An Exploration of the Influences of Don Miguel de Cervantes
Marta Gutierrez
Introduction
Don Quixote, by poet, playwright and novelist Don Miguel de Cervantes’ is oft-cited as one of the best novels ever written and a major influence on Western writers, including William Shakespeare. While his influence on Western Literature is often commented upon, this website will explore ways in which Cervantes himself was influenced, by other writers as well as by the time in which he lived, preceded by an overview of Cervantes in order to give some idea of his life.
Contents
- Overview of Cervantes
- Chronology of Cervantes
- Cervantes in England
- Cervantes in Relation to Aristotlelian-Thomist Epistimological Theories
- Cervantes and Tasso Re-examined
- Did Cervantes have a Library?
- Cervantes and Aesop
- Criteria and Search Methods
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Overview of Cervantes
This page provides a biography of Cervantes, before the web site goes on to explore in more detail influences upon his writing.
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Miguel de Cervantes 1547-1616 - surname in full
CERVANTES SAAVEDRA - nickname: Cripple of Lepanto |
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Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote, the most famous figure in Spanish literature. Although Cervantes' reputation rests almost entirely on his portrait of the knight of La Mancha, El ingenioso hidalgo, his literary production was considerable. William Shakespeare, Cervantes' great contemporary, had evidently read Don Quixote, but it is most unlike that Cervantes had ever heard of Shakespeare. In spite of his fame, Cervantes remained a poor man. For if he like a madman lived, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra lived an unsettled life of hardship and adventure. He was born in Alcalá de Henares, a small town near Madrid, into a family of the minor nobility. His mother was Leonor de Cortinas; she gave birth to seven children, Cervantes was the fourth. Rodrigo de Cervantes, his father, was an apothecary-surgeon. Much of his childhood Cervantes spent moving from town to town while his father sought work. After studying in Madrid (1568-69), where his teacher was the humanist Juan López de Hoyos, he went to Rome in the service of Guilio Acquavita, who became a cardinal in 1570. In the same year Cervantes joined a Spanish regiment in Naples. He took part in the sea battle at Lepanto (1571), during which he received a wound that permanently maimed his left hand. Cervantes was extremely proud of his role in the famous victory and of the nickname he earned, el manco de Lepanto (the cripple of Lepanto). After recuperation in Messina, Sicily, he continued his military career. In 1575 he set out with his brother Rodrigo on the galley El Sol for Spain. The ship was captured by pirates under Arnaute Mami and the brothers were taken to Algiers as slaves. Rodrigo was ransomed in 1577. The Moors though that Cervantes was more valuable captive because he had carried letters written by important persons. Cervantes spent five years as a slave until his family could raise enough money to pay his ransom. During this period he tried to escape several times without success. Cervantes was released in 1580, with the payment of 500 escudos raised by his family and the Trinitarian order. He returned to Madrid where he held several temporary, ill-paid administrative post. His first play, LOS TRATOS DE ARGEL (1580), was based on his experiences as a Moorish captive. In 1584 he married 18 years younger Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, the daughter of a well-to-do peasant. The marriage was childless. He had also a daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, from an affair he had with an actress, Ana Franca de Rojas (or Ana de Villafranca). Isabel worked as a servant in the family but her way of life caused him much worries. The other members of the household included his mother and two unmarried sisters. In the late 1580s Cervantes left his wife. During the next 20 years he led a nomadic existence, also working as a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada and a tax collector. He suffered a bankruptcy and was imprisoned at least twice (1597 and 1602) because of fiscal irregularities. It is generally believed that Cervantes was honest, but a victim of a thankless task. Between the years 1596 and 1600 he lived primarily in Seville, and by 1604 he had moved to Valladolid, where Philip III had established his court. In 1606 Cervantes settled permanently in Madrid, where he spent the rest of his life. His economic situation remained difficult. When a nobleman, Gaspar de Ezpeleta, was mortally wounded on the street in front of Cervantes' house, and died there, Cervantes and the women in his household were jailed on suspicion of having had something to do with his death. After one Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published a poor sequel to Don Quixote, Cervantes answered to the challenge and produced the second part, which appeared in 1615. He died on April 23, 1616. Three days before he had finished his novel The Exploits of Persiles and Sigismunda, dedicated to the Count of Lemos. "The truth lies in a man's dreams... perhaps in this unhappy world of ours whose madness is better than a foolish sanity." Cervantes started his literary career in Andalusia in 1580. According to Cervantes, he wrote 20-30 plays, but only two copies have survived. His first major work was the GALATEA (1585), a pastoral romance. It received little contemporary notice and Cervantes never wrote the continuation for it, which he repeatedly promised. He also mentions the book in Don Quixote, where the priest says to the barber: "His book exhibits some faculty of invention, but it proposes things and arrives at no conclusion. In the meanwhile let us wait for the continuation which he promises us; with better luck he may give us something that his wretched circumstances have hitherto denied him." In his play EL TRATO DE ARGEL, printed in 1784, Cervantes dealt with the life of Christian slaves in Algiers. Aside from his plays, his most ambitious work in verse was VIAJE DEL PARNASO (1614), an allegory which consists largely of a rather tedious though good-natured reviews of contemporary poets. Cervantes himself realized that he was deficient in poetic gifts. Later generations have considered him one of the world's worst poets. NOVELAS EJEMPLARES (1613, Exemplary Tales), a collection of short stories, contained some of his best prose work about love, idealism, gypsy life, madmen, and talking dogs. Tradition maintains, that he wrote Don Quixote in prison at Argamasilla in La Mancha. Cervantes' idea was to give a picture of real life and manners and to express himself in clear language, "in simple, honest, and well-measured words," as he stated in the prologue to Part I of Don Quixote. The intrusion of everyday speech into a literary context was acclaimed by the reading public. The author stayed poor until 1605, when the first part of Don Quixote appeared. Although it did not make Cervantes rich, it brought him international appreciation as a man of letters. According to a story King Philip III of Spain once saw a man reading beside the road and laughing so much that the tears were rolling down his cheeks. The King said: "That man is either crazy or he is reading Don Quixote." However, Lope de Vega, the most influential playwright at that time, slaughtered Cervantes as a poet and novelist in a letter. Don Quixote (part I; 1605; part II 1615) - Often called the first modern novel, originally conceived as a comic satire against the chivalric romances. The work has been interpreted in many ways since its appearance. It has been seen as a veiled attack on the Catholic Church or on the contemporary Spanish politics, or symbolizing the duality of the Spanish character. Cervantes himself had believed in uplifting rhetoric, fought for Spain, and when he returned to Madrid after slavery, he found out that the government ignored his services. The English writer Ford Madox Ford stated in The March of Literature (1938) that Cervantes did with his book to the world a disservice: "The gentle ideal of chivalry is the one mediaeval trait which, had it survived as an influence, might have saved our unfortunate civilization." "Every one is as God made him and oftentimes a good deal worse." Neither wholly tragedy nor wholly comedy Don Quixote gives a panoramic view of the 17th-century Spanish society. Central characters are the elderly, idealistic knight, who sets out on his old horse Rosinante to seek adventure, and the materialistic squire Sancho Panza, who accompanies his master from failure to another. Their relationship, although they argue most fiercely, is ultimately founded upon mutual respect. In the debates they gradually take on some of each other's attributes. "It seems to me," said Sancho, "that the knights who
did all these things were driven to them... but... why should you go crazy?
What lady has rejected you...? Before the good Knight of La Mancha dubs himself Don Quixote, his name is Quijida or Quesada. His is a country gentleman, around fifty. During his travels, dressed in a old, black suit of armor, Don Quixote's overexcited imagination blinds him to reality: he thinks windmills to be giants, flocks of sheep to be armies, and galley-slaves to be oppressed gentlemen. Sancho is named governor of the isle of Barataria, a mock title, and Don Quixote is bested in a duel with the Knight of the White Moon, in reality a student of his acquaintance in disguise. Don Quixote is passionately devoted to his own imaginative creation, the beautiful Dulcinea. "Oh Dulcinea de Tobosa, day of my night, glory of my suffering, true North and compass of every path I take, guiding star of my fate..." The hero returns to La Mancha, and only at his deathbed Don Quixote confesses the folly of his past adventures. - Cervantes's influence is seen among others in the works of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, also in the works of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a short story about an author, Pierre Menard, who undertook to compose Don Quixote - not another Quixote, but the Quixote. After studies of Spanish, history, and the Catholic faith, he writes the novel, word for word. "Cervantes's text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)" - from 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' - See also: Torquato Tasso, Anton Tammsaare For further reading: Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes by Michael E. Gerli (1995); Miguel de Cervantes: "Don Quixote" by A.J. Close (1990); A Critical Introduction to Don Quixote by L.A.Murillo (1988); Cervantes and Ariosto by Thomas R. Hart (1989); Don Quixote by E.C. Riley (1986); Cervantes by Jean Canavaggio (1986); Cervantes by P.E. Russell (1985); Cervantes by Manuel Duran (1974); Cervantes across the Centuries, ed. by Angel Flores and M.J. Benardete (1969); The World of Don Quixote by Richard L. Predmore (1967); Mimesis by Erich Auerbach (1953); Cervantes by William J. Entwistle (1940); A Man Called Cervantes by Bruno Frank (1935); Cervantes by Rudolph Schevill (1919); Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: A Memoir by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (1913); Life of Miguel de Cervantes by Henry Edward Watts (1891) - In Finnish: Cervantesin tuotantoa on suomeksi sovittanut mm. Pietari Hannikainen 1800-luvulla, ensimmäisen julkisesti esitetyn suomenkielisen näytelmän tekijä. Selected works:
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http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cervante.htm
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Chronology of Cervantes
This chronology of Cervantes is for the purpose of illustrating how historical events may have influenced his life and thus his writing.
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YEAR |
CERVANTES' LIFE |
HISTORICAL EVENTS |
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1547 |
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, fourth child of the surgeon Rodrigo de Cervantes and of Leonor de Cortinas, is born in Alcalá de Henares. He may have been born September twenty-ninth, the day of Saint Michael, hence his name Miguel. But so far, the only thing that has been found is his baptismal certificate, according to which he was baptized October 9, 1547, in the Church of Saint Mary the Great. |
Protestants defeated in the battle of Mühlberg. Jerónimo Fernández, Don Belianís de Grecia (1547-49). Birth of Mateo Alemán and Juan Rufo. |
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1548 |
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Interregnum of Charles V. Juan de Segura, Proceso de cartas de amores. |
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1550 |
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Pedro de Luján, Coloquios matrimoniales. Death of Cristóbal de Virués, Juan de la Cueva, and Vicente Espinel. |
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1551 |
In search of a better life, the family moves to Valladolid, where the court is located at the time. They set themselves up in the Sancti Spiritus district, but Cervantes's father is imprisoned on account of his debts, and all their possessions are confiscated. |
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1552 |
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Defeat at Innsbruck. Núñez de Reinoso, Historia de los amores de Clareo y Florisea. |
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1553 |
Unsuccessful in Valladolid, the family returns to Alcalá de Henares and, the father at least--we don't know if his wife and children accompanied him--sets out on a veritable pilgrimage which takes him first of all to Córdoba. There, Cervantes may have attended the Jesuit school Saint Catherine, where from the age of six he would have received his first instruction and soaked up the picaresque atmosphere that he would later recreate in his writings |
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1554 |
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Philip, son of Charles V, marries Mary Tudor. |
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1555 |
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Peace of Augsburg. Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra, El caballero del Febo. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios. |
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1556 |
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Charles V abdicates. Philip II crowned in Valladolid. Melchor de Ortega, Felixmarte de Hircania. Fray Luis de Granada, Guía de pecadores. |
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1557 |
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Battle of San Quintin. |
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1558 |
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Charles V and Mary Tudor die. Diet of Frankfurt. Elizabeth I ascends the throne of England. |
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1559 |
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Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis |
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Philip II marries Elizabeth of Valois. Jorge de Montemayor, La diana. Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola is born |
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1560 |
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Juan de Arguijo is born. |
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1561 |
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The court moves to Madrid, the new capital. Historia del Abencerraje y de la hermosa Jarifa. Luis de Góngora is born. |
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1562 |
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El Brocense, Latinae institutiones. Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, Lope de Vega, and José de Valdivieso are born. |
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1563 |
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The cornerstone of El Escorial is laid. The Council of Trent ends. P. de Luján, El caballero de la Cruz (II). |
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1564 |
Towards the end of 1564, Cervantes's father shows up in Seville, where he manages some rental property. Again, we do not know whether his family was with him or not, but new debts force him to leave the city after about two years. Miguel may have attended the Jesuit school, where he would have been taught by Father Acebedo and been a classmate of Mateo Vázquez, future secretary to Philip II. |
Turks defeated at Oran. Gaspar Gil Polo, La Diana enamorada. Antonio de Torquemada, Don Olivante de Laura. Shakespeare is born. |
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1565 |
Luisa de Cervantes enters the Alcalá convent. |
Turks defeated at Malta. Revolt in the Netherlands. Jerónimo de Contreras, Selva de aventuras. Juan de Timoneda, El Patrañuelo. Lope de Rueda dies. |
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1566 |
In the autumn, Rodrigo Cervantes is living with his family in Madrid, where he has business dealings with, among others, Alonso Getino de Guzmán, an organizer of public entertainment in the |
The Breda Agreement. The Duke of Alba becomes governor of the Netherlands. Luis de Zapata, Carlo famoso. |
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capital and thanks to whom Cervantes makes his poetic debut with a sonnet ("Serenísima reina en quien se halla") written on the occasion of the birth of Princess Catalina Micaela, the second daughter of Philip II and Elizabeth of Valois. |
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1568 |
Cervantes studies with Juan López de Hoyos, who became rector of the "Estudio de la Villa" on January 12, 1568. López de Hoyos, referring to Cervantes as "beloved pupil," commissions him to write four poems to be included in the Relación oficial de las exequias (published the following year) on the death of Elizabeth of Valois. About this time our young author and fledgling poet must have frequented and been a friend of poets such as Pedro Laýnez and Gálvez de Montalvo. |
Death of Prince Charles and of Elizabeth of Valois. Rebellion of the "moriscos" in Granada. |
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1569 |
The following year finds Cervantes unexpectedly in Rome as valet to Monsignor Acquaviva, with whom he would remain only a year or so. The only logical explanation for this brusque change of scene has to do with a royal dispatch of September 1569, ordering the arrest of a young student of the same name as our author for having wounded the master builder Antonio de Sigura in a duel. Whether we like it or not, this hypothesis will stand until the existence of another Miguel de Cervantes is documented. |
The Turks occupy Cyprus. Philip II marries Anne of Austria. The Holy League is formed. Antonio de Torquemada, Jardín de flores curiosas. |
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1571 |
Diego de Urbina's troops board the galley Marquesa to carry their support to the Venetian contingent. Cervantes is stricken with malaria but, in spite of high fevers, fights heroically from the bow of the ship, in the "greatest moment that past centuries have seen and which those to come have no hope of seeing," |
Battle of Lepanto. War of the Alpujarras ends. |
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Cervantes described the battle of Lepanto. This is where he received two harquebus wounds in the chest, and a third would leave his left hand useless and immortalize him as the "one-armed man of Lepanto." He recuperates in Mesina. |
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1572 |
In spite of having lost the use of his left hand, he joins the company of Don Manuel Ponce de León, part of Don Lope de Figueroa's regiment, and takes part as a highly paid soldier in various military campaigns during the following years, the most important being Navarino and La Goleta. He remains, for the time being, at the winter quarters in Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples. |
Pius V dies. Corfu and Mondón campaigns. |
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1573 |
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Don Juan of Austria captures Tunis. Mateo Vázquez named secretary to Philip II. |
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1574 |
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Melchor de Santa Cruz, Floresta española. El Brocense writes on Garcilaso. |
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1575 |
Now a highly paid soldier, Cervantes receives letters of recommendation from Don Juan and the Duke of Sessa and decides to return to Spain. In early September he leaves Naples with a four- galley fleet bound for Barcelona. A storm disperses the ships, and El Sol (The Sun), carrying both Cervantes and his brother, is captured off the Catalan coast by Berber corsairs under the command of Arnaut Mamí. The captives are taken to Algiers and Miguel de Cervantes falls into the hands of Dalí Mamí, alias The Cripple, who, conside- ring the letters of recommendation, sets Cervantes's ransom at 500 gold ducats, an amount hardly within the power of his family to pay. |
Philip II's second bankruptcy. Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios. |
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1576 |
First escape attempt: Cervantes flees with other Christians towards Oran, but they are deserted by the Muslim who was guiding them and are forced to return to Algiers. |
Spaniards sack Antwerp. Don Juan of Austria named Regent of the Netherlands. |
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1577 |
Second attempt: Cervantes and fourteen other captives hide in a grotto of the gardens belonging to the warden, Hassan. They remain there five months waiting for Cervantes's recently ransomed brother Rodrigo to come back for them. A renegade known as El Dorador betrays them and they are trapped in the grotto. Cervantes assumes total responsibility, is shackled and sent to the king's dungeon. |
Hassan Baha king of Algiers. |
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1578 |
Third attempt: Cervantes sends a Muslim with letters addressed to Don Martín de Córdoba, commander of Oran, asking him to send a spy to rescue them from Algiers. The Muslim is arrested and Hassan sentences Cervantes to 2000 thwacks. All we know for sure is that the punishment was never carried out. |
Juan de Escobedo assassinated. Antonio Pérez prosecuted. Don Juan of Austria dies. Death of Sebastian of Portugal in the battle of Alcazarquivir. The future Philip III is born. |
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1579 |
Fourth attempt: Cervantes attempts to arm a frigate to reach Spain with about sixty passengers. Another betrayal, this time also by a renegade Caybán, thwarts the plan. Cervantes again takes the blame and turns himself in to Hassan, who spares his life but locks him up in his bathhouse. |
Fall of Antonio Pérez. Opening of the first theaters in Madrid. |
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1580 |
On September 19, 1580, Cervantes is about to sail for Constantinople with Hassan Baha's fleet when the Trinitarians Fray Juan Gil and Fray Antón de la Bella pay the writer's ransom and he is set free. On October 27, he reaches the Spanish |
Philip II king of Portugal. Pedro de Padilla, Tesoro de varias poesías. Fernando de Herrera, Anotaciones a las obras de Garcilaso. Birth of Francisco de Quevedo. |
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coast and disembarks in Denia (Valencia); his captivity has lasted five years and one month. Towards the end of the year he goes to Madrid to initiate a series of suits in demand of compensation for his military service. |
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1581 |
Cervantes only procures an obscure assignment in Oran which he carries out in the middle of 1581, after which he goes to Lisbon to report to Philip II. |
The Netherlands become independent. Birth of Salas Barbarillo and Ruiz de Alarcón. |
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1582 |
At the start of the year we find Cervantes again living in Madrid and still aspiring unsuccessfully to obtain a post. Meanwhile, he is perfectly at home in the literary circles of the court, maintains cordial relations with the best-known poets, and works on La Galatea, in which many of these poets appear. At the same time, he follows closely the development of the theater, with the birth of the "corrales," and absorbs the works of authors such as Argensola, Cueva, and Virués. His oldest preserved works, El trato de Argel and La Numancia, might be from this period. Unable to obtain a government post, Cervantes seems to be clearly launched on a literary career, but things will change very soon. |
Fernando de Herrera, Poesías Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, El pastor de Fílida. Birth of the Earl of Villamediana. |
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1583 |
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Juan de la Cueva, Comedias y tragedias. Fray Luis de Granada, Introducción al símbolo de la fe. Fray Luis de León, La perfecta casada y De los nombres de Cristo. |
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1584 |
Cervantes has relations with Ana de Villafranca, or Ana Franca de Rojas, who would give him his only offspring (notwithstanding the Promontorio alluded to in Viaje al Parnaso): Isabel de Saavedra. He immediately travels to Esquivias to |
Philip II moves to El Escorial. Juan Rufo, La Austriada. Birth of Tirso de Molina and Saavedra Fajardo. |
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meet with Juana Gaitán, the widow of his friend Pedro Laýnez, and tries to get his works published. In Esquivias he meets Catalina de Palacios, whose nineteen- year-old daughter he, at thirty-seven, marries on December twelfth. He sets up house with his new wife but soon starts a constant pilgrimage between Esquivias and Madrid. |
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1585 |
The fifth of March he signs a contract with Gaspar de Porres, who will pay him forty ducats for two lost plays: El trato de Constantinopla and La confusa (the lost works from his earliest theater-writing period must be from about this time). A few days later, the Primera parte de la Galatea, divided into six books and addressed to Ascanio Colona, is printed in Alcalá de Henares by Juan Gracián under the editorship of Blas de Robles. His father dies this same year. His travels increase steadily. There are frequent trips to Toledo and at year's end we find him in Seville, just before he returns to Esquivias at Christmas time. |
San Juan de la Cruz, Cántico espiritual. Saint Teresa, Camino de perfección. |
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1586 |
Towards the middle of the year he goes back to Seville but returns right away to receive Catalina's dowry (a little more than 400 ducats). He writes some sonnets to celebrate miscellaneous occasions. |
Barahona de Soto, Las lágrimas de Angélica. |
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1587 |
In early May we find Cervantes in Seville, where, with the help of the governor of the "Real Audiencia de Sevilla," Diego de Valdivia, he finally obtains the post of Royal Commissioner of Supplies for the Invencible Armada, under the supervision of Antonio de Guevara, Chief Commissioner for the supplying of the royal fleet. He thus begins a restless period as a wandering businessman which would last around fifteen years but would procure him only |
Preparations begin for the Invencible Armada. Lope de Vega is banished from Madrid. Cristóbal de Virués, El Monserrate. B. González de Bobadilla, Las ninfas y pastores de Henares. |
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problems, lawsuits, and time in jail. Starting in Écija, where the Vicar General of Seville excommunicates him for having requisitioned the Church's stored grain, he covers the province of Córdoba, including La Rambla, Castro del Río-- where he is again excommuni-cated, this time by the Vicar General of Córdoba-- Espejo, Cabra, etc. |
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1588 |
For two more years he continues requisitioning oil and wheat in Écija and surrounding areas. He is absolved of the accusations of embezzlement brought against him by the viceroy Luis de Portocarrera. Cervantes's mother-in-law Catalina de Palacios dies in early May. |
Defeat of the Invencible Armada. El Greco, "The Burial of Count Orgaz". Saint Teresa, Libro de la vida and Las Moradas. |
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1590 |
The beginning of the year finds Cervantes in Carmona with a commission from Guevara's successor Miguel de Oviedo to requisition oil in that region. In May Cervantes, tired of all the running about, in a petition to the president of the Consejo de Indias, solicits one of the then vacant "post[s] in the Indies": auditor of the kingdom of Granada, governor of Soconusco, auditor for the Cartagena fleet, or peace officer. The response was another disappointing "no": "Find something here to your liking." The interpolated Novela del Cautivo from the first Quijote (XXXIX-XLI) is from this period. |
Revolt in Aragon. |
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1591 |
The new Chief Commissioner Pedro de Isunza renews Cervantes's commission. Cervantes continues his requisitions throughout Jaén, Úbeda, Baeza, Estepa, Montilla, etc. His assistant Nicolás Benito is accused of wrongdoing; Cervantes avoids censure thanks to the intervention of Isunza. |
Antonio Pérez escapes. Death of Mateo Alemán. Bernardo de Vega, El pastor de Iberia. |
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1592 |
The confrontations generated by his troublesome job land him in the Castro del Río jail: he is arrested by order of the chief magistrate of Écija for the illegal sale of wheat. Again, he is soon released through the good offices of Isunza. On September fifth Cervantes contracts with Rodrigo Osorio to compose six plays for the sum of 300 ducats. |
Tarazona Parliament. |
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1593 |
The conclusion of his job as commissioner of supplies coincides with the death of his mother in October. There remains one last assignment from Miguel de Oviedo after which the vast enterprise initiated by Guevara will come to an end in 1594. However, new troubles still await Cervantes. Around this time (1590-93) Cervantes composes miscellaneous poems (odes to the Invencible Armada, a ballad on La morada de los celos, etc.) And he may have begun sketching some of his short novels: El cautivo, Rinconete y Cortadillo, El celoso extremeño, etc. |
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1594 |
Agustín de Cetina entrusts the ex- commissioner with collecting back taxes in the kingdom of Granada. So Cervantes goes back to tax collecting, depositing the money in Simón Freire's bank. When Freire's bank fails, he ends up in jail again. |
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1595 |
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Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada. |
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1596 |
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Howard and Essex sack Cádiz. Alonso López Pinciano, Philosophia antigua poética. Juan Rufo, Los seiscientos apotegmas. |
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1597 |
Cervantes, unable to make good the amount of money lost, on September 6 is ordered by an overzealous judge, Gaspar de Vallejo, to be imprisoned in Seville, |
Philip II's third bankruptcy. |
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where he will remain several months. It may be there that he sketched the plot of the Quijote and may even have begun its composition. |
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1598 |
Ana Franca dies and the following year her daughter Isabel, under the name of Isabel de Cervantes, goes to work for Magdalena de Cervantes. Cervantes composes the sonnet "Al túmulo de Felipe II". |
Peace of Vervins with France. Isabel and Alberto are Regents of the Netherlands. Death of Philip II. Accession of Philip III. Duke of Lerma heads the government. Birth of Zurbarán. Theaters closed by government decree. Lope de Vega, La Arcadia and Dragontea. |
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1599 |
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Plague epidemic in Spain. Philip III marries Margaret of Austria. Birth of Velázquez. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache I. Lope de Vega, El Isidro. |
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1600 |
During the summer Cervantes leaves Seville around the same time that his brother Rodrigo dies in the battle of the Dunes. We can be sure of little more than that. Cervantes may have been totally immersed in the Quijote until 1604. He probably traveled to Seville and to Esquivias. Some assume, with little to go on, that he may have gone to jail again in 1602. |
Theaters reopen. Birth of Calderón de la Barca. Romancero general. |
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1601 |
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The court is moved to Valladolid. Juan de Mariana, Historia de España. Birth of Baltasar Gracián. |
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1602 |
New money problems with the Treasury. |
Lope de Vega, La hermosura de Angélica and Rimas humanas. Mateo Luján, Segunda parte del Guzmán de Alfarache. |
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1603 |
The Cervantes family settles in Valladolid, the new location of the court. They reside in the Rastro de los Carneros |
Death of Elizabeth I of England. Agustín de Rojas, El viaje entretenido. Francisco de Quevedo composes El |
|
1604 |
|
Capture of Ostend. Gregorio González, El Guitón Honofre. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache II. Lope de Vega, Primera parte de Comedias and El peregrino en su patria. |
|
1605 |
At the beginning of the year, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, dedicated to the Duke of Béjar, is published in Madrid by Juan de la Cuesta, under the editorial supervision of Francisco de Robles. It is an immediate and resounding success. Bootleg editions are issued in Lisbon, Valencia, and Zaragoza. Three months later Cuesta starts working on the second edition. Numerous orders are shipped to America. But celebration is short-lived. At the end of June, Gaspar de Ezpeleta is mortally wounded in front of Cervantes's house, and he is, along with part of his family, jailed again, however briefly, this time by order of the mayor, Villarroel, who was undoubtedly influenced by the bad reputation of the Cervantes women. |
Birth of Prince Philip, future Philip IV. Lord Howard, ambassador. Francisco López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina. |
|
1606 |
Again, following the court, Cervantes moves to Madrid, where, at least as early as 1608, he sets himself up in the Atocha district. He later moves to Magdalena Street near Francisco Robles's bookstore and Juan Cuesta's printing shop. His daughter Isabel marries Diego Sanz and the following year they have a daughter, Isabel Sanz. |
The court moves back to Madrid. |
|
1608 |
Cervantes's daughter Isabel marries Luis de Molina after her husband Diego dies. |
Bernardo de Balbuena, Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erifile. |
|
1609 |
In April, worried about his salvation, Cervantes joins the congregation of the Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Olive Grove. Magdalena, Catalina, and Andrea have already joined the Third Order of Saint Francis. Death pursues his family: his sister Andrea dies in October, his granddaughter Isabel Sanz six months later, and Magdalena after another six months. |
Twelve-year Truce in the Netherlands. Expulsion of the "moriscos" decreed. Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo de hacer comedias. |
|
1610 |
Cervantes attempts to accompany don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Earl of Lemos, to his viceroyalty in Naples, but Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, who was responsible for putting together the retinue, leaves out both Cervantes and Góngora. |
The Earl of Lemos named viceroy of Naples. Larache taken. Henry IV assassinated in France. |
|
1611 |
|
Margaret of Austria dies. Theaters closed temporarily Fray Diego de Hojeda, La Cristiada. Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana. |
|
1612 |
Cervantes, accompanied by Constanza, moves to number 18, Huertas Street, opposite the residences of the Prince of Morocco, don Felipe de África. Still fond of poetry, the now famous novelist takes part in the fashionable academies, among them the Academia Selvaje, founded by Francisco de Silva y Mendoza in his palace on Atocha Street. Meanwhile, the Quijote is translated into English by Thomas Shelton. |
Diego de Haedo, Topographía e historia general de Argel. J. de Salas Barbadillo, La hija de Celestina. Lope de Vega, Los pastores de Belén. C. Suárez de Figueroa, La España defendida. |
|
1613 |
Cervantes travels to Alcalá, where he becomes a novice in the Third Order of Saint Francis, and, three years later, will make his final vows. The Novelas ejemplares, dedicated to the Earl of Lemos and edited by Francisco de Robles, are published in Madrid by Juan de la Cuesta. |
Luis de Góngora, Primera Soledad and El polifemo. |
|
1614 |
Cervantes publishes Viaje del Parnaso. It is dedicated to Rodrigo de Tapia and printed by the widow of Alonso Martín. César Oudin translates the Quijote into French. |
A. Fernández de Avellaneda, Segunda parte del Quijote. Lope de Vega, Rimas sacras. |
|
1615 |
With his wife and a servant, Cervantes moves for the last time, to a house on Francos Street, at the corner of León Street, opposite a popular hangout for actors. A volume of plays, Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos nuncarepresentados dedicated, once again, to the Earl of Lemos, is printed by the widow of Alonso Martín under the editorial supervision of Juan de Villarroel. The Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha is printed in Madrid by Juan de la Cuesta for distribution by the bookseller Francisco de Robles. |
Louis XIII of France marries Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III. |
|
1616 |
Incurably ill of dropsy, in April Cervantes takes his final vows in the Third Order. On the eighteenth he receives the last rites and on the nineteenth composes, "with my feet in the stirrup," the last thing he wrote: the hair-raising dedication of Persiles. On Friday the twenty-second, a little over a week after Shakespeare, the author of the Quijote expires and is buried the following day, dressed in his Franciscan habit, in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians, on Cantarranas (now Lope de Vega) Street. |
Death of Shakespeare. |
|
1617 |
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http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/english/ctxt/cec/chron.html
Next [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Cervantes in England
This is the first of a number of pages that will explore not only the impact of Cervantes writing on the Western World, but the influences upon Cervantes himself.
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Plays
and Playwrights
The earliest seventeenth-century2
play with a Spanish connexion derives from La vida de Lazarillo de
Tormes, a work translated into English in 1586 by David Rowland and
reprinted in 1596, 1624 and subsequently. Blurt, Master Constable or The
Spaniard's Nightwalk was published anonymously in 1602 and has
variously been attributed to Thomas Dekker and to Thomas Middleton.3
A brief digression is necessary here, to note that at this period a play
was the property of whichever acting company the playwright - or
playwrights, for collaborative authorship was a common practice - sold it
to. A company might, in its turn, sell on the play eventually to a
publisher, who might, but not invariably, pay 6d to the Company of
Stationers to register his or her rights in the copy. Publication might
follow, but was not inevitable and in any case could be delayed for many
years: most of the works of John Fletcher, one of the most esteemed dramatists
of the period, were not published until 1647, twenty-two years after his
death. The first publication of some popular Jacobean plays, such as The
Changeling, occurred during Cromwell's Protectorate while the theatres
were closed - The Changeling was published in 1653 - or after the
Restoration of 1660. There are thus two important sources of information
for the authorship of a play, although neither is necessarily accurate: the
title-page of the published text, and the Register of the Stationers' Company.4Whoever
its author was, Blurt was not a success. Internal evidence dates the
play no earlier than 1601; its appearance in print indicates that the
company who owned it, the Children of St Paul's, had no further use for it.
But in 1607 a much more successful play appeared. This was The Knight of
the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont, a member of the gentry turned
playwright. The Knight contains a scene at an inn which, it has been
argued, derives from Part I of Don Quijote.5
If this argument is accepted, then it demonstrates an educated dramatist
familiar with Cervantes' work no more than two years after it first
appeared in Spain and several years before the first translation into
English - Shelton's - was published in 1612. Ben Jonson certainly knew of Don
Quijote by 1609, for in Epicoene, a play dated to that year, he
gives the character True-Wit a speech in which he makes passing reference
to Amadis de Gaul and Don Quijote as the sort of books with
which one might shut up oneself in one's chamber for a month at a time.6
In 1611 the Master of the Revels licensed for the stage an anonymous play
to which he himself gave the title The Second Maiden's Tragedy. This
is based on the inset narrative in Part I of Don Quijote known as El
curioso impertinente and is described by its modern editor as "the
first known English play to make extensive use of Don Quixote".7 The
Second Maiden's Tragedy has been convincingly ascribed on internal
evidence to Thomas Middleton.8Francis
Beaumont collaborated for much of his dramatic career with John Fletcher.
They were close friends who shared lodgings; their living arrangements were
recorded by John Aubrey in his Brief Lives: They lived
together on the Banke side, not far from the Play-house, both batchelors;
lay together ...; had one wench in the house between them, which they did
so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c., betweene them.9It
seems a reasonable assumption, although not capable of proof, that if
Beaumont had come across Don Quijote - perhaps in Spanish, perhaps
in a manuscript translation - then Fletcher would also have known of it.
And by 1609 Fletcher had written The Coxcomb, a play which takes one
of its plots from El curioso impertinente. After his marriage in
1613 Beaumont wrote little for the theatre, but Fletcher moved on to become
Shakespeare's collaborator and eventual successor with the King's Men.
Together Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote three plays in 1612-13: All is
True (Henry VIII), The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio.
This latter play no longer survives but, before being lost, was adapted in
the eighteenth century by Lewis Theobald as The Double Falsehood;
from this adaptation it can be confirmed that Cardenio had its
origin in the inset narrative in Part I of the Quijote.10In
1619 William Rowley, an actor-playwright who often collaborated with Thomas
Middleton, produced the first of his several 'Spanish' plays: All's Lost
by Lust. The 'all' which is lost is Christian Spain, and the 'lust' is
that of King Roderick for the daughter of his general, who in revenge
defects to the Moorish army. Facing defeat, King Roderick opens a set of
forbidden doors in his castle, releasing a curse and losing his kingdom to
the Moors. No specific source has ever been identified, but Rowley is known
to have been interested in historical topics11
and may have picked up the legend of the last of the Visigothic kings in
his general reading. All's Lost is, however, only one example of a
series of 'Spanish' plays which were produced in London in a period of ten
years or so.12
The first in the run may have been John Fletcher's The Chances,
based on Cervantes' novela ejemplar, La señora Cornelia and which
can be dated no more precisely than between the publication of the novela
in 1613 and Fletcher's death in 1625. The Island Princess (1619-21),
also by Fletcher, was based either on Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola's Conquista
de las islas Malucas of 1609, or on L'Histoire de Ruis Dias et de
Quixaire princesse des Moloques, a novel by the Sieur de Bellan which
was based on the Conquista and which was published together with the
French translation of the novelas13.
Love's Pilgrimage (1615), by Beaumont and Fletcher, used another of
the novelas, Las dos doncellas. Then comes a collaborative
work with Fletcher's new rend="display" partner Philip Massinger,
The Custom of the Country, which takes incidents from Cervantes' Los
trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and dates from 1620.14
In 1622 Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, already a well-established
partnership, produced The Changeling, an acknowledged masterpiece of
the Jacobean drama. This play is set in the fortress of Alicante and its
main plot, the moral corruption of the governor's daughter Beatrice-Joanna
and the murders which ensue, comes from a supposedly true story of a murder
in Spain, related in 1621 by John Reynolds in The Triumphs of God's
Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Wilful and Premeditated
Murder. Some other elements of the action are taken from Gerardo the
Unfortunate Spaniard, a recent translation by Leonard Digges of the Varia
fortuna de soldado Píndaro by Céspedes y Meneses. The Unfortuate
Spaniard also provided the source for Fletcher and Massinger's The
Spanish Curate of 1622. The Spanish Gipsy, a play of 1623
probably by Middleton and Rowley,15
weaves together two more novelas ejemplares, La fuerza de la
sangre and La gitanilla. Massinger turned to a Cervantes play, Los
baños de Argel, when he wrote The Renegado in 1624, and in the
same year Fletcher turned El casamiento engañoso into Rule a Wife
and Have a Wife. 1624 also saw a theatrical cause célèbre when
Thomas Middleton wrote A Game at Chess for the King's Men, a
political satire in which King James, Prince Charles, the Marquis of
Buckingham, Philip IV and the recently-departed Spanish ambassador the
conde Gondomar, were clearly identifiable. Fletcher's last play, The
Fair Maid of the Inn, takes as its source yet another of the novelas
ejemplares, La ilustre fregona; it was licensed for the stage
posthumously on 22 January 1626. A political explanation for this
concerted interest in Spanish literature is offered below, but the
relationship between the playwrights concerned will also repay
investigation. The key is given in the preliminaries to The Travels of
Persiles and Sigismunda. A Northern History, an anonymous translation
from a French intermediary of Cervantes' romance Los trabajos de Persiles
y Sigismunda and published by Matthew Lownes in 1619, two years after
the Spanish original. Preserving the translator's anonymity, Lownes himself
provided a dedication to Philip, Baron Stanhope. Philip Stanhope was the
future Lord Chesterfield, and it was to his wife Katherine that Philip
Massinger in 1623 dedicated one of his plays, The Duke of Milan.
Lady Stanhope was the sister of the Earl of Huntingdon, an early patron of
John Fletcher. Gordon McMullan has teased out the strands of the patronage
connexions in his 1994 book, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John
Fletcher. He makes the interesting suggestion that it may have been
Huntingdon who first introduced Massinger to Fletcher; he points out that
Francis Beaumont and Huntingdon were related and had undoubtedly known each
other almost from birth - important factors in a society which depended
heavily on clientage and kinship networks. They were both members of the
Inns of Court - Huntingdon of Gray's Inn and Beaumont of the Inner Temple,
with which it was closely allied; and in 1613 Francis Beaumont had written
the Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn for the wedding of
Princess Elizbeth to the Elector Palatine.16
Beaumont, it will be recalled, was a close associate of John Fletcher.
Baker records the tradition that William Rowley was 'beloved' of Fletcher
and Shakespeare;17
and Rowley and Middleton, severally and jointly, wrote plays with a Spanish
interest. A genealogy can therefore be traced through this network of
dramatists, from The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1607 to The
Fair Maid of the Inn in 1625. The political fall-out from A Game at
Chess18
put an end to Thomas Middleton's dramatic career: he went into hiding,
writing nothing more for the stage, and died in 1627.19
Fletcher, as noted above, died in 1625 and Rowley in the early weeks of
1626. King James himself also died in 1625; the combination of royal death
and a virulent visitation of the plague kept the theatres closed for most
of 1625. When they re-opened in 1626, only Massinger of our group of
playwrights was still active, and the brief vogue for Spanish plays had
passed. The
Political Context20
At this point, the context in which the dramatists were writing becomes
important: why was Spain so important to writers in the London of James I? In
1619, when Rowley wrote All's Lost by Lust, England was poised at an
interesting political moment. In 1613 James had married his only daughter
Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, and now he was teetering on
the brink of the incipient Thirty Years' War. A strongly pro-Protestant foreign
policy had influential support and had been urged by the late Henry, Prince
of Wales, James's glamorous eldest son whose death from typhus in 1612 at
the age of eighteen was still deeply mourned.21
James, however, favoured a Catholic marriage for Prince Charles, now his
heir and only surviving son, to balance Elizabeth's marriage and retain
England's neutrality. To this end, negotiations with Spain had been under way
in a somewhat desultory fashion for several years. Accustomed to
seeing Anglo-Hispanic history through the prism of the Armada it is easy to
regard England and Spain as natural enemies, but this was not necessarily
the case. The Houses of Tudor, Stuart and Castile shared descent, in the
Lancaster line, from Edward III.22
For centuries they had had a common interest in resisting French expansion.
Two factors in the mid-sixteenth century had, more than anything else,
changed English attitudes to Spain. First, Mary I's marriage to Philip II
in 1554 was unpopular with much of her nobility and advisers. With the
progress of time, Philip became associated in folk memory with the
Smithfield burnings of protestants which marred the second half of Mary's
reign. The marriage treaty was in fact carefully drawn up to protect
English interests - Philip, for example, was never to be
rend="display" crowned - but for a variety of causes, from the
language barrier between Philip's entourage and Mary's to the loss of
Calais by the English in 1558, the marriage was not a political success.23
The strategic importance of England to Spanish interests in the
Netherlands, however, is signalled by the fact that on Mary's death Philip
himself contemplated marrying her protestant half-sister and heir,
Elizabeth I, and prompted suits to her from his Austrian cousins, the
Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles.24
All three proposals foundered on the religious question. Secondly, in 1570
Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth I by Papal Bull,25
thus inviting her deposition as a heretic by Catholic monarchs. The fear of
invasion by Catholic armies was a constant factor in English policy from this
point, and antipathy to Spain easily deteriorated into war. A
generation later, however, when King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the
throne of England in 1603 as James I, the Anglo-Spanish war was effectively
played out; the conclusion of a peace treaty was one of his first acts of
foreign policy, the treaty being signed first in London in 1604 and then in
Madrid in 1605. The acting company in which Shakespeare was part-sharer,
the King's Men, was in attendance at Somerset House while the Duke of Frias
was lodged there during the summer of 1604 as ambassador extraordinary and,
when the Earl of Nottingham paid the reciprocal visit to Spain to sign the
Madrid copy, a visit to the theatre was included in his schedule. However,
Leeds Barroll has recently suggested that too much should not be read into
the players' position during the Spanish embassy, pointing out that King
James was playing host to two such visits, by Spain and Austria, while at
the same time trying to maintain business as normal at the court of
Whitehall. The appointment of the King's Men could thus be seen as an
indication, not of an interest in drama on the part of either James or the
ambassador, but of a desperate shortage of staff.26Spain
and England maintained relatively friendly relations through the years of
James's reign. The Queen Consort, Anna of Denmark, was sympathetic to
Spanish interests, possibly also to Catholicism, and may have used her
patronage at court to promote her enthusiasms. Her relationship with the
conde Gondomar, longest-serving Spanish ambassador of James's reign, was
exceptionally cordial: there were even suspicions that he led her to a
death-bed conversion to Rome. When Anna died in 1619, then, an important
pro-Spanish counterweight to the militant protestant faction was removed
from the scene.27It
is arguable that from 1619 until James's death, no literary reference to
Spain could be a-political. Notable events of interest to London included
the Elector Frederick's acceptance of the Crown of Bohemia, against James's
advice; his loss of the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620; and his and
Elizabeth's expulsion from the Palatinate as well as Bohemia. Politics was
not the preserve of Parliament, as Conrad Russell reminds us: Parliaments,
if they are to be seen in perspective, should not be seen as the makers of
the major historical events of the 1620s, but as ad hoc gatherings of men
reacting to events taking place elsewhere. Major political decisions were
usually taken at court, and other major political events tended to take
place in the country, well away from the Palace of Westminster.28The
London stage could not but be party to the prevailing interest in foreign
policy, especially when negotiations for the 'Spanish Match' for Charles
appeared to become serious. Interest reached its height when Charles and
Buckingham travelled to Spain in 1623 to woo the Infanta in person. They
went in disguise, setting off without James's knowledge, on a fruitless
quest which embarrassed both English and Spanish governments and aroused
great anxiety in London. In 1621 Gondomar had visited the Fortune playhouse
and provided a feast for the players;29
while exactly a month after Charles returned from his trip to Madrid, on 5
November 1623, the acting company from the Cockpit theatre performed The
Spanish Gipsy at Whitehall, "the Prince [Charles] being there
only."30
The choice of play cannot have been coincidental. While the practice of
staging plays at court on festival days such as 5 November or the Christmas
season cannot be supposed to have made the players intimate with King
James, it inevitably brought them into contact with makers of influence and
policy, and with high-quality gossip. It has been argued that
throughout the theatrical season of 1623-24, political influences were
manipulating the drama;31
certainly this can be demonstrated in the case of Middleton's A Game at
Chess of 1624, staged by the King's Men in August while James was out
of London. It has been noted above that certain characters were satirical
portraits; to drive the point home, the arch-villain was dressed in
Gondomar's clothes, which the players had bought, and was carried on stage
in Gondomar's chair. At nine days, this play had by far the longest
continuous run of any play on the Jacobean stage and its popularity is
further attested by the number of manuscript copies extant.32
Two conclusions may be drawn from this incident: first, since it was
predictable that the Spanish embassy would hear of what was happening and
complain to the Privy Council, as indeed it did, the King's Men must have
felt that they had a measure of political protection. Jerzy Limon implies
that their friends at court included the Earl of Pembroke, one of the two
Herbert brothers to whom the Shakespeare First Folio was dedicated and a
relative of the Master of Revels, whose role in this affair - he was
responsible for licensing plays for acting - is both mysterious and
important. Leeds Barroll has postulated that Pembroke was influential in
the first days of James's reign, in getting Shakespeare's company adopted
under the King's patronage in an unusually short space of time.33
The circumstantial evidence surrounding Pembroke is suggestive. Secondly,
for the players to make it worth their while going to the trouble and
expense of impersonating Gondomar, he must have been a well-known figure
whom a London audience would easily recognise, since at no point could he
be named: otherwise, where would have been the point? A Game at Chess
is a precise example of the theory of cultual exchange which Stephen
Greenblatt has described in his book Shakespearean Negotiations: The
textual traces that have survived from the Renaissance ... are the products
of extended borrowings, collective exchanges, and mutual enchantments. They
were made by moving certain things - principally ordinary language but also
metaphors, ceremonies, dances, emblems, items of clothing, well-worn
stories, and so forth - from one culturally demarcated zone to another. We
need to understand not only the construction of these zones but also the
process of movement across the shifting boundaries between them. Who
decides which materials can be moved and which must remain in place? How
are cultural materials prepared for exchange? What happens to them when
they are moved?34Greenblatt
uses the term 'social energy', which he derives from the Greek energia,
to describe the ceaseless interchange of ideas between the world of the
theatre stage and the world outside. We identify energia only indirectly',
he says, "by its effects: it is manifested in the capacity of certain
verbal, aural, and visual effects to produce, shape, and organize
collective physical and mental experiences".35
In other words, what we are looking at is the process of ideas being picked
up by the theatre, or any other literary medium, rend="display"
for it need not be dramatic, used and put on display to the audience, which
then recycles them into its further thinking and debate. Here is Greenblatt
again: We can say, perhaps, that an individual play mediates
between the mode of the theater, understood in its historical specificity,
and elements of the society out of which that theater has been
differentiated. Through its representational means, each play carries
charges of social energy onto the stage; the stage in its turn revises that
energy and returns it to the audience.36We
have seen that Charles and Buckingham travelled incognito to Spain in 1623
in a truly quixotic quest for a bride, producing much anxious speculation;
and when they returned, bride-less, on 5 October 1623, rejoicing was
profound: by one report, there were at least 335 bonfires between Whitehall
and Temple Bar alone.37
People in London were interested in Spain and in what was going on there.
People in London made up the audiences in the London theatre. To answer
Stephen Greenblatt's rhetorical question, it was the players who moved
Spanish materials from the political to the cultural world. Spain was good
box-office. The
Attraction of Cervantes
The argument so far gives us two answers out of three: a group of
writers interested in Spain, who saw a commercial opportunity for the
theatres. The third part of the investigation now turns to why these
writers chose Cervantes rather than anyone else as their source material. "It's
the arrangement of events which makes the stories," notes the
fictional writer who is the narrator of Carol Shields's novel Small
Ceremonies. "It's throwing away, compressing, underlining."38
Herein lies the clue to why English dramatists may have found Cervantes,
and especially the Novelas ejemplares, so attractive. The choice of
source material for a playwright is never random. The chosen subject must
be both congenial in content and suitable for adaptation, even if the
playwright's ambitions are aimed at commercial rather than literary
success. A dramatist hoping to write something more thought-provoking than
a humdrum schedule-filler will also be looking for material which can be
arranged in a certain way and made to carry a significance which it may or
may not hold in its original form. The Changeling, for example, has
two narrative threads. In the main plot, Beatrice-Joanna is already
betrothed when she meets a man who takes her fancy better. She hires De
Flores to murder her fiancé and finds herself forced to become his mistress
in payment; then, in an attempt to hide her loss of virginity, she is
responsible for the death of her maid. In the sub-plot, Isabella is married
to the master of the local lunatic asylum. She remains chaste and loyal to
her husband despite both his grotesque jealousy and attempts to seduce her
by a lecherous servant and by young noblemen feigning lunacy. The
progressive moral corruption of spoilt, privileged but ultimately vacuous
Beatrice-Joanna is given resonance by its juxtaposition with the integrity
- moral, physical and psychological - of the asylum-keeper's wife.39In
the later years of the Jacobean period, the English readership was just
beginning to recognise Cervantes as a major writer. Part I of the Quijote
was published in an English translation in 1612 and, as we have seen, was
in circulation by about 1607, although whether in Spanish, English or the
French translation is impossible to determine from the use made of it. The
anonymous translator40
of Persiles y Sigismunda wrote, in his preface to the reader, "
The Authour is a Spaniard: whose stile becomes him well, in his own mouth:
and his Works of this kinde, have raysed his name, and approved his spirit;
not alone in his owne Country, but in others."41
suggesting that Cervantes was not yet a household name, but a writer
already appreciated among the cognoscenti. The second part of Don
Quijote appeared in English translation in 1621, although the
anglophone public had to wait until 1640 for a translation of the novelas,
when James Mabbe published translations of six of Cervantes' twelve.42
The novelas were available in French before 1625, and the question
of whether John Fletcher for one read his sources in Spanish, French or
both has yet to be satisfactorily resolved.43
The significant point is that the source most used for 'Spanish' plays -
the novelas - was not the most easily accessible. Part II of the Quijote
had no impact on Jacobean drama; Persiles yielded one play; but of
the twelve novelas, six had been dramatised by 1625, although none
could be read in English and they were therefore not easily consulted by the
playwrights. This indicates that there was something inherent in them which
made them particularly attractive to the dramatist who was looking for a
plot. The six novelas which were dramatised - La fuerza
de la sangre, La gitanilla, Las dos doncellas, El
casamiento engañoso, La señora Cornelia and La ilustre
fregona - had in common the clarity of their narrative line and the
strength of their stories. The claim could also be made of some of the
remaining six which were not dramatised: El celoso extremeño, in
particular, might be thought to offer excellent theatrical possibilities in
the campaign of seduction by Loaysa of Leonora, while Carrizales, the
jealous Extremaduran himself, could be turned into a memorable character
part. But there is no reason to suppose that Fletcher's exploration of the novelas
was complete at the time of his death; had he lived longer, there is no way
of knowing where he would have turned next for inspiration. It remains
true, however, that El coloquio de los perros would have been
difficult to adapt, by its very nature as a dialogue and therefore static;
the content of El licenciado vidriera, much of which consists of the
Glass Graduate's apophthegmata, would present similar difficulties. Rinconete
y Cortadillo would have had its attractions in the earlier years of
James's reign, when there was a vogue for satirical comedies about city
life and corruption, but such a theme was old-fashioned by the 1620s. In
the majority of the dramatised novelas, there is a moment when the
action is particularly striking: when it can be captured in a visual image,
as if time stands still. One might instance the moment of astonishment in La
señora Cornelia when don Juan finds that he has been left literally
holding the baby: "Alargó la mano don Juan, y topó un bulto, y
queriéndolo tomar, vio que eran menester las dos manos, y así le hubo de
asir con entrambas; y apenas se le dejaron en ellas, cuando le cerraron la
puerta, y él se halló cargado en la calle y sin saber de qué."44or
the point in La gitanilla when the 'stolen' jewels are found in
Andrés's pack: "Acudieron luego los ministros de la justicia a
desvalijar el pollino, y a pocas vueltas dieron con el hurto; de que
rend="display" quedó tan espantado Andrés, y tan absorto, que no
pareció sino estatua, sin voz, de piedra dura."45or
the final proof for the Ensign Campuzano in El casamiento engañoso
that his wife has indeed tricked him: "Fui a ver mí baúl, y halléle
abierto, y como sepultura que esperaba cuerpo difunto..."46Such
moments fulfil the Oxford English Dictionary's definition 2 of the
term 'dramatic': "Characteristic of, or appropriate to, the drama;
often connoting animated action or striking presentation, as in a play;
theatrical." It is not surprising that they should catch the eye of
the dramatist, and scenes deriving from each of these found their way on to
the English stage, in Act 1, scene 3 of The Chances, Act 4, scene 3
of The Spanish Gipsy and Act 3, scene 4 of Rule a Wife and Have a
Wife respectively. One of Cervantes' great coups de théâtre
occurs at the beginning of Las dos doncellas. A rider has arrived at
an inn, "a la hora que anochecía", and has taken the only
available room, paying double so as not to have to share. But shortly
afterwards a second guest arrives and the room has to be shared after all.
During the night the first guest falls into distress, and is revealed to be
female; she tells her story, which she fears will dishonour her family. As
dawn breaks she is eager to see her room-mate in daylight; but when the
windows are opened, the speaker discovers that she has been talking all
night to her own brother.47Cervantes
manipulates the Spanish language to gain the maximum effect while still
keeping faith with his reader. The reader may assume that the first
traveller to arrive at the inn is a man; but, not being required to put a
pronoun before the verb, and exploiting the ambiguity in the gender of '-le',
Cervantes never actually says so: "entró un caminante ... No
traía criado alguno ...", "y rociándole con agua el rostro
le hizo volver en su acuerdo".48
This facility is not available to the translator working in English, no
matter how skilled and polished, because English insists that the subject
and object of a verb must be declared as masculine, feminine or neuter; so
the English version of this passage must deliberately mislead the reader:
"He had no servant with him", "by splashing water on his
face, brought him round".49
Further, the English translation is led into the extra awkwardness of
changing the pronoun from 'he' to 'she' once the traveller has revealed
his/her gender. But on the Jacobean stage, this problem does not
arise - rather, in Love's Pilgrimage the playwrights can utilise Cervantes'
game-playing to the full. Since all the parts were played by male actors,
there was no reason to suppose when the first guest appeared on stage that
'he' was not indeed a man. The reader will know the truth, because the play
text gives the speech prefixes for this character as 'Theodosia'; but the
play was not published until 1647, a generation after its first
performance.50
An audience seeing the play for the first time would have supposed the
character entering in male costume to be male, with the knowledge -
willingly suspended when necessary - that everyone on stage was male even
if some were temporarily appearing to be female. This tension between
appearance and reality was used for dramatic effect throughout the period
by making female characters disguise themselves as men, so that the real
player-boy pretended to be a woman pretending to be a man: consider, to
take merely the best-known examples, Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroines
such as Julia (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), Jessica, Portia and Nerissa
(The Merchant of Venice), Rosalind (As You Like It), Viola (Twelfth Night)
and Imogen (Cymbeline). Shakespeare's defiantly belligerent hero Coriolanus
makes self-mocking reference to the uncertainty regarding a character's
gender:
Enter Diego with a light.
(1.2.122-133)
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http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/pub/b023.html
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Cervantes in Relation to Aristotlelian-Thomist Epistemological Theories
This article, from the Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America explores Cervantes influence by Aristotelian-Thomist theories on epistemology., finding evidence to support the theories from Don Quixote.
Américo Castro has proven that Cervantes was influenced by the Neoplatonist theories of Bembo, Erasmus, and Castiglione (pp. 85-90). What evidence is there that Cervantes was familiar with Aristotelian-Thomist epistemological theories distinguishing between sense-experience and intelligibility and could have had them in mind when he elaborated Don Quijote's ideas on the subject of enchantment? In general, the premises of the present study are consistent with Forcione's thesis that through the figure of Don Quijote (his ideas and actions), Cervantes sought «the liberation of art from the mimetic theories that dominated the mainstream of literary theorizing of the sixteenth century» (p. 121) and that were based on a misreading of Aristotle's Poetics (pp. 45-48, 346). In the Poetics Aristotle distinguishes between a historical and factual truth (the proper subject of historiography) and an ideal, aesthetic truth (the proper subject of poetry). Thus, even if Cervantes had not had access to the details of Aristotle's ideas on epistemology, the concept of a creative mental activity that is independent of the factuality of sense-data would have been present to him. However, it is more than likely that Cervantes was well aware of the theories of perception of Aristotle and Aquinas. Whereas Américo Castro, for example, felt the need to document probable traces and definite evidence of Neoplatonic thought in Cervantes's writings, in Renaissance Spain «la filosofía aristotélica predomina ampliamente sobre la platónica» («Aristotelian philosophy predominates widely over Platonic philosophy»: Fraile I, 231). Aristotelianism was the official philosophy in sixteenth-century Spain (Abellán 173). It would have been difficult for Cervantes not to know about such theories, even if his knowledge came more from conversations than from reading. There can be no doubt that he was interested in the subject. Yet his knowledge may well have come from reading as well. There is a reference in the Quijote (I, 47) to the Súmulas by Gaspar Cardillo de Villapando, an important textbook in Spanish universities. The «Súmulas» is not a discussion of De anima but a presentation of Aristotle's theories in logic; however, the same author wrote a commentary on Aristotle's De anima entitled Apologia Aristotelica adversus eos, qui aiunt sensisee animam cum corpore extingui published in Alcalá in 1560 and in 1569 (Solana 112-16, Díaz-Díaz 146-47, Abellán 176-79). Yet the most famous commentator on Aristotle's De anima was Pedro Martínez Brea, who published his In libros tres Aristotelis De anima Commentarii in Sigüenza in 1575. Let us recall that Castro (p. 106) believes Cervantes to have had a good command of Latin. Martínez de Brea «señala las diferencias entre el apetito sensitivo, que sólo atiende al tiempo presente, y otro intelectivo que atiende al presente, pasado y futuro» («points out the differences between the sensory inclination, which only notices the present, and the other, intellective inclination, which notices present, past and future»: Abellán 179-80). Even if Cervantes had not read or heard of the epistemological theories attributed directly to works by Aristotle, he was sure to have heard about or read Thomas Aquinas's important elaboration. The sixteenth century was the golden age of Thomism both in Spain and Italy. The principal faculty positions in theology were reserved by universities (even in Alcalá de Henares) for the teaching of Thomist doctrine. As Bell observes, at the time «those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things were in the air of Europe» (p. 118). Cervantes did not use philosophical terminology or explicitly broach the issues discussed in this study: he used the language of fiction. As Américo Castro notes, «Cervantes was not a philosopher, but dramatized in his works, especially in the Quijote, one of the central problems that caused unrest in modern thought in the dawn of the formation of the great systems» (p. 89, my translation). With a perspective different from our own, Robert Felkel has published an interesting article in which he argues that Don Quijote's «madness» is a paradigm of intellection's failure due to deficiencies in sensory perception and the associated processes as they are described in Aristotelian-Thomist theories of perception («Aristóteles, Santo Tomás y la percepción sensorial en el Quijote»).
Cervantes
[Publicaciones periódicas] : Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America.
Volume XII, Number 1, Spring 1992
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/12937642021296061865624/not0001.htm
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Cervantes and Tasso Re-examined
The following hyperlink links to a PDF by Daniel Eisenberg that explores the relationship between Cervantes and Tasso.
Cervantes and Tasso Re-examined
Please click the back button in the PDF window to return to this page and continue.
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Did Cervantes Have a Library?
The following hyperlink links to a PDF by Daniel Eisenberg that explores whether or not Cervantes read extensively, and if so, what he may have read and what evidence there is to support this.
Please click the back button in the PDF window to return to this page and continue.
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Cervantes and Aesop
This is an essay that ties Cervantes’ creations, Cipion and
Berganza, to work by Aesop.
Cipion, Berganza, and the Aesopic
tradition.
Publication Date: 22-MAR-03
Publication Title: Cervantes:
Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
Format: Online
Author: Carranza, Paul
Description
When near the end of
"El casamiento engañoso" Campuzano tells his friend, the licentiate
Peralta, that while he was in the hospital he overheard two dogs speaking to
each other, Peralta reacts with an outburst of frank incredulity:
"¡Cuerpo de mi!--replicó el Licenciado--. ¡Si se nos ha vuelto el
tiempo de Maricastaña, cuando hablaban las calabazas, o el de Isopo, cuando
departÃa el gallo con la zorra y unos animales con otros!" (2: 294). (1)
Despite his friend's disbelief, Campuzano insists that the dogs were in fact
talking, and that he was not dreaming what he heard. He then gives his friend a
notebook containing a near word-for-word transcription of the dogs'
conversation, and the contents of the notebook become the "Coloquio de los
perros," the story framed by the "Casamiento engañoso."
Peralta's mention of Aesop (2)--whose name will come up again later, this time
mentioned by the dog Berganza in the "Coloquio" itself--and the fact
that the interlocutors of the "Coloquio" are two talking dogs, have
led readers of the novella to speak of it in terms of the work of the ancient
Greek author of animal fables. Such comparisons between the
"Coloquio" and Aesop have not gone very far, however. Commentators
who cite Aesopic fables asa source of the "Coloquio" do it in one of
two ways: either they are content to mention Aesopic fables as one of many
sources of the novella, and leave it more or less at that, or they mention the
Aesopic tradition only to dismiss it as a serious influence on Cervantes in his
creation of the dogs Cipión and Berganza. While some of the discussions in the
former category have been suggestive, they have not gone far enough in bringing
out the important links that exist between the Aesopic fable--the most
traditional of genres--and Cervantes' experimental narrative in the form of
dialogue.
The first task of this study will be to demonstrate a greater influence of the
Aesopic tradition on the "Coloquio" than has been observed hitherto:
the Aesopic corpus does more than provide a possible model for the talking dogs
Cipión and Berganza. To begin with, critics have ignored the possible
influence of the so-called Life of Aesop on the adventures of Cervantes' dog
characters. The Life of Aesop, a purported biography of the fabulist, presents
readers with an Aesop who, beginning life as a mute slave, was one day
magically given the gift of speech, and then proceeded to serve several masters
as a servant, philosophical interlocutor, and all-around problem-solver. This
Life, used as an introduction to a collection of the fables that was first
translated into Castilian in the late fifteenth century, became highly popular
in Spain. Modern critics have pointed to the Life's picaresque nature and
possible influence on the Spanish picaresque genre as a whole, but have not
gone as far as to compare it explicitly to the "Coloquio." While it
is impossible to prove without doubt that Cervantes was influenced by the Life
of Aesop in composing the "Coloquio," I hope to show that it is
highly useful to read the two texts side by side, for the "Coloquio"
re-stages, in a highly interesting way, the Life's dismantling of the hierarchy
between philosophy and popular literature, between lofty theoretical
speculation and base corporeal adventures.
In addition to the possible influence of the Life of Aesop on the
"Coloquio," there is also the question of Aesop's fables themselves
and their presence in Cervantes' novella. Here again the comparisons are
fruitful. We will see that one of the more interesting themes of Aesopic fables
is the question of identity--what is "real" about both self and
other, and how to guard against possible deception. What the Aesopic fable
promises is a way to learn the "true" identity of one's surroundings
by means of, paradoxically, a fiction. The "Coloquio" presents an
interesting variation on the same paradox: an utterly fantastic story is
claimed by its intradiagetic author to be true, and the story presents itself
as exemplary. While I do not claim that a comparison to Aesopic fables alone
can give us a comprehensive interpretation of the "Coloquio" and its
frame, "El casamiento engañoso," I will demonstrate that the themes
of the Aesopic tradition appear in the "Coloquio," that they had
their possible source in Aesopic fables, and that recognition of this leads to
a more profitable reading of Cervantes' two novellas.
When commentators discuss the possible sources and models of the
"Coloquio," the works most often discussed are stories of
metamorphosis, such as Apuleius's The Golden Ass or Lucian's The Cock. Aesopic
fables are usually not mentioned as possible sources. When they are, they are
usually dismissed as a model because the dialogue of Cipión and Berganza takes
place in an otherwise "realistic" world, nota fantastic world in
which animals can talk as a matter of course. (3)
The first commentator to compare the "Coloquio de los perros" to
Aesop's fables was AgustÃn de Amezúa y Mayo, in his edition of the two
novellas. After downplaying earlier assertions of the importance of Apuleius'
Golden Ass and Lucian's dialogues as sources, Amezúa notes that there was a
closer model at hand for Cervantes, in the form of Aesop's fables (92):
"Sin dar al 'Coloquio,' literariamente, todo el valor y carácter de un
apólogo, ya que otro es su linaje, al menos, en lo que toca a su forma y a la
encarnación canina de sus protagonistas, Cervantes no tuvo necesidad de imitar
a Apuleyo ni a Luciano para idear el sabroso diálogo entre Berganza y su fiel
camarada; en Esopo y sus fábulas tenÃa ejemplar bastante en que inspirarse;
tanto más, cuando él mismo, en 'El casamiento engañoso,' nos da testimonio
de haberlo leÃdo, y apuntó veladamente que a semejanza suya se escribÃa"
(93). Amezúa goes on to cite López Pinciano's definition of an
"apólogo"--"poema común, el cual debajo de narración fabulosa
enseña una pura verdad, como se ve en las fábulas de Esopo'--as an
"excelente y justÃsimo retrato del 'Coloquio'" (110-11).
Frank Pierce, in an article entitled "Cervantes' Animal Fable," also
downplayed the influence of Apuleius and Lucius on the "Coloquio," in
favor of seeing it in terms of an animal fable. For Pierce, Cervantes' use of
the animal fable model gives the "Coloquio" more credibility as a
story by placing it in the fantasy world of a genre in which animals talk as a
matter of course. Using the animal fable as a source "allows Cervantes to
enter upon his dialogue with more imaginative freedom and to introduce the
moralistic comment at an earlier stage, because of the very independence of his
two creatures from the world they discuss and criticize" (106). (4) Pierce
does not go very far beyond this, however, in connecting the
"Coloquio" to the Aesopic tradition.
Several commentators have devoted attention to the second mention of Aesop in
the intertwined novellas. The mention comes as Berganza is relating to Cipión
his service to a rich merchant and his family. One day the merchant unties
Berganza, in return for the joy exhibited by the dog on his master's return.
Once untied, Berganza follows the example of an Aesopic fable in showing his
thanks in a way appropriate to his canine condition: "Como me vi suelto
corrà a él, rodeele todo, sin osar llegarle con las manos, acordándome de la
fábula de Isopo, cuando aquel asno, tan asno que quiso hacer a su señor las
mismas caricias que le hacÃa una perrilla regalada suya, que le granjearon ser
molido a palos. Parecióme que en esta fábula se nos dio a entender que las
gracias y donaires de algunos no están bien en otros; apode el truhán, juegue
de manos y voltee el histrión, rebuzne el pÃcaro,...
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-3049436_ITM
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Criteria and Search Methods
My criteria for selecting which web pages to include in my website include:
1) The date of publication. Earlier postings will not include the latest figures and research. While this is a consideration, it is not necessarily a problem as some comments on Cervantes will hold true regardless of whether it was made in the last ten years or not.
2) The purpose of the webpage is also an important consideration ie whether or not it matches my intention to explore, persuade or define. It was also important to understand whether the webpage was intended for students or for the general public and for the most part I have included such pages that were intended for study as opposed to general sites and sites that gave biographies of Cervantes, as this was not appropriate for my website. One of the difficulties encountered in this respect, was that many otherwise appropriate sites on Cervantes, which delved into topics in some depth, were written in Spanish, thus making them inappropriate for this webpage. Still more websites required the user to make a purchase in order to acquire full texts on the subjects.
3) I have included pages that list their sources, as this gives some idea as to the accuracy of the webpage, marking the difference between comment or opinion and researched hypotheses.
4) I discounted message boards and forums, such as http://mobydicks.com/lecture/Cervanteshall/wwwboard.html as the qualifications of the authors were unclear, there was a lack of quoted sources and posts were often off topic.
Each page was assessed with regard to the implied/intended audience. Although many search techniques were used, looking through directories and following indirect links, the pages selected were found using direct links from search engines Alta Vista, Yahoo and Google, within the first 7 pages of search results.
Although the purpose of each page was seldom explicit, I found it possible to infer a purpose from the way in which the text was presented, for example whether the text was dense and accompanied by annotations and notes, which suggests serious research and criticism, as opposed to sites that sported many bright colours and pictures, which suggest (but does not mean entirely) a site intended for information and perhaps topics explored in less depth. The web address also gave clues as to the nature of the page, for example an address featuring the ‘.edu’ domain immediately suggests a school, college, university of other educational facility. Similarly, ‘.org’ implies a not-for-profit organisation or charity that may be presenting information for its own sake, and ‘.com’ implies (but again does not mean) a there may be a commercial aspect to the site and that the user may be asked to part with funds at some point whilst viewing the website.