Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, MIGUEL DE (1547-1616) , Spanish writer was born at Alcalá de Henares in the province of Madrid. His father, Rodrigo de Cervantes, was a modest surgeon, and the numerous family lived
in the constant penury familiar to the younger Cervantes thoughout his unhappy life. Very little is known about his early years except that he was baptized on Oct. 9, 1547; in the next record of his life, some twenty years later,
he is named as the author of a sonnet addressed to Queen Isabel of Valois, the third wife of Philip II, before her death on Oct. 3, 1568. Shortly afterward we find him as a student in the College of the City of Madrid,
the principal of which was a fine humanist, Juan López de Hoyos. López de Hoyos was commissioned by the city to prepare a book reviewing all the solemnities that marked the death of the Queen, and in this volume
Cervantes, designated by the editor as his "beloved and cherished pupil," figured as the author of several poems written in the name of the entire college. Thus, although these poems in no way foreshadow the future author of Don Quixote,
Cervantes had already developed at the age of twenty-one a personality that attracted attention.
Cervantes' studies were probably too irregular and fragmentary to bring him within reach of an academic degree. In any case, finding no means of livelihood in Spain, he went to Italy, and in 1570 he emerges as an attendant, or camarero,
to Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva. But we know nothing further of his Italian sejourn except that in 1571 he enlisted as a soldier in the naval expedition that the King of Spain, the Pope, and the Seigniory of Venice were preparing to send against the Turks.
Cervantes fought with courage at Lepanto (Oct. 7, 1571), although he was ill and had a high fever, and one of the two wounds he received left his arm and hand crippled and useless. He returned to Sicily to convalesce and remained in southern
Italy until 1575 but then decided to return to Spain, thinking that he might be rewarded for his services by being given the captaincy of a company in the army. Fate was against him, however, for on Sept. 26, 1575, the ship he was on
was overpowered by Turkish pirates. Cervantes was taken to Algiers as a captive and remained there until Sept. 19, 1580. During those five bitter years his qualities as a leader came into sharp relief, and
he showed great daring and heroism in organizing unsuccessful schemes of escape for himself and many fellow prisoners. The Bey of Algiers considered him very dangerous, but in spite of this,
and incomprehensible as it may seem in view of the well-known cruelty of the Turks, Cervantes was never severely punished. His powerful and ingenious imagination, later revealed in Don Quixote, probably helped to preserve his life.
Eventually, the Trinitarian friars, with the help of money collected by Cervantes' family, managed to ransom him. He expected worthy rewards when he returned home, but actually he obtained almost nothing.
Spanish officialdom took no notice of his existence, and, like many other Spaniards, Cervantes found himself at odds with the society in which he lived. Nevertheless, it was out of his experience in this very conflict that he was later to create Don Quixote.
In 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, Cervantes was married in Esquivias, in the province of Toledo, to a 19-year-old girl, Catalina de Palacios. But family life, like everything else touching Cervantes, was irregular for him and he spent
long years separated from his wife. Indeed, it was an illicit love affair that gave him his only child, his daughter Isabel de Saavedra.
In 1585 Cervantes took a strange job: he became an agent of the crown charged with the requisitioning of wheat, barley, and olive oil in Andalusia to supply Philip II's Invincible Armada. From the heroic dream of Lepanto Cervantes
thus awakened to work at a task as undistinguished as it was difficult and perilous. The crop owners yielded their goods only with ill will, since they hoped to sell them at a higher price than the royal administration paid.
Moreover, on two occasions Cervantes had to requisition wheat that belonged to ecclesiastics, and, in spite of the fact that he was carrying out orders of the king, he was excommunicated. As a final misfortune,
he was tried and imprisoned because his accounts appeared to be irregular. Another disappointment (1590) was his unsuccessful application for a position in the Spanish American colonies.
It seems safe to assume that it was during one of his periods of imprisonment that Cervantes began to write his immortal book, but in 1602 judges and courts had done with annoying him about his alleged debts to
the crown and in 1604 he moved to Valladolid, where the King was then residing. In 1608, however, he established himself in Madrid for good and there devoted himself exclusively to writing and publishing his books.
During these last years he was able to subsist chiefly by means of the pensions he received from the Count of Lemos and the Archbishop of Toledo. Cervantes died in Madrid on Apr. 23, 1616.
The foregoing facts afford only a fragmentary and hardly an intimate view of Cervantes' life, but in his life the greatest events were, after all, the works that brought him immortality.
The very nature of the personality of Cervantes, a man who was reserved and cautious though at times aggressive, is reflected in the scarcity of documents concerning him,
whereas there is an abundance of information about persons of minor significance. Sixteen years after his college verses were printed, there appeared La primera parte de la Galatea (1585),
a pastoral novel based upon the genre introduced into Spain by Jorge de Montemayor's Diana (1559). Its theme is the fortunes and misfortunes in love of a number of idealized shepherds
and shepherdesses, who spend their life "singing and playing musical instruments" after a fashion in which no real shepherds have ever indulged. This, indeed, Cervantes admits in his tale Coloquio de los perros
(The Dogs' Colloquy), in which he observes that pastorals are merely "things of the imagination, well-written," or in other words, poetic works that do not depict the reality of actual experience.
In the Galatea prose alternates with poetry; it possesses no central character or action, and the incidents are linked together only by means of the simple device of shepherds meeting other shepherds
and relating their joys and sorrows. The action has a conventionalized natural setting of woods, springs, or clear streams, which are always the same, and takes place in an eternal springtime that makes living out-of-doors possible.
Pastorals of this type charmed readers of both sexes, but especially women, throughout Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, and many of them were much moved by the sentimental
discourses of these tormented and spectral characters. Such prose narration seems to have stirred the emotions of the reader more effectively than did lyric poetry, by giving the illusion of
being more probable; since the exchange of amorous confidences arose out of familiar minor happenings, and in addition strong emphasis was placed upon the feelings of the heart. The Galatea fulfilled these conditions,
for although it frequently takes the form of a dialogue, it is really a collection of monologues revealing what the heart experiences in solitude:
With this thought, and with the many that his love caused in him, after leaving his herd in a place of safety, he went from his hut, as was his wont at other times,
and by the light of the beauteous Diana, who showed herself resplendent in the sky, he entered the denseness of a dense wood beyond, seeking some solitary spot where,
in the silence of the night, with greater peace he might give rein to his amorous fancies: for it is an assured fact that to sad, fanciful hearts, there is no greater joy than solitude, the awakener of sad or happy memories.
Inspired by the Neoplatonic ideas of the Renaissance, which were the basis of this literary genre, Cervantes derives the outpouring of feelings from the spirit of love, which transcends them and from which they seem to be an emanation:
Though rustic, he was, like a true lover, so discreet in things of love, that whenever he discoursed thereon, it seemed that Love himself revealed them to him, and by his tongue uttered them.
The pastoral novel, with its meditations, torments, uncertainty, and sublime joys, thus appears as a secularized version of mystical literature. The notion of divine grace,
sanctifier of the souls of the elect, is here humanized, and love comes to be like a divinity which the enamoured one adores and from which he receives quickening faith and the
will to live. A faith arising from human desires was thus set up alongside religious belief, and to this fact may be ascribed the constant attacks of Catholic moralists against
the pastoral novel, which flourished and died out in the second half of the sixteenth century. Tears and sighs were more perceptible than murmurs of joy in the ideal forms that
peopled these works, and although spotless chastity characterized the love that animated them, this circumstance was not sufficient to protect the pastoral novel from church censure.
Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and several other writers had tried to make the artistic evaluation of purely human feelings compatible with the rigorous discipline introduced by the Council of Trent, but they had tried in vain.
In more than one sense, the Galatea is a forerunner of the novelistic technique of Don Quixote, for the characters are endowed with an inner life based
upon the desires of the individual and not merely on generic abstractions. As occurs later in Quixote, so here, too, even the animals possess the consciousness of being individual creatures:
Erastro came accompanied by his mastiffs, the faithful guardians of the simple sheep. He made sport with them, and called them by their names, giving to each the title that its disposition
and spirit deserved. One he would call Lion, another Hawk, one Sturdy and another Spot; and they, as if they were endowed with understanding, came up to him and, by the movement of their heads, expressed the pleasure which they felt at his pleasure.
The Galatea is a book which is undeservedly forgotten, for the conception of life and of the world possessed by the author of Don Quixote was already sketched in this, his first important work.
Repeatedly its author promised a second part that he said he had finished in his touching letter addressed to the Count of Lemos a few days before his death, but this continuation seems never to have appeared.
Prior to 1600, Cervantes cultivated only such literary genres as the pastoral novel, poetry, and the drama. Fifty years of his life had thus already passed when he began
to discover his novelistic capacity to narrate and describe human incidents in prose and to animate them with a new interest. The ideas of the author upon Spanish life and
man in general, the projections of his fantasy and disillusionment, were to make themselves apparent in the masterworks written between 1600 to 1615, and although Cervantes
had now come to the sunset of his physical life, this was the great period of dawning for his genius. In 1605
the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha) was published, and in 1615 the second part, Segunda tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, appeared.
In 1613 came the Novelas exemplares (Exemplary Novels); in 1614 the Viaje del Parnaso (Voyage to Parnassus) appeared; and in 1615 Ocho comedis y ocho entremeses nuevos
("Eight Comedies and Eight New Interludes") was published. Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda ("The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda") appeared as a post humous work
in 1617. Cervantes also mentions the titles of several of his works that have not come down to us: the second part of Galatea, Las Semanas del jardín ("Garden Weeks"), El Engaño á los ojos ("Deception to the Eyes"), and some others.
The Exemplary Novels are twelve short stories of varied types, but the "exemplary" of the title refers to the moral significance which the author consciously injected into all of them.
Four of them are perhaps of less interest than the rest: El Amante liberal (The Liberal Lover), La Señora Cornelia (The Lady Cornelia), Las dos donzellas (The Two Maidens), and La Española inglesa (The Spanish-English Lady).
The theme common to these is basically the traditional one of the Byzantine novel: pairs of lovers separated by lamentable and complicated happenings are finally reunited and find the happiness
they have longed for. The heroines are all of most perfect beauty and of sublime morality; they and their lovers are capable of the highest sacrifices, and they exert their souls in the effort
to elevate themselves to the ideal of moral and aristocratic distinction which illuminates their lives. In The Liberal Lover, to cite an example, the beautiful Leonisa and her lover
Ricardo are carried off by Turkish pirates; both fight against serious material and moral dangers; Ricardo conquers all obstacles, returns to his homeland with Leonisa,
and is ready to renounce his passion and to hand Leonisa over to her former lover in an outburst of generosity; but Leonisa's preference naturally settles on Ricardo in the end.
Another group of "exemplary" novels is formed by La Fuerza de la sangre (The Force of Blood), La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Kitchen-maid), La Gitanilla (The Little Gypsy), and El celoso estremeño (The Jealous Estremaduran).
The first three offer examples of love and adventure happily resolved, while the last unravels itself tragically. Its plot deals with the old Felipe Carrizales, who, after traveling widely and becoming rich in America,
decides to marry, taking all the precautions necessary to forestall being deceived. He weds a very young girl and isolates her from the world by having her live in a house with no windows
facing the street; but in spite of his defensive measures, a bold youth succeeds in penetrating the fortress of conjugal honor, and one day Carrizales surprises his wife in the arms of her seducer.
Surprisingly enough he pardons the adulterers, recognizing that he is more to blame than they, and dies of sorrow over the grievous error he has committed. Cervantes here deviated from literary tradition,
which demanded the death of the adulterers, but he transformed the punishment inspired by the social ideal of honor into a criticism of the responsibility of the individual.
Rinconete y Cortadillo, El Casamiento engañoso (The Deceitful Marriage), El Licenciado vidriera (The Licentiate of Glass), and The Dogs' Colloquy,
four works of art which are concerned more with the personalities of the characters who figure in them than with the subject matter, form the final group of these stories. The protagonists
are two young vagabonds, Rincón and Cortado; Lieutenant Campuzano; a student, Tomás Rodaja, who goes mad and believes himself to have been changed into a man of glass; and finally two dogs,
Cipión and Berganza, whose wandering existence serves as a mirror for the most varied aspects of Spanish life. Rinconete y Cortadillo is one of the most delightful of Cervantes' works.
Its two young vagabonds come to Seville attracted by the riches and disorder that the sixteenth-century commerce with the Americas had brought to that metropolis. There they come into contact with
a brotherhood of thieves led by the unforgettable Monipodio, whose house is the headquarters of the Sevillian underworld. Under the bright Andalusian sky persons and objects take form with the
brilliance and subtle drama of a Velázquez, and a distant and discreet irony endows the figures, insignificant in themselves, as they move within a ritual pomp
that is in sharp contrast with their morally deflated lives. When Monipodio appears, serious and solemn among his silent subordinates, "all who were looking at him performed a deep, protracted bow."
Rincón and Cortado had initiated their mutual friendship beforehand "with saintly and praiseworthy ceremonies." The solemn ritual of this band of ruffians is all the more comic for being concealed in Cervantes' drily humorous style.
Cervantes' greatest work, Don Quixote, is a unique book of multiple dimensions. From the moment of its appearance it has amused readers or caused them to think, and its influence has extended
in literature not only to works of secondary value but also to those which have universal importance. Don Quixote is a country gentleman, an enthusiastic visionary crazed by his reading of romances of
chivalry, who rides forth to defend the oppressed and to right wrongs; so vividly was he presented by Cervantes that many languages have borrowed the name of the hero as the common term to designate a person inspired by lofty and impractical ideals.
The theme of the book, in brief, concerns Hidalgo Alonso Quijano, who, because of his reading in books about chivalry, comes to believe that everything they say is true and decides to become a knight-errant himself.
He assumes the name of Don Quixote de la Mancha and, accompanied by a peasant, Sancho Panza, who serves him as a squire, sets forth in search of adventures. Don Quixote interprets all that he encounters in accordance
with his readings and thus imagines himself to be living in a world quite different from the one familiar to the ordinary men he meets. Windmills are thus transformed into giants, and this illusion, together with many others,
is the basis for the beatings and misadventures suffered by the intrepid hero. After the knight's second sally in search of adventure, friends and neighbors in his village decide to force him to forget his wild fancy and
to reintegrate himself into his former life. The "knight" insists upon following his calling, but at the end of the first part of the book they make him return to his home by means of a sly stratagem. In the second part the hidalgo
leaves for the third time and alternately gives indication of folly and of wisdom in a dazzling array of artistic inventions. But now even his enemies force him to abandon his endeavors.
Don Quixote finally recognizes that romances of chivalry are mere lying inventions, but upon recovering the clarity of his mind, he loses his life.
The idea that Don Quixote is a symbol of the noblest generosity, dedicated to the purpose of doing good disinterestedly, suggests the moral common denominator to be found in Cervantes' creation.
But in addition to furnishing a moral type capable of being recognized and accepted as a symbol of values in any time or place, Don Quixote is a work of art
with as many aspects and reflections as it has readers to seek them. Considerations of general morality thus become intermingled with the psychological and aesthetic experience of each individual
reader in a way that vastly stimulated the development of the literary genre later known as the novel, and Fielding, Dickens, Flaubert, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, and many others have thus been inspired
by Cervantes. In Madame Bovary, is Gustave Flaubert, for example, the heroine changes the orientation of her life because she, like Don Quixote, has read her romances of chivalry, the romantic novels of the nineteenth century.
Cervantes demonstrated to the Western world how poetry and fantasy could coexist with the experience of reality which is perceptible to the senses. He did this by presenting poetic reality,
which previously had been confined to the ideal region of dream, as something experienced by a real person, and the dream thus became the reality of any man living his dream.
Therefore, the trivial fact that a poor hidalgo loses his reason for one cause or another is of little importance. The innovation is that Don Quixote's madness is converted into the theme of
his life and into a theme for the life of other people, who are affected as much by the madness of the hidalgo as is he himself. Some want him to revert to his condition of a peaceful and sedentary hidalgo; others would like him to keep on amusing or stupefying people with his deeds, insane and wise at the same time.
Before Cervantes, literature was, as occasion offered, fantastic, idealistic, naturalistic, moralistic, or didactic. After his time, literature continued to exploit all these types,
but with them it was inclined to incorporate, as well, some readers' experience of them. Romances of chivalry could now attain a significance beyond that of mere books and could become
what people felt or thought about them, thus growing to be the very dynamic functioning of living persons. In Don Quixote, for example, the hero takes them for the gospel;
the priest believes them to be false; the innkeeper admires the tremendous blows delivered by the knights; his daughter is taken by the sentimental aspect of the love affairs which they describe;
and so on. But the reality of the literary work is the ideal integration of all possible experience which all of the possible readers undergo. This point can be further illustrated by taking proverbs
as an example. Before Don Quixote, many collections of sayings and proverbs had been published, but when Sancho interspersed these proverbs helter-skelter in his conversation and thus brought
his master to despair, the proverbs became the living experiences which Sancho and Don Quixote derived from them. In this manner, everything in Don Quixote can be either real or ideal,
either fantastic or possible, according to the manner in which it affects the variety of readers, whether they be creators of beautiful and comforting illusions or dispassionate demolishers of dreams.
To live, for Cervantes, is to let loose the extensive capacity of all that is human; it may also be to remain deaf and inert before the attractions of love, faith, and enthusiasm.
All who live in the human universe of the greatest book of Spanish literature succeed or destroy themselves, according to one of these opposing trends.
When compared with such a prodigious book, all of Cervantes' works which have not previously been mentioned, no matter what their value,
must be relegated to a lower level. Among his dramatic works, La Numancia, a description of the heroic defense of that Iberian city
during the Roman conquest of Spain in the second century b.c., and the amusing Interludes, such as El Juez de los divorcios ("The Judge of Divorces") and El Retablo de las maravillas ("The Picture of Marvels"), are outstanding.
Also worth mentioning is the verse Voyage to Parnassus (1614), in which almost all of the Spanish writers of the period are lauded, and Persiles y Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617. In this last-named work the author returns to the
theme of the Byzantine novel and relates the ideal love and unbelievable vicissitudes of a couple who, starting from the Arctic regions, arrive in Rome, where they find a happy ending for their complicated adventures.
Source: Collier's Enclycopedia, 1997. Author: Américo Castro
Copyright © 1997 Collier Newfield, Inc., all rights reserved.
Related Internet Links
- COMEDIA textlist Spanish Classical theatre. Dozens of plays pertaining to the Spanish Golden Age theater (the vast majority of them in its original Spanish version). Maintained by
the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater Inc
- El Web de Cervantes Nada hay comparable en la Red en relación con Cervantes y su obra: Biografía, Las Obras Completas de Cervantes online en formato HTML, aspectos literarios y biográficos, Galería Cervantina, y Area de discusión sobre la obra y figura cervantina. by Asunción López
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. An English translation by John Ormsby of the
inmortal yet delightful masterpiece. It takes a while for the page to load, so be patient. (Eng)
- El Quijote.com Web dedicada a glosar la figura de El Ingenioso Hidalgo. Aquí se puede encontrar casi todo lo referente al Quijote
- Proyecto Cervantes 2001 at TAMU (Texas A&M University) (Eng)
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