The Teatro Cervantes in Alcalá de Henares: "To airy nothing, a local habitation and a name"

The author writes, "This is the first installment of what I am projecting as a four- or five-part series. Anticipated are chapters on 'The '80s: Discovery and Preservation,' 'The '90s: Recovery and Restoration,' and 'A Fifth Century: Dedication and Rebirth.' My hope is to publish the entire text in Spanish, as Volume 2 of El Teatro Cervantes de Alcalá de Henares in the Tamesis series Fuentes para la historia del teatro en España. The work is intended as a tribute to the late John Varey, without whom Spanish theater history would be significantly impoverished, none of the work I have done in the area would exist, and the Teatro Cervantes in Alcalá would very likely have become a McDonald's franchise."

CHAPTER ONE
The Spanish Contribution to the Origins of Modern European Playhouse Design

Histories of theater trace two lines of development, one religious, the other secular, through medieval Europe and on to the dawn of modernity: miracle and mystery plays and cyclical processions on the one hand, pageantry and court extravaganza and festivities on the other. The theatrical activity in both traditions consists largely of performing written texts with classical sources and staging scriptural moments of sacred history. The people involved represent the nobility and the clergy; the activity takes place in churches, palaces, and temples.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, itinerant Commedia dell'Arte troupes arose in Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance. When Alberto Naselli, called "Ganassa," brought his troupe to Madrid, the capital of the first modern nation-state, he performed in the street-theater environment of the corral de comedias, but with a crucial difference: he fenced in the itinerant players and the audience, providing the control of admission that made theatrical presentation commercially viable. The Corral de la Cruz and the Corral del Príncipe in Madrid, backed by Ganassa's financing of some of the earliest spectator boxes and holding a monopoly of commercial theater production in the capital, constitute the origin of modern theater on the continent. This line of development is actor-centered and bottom-up; it begins not with princes and prelates, architects and patronage, and written texts, but with actors and spectators, carpenters and commerce, and improvised dialogue.

Modern theater, by which I mean commercial theater, began in Spain with actors and a stage, but without a playhouse; Miguel de Cervantes is its first historian. It began, Cervantes tells us, not with the plays of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro and Gil Vicente in ducal palaces, but with the performances of Lope de Rueda and his troupe, around 1560, outdoors, on "four benches drawn together to form a square, with four or five boards across them. ... An old blanket, drawn from one side to the other with two ropes, constituted the dressing room" (Cervantes, prologue to Ocho comedias). Commercial theater began with the control of access to the outdoor stage that Ganassa and others provided in the 1570s. That is what the Corral de la Cruz brought to Madrid. When the spectators entered the Corral on opening day, November 29, 1579, they passed through a building on the Calle de la Cruz and out into the open yard behind it. There were bleachers along each side, facing each other, extending to a covered stage set up at the other end of the yard, and there were no buildings on either side. By the time an illiterate carpenter named Francisco Sánchez came down from Alcalá de Henares to see a performance a few years later, there were two spectator boxes on a platform in the yard next door to the left, near the building through which he entered, but there were no other structures in the rest of the space at either side of the yard (see Davis 120-22). It was, in fact, just a yard—a patio, a corral—and not in any sense a building, much less a theater: it was "airy nothing." We had always thought that the Corral de la Cruz was built in 1579; it was born in 1579...