Pedro, the Great Pretender

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Oberon, 2004 - Drama - 125 pages

The plot of Pedro, the Great Pretender follows the tricks of a master chameleon whose picaresque escapades involve him with royalty and peasants, gypsies and actors, courtiers and shepherds, village bigwigs and religious devotees as he struggles to find his true vocation in life.

About the author

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, in 1547. In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, he published his first major work as an author, the pastoral novel La Galatea which was poorly received. Cervantes became a tax collector in Granada in 1594, but was imprisoned in 1597 due to money problems with the government. Folklore maintains that while in prison, he wrote his most famous novel, Don Quixote, which was an immediate success upon publication in 1605. After several years of writing short novels and plays, Cervantes was spurred to write the sequel to Don Quixote in 1615 when an unauthorized sequel appeared to great acclaim. Though Cervantes' sequel was rushed and flawed, Don Quixote remains a powerful symbol that has endured to present times in many forms. Cervantes died on April 22, 1616, at the age of 69.

Philip Osment was brought up on a farm in North Devon and read Modern Languages at Keble College, Oxford. He trained as an actor and acted with leading alternative theatre companies, including Gay Sweatshop, The Half Moon and Shared Experience. He has also worked as a director and until 1989 was one of the artistic directors of Gay Sweatshop. More recently he directed plays for two young people's theatre companies, Theatre Centre and Red Ladder. As a writer, his plays include "Telling Tales" (1982), "The Island's Mine" (1988) and "The Undertaking "(1996) for Gay Sweatshop;" Who's Breaking "(1989) and "Sleeping Dogs" (1993) for Red Ladder; "Listen "(1990) for Theatre Centre. His trilogy of 'Devon Plays' was commissioned by Mike Alfreds and produced by Cambridge Theatre Company (Method and Madness): "The Dearly Beloved" (toured, then Hampstead Theatre, London, 1993; winner of the 1993 Macallan Writers Guild Award for Best Regional Play);" What I Did in the Holidays "(toured, then Drill Hall, London, 1995; nominated for the same award in 1995); and "Flesh and Blood" (toured, then Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1996).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Pedro, the Great Pretender; Absolute classics
• Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• Translated by: Philip Osment
• Contributor: Royal Shakespeare Company
• Publisher: Oberon, 2004
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: May 23, 2008
• ISBN: 1840024437, 9781840024432
• Length: 125 pages
• Subjects: Drama / European / General