[143] After alluding to his earlier efforts on the stage, Cervantes goes on in the Prólogo to his new plays: “Tuve otras cosas en que ocuparme; dexé la pluma y las comedias, y entró luego el monstruo de naturaleza, el gran Lope de Vega, y alzóse con la monarquía cómica; avasalló y puso debaxo de su jurisdiccion á todos los Farsantes, llenó el mundo de Comedias propias, felices y bien razonadas; y tantas que passan de diez mil pliegos los que tiene escritos, y todas (que es una de las mayores cosas que puede decirse) las ha visto representar, ú oido decir (por lo menos) que se han representado; y si algunos, (que hay muchos) han querido entrar á la parte y gloria de sus trabajos, todos juntos no llegan en lo que han escrito á la mitad de lo que él solo,” etc. The number of these writers for the stage in 1615 was, as Cervantes intimates, very considerable; and when he goes on to enumerate, among the more successful, Mira de Mescua, Guillen de Castro, Aguilar, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Gaspar de Avila, and several others, we perceive, at once, that the essential direction and character of the Spanish drama were at last determined. Of course, the free field open to him when he composed the plays of his youth was now closed; and as he wrote from the pressure of want, he could venture to write only according to the models triumphantly established by Lope de Vega and his imitators. The eight plays or Comedias he now produced were, therefore, all composed in the style and in the forms of verse already fashionable and settled. Their subjects are as various as the subjects of his tales. One of them is a _rifacimento_ of his “Trato de Argel,” and is curious, because it contains some of the materials, and even occasionally the very phraseology, of the story of the Captive in Don Quixote, and because Lope de Vega thought fit afterwards to use it somewhat too freely in the composition of his own “Esclavos en Argel.”[144] Much of it seems to be founded in fact; among the rest, the deplorable martyrdom of a child in the third act, and the representation of one of the _Coloquios_ or farces of Lope de Rueda by the slaves in their prison-yard. [144] This play, which Cervantes calls “Los Baños de Argel,” (Comedias, 1749, Tom. I. p. 125), opens with the landing of a Moorish corsair on the coast of Valencia; gives an account of the sufferings of the captives taken in this descent, as well as the sufferings of others afterward; and ends with a Moorish wedding and a Christian martyrdom. He says of it himself,-- No de la imaginacion Este trato se sacó, Que la verdad lo fraguó Bien lejos de la ficcion. p. 186. The verbal resemblances between the play and the story of the Captive are chiefly in the first _jornada_ of the play, as compared with Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 40.