Captivity in Cervantes

Cervantes’s obsession with freedom and captivity evokes his long incarceration in Algiers (1575–80). In effect, his capture by Barbary corsairs in 1575 and the five years he spent in Algiers left an indelible impression on his fiction. From the first works written after his liberation, such as his play El trato de Argel (c. 1581–3) and his novel La Galatea (1585), to his posthumous book Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), the story of this traumatic experience continuously resonates throughout his work. The motif of captivity characterizes Cervantes’s autobiographical narrative, La historia del cautivo, interpolated in Don Quixote I.39–41, as well as two of his novellas. Concurrently, his Barbary plays turn around the theme of captivity suffered by Christians in Ottoman territories during the early modern period.