Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de

CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, MIGUEL de. - Spanish writer, b. in 1547 (perhaps Sept. 29) at Alcalá de Henares, d. at Madrid on Apr. 23, 1616. It is probable that the future author of the Quijote studied at Seville with the Jesuits (1564-65) and at Salamanca between 1582 and 1584, then at Madrid in the school of Juan López de Hoyos. In Italy, where he arrived in the retinue of Card. Acquaviva, he was fascinated by the «libre vida» and in particular Rome «señora del mundo» imposed itself on his admiration and, in Catholic Rome, «la autoridad del colegio de los cardinales, la majestad del sumo pontifice, el concurso y variedad de gentes y naciones»: and the mirage of Rome would still shine in his last romantic dream, the adventures of Persiles and Segismunda. A man of action and of culture, he is found in 1571 as a heroic fighter at the battle of Lepanto, where an arquebus shot carries off his left hand; he is found again, after a stay at Messina, at Corfu, at the siege of Navarino and in the enterprise of Tunis (1573). On garrison duty, the following year, at Naples and Palermo, during the return journey to Spain he is taken prisoner by the Saracens and transported to Algiers, where for fully five years he must learn to «tener paciencia en las adversidades», until friar Juan Gil can complete the sum offered by C.'s family and reach the 500 scudi demanded by the pirates for the ransom (Sept. 1580). But in Spain hardships and bitterness await him: he successively holds modest employments, and his marriage to Catalina de Salazar y Palacios (1584) ends by adding new disappointments to his troubled life. Appointed commissioner for the requisitioning of provisions destined for the «Armada invencible» and for the ships bound for the Indies, he loses his post following the disaster of that fleet: new sad experiences, dark years of toil and misery follow one another, until he is involved together with his family in a trial for homicide. In 1607 he is at Madrid where, although his masterpiece has already been published, he will remain lost in the crowd, an object more of satire than of praise: Lope will in fact come to assert that there is no poet as bad as C. and «tan necio que alabe a don Quijote». On Apr. 23, 1616 his laborious earthly day closes: a few days earlier, «puesto ya el pie en el estribo», he was writing the dedication of his book to the count of Lemos.

Desolate and heroic, C.'s life coincides with the early times of Spain's decadence and appears as a synthesis of that twofold world, picaresque and heroic, between whose extremes national life now oscillated. A poet of scant virtues, as he himself laments («me desvelo-por parecer que tengo de poeta-la gracia que no quiso darme el cielo»), an imitator chiefly of Garcilaso, his lyrical work proves uneven and only rarely illuminated by happy moments (the «Canto de Caliope» in the Galatea, inspired by Gil Polo, some compositions inserted in the novellas, the dignified and noble epistle to Matteo Vázquez, a few sonnets and in particular the one inspired by the obsequies of Philip II, two songs in Herrerian tone to the «Invencible Armada», etc.): his major poem is the Viaje del Purnaro (1614), inspired by the work of the same name by Cesare Caporali, in which the motif of the fantastic journey allows the mordant criticism of contemporary poets, and a breath of emotion is brought only by surfacing autobiographical memories.

As a dramatist, he has left us, besides eight interludes, ten comedies which he seems to have composed in two distinct periods, that is, around 1590 and, with less success, in the decade preceding the publication of the Novelas (1613), for in 1615 he in fact published 8 comedies and 8 interludes, of which it is however impossible to fix a precise chronology: to the first period belong, instead, the Numancia and the Trato de Argel (besides comedies that have been lost), in which he reveals scant interest in dramatic structure and, instead, marked psychological preoccupation and fervent passion. Only later will he attempt to imitate Lope, hoping to achieve by the accumulation of episodes and characters what the latter achieved with dramatic talent and with expert theatrical technique. The subjects are disparate, ranging from those of the «comedia de santos» (El rufidín dichoso) to those «de cautivos» (La gran Sultana), to picaresque motifs (Pedro de Urdemalas), etc.; the best of all: Los baños de Argel, an intensely pathetic drama, and the Pedro de Urdemalas, rich in poetry and in the most varied situations; but from all of them it is evident that C. finely intuited the essence of the future national comedy, both because of the knowledge he displays there of the society from which that comedy expresses itself, and because of his having foreshadowed forms and conceptions of Lope and Calderón. In the interludes (he left eight of them), C. is unsurpassable, nor will he be equaled even by Quiñones de Benavente or by Ramón de la Cruz: in them the realism of the pasos of the great Lope de Rueda (as he himself proclaims), which he had known in his early youth at Valladolid and at Madrid, is treated in themes drawn from every source, from the Italian Renaissance, from the life of the hampa, from the most suggestive folklore, realizing pictures of milieu that are almost etchings of extraordinary precision and penetrating psychology, in which stand out not popular types, but characters and indeed decided individualities, underscored by witty satirical touches.

Galatea, the first work published by C. (1584), is a pastoral novel of scant interest in its action, but of great value as a document of the author's aesthetics: although lacking that background and those elements typical that embellish the creations of Montemayor and of Gil Polo, oriented on the principles of Neoplatonic philosophy of the dialogues of Leone Ebreo, mixed of prose and verse (better that of the latter), it presents at times clear and sparkling pages: and the pastoral element, however (for Galatea C. will always nurture a particular tenderness), will penetrate, and not scantily, even into the major novel itself in episodes such as that of Marcella and Grisostomo. The twelve Exemplary Novellas (published in 1613), whose title already betrays the will to pay homage to the Council of Trent (the prologue in fact says « no hay ninguna de quien ne se pueda sacar algún ejemplo provechoso », although only in some and occasionally does the didactic-moral intent show through), although the author's naturalistic morality always surfaces there, welcome various influences and tendencies, intensely realistic the one, idealistic the other, of origin sometimes typically Spanish, sometimes instead inspired by the Italian Renaissance. Not profound but narrated with great art, sober and elegant, agile and harmonious, they will become the model of the short narrative of the 18th century; and through the adventures of the Gitanilla, the impassioned and sentimental coloring of the Celoso extremeño, or the humor of the Coloquio de los perros and of the Licenciado Vidriera, which seems to sum up the essence of the author's moral experience, or the pictures of the life of the hampa as it appears in Rinconete y Cortadillo, they offer scenes of intense plastic force and of high beauty.

In 1605 Don Quixote was published, subsequently reprinted several times and immediately translated into English in 1612, into French two years later, and into Italian in 1622; a novel that, springing from original motives of literary criticism ("poner en aborrecimiento de los hombres las fingidas y disparadas historias de los libros de caballerías"), acquired, in its progressive unfolding, the significance of a symbol. A synthesis of the most varied models of contemporary narrative literature (pastoral romance, Italian novella, chivalric romance), its various motifs intertwine around the adventures of the knight and his squire and give the work a sense of prodigious life, one that has remained unparalleled in the history of any literature. Don Quixote, whose first sally is entirely a satire against chivalric romances, is presented in all his humanity from the very first words: driven to madness by the excessive reading of those books, he remains always a man, the one who on a hot July day sets out across the countryside of Montiel while beside him Sancho Panza measures his pace, a soul of the common people, but one also of a most human and yet primitive psychology, a jumble of selfishness and goodness, of admiration for his master, of skepticism and of faith. Around the two wanderers the landscape takes shape, seen with faithful eyes, and a manifold world of characters springs forth. Not immobile symbols, the one of the ideal, the other of practical good sense, Don Quixote and Sancho in their long fraternal intimacy will draw spiritually closer to one another, so that the one, as life declines, will regain reason and good sense and the other will raise himself little by little toward a higher world. Created at the crossing of two centuries, by an artist who saw the glory of Lepanto submerged in the tragedy of the Armada and in the shame of the English landing at Cadiz, the work is a sorrowful parody of that heroism and that sense of justice which is collapsing before the base and petty fraud of picaresque daily life, in which ideal and reality cannot be harmonized. The two heroes are both symbols of the spirit of the age, the one embodying the false road that leads to the delirium of illusion, the other that which leads to materialism, both ruinous for the Spanish people. But the necessity of pointing to a light of salvation in so much desolation is the motive for the wondrous doubling of Don Quixote's personality, in which the incurable madness is tempered by a prudent chivalric spirit, just as Sancho's ignorant selfishness is illuminated by genuine good sense. Having entered the field in defense of his humanitarian ideal, the author himself defines the qualities of the true knight: "casto en los pensamientos, honesto en las palabras, liberal en las obras, valiente en los hechos, sufrido en los trabajos, caritativo en los menesterosos, y finalmente mantenedor de la verdad, aunque le cueste la vida el defenderla". Animated by the same heroic spirit as a St. Ignatius or a St. Teresa (the acute comparison is that of L. Pfandl), C. endures persecutions and mockery for his ideal, incapable of surrendering to continual disappointments except at the hour of death, in which he must finally recognize the tragic vanity of his action.

All the literary motifs of the 16th century, narrative and critical, are contained in the work, which nevertheless has, at the same time, points of contact with the literature of the 17th century, principally through that sense of contrast from which the whole work springs, and which recomposes in a humorous solution the great discord between the ideal plane and the human one.

The publication (1614) of an apocryphal continuation due to the "licenciado Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda" preceded by only one year that of the second part of the novel, perhaps superior to the first since a most human emotion, almost a surpassing of the characters themselves, slowly intensifies up to the death of the hero.

But the drama of C., which identifies itself with his hero, as he himself openly affirms ("para mi solo nació don Quijote y yo para él: él supo obrar y yo escribir: solos los dos somos para en uno"), finds a worthy finale in the work Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda (1617), an extreme synthesis in which all the author's aspirations, dreams and romantic exploits of his youth, fantasy and sentiment, triumph in magnificent adventures, which unfold against an ever-changing background, from the mysterious countries of the north to the sun-drenched lands of Spain and Italy, and are narrated in the richest and most colorful, most elegant and limpid style. It seems that in this work, of which the most varied and contrasting judgments have been formulated, C. truly wished to dream (as has been said with a happy expression) his last romantic dream.

Jole Scudieri Ruggieri