Collaborative encounters? Two recent Spanish takes on the Shakespeare–Cervantes relationship

In the context of the commemoration of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, this article reconsiders the relationship between these two national icons and its implications for the question of authorship. Since Anthony Burgess published his short story A Meeting in Valladolid in 1989, the possibility of an encounter, whether real or imaginary, between the two men, each learning from the other’s fortes and mistakes, has proven an attractive and pervasive one. In Cervantes’s own country Spain the idea of an encounter has given rise to (amongst other artifacts) a stage play called Miguel Will, by José Carlos Somoza in 1997, in which Cervantes helps Shakespeare compose a play about Don Quixote and Sancho and a movie called Miguel y William, directed by Inés París in 2007, in which the romantic rivalry between the two authors is the inspiration for a collaborative theatrical endeavour. After briefly discussing these two texts and the scholarly and popular myths on which they are predicated, I go on to link them to the larger issues of biography, influence and intertextuality. While, with the possible exception of the lost Cardenio, there was no demonstrable collusion between Shakespeare and Cervantes, Miguel Will and Miguel y William seem to suggest alternative modes of “collaboration” that nonetheless fail to challenge or transcend still prevalent notions of writerly authority. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.