economics of exchange that further complicates the thematic nexus surrounding conversion. When the rich Muslim character (and “secret” Christian) Zara raises moneybags on a pole in order to ransom (and subsequently marry) the Christian captive Don Lope, we are squarely situated within an early modern theatrical imagination of the Mediterranean in which recognizable tropes and staging devices can be used for variously inflected purposes; it is not far, in short, from Zara’s gold to Jessica’s in The Merchant of Venice, inasmuch as both occurrences of this motif navigate the waters of several interrelated themes: captivity, conversion, interreligious erotic attachment, and cultural stereotyping. REVIEWS 237 The translation of these two plays by Cervantes is an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning field of early modern Mediterranean Studies. The plays’ depiction of imperial rivalry and of empires under threat can be seen in both their anxious retrospection on imperial precedents—one of the Spanish Harquebusiers in The Bagnios of Algiers utters proverbially: “We can only bear witness that here was Troy” (7)—and teleologies, the progression of translatio imperii which so fascinated Cervantes’s medieval predecessors. Read in this light, the aside muttered by Constanza about romantic love can be expanded beyond its immediate context and made to articulate some of the fundamental concerns experienced by Cervantes’s compatriots in the Mediterranean: “What if Barbary concludes what Spain began?” (37). As Fuchs and Ilika note, the Cervantine legacy of dramas of captivity was far-reaching, and can be seen in both Spanish dramatic successors such as Lope de Vega and in English adaptations of this captivity “subgenre,” such as Philip Massinger’s The...