SHAKESPEARE & CERVANTES

I would like to state that Shakespeare and Cervantes are two of the global genius of modern literature.

They are omnipresent in different cultures through a variety of representations and performances. Their appropriation to different contexts and situations has facilitated new interpretations of them. Their works are characterised by continuing popular appeal which allows them to be our contemporaries. Shakespeare, like Cervantes, ‘is part of our common culture.’1

Their language is, somehow, our language. English and Spanish, two of the leading languages in our world, are so rich and varied because of Cervantes and Shakespeare’s dynamic imagination in making and coining new words. Their relevance today provides a productive field for learning more about each one of them that will help us to understand their significance in the future.

Their works have the potential of bringing about and showing modern ways of being and representing man and the world.

Thus, we can see Shakespeare and Cervantes’s works in relation to our own age and perceptions as there is always more of Shakespeare and Cervantes than we can imagine at a particular moment. They advance the troubles and expectations of modern times.

Like Shakespeare ‘Cervantes is always out ahead of us, and we never quite can catch him up 2.’

 As I have pointed out, they anticipate and represent the troubles and contradictions of today and tomorrow. We find ideas and attitudes that belong to our world in their works. In their characters we recognise ourselves.

However, there is a previous question to be answered in this comparative approach. Can we compare Shakespeare with Cervantes? Can we establish particular links between their literary masterpieces? Is there, possibly, a literary exchange in a global context?

For instance, Shakespeare’s drama was not written in uncontaminated isolation but in full knowledge of the traditions and cultures of Renaissance Europe. Therefore, ‘a dialogue with other…writers on an equal basis’3, like Cervantes, will be of help in understanding the full potential of Shakespeare’s drama. Moreover, Cervantes, like the other Spanish contemporaries of Shakespeare, will facilitate our contemporary understanding of the writer. Shakespeare also had his Spanish contemporaries. Shakespeare not only had English contemporaries who rewrote and reproduced Shakespeare’s dramatic patterns and themes but also Spanish ones like Cervantes.

Their “contemporaneity” can reveal common data which needs exploration if we want really to explain fully the potential and possibilities contained in their paradigmatic creations. In Cervantes and Shakespeare’s texts we discover the ways in which both writers challenge and in some cases exceed the insights of the modern world.

Rather than attempting “quixotically” to get back to the past, we, as readers and spectators, should try to get closer to those whose writing and thinking often run far ahead of our own. The significance of their writings demonstrates the importance of their literary achievement. Rather than look at them only as writers situated in the far-away past of an unfamiliar culture, Cervantes and Shakespeare’s works can anticipate the worries and expectations of tomorrow.

They are deeply concerned with the problems, questions and anxieties that worry us. In them we acknowledge ourselves. They are concerned with our dilemmas. Their works involve central questions related to our being. Their greatness is not only due to artistic considerations but also to the questioning of their discourse as both writers could ‘reach deep into the wells of human consciousness’ 4

In this way,  it can be stated that they give a literary response to man and the world around him.

Shakespeare and Cervantes, or Cervantes and Shakespeare, have found ways of showing man’s limits, expectations, and possibilities.

Shakespeare and Cervantes write about contemporary worries as they develop in life. They show a different way of contemplating reality, of seeing things.

Another example is the dichotomy reality-appearance which is a major concern in Shakespeare and Cervantes. In both of them there is certain coolness and a sceptical attitude about the possibility of the knowledge of reality and truth since fiction and illusion coexist in life and we can be misled by our perceptions.

Cervantes’s dramatic works, show ‘his awareness that while all story, including the dramatic kind, is illusion and deception, the boundaries between fact and fiction are permeable. ’5

In addition, Cervantes and Shakespeare are also concerned with the power and influence of dreams on human life as a source of illusion, fancy, and fiction. They seem to take us to a different reality and provide a different experience which shows truths that are beyond reason.

After all my research, I have learnt that when exploring two authors is important to work in two complementary directions. First, it is important to analyse the contexts and projections of each author in the other’s culture and secondly to capture those elements which connected both writers, from common readings to emblematic and literary conceptions.

One clear attempt of this approach was done in the book, Between Shakespeare and Cervantes: Trails along the Renaissance (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006), I would like to summarise some key aspects of this book which is divided in two parts.

The first, «Crossroads», proposes four meeting points to inform about each author in the other’s natural context. I would like to point out how Richard Wilson analyses a quite heterodox view of Catholic Spain in All’s Well that Ends Well, and suggests similar ways of reading Cardenio, or what remains of it, and La española inglesa. Daniel Eisenberg defends the figure of John Bowle as the pioneer of Cervantism. For his part, José Javier Pardo guides us along the Cervantine paths of the eighteenth and nineteenth century English novel. This section is closed by José Montero, who claims a restoration of the forgotten Cervantine and Shakespearean studies of the learnt Astrana Marín.

The second part, «Parallel Paths», searches for literary and cultural motifs, as well as poetics and traditions contemporaneous to both authors. Roland Greene analyses the culture of blood in Renaissance Europe, as well as its meanings and representations in Cervantes and Shakespeare. The festive and carnivalesque character of Sancho Panza and Sir John Falstaff is Augustin Redondo’s object of study, which is somehow continued by the scrutiny that Valentín Núñez carries out of the representations of madness and buffoonery in Hamlet, King Lear, El Licenciado Vidriera and Don Quixote. Jorge Casanova proposes readings of episodes of Don Quixote and the Rape of Lucrece in the light of iconography and the emblem, and points different modes of visual absences in the «portraits» of our authors. Elena Domínguez’s chapter investigates the love discourses and their neo-Platonic roots in pastoral novels and plays like Galatea and As You Like It through the filters of Jorge de Montemayor and Baltasar Gil Polo. In an attempt to shorten the distance between Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s genres, Zenón Luis-Martínez brings together their late works, mainly Pericles and Persiles, in the light of the conventions of romance. Finally, Luis Gómez Canseco and Cinta Zunino trace the history of the transmission and influence of Apuleius between Spain and England, as well as his comic and literary use in both writers.

After all these examples,  I ask myself  this question,  how globalisation will affect them?

We are living in the “information age” when computers, satellites and television are opening up new possibilities and ways of communication and interaction. There are more questions than answers when we talk about the future but we should bear in mind that Shakespeare’s works, like those of Cervantes, ‘do magnificently what all literature seeks to do: they create a richly patterned, resonant, engaging structure of words that evokes for the reader and audience alike, an experience, that, while true to the complexity of the world it reflects, seems at once greatly significant and profoundly satisfying’ 6.

It explains why Cervantes and Shakespeare still make sense. I hope great expectations about their future but the history of Cervantes and Shakespeare in the twenty-first-century is yet to be written.

New productions of Shakespeare, traditional and experimental, are being performed worldwide to audiences old and new.

Shakespeare’s plays are being reconsidered on the page and on the stage. New editions of Don Quixote appear and the output of Cervantine criticism after the centenary year is unprecedented.

Besides both have become an important presence on the web. Their work is more accessible, and more relevant, than ever as they go digital.

Just close your eyes and … how Shakespeare and Cervantes talk to the present?  How the present talk to them?

And how all about them is just spoken  anyway?

1 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), p. 29.

2 Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), p. 78.

3 Emma Smith, “Studying Shakespeare and His Contemporaries” in Talking Shakespeare, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Michael Scott (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 55.

4 Susan Wells, “Millennium Masterworks: Shakespeare”, Sunday Times, Cultural Section, 15.08.1999, p. 6.

5 Melveena McKendrick, “Writings for the stage” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 156.

6 Michael J.Collins,” Why we talk Shakespeare”, in Talking Shakespeare, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Michael Scott (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 212.

Iván Torrijos ©