What question did this study set out to answer?

This article investigates the performance history and cultural relevance of Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s work as reflected in handwritten notes and documents.

June 5, 2026

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

Key Points

This article investigates the performance history and cultural relevance of Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s work as reflected in handwritten notes and documents.
Examined prompters' copies of Vida y muerte del Cid from the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid (BHM).
Analyzed handwritten notes, cast lists, and performance dates primarily from the Coliseo del Príncipe between 1807 and the 1830s.
Studied the cultural impact of the play during the era of Isidoro Máiquez and Juan de Grimaldi.
Identified seven copies with important handwritten prompters' notes that reveal insights into casting and staging of the play.
Findings suggest a significant role of the play in the cultural life of 19th-century Spain.
Reconstruction of performance history indicates the popularity and adaptation of baroque plays in the 19th-century setting.

Abstract

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.

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