Friends, Wives, and Dubious Reputations: Cervantes’s “El curioso impertinente” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s <i>The Coxcomb</i>

Between 1608 and 1610, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher wrote The Coxcomb, a city comedy in the tradition of Jonsonian theater, where the main theme is the relationship between friendship, marriage, and the consequences of misunderstanding the concept of reputation. It is my argument that The Coxcomb is based on “El curioso impertinente,” one of the stories embedded in the first part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. In the transference from Spain to England, from novel to play, we can observe the alterations in the concepts of friendship, female agency, and reputation that only speak to the different expectations of contemporary readers and audiences. This article explores the manner in which these expectations are fed attending to considerations both national and generic.