Adapting the Baroque Play for a Nineteenth-Century Audience: Prompters’ Copies of Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s Vida y muerte del Cid in the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid

Abstract Comedias sueltas printed in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries may not help scholars understand a seventeenth-century work in its original context, but for scholars of reception history and performance tradition they are invaluable resources. This article examines several copies of Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s Vida y muerte del Cid conserved by the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid (BHM). Seven of these copies include handwritten prompters’ notes, cast lists, performance dates and/or licenses, which are important for reconstructing the performance history of the play, mostly in the Coliseo del Príncipe between 1807 and the 1830s. The notes on casting and staging in these sueltas can, in turn, tell us something about the cultural significance of this play in the age of Isidoro Máiquez and, later, Juan de Grimaldi.