From a socio-historical point of view Cervantes’s writing is important in helping to provide a picture of his time, not only because of what he depicts but also because of the language he uses, since his writing is a veritable storehouse of proverbs and slang terms. This edition of La entretenida therefore seeks to map the play contextually, exploiting the special advantages of digital texts with regard to information retrieval and visualisation, and encoding the text in such a way as to enable the generation of indices of names, places and linguistic terms and sophisticated semantic search facilities. The intention has been to supplement the concordances that are already available, for example at the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, by enabling the end-user to search generically, and by furnishing information that might help to provide a better picture of Cervantes, the world that he moved in and his artistic preoccupations.

Cervantes is a writer who frequently makes connections between his works, and encourages his readers to do the same. The indices that have been generated are therefore proposed as part of a model for a much larger project, a hypothetical encoding of all of the plays in Ocho comedias, or even of the complete works, which invites us to view his writings holistically.

Index of Places

Although La entretenida is superficially an urban comedy, Cervantes takes us on an imaginative journey to many remote corners of the known world. Place names have therefore been encoded in such a way that it is possible to search using different criteria, for example by 'Bloc' (New World or Europe), 'Country' (Bolivia, Italy, Peru and Spain), 'Settlement' (Madrid or Rome) or 'Building'.

Performance Index

This index lists costume items, props and stage furniture specified in Cervantes’s stage directions, as well as references to non-appearing characters. To search for items within a particular scene one should select from the Performance Information menu (see Key Features).