Cervantes’s interpolated novels in “The comical history of Don Quixote”

Immensely popular in seventeenth-century Britain, the interpolated episodes of Marcela and Cardenio were featured in the performance of the first British stage adaptation of Cervantes’s masterpiece: Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote. This article provides a comparative analysis of the aforementioned stories in both works. An analysis of Cervantes’s novel reveals that the protagonists of these tales enact a counter-hegemonic identity that subverts the dominant notions of gender and class. Hence, D’Urfey’s play is approached with a view to determining whether the subversive potential of the original is preserved. It can be argued that, as opposed to his literary predecessor, D’Urfey exploits these episodes to reinforce and naturalise the hegemonic ideology and the resulting social order.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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