Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes was an almost exact contemporary of William Shakespeare. They died, according to legend, on the same day, in the spring of 1616. Together, they bestride our Western canon like a twin colossus, one having created the greatest body of dramatic literature, the other its first and greatest novel.

Unlike Shakespeare, who lived a life of careful circumspection, Cervantes’ life was marked by constant, almost unceasing incident. He was, at various times, an actor, soldier, playwright, tax collector, and prisoner. After five decades of episodic (and quixotic) activity, he died, much as he lived, amid penury and suffering. How ironic, then, that his work has outlived that of almost any other author, and that it speaks to the immortal desire of the human spirit to be free.

Cervantes was born in 1547, about 20 miles from Madrid, to a poor family from the minor nobility. Like Shakespeare, he does not appear to have attended university. He left Spain at the age of 21 for Italy, where, eager to make his name and fortune, he enlisted as an infantryman in a Spanish regiment stationed in Naples. In 1571, he helped defeat the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto. Cervantes fought courageously, sustaining two gunshot wounds to the chest, and a third that paralyzed his left arm for the rest of his life. He would later claim he had “lost the left for the glory of the right.”

In 1575, Cervantes set sail for Spain. Pirates, however, captured his ship, and sold Cervantes into slavery in Algiers. It took five years for his family to pay his ransom. He tried to escape four times, to no avail. Returning to Spain a wounded veteran with no money and reputation, Cervantes was forced to take odd jobs in the civil service. He eventually married a middle-class woman 19 years his junior by the name of Catalina. As with Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, we know nothing about their relationship. The year after his nuptials, in 1585, he published La Galatea, a pastoral romance and his first work of fiction. Though he made repeated attempt to gain success as a playwright, writing 40 plays over the next 20 years, nearly all of them failed.

From 1587 to 1605, Cervantes purchased provisions for the Armada, collected taxes for the Crown, and won his first poetry prize: three silver spoons. He was excommunicated from the chirch and imprisoned twice. It was there, in 1597, where he conceived the idea for “a story… that might be engendered in a prison where every annoyance has its home and every mournful sound its habitation.”

Part I of Don Quixote was published in 1605. It made Cervantes known throughout Europe, but no richer, as he had sold the rights to his publisher. Cervantes was prolific in the last decade of his life, writing novellas, epic poetry, and dramas. Part II of Don Quixote, considered by most critics to be richer than the first, was published in 1615. It found the elder Cervantes reflecting on authorship and identity as his old knight continued his undefinable quest.

Cervantes would complete one more work, the romance Persiles and Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617. In the dedication, written three days before his death, Cervantes bid farewell to the world “with a foot already in the stirrup,” his travails (and travels) finally ended.