Thomas D’Urfey’s Adaptation of Cervantes’s Quixote: The Comical History of Don Quixote

Abstract

The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) is one of the first dramatizations of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in English, written in three parts. Starting with the episode of Cardenio and Luscinda in the first part, Thomas D’Urfey takes liberties with the characters and twists the plot, mixing chapters and embellishing it with songs by composer Henry Purcell and music by other contemporary artists. However, this dramatist presents us with a noble and quite sensible Don Quixote, as opposed to a histrionic Sancho, thus inverting the essence of the original characters in Cervantes’s novel.This article will analyze – from the perspective of studies on theatrical adaptation, such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Jane Barnette’s ADAPTURGY: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (2018) – Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) as an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Quixote. The author will explore the different episodes that D’Urfey chose to rewrite in the three parts of his play, analyzing the differences and similitudes between the original stories in the novel and their adapted version in the play, in order to prove that, on the one hand, Cervantes’s novel was already widely known by English audiences when D’Urfey’s plays were premiered, on the other, that he adapted the existing material to suit the preferences of English seventeenth-century audiences and, finally, that he created a parody in which Don Quixote is actually a nobler character than that of the preceding seventeenth-century adaptations.1