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Cervantes was trapped in a paradoxical stance as a playwright:
he had to defend his theater outside the stage. That situation led to the "virginal" publication (that is, with no previous performance) of most of his known plays, which, in turn, stressed another paradox: Cervantes conceived his playwriting as a "pure," intellectually thrilling production in a context in which plays had turned into "mercadería vendible" (Quijote 1). My aim in this article is to analyse the extra-theatrical strategies by which Cervantes sought to relocate his relationship with theater and with literature at large, once he realized that it was out of touch with the massive marketability imposed by Lope's theater. These strategies are to be found, then, in his non-dramatic works (Don Quijote, Novelas ejemplares, Viaje del Parnaso) and were comprised of textual, authorial, and self-fashioning position-takings. Among the textual ones that we can identify are his prologues, the dialectical nature of most of his works (including the Viaje), and isolated episodes in non-dramatic works such as Don Quijote. Concerning his authorial strategies, two can be mentioned: first, the reflexivity that he uses to look both at literature itself and, at the same time, at the outsider, the somewhat secondary role that he played in the emerging literary field; and, secondly, the use of a veiled but distinctive symbolic violence against Lope and the theater that he represents. Finally, Cervantine works after 1605 left behind a trace of self-fashioning, as his self-portraits and ironic self-deprecations and confessions frequently remind us. It could be argued that what Cervantes tried to do with these strategies was to inscribe himself as a character into the dramatis personae of the Spanish literary stage.
