By the death of his father on June 13, 1585, Cervantes became the head of the family, and the position was no sinecure. His sister Luisa had entered the convent of Barefooted Carmelites at Alcalá de Henares twenty years before this date, and his brother Rodrigo had been promoted to a commission in the army for his signal gallantry at the Azores. But Cervantes’s mother and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena, were unprovided for, and looked to him for help. He resumed writing for the stage, and is found witnessing a legal document at the request of Inés Osorio, wife of the theatrical manager Jerónimo Velázquez, with whose name that of Lope de Vega is unpleasantly associated. Now, if not earlier,—as a complimentary allusion in the _Galatea_ might suggest—Cervantes must have met that marvellous youth who was shortly to become the most popular dramatist of the age. Meanwhile Cervantes’s affairs were going ill. According to his own statement he wrote from twenty to thirty plays between 1582 and 1587; but these plays cannot have brought him much money, for there are proofs that some of his family sold outright to a pawnbroker certain articles which Cervantes had left in pledge two years before. Clearly he was hard pressed. He eked out his income by accepting other work unconnected with literature, executed business commissions as far away as Seville, and looked around for permanent employment. He found it as commissary to the Invincible Armada which was then fitting out, and in the autumn of 1587 he took up his new duties in Andalusia. This amounts to a confession of defeat. If a man of exceptional literary genius can thrive on literature, he does not abandon it for a less agreeable occupation. It is a fine thing to write masterpieces, but in order to write them you must contrive to live. Cervantes’s masterpieces lay in the future, and in the meantime he felt the pinch of hunger.