Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Unlike many authors, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra led a life as full of action and adventure as any plot he ever created for his fictional characters. Even a brief summary of Cervantes' eventful life will give you an idea of where some of the author's inspiration for Don Quixote came from.

Cervantes was born in 1547, at a time when Spain was the richest, most powerful nation in Europe, Spaniards had explored and conquered vast territories in the western hemisphere, sending home gold and silver treasures by the shipload. The Spanish king, Charles I (reigned 1516 to 1556) was easily the most powerful man in Europe. Charles I also ruled large sections of Germany and central Europe in his capacity as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and he dreamed of uniting the entire continent under the leadership of Spain and the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic church. The king was an inspiring figure. His bravery in battle was matched by his cultivated mind and charismatic personality. Under his leadership, Spain seemed on its way to consolidating its position as the most fortunate country in the world.

As a soldier and a writer, Miguel de Cervantes contributed much to his country's greatness. However, he received few rewards for his efforts. Although he was a brave man and an honest one, luck seemed to run against him in everything he tried. Perhaps even more discouraging, he lived long enough to see the promise of Spain's Golden Age begin to tarnish with the onset of economic inflation and the beginnings of a retreat into cultural parochialism.

The Cervantes family was part of the hidalguia, the noble class, yet it was dogged by poverty and bad luck. Miguel de Cervantes' father, Roderigo, was a surgeon- an occupation that ranked somewhere below a full-fledged doctor but above a barber. (Barbers were responsible for some kinds of minor surgical procedures in those days.) Surgery was a risky business in the sixteenth century. But for Roderigo's patients it seemed to be riskier than for most. On one occasion the family had to move to another town to escape the complaints of a dissatisfied patient. A few years later, Roderigo Cervantes was thrown into prison because of unpaid debts.

In theory, gentlemen (hidalgos) were supposed to be exempt from debtors' prison. However, Cervantes' father could not manage to come up with the document that proved his noble ancestry. Perhaps this was just another example of the family's bad luck- or a matter of red tape and mislaid paperwork. Some biographers have suspected that the Cervantes family was not quite what it claimed to be. A few writers have even argued that family members were conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity to escape persecution. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Roderigo really was an hidalgo. In Spain, noble birth did not necessarily mean financial security, and the Spanish people's fondness for titles unsupported by practical accomplishment was a national weakness that Cervantes would later satirize in his adult writing.

Because of his family's money problems, young Miguel had a rather spotty education. However, he loved to read and dreamed of becoming a poet. In his late teens he managed to study briefly with a famous humanist scholar, Juan Lopez de Hoyos. Cervantes' advanced schooling lasted little more than a year, but it must have been an exciting time. The Spanish Renaissance was in full swing and scholars such as Cervantes' teacher were encouraging students to question established values. Students were rediscovering long-neglected masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature, and at the same time developing a lively interest in the life and language of the common people. Religious studies were no longer the center of every curriculum, and Latin was no longer considered the only language suitable for serious literature. Writers and students were beginning to think that they ought to write in the same language that was used in daily life.

By the end of 1569, Cervantes had left Spain for Rome. Here he made himself fluent in Italian and became familiar with the works of Italian authors, such as Boccaccio, who were writing in their native tongue instead of Latin. We do not know for sure why Cervantes gave up his studies to go to Rome. But police records of the time suggest a possible answer. A young man named Miguel de Cervantes was being sought in connection with a duel in which another student had been wounded. Was this wanted man Miguel de Cervantes the future writer? Most authorities think it was.

After a year or so in Rome, Cervantes joined the army. He soon proved his heroism by fighting in the battle of Lepanto- an important naval battle, in 1571, in which European Christian forces virtually destroyed the Turkish fleet. According to contemporary accounts, Cervantes was ill in bed with a fever when the battle began. The captain of his ship gave him permission to stay belowdecks when the fighting began, but Cervantes insisted on fighting- and at the very spot where the action was heaviest. He fought bravely and was wounded three times. Fortunately, two gunshot wounds he received were not serious. However, the third wound, to Cervantes' left hand, resulted in permanent disfigurement. The hand was saved but was paralyzed from that time on. Throughout his life Cervantes remained very proud of his contribution to the naval victory at Lepanto.

Four years later, in 1575, a ship the soldier Cervantes was traveling on was captured by Turkish pirates. Cervantes was taken to Algiers- then controlled by the Turks- as a slave. It was a common practice in those days for pirates to hold their captives until the families paid a stiff ransom. Because Cervantes carried seemingly important letters, his captor believed he came from a very wealthy family. A ransom of five hundred gold crowns was demanded. Cervantes' chances of ever being rescued looked grim.

Over the next five years, Cervantes made four escape attempts, each more daring than the last. After his third try, he was sentenced to two thousand lashes- a punishment that meant certain death. But it was never carried out, perhaps because he had impressed the ruler (dey) of Algiers. Cervantes' fourth escape attempt involved a conspiracy with sixty fellow captives. The plan had an obvious weakness. Too many people were in on the secret, and, sure enough, one of them betrayed Cervantes to the authorities. Finally, in 1580, Cervantes was rescued just before he was to be sent to Constantinople. An emissary from Spain managed to borrow some money from local Christians to add to what the Cervantes family had been able to raise, and, the ransom paid, Cervantes was declared free when already on the ship that was to take him to Constantinople.

After returning to Spain, Cervantes tried to establish himself as a poet, an occupation that was no more profitable then than it is today. He was continually in debt, and his financial problems worsened after his marriage, in 1584, to an eighteen-year-old bride, Catalina. After some time he got a job as an agent of the government commissary, collecting grain to feed the army. The position was a tricky one because the government was often slow in paying suppliers for the grain it took. Cervantes' attempts to be fair got him into trouble more than once. Reasoning that the churches had more than enough grain in storage for their needs, he requisitioned a large share from them. As a result he was excommunicated- ejected from the church.

Throughout all these difficulties, Cervantes had been writing poetry. As it turned out, however, his poems were never quite first rate. He also tried writing plays, but these suffered by comparison to the work of the great Lope de Vega, who was just then introducing a more modern and popular style of dramatic writing. Cervantes did not make his reputation as a writer of the first rank until he turned to prose fiction- a form of literature still not considered entirely respectable by many well-educated people of the time. Cervantes' La Galatea (1585), a pastoral romance, was well received. More importantly, the first part of Don Quixote, which appeared in early 1605, was an instant success.

Cervantes' triumph did not mean the end of his troubles. He made no royalties from Don Quixote, having sold the book outright to the printer for a rather small fee. He also continued to attract trouble through no fault of his own. One such incident, in mid-1605, began when one of his sisters gave shelter to a courtier who had been wounded in a streetfight near the Cervantes' apartment. The man died while under Cervantes' roof and, somehow, the magistrate got the idea that the Cervantes family knew more about the attack than it was telling. Once again, Cervantes was arrested and thrown in jail, where he stayed for some days until the matter was straightened out.

Cervantes was now in his late fifties and suffering from an illness that was probably diabetes. He continued working, however, and in 1613 published a collection of short fiction under the title Novelas ejemplares ("Exemplary Novels"). However, the project of writing a sequel to Don Quixote- what we now know as Part II of the novel- was taking longer than expected. Cervantes delayed so long that an anonymous writer beat him to the punch by publishing, in 1614, a bogus version of Part II. Writing unauthorized sequels to other people's works was a common practice at the time. The author of this sequel, however, compounded the insult by including belittling comments about Cervantes and about the literary qualities of Part I!

Scholars have speculated a good deal about the identity of the author of this bogus sequel. Some have even suggested that the author was none other than Lope de Vega- Cervantes' literary rival. There is no genuine evidence to support this idea, intriguing as it may be. Whoever he was, perhaps the anonymous author did the world a favor after all. The appearance of the bogus sequel made Cervantes so angry that he was inspired to finish his own version of Part II.

Cervantes had little opportunity to enjoy the acclaim that greeted the appearance of the authentic Don Quixote, Part II. Already in bad health, he completed just one more work and died a year later in April 1616- in the same month as his great contemporary, William Shakespeare.

On the closing page of Part II of his great novel, Cervantes had written "For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him. He knew how to act, and I knew how to write." These lines were primarily intended as a rebuke to the author of the bogus sequel to his work. However, they were soon to take on a deeper significance. Although Cervantes' active life had never brought him wealth or worldly success, the adventures of his best-known character, Don Quixote, have gained him immortality.

The character of the Don is known all over the world, and millions who have never read the novel have a vivid mental picture of the would-be knight who sets out to do great deeds and ends up tilting at windmills. The story of Don Quixote has been the subject of at least sixteen operas, including works by the nineteenth-century Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti and the French composer Jules Massenet. There have been ballet versions of Don Quixote, a hit Broadway musical (Man of La Mancha), and any number of artists' and sculptors' "portraits" of the imaginary Don.

Ironically, because many of Cervantes' contemporaries on the Spanish literary scene considered Don Quixote a popular but basically frivolous book, Cervantes' most ardent fans have been other writers. The list of novelists who have admired and been influenced by Cervantes' masterpiece is practically endless. It begins with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English writers Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, and Henry Fielding and continues on through the nineteenth-century Russian novelists Turgenev and Gogol. Among the noted present-day writers said to have been influenced by Cervantes are the American authors Saul Bellow and Walker Percy; the English author Graham Greene, popularly known for his spy thrillers, has even written his own version of the Quixote story. Cervantes' popularity with other writers- and with those who aspire to become writers- is related to his many technical innovations. He was one of the first novelists to succeed in creating fully developed characters, in writing lively dialogue that sounded convincingly like the speech of real people, and in mixing characters from all classes of society and many ways of life in a single work. However, for writers and artists, as well as for the average reader, the greatest attraction of Cervantes' masterpiece is the character of Don Quixote himself. Cervantes was one of the first to treat in depth the theme of a hero who sets out to reinvent his own identity by sheer force of will. And the theme of the search for identity, in one form or another, has continued to fascinate novelists and their readers ever since.

Given the subsequent popularity of his best-known character, Cervantes' words "For me alone was Don Quixote born" seem especially moving. You might expect, considering Cervantes' own history of bad luck, that he would have filled the pages of his writings with bitterness and gloom. On the contrary, for all its serious overtones, Don Quixote is also a funny book. Cervantes, who by his own admission did not "know how to act" in order to succeed in life, did know how to turn the experiences of his own life into the material for a masterpiece that would entertain, and often inspire, millions.

THE NOVEL

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[Miguel de Cervantes - Famous Quotes]
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