Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de

I

Introduction

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547-1616), Spanish writer of the Golden Age, whose satiric novel Don Quixote is one of the masterpieces of world literature.

II

Life

Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, on September 29, 1547. His father was an indigent surgeon with a large family. In 1568, when Cervantes was a student, a number of his poems appeared in a volume published in Madrid to commemorate the death of the Spanish Queen Elizabeth of Valois. In 1569 he went to Rome, where in the following year he entered the service of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva. Soon afterwards Cervantes joined a Spanish regiment in Naples. He fought in 1571 against the Turks in the naval battle of Lepanto, in which he lost the use of his left hand. While returning to Spain in 1575, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates. He was taken to Algeria as a slave and held there for ransom. During the next five years he made several heroic but unsuccessful attempts to escape, and he was finally ransomed in 1580 by his family and friends.

Returning to Spain at the age of 33, Cervantes, despite his wartime service and Algerian adventure, was unable to obtain employment with a noble family, the usual reward for veterans who had distinguished themselves. Deciding to become a writer, he turned out poems and plays at a prodigious rate between 1582 and 1585; few of these are extant. His pastoral novel La Galatea (1585) gained him a reputation, but the proceeds from its sale were insufficient to support him. Cervantes then took government jobs, first furnishing goods to the fleet of the Armada and later collecting taxes. The government imprisoned him several times because he failed to give a satisfactory explanation of his tax-collecting activities.

While in prison Cervantes conceived the idea for a story about a man who imagines himself a knight-errant performing the splendid feats described in medieval tales of chivalry. The first part was issued under the title El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha (1605; The ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, 1612). It became such an immediate success that within two weeks after publication three pirated editions appeared in Madrid. Partly because of the pirating and partly because of his lack of financial acumen, Cervantes never gained substantial wealth from the enormous success of the work.

His Novelas ejemplares (1613, Exemplary Novels), a collection of 12 short stories, includes romances in the Italian style, descriptions of criminal life in Seville, and sketches of unusual events and characters. One of these stories, “El coloquio de los perros” (The Talking Dogs), is particularly renowned for its satirical prose style. The second part of Don Quixote was published in 1615. Cervantes completed the fantastic allegorical novel Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) four days before he died in Madrid on April 23, 1616.

III

Don Quixote

Cervantes's most important work, called in full The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, is generally regarded as the first modern novel. It is a brilliant satire, not only of the chivalrous romances of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance but also of the sentimental and pastoral novels popular in Cervantes's own time.

The principal character of the novel is Don Quixote, an elderly village gentleman of modest means. An avid reader of old-fashioned tales of chivalry, he becomes obsessed with the idea of reintroducing the practice of knight-errantry into the world. In Part I Don Quixote equips himself with arms and armour and rides forth on Rosinante, an elderly horse, to challenge evil wherever he may find it. He is accompanied by the loyal and shrewd, but credulous, peasant Sancho Panza, who serves him as squire.

In his deranged state, Don Quixote sets himself the task of defending orphans, protecting maidens and widows, befriending the helpless, serving the causes of truth and beauty, and re-establishing justice. His adventures and skirmishes are often grotesquely inappropriate to the situation; for example, he attacks a windmill, thinking it a giant, and a flock of sheep, thinking it an army. The obstinacy of his illusions never permits him to heed the warnings of Sancho Panza, whose attitude is as realistic as that of his master is idealistic. The philosophical perception of the novel lies in the suggested balance of their contrasting views.

In Part II the contrast between the romanticism of Don Quixote and the practical wisdom of Sancho Panza is less striking. Don Quixote becomes a trifle more reasonable, and Sancho Panza begins to understand rather dimly the illusions of his master. In the end Don Quixote returns to his village and abandons knighthood. He realizes the error of his ways, declaring that “in the nests of yesteryear there are no birds today”, falls ill, and dies. Critics generally agree that Part II of Don Quixote is superior because of its compact organization.

Don Quixote has had a tremendous influence on the development of prose fiction; it has been translated into all modern languages and has appeared in some 700 editions. The first publication in English was in a translation (Pt. I, 1612; Pt. II, 1620) by Thomas Shelton. It has been the subject of a variety of works in other fields of art, including operas by the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello, the French Jules Massenet, and the Spanish Manuel de Falla; a tone poem by the German composer Richard Strauss; a German film (1933) directed by G. W. Pabst and a Soviet film (1957) directed by Grigori Kozintzev; a ballet (1965) by George Balanchine; and an American musical, Man of La Mancha (1965), by Mitch Leigh. Its influence can be seen in the work of Smollett, Defoe, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the classic 19th-century novelists Scott, Dickens, Flaubert, Melville, and Dostoyevsky. The theme also inspired the 19th-century French artists Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré.