With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that
Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, and
for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he
had already a certain reputation as a poet; he made up his mind,
therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture
committed his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salva y Mallen
shows conclusively, at Alcala, his own birth-place, in 1585 and no doubt
helped to make his name more widely known, but certainly did not do him
much good in any other way.

While it was going through the press, he married Dona Catalina de
Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and
apparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which may
possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that was
all. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages and
strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned to
it for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty or
thirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing of
cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses,
outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not bad enough
to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own upon
it. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two of
the seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we may assume they are
favourable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato
de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas.
Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional they may show, they
are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they
failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament
and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to
gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was the
rising popularity of Lope the cause, as is often said, notwithstanding
his own words to the contrary. When Lope began to write for the stage is
uncertain, but it was certainly after Cervantes went to Seville.

Among the "Nuevos Documentos" printed by Senor Asensio y Toledo is one
dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement
with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at
fifty ducats (about