Francisco de Quevedo

"Quevedo" redirects here. For other uses, see Quevedo (disambiguation).

Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, currently attributed to Juan van der Hamen and, erroneously in the past, to Diego Velázquez. 17th century. (Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid).
Born	(1580-09-14)14 September 1580 Madrid, Spain
Died	8 September 1645(1645-09-08) (aged 64) Villanueva de los Infantes, Ciudad Real, Spain
Occupations	Writer, playwright, poet
Relatives	Pedro Gómez de Quevedo and María Gómez de Santibáñez (parents)
Writing career
Language	Castilian
Period	Golden Age
Movement	Conceptismo
Signature

Francisco Gómez de Quevedo Villegas y Santibáñez Cevallos (Madrid, September 14, 1580 – Villanueva de los Infantes, Ciudad Real, September 8, 1645) was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer of the Golden Age.

He was a knight of the Order of Santiago from 1618 and lord of Torre de Juan Abad from 1620. Together with Luis de Góngora, with whom he maintained an enmity throughout his life, he is recognized as one of the most notable poets of Spanish literature. In addition to his poetry, he was a prolific writer of narrative and theater, as well as of philosophical and humanistic texts.

Biography

Quevedo was born in Madrid into a family of hidalgos from the village of Vejorís (Santiurde de Toranzo), in the mountains of Cantabria. He was baptized in the parish of San Ginés on September 26, 1580. He was born lame, with both legs twisted and severe myopia; perhaps for this reason he spent a lonely and sad childhood (the origin of the "affective tear" that the critic Dámaso Alonso spoke of in his regard) in the Villa y Corte, surrounded by nobles and potentates, since his parents (and some other relatives) held high offices in the Palace, enduring the taunts of other children and devoting himself compulsively to reading. His mother, María de Santibáñez, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and his father, Pedro Gómez de Quevedo, was secretary to Maria of Austria, sister of King Philip II, and later to Queen Anna of Austria, fourth wife of King Philip II. But Quevedo very soon had to overcome a greater bitterness when he was left fatherless at the age of six (1586), so that a distant relative, Agustín de Villanueva, of the Council of Aragon, was appointed as his guardian; in 1591, moreover, when he was eleven, his brother Pedro died.

Of precocious intelligence, he was taken to what from 1609 would be renamed, on account of its enlargement, the Imperial College and in 1625 the Reales Estudios de San Isidro, as a seminary of nobles, but which was then called the College of San Pedro y San Pablo, and there, between 1596 and 1600, he studied classical languages, French, Italian, philosophy, physics and mathematics with the Jesuits, as well as theology at the University of Alcalá, without ever being ordained. On October 4, 1599, he did not appear to collect his bachelor's degree, perhaps because he traveled to Seville and Osuna in the company of Don Pedro Téllez Girón, the future Duke of Osuna; he did not do so until June 1, 1600.

Between 1601 and 1605 he studied at the University of Valladolid. It is commonly held that during the stay of the Court in Valladolid the first poems of Quevedo circulated, imitating or parodying those of Luis de Góngora, whether under a pseudonym (Miguel de Musa) or not, and the Cordoban poet quickly detected the young man who was undermining his reputation and gaining fame at his expense, so that he decided to attack him with a series of poems; Quevedo, or someone passing himself off as him, answered, and that was the beginning of an enmity that did not end until the death of the Cordoban swan, who left in these verses a record of the debt that Quevedo had contracted with him.

Francisco de Quevedo portrayed after his admission into the Order of Santiago in 1618 by Francisco Pacheco in his Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos, ilustres y memorables varones.

A Muse that blows and does not inspire / and knows that the treacherous thing / is to put one's fingers rather / into my purse than on her lyre, / is not Apollo's, for it is a lie.

It does seem that in 1603, the Cordoban swan having spread his satires on the polluted and foul-smelling branches of the Esgueva River that made Valladolid stink, Quevedo circulated a satire in which he disqualified them for their bad taste, coarseness and contemptible vocabulary.

Since you compose couplets, / see that the poets say / that, being meant for privies [id est, latrines], / you make them very public. / They say you have colic, / since you purge through the mouth. / They say you are satirical. / You pester us all [id est, with a humorless joke]: / you have uncovered the ca-ca / with the ca-cas that you sing...

Nevertheless, Antonio Carreira and Amelia de Paz doubt that this enmity lasted very long and maintain that such controversies were customary exercises in Baroque poetry; Góngora never names Quevedo and the attributions of the satires to one or the other are quite doubtful; at Góngora's death, Quevedo was an almost unpublished writer (although rather more than many manuscript copies circulated), and therefore, according to Professor Antonio Carreira, such an enmity could never have extended very far in time beyond the disagreement between the conceptista style embraced by Quevedo and the culterano style propagated by Góngora, the true source of most of these satires and of their extension over time, whose most representative piece, Aguja de navegar cultos. Con la receta para hacer "Soledades" en un día (1625), barely dwells on personal attacks.

In 1605 Pedro Espinosa's poetic anthology Flores de poetas ilustres was published in Valladolid, among which eighteen compositions by Quevedo appear; some also appear as by an anonymous poet in the Segunda parte del Romancero general y Flor de diversa poesía (Valladolid, 1605), compiled by Miguel de Madrigal, a student at the university; with this he was already recognized as a first-rank poet.

During his student life, he wrote in Castilian and anonymously some burlesque, shameless and tasteless little works, which he would later disown, but which at the time made him very popular through manuscript copies that ended up overwhelming and defaming their author, who found himself obliged to denounce them to the Inquisition, not so much to prevent them from spreading, but also to prevent the printers who had begun to disseminate them from getting rich at his expense; it was probably these short writings that, in the course of time, transformed their author into a proverbial little figure of obscene or tasteless jokes; something undoubtedly enhanced by his intellectual's love of bons mots to épater le courtisan. The wittiest and least lewd of these little works is undoubtedly the Epístolas del caballero de la Tenaza, donde se hallan muchos saludables consejos para guardar la mosca y gastar la prosa (c. 1606), in which a stingy hidalgo offers all kinds of excuses in writing so as not to give money or gifts to his lover.

While I was thinking about how I would answer the things that Your Grace asks of me, there came to my memory those ineffable words that are said to the poor with pity and to women with reason: "There is nothing to give." My lady, I well understood that there were mendicant orders, but not mendicant girls without order. Whoever wishes to make me chaste, let him ask me for something. And if the devil is as self-interested as your flesh, let Your Grace not doubt that I shall try to save myself, out of sheer miserliness. Is it possible that women will not be persuaded to believe that, except by giving and not asking, they cannot be well liked? See what face a poor man makes at them when he hears: "Give me, bring me, buy me, send, show." Leave aside such strong words, which in the duel of the purse affront even the spirit. Let asking stay still, and let love letters fly high: for I offer to write more than El Tostado. May Our Lord keep Your Grace, though I fear you are so much an enemy of those who keep things that not even God will wish to keep you.

He also approached prose by writing, as a courtly game in which the most important thing was to display wit, the first manuscript version of a picaresque novel, La vida del Buscón, some of whose passages reach expressionism and have passed into the history of black humor; in this work, written from the point of view of an aristocrat, a poor déclassé man is degraded, who ends his career of attempts to rise in social condition by killing a person and having to emigrate to America to avoid persecution. Likewise around that time he maintained a very erudite exchange of letters in Latin with the humanist Justus Lipsius on philological questions and deploring the wars that were shaking Europe, as can be seen in the Epistolario gathered by Luis Astrana Marín. In 1601 his mother, María Santibáñez, died. Around 1604 he tried to explore new metrical paths by creating a book of silvas, which he did not finish, in imitation of those of Publius Papinius Statius, freely combining lines of seven and eleven syllables. In 1605 his sister María died.

Obras de don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, 1699

Once the Court had returned to Madrid, Quevedo arrived there in 1606 and lived there until 1611, devoted to letters; he wrote four of his Sueños, beginning with the "Sueño del Juicio final", which would not be printed until 1627, and various short satires in prose; works of biblical erudition such as his commentary Lágrimas de Jeremías castellanas; a defense of humanistic studies in Spain, the España defendida, and a political work, the Discurso de las privanzas, as well as amorous and satirical lyric poetry. In 1610, the year in which the Duke of Osuna was appointed Viceroy of Sicily, the Dominican Antolín Montojo denied Quevedo authorization to print the Sueño del Juicio final. In 1611 he had to move to Toledo because of the lawsuit he was pursuing against Torre de Juan Abad, and there he met Father Juan de Mariana. He won the friendship of Félix Lope de Vega (there are numerous praises of Quevedo in the Phoenix's books of Rimas, and Quevedo approved the Rimas humanas y divinas of Tomé de Burguillos, the Phoenix's heteronym), as well as of Miguel de Cervantes (he is praised in the Viaje del Parnaso of the native of Alcalá, and Quevedo reciprocates in the Perinola), with whom he belonged to the Confraternity of Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament; on the other hand, he mercilessly attacked the playwrights Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, whose physical defects amused him (he was red-haired and hunchbacked), being himself deformed, as well as Juan Pérez de Montalbán, son of a bookseller with whom Quevedo had certain disputes. Against the latter he wrote La Perinola, a cruel satire on his miscellaneous book Para todos. However, the most attacked was undoubtedly Luis de Góngora, to whom he addressed a series of terrible satires accusing him of being an unworthy priest, a homosexual, a filthy and obscure writer, given to cards and indecent. Quevedo shamelessly did violence to the relationship, even going after his appearance (as in his satire A una nariz, in which he lashes out at Góngora's nasal appendage, since at the time it was believed that the most pronounced physical feature of the Jews was having big noses). In his defense, it must be said that Góngora answered him with almost the same violence, branding him lame, a drunkard ("Francisco de Quebebo"), misshapen and a poor Hellenist:

Spanish Anacreon, there is no one who meets you / who does not tell you (with great courtesy) / that, since your feet are of elegy, / your sweetnesses are of grape syrup.

Elegiac feet (or "lye" feet, de lejía, for being caustic) are unequal in Latin poetry, but Góngora also notes the pendular unevenness of his inspiration between satirical bitterness and amorous sweetness: his disciple, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, 2nd Count of Villamediana, himself also a fearsome satirist, pointed out around 1620 the great distance that separated Quevedo's coarse burlesque poetry from his sublime love poetry: "Quevedo: a most uneven beast: blows in the clouds and thumps in the cellars". At that time he formed a great friendship with the grandee Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of Osuna, whom he would accompany as secretary to Italy in 1613, carrying out various commissions for him that took him to Nice and Genoa, though apparently not to Venice (J. O. Crosby and Carlos Seco have shown that he did not intervene directly in the Conspiracy of Venice), and finally back to Madrid, where he joined the circle of the Duke of Lerma, always with the purpose of obtaining for his friend the 3rd Duke of Osuna the appointment as Viceroy of Naples; with that aim he bribed various figures; he indeed obtained the approval of the Duke of Uceda and of the confessor of the pious King Philip III, the Dominican Luis de Aliaga, and at last secured that office for him on April 16, 1616. He embarked at Cartagena and arrived in Naples on September 12.

Quevedo and the Skeletons of Juan de la Encina and King Perico, Leonaert Bramer, 1659, ink and gray wash drawing, Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung.

Once in Italy, Osuna entrusted him with directing and organizing the Treasury of the Viceroyalty. He was very well received by the Academia de los Ociosos, founded four years earlier by the then Viceroy of the city, the Count of Lemos, and whose patronage and protection, albeit with less prestige, the Duke of Osuna maintained by attending, accompanied by a numerous cohort of aristocrats and men of letters, its meetings in the cloister of San Domenico. Quevedo joined it as one more member, forming a special friendship with the Neo-Latin poet Giulio Cesare Stella (1564–1624) and also with Cardinal Doria, Filippo Paruta, Martín Lafarina, Ercole Branchiforte and Mariano Valguarnera, who, at Don Francisco's request, translated the Greek poet Anacreon into Italian. Likewise, in Naples, according to his biographer Pablo Antonio de Tarsia:

He was so attended by men of letters that no one seemed to deserve the name of learned who did not qualify himself with the friendship and approval of Don Francisco, on whom all fixed their eyes, admiring his prodigious wit.

Quevedo tried, with mixed success, to attract other authors to the Academy, such as Gian Andrea De Cunzi, Carlos de Eybersbach, Vicente Mariner, Justus Lipsius and Michaël Kelker, among others, maintaining correspondence with them, and during his stay in Naples he also carried out other missions, some related to espionage against the Republic of Venice, though not directly as was believed until recently. In reward for these services, and on the recommendation of the Duke of Osuna, Viceroy of Naples and Sicily, Quevedo obtained the habit of Santiago in 1618, which his friend Stella celebrated in his poem of the same year Ad Don Franciscum Quevedum / comitis Julii Caesaris Stellae ode.

But in that same year the grandee Osuna fell; in June Quevedo defended him before the Council of State against the charge of complicity in the Conspiracy of Venice, but he too was dragged down as one of his trusted men and was banished (1619–1621, except for a brief imprisonment in Uclés) to Torre de Juan Abad (Ciudad Real), whose lordship his mother had bought for him with all her savings before dying. The inhabitants of the place, however, did not recognize that purchase and Quevedo would litigate endlessly with the council, although the lawsuit would only be resolved in his favor after his death, in the person of his heir and nephew Pedro Alderete. Having arrived there on the back of his pony "Scoto", so named for how subtle it was, as he relates in a romance, and now isolated from the stormy courtly intrigues, alone with his conscience, Quevedo would write some of his best poems, such as the sonnet "Retirado a la paz de estos desiertos..." or "Son las torres de Joray...", and he would find consolation for his courtly ambitions and his affective tear in the Stoic doctrine of Seneca, whose works he studied and commented on, becoming one of the principal exponents of Spanish Neostoicism. In that sense his reading, translation and assimilation of the Stoic Manual of Epictetus also had an effect, which came to console his vehement spirit:

"It is not the things themselves / that disturb and frighten man, / but the deceptive opinions / that man holds of those same things; / as is seen in death, / which, if regarded with the light of truth, / is not troublesome in itself […] / In death what is harsh, / when we foolishly fear to suffer it, / are the opinions we hold of it; / and, this being a clear truth in death / (which is the most formidable and frightful thing) / you must judge the same of anything."

He completed the number of his Sueños and wrote political treatises such as Política de Dios, moral ones such as Virtud militante, and two extensive satires: Discurso de todos los diablos and La hora de todos. Around that time Venganza de la lengua española contra el autor de Cuento de cuentos (Huesca, 1626) was published by a certain Juan Alonso Laureles, probably a pseudonym, which attacks the writer; neither he nor his circle would respond, however. He did take a very active part in the controversy over the patronage of Spain with two works: Memorial por el patronato de Santiago and Su espada por Santiago, 1628. The question had arisen when a reform of the Roman Breviary in the 17th century did not mention the preaching and burial of Saint James in Spain, which provoked an exchange of letters and pressures that lasted thirty-two years until its revocation was achieved; the matter was revived when it was sought to grant the patronage of Spain to Saint Teresa of Jesus, which ended up turning into a veritable battle of intellectuals in favor of one or the other, and Quevedo, always misogynistic, leaned toward the patronage of the warrior saint Saint James, who appeared at the Battle of Clavijo.

Convent of San Marcos in León

In 1622 he had again been briefly banished to the Torre, but the enthronement of Philip IV meant for Quevedo the lifting of his punishment, the return to politics and great hopes before the new favoritism of the Count-Duke of Olivares, whose friendship he managed to win by working as a pamphleteer for him. Quevedo accompanied the young King on journeys to Andalusia (1624) and Aragon (1626), some of whose amusing incidents he recounts in interesting letters. On March 24, 1624, a note from the Board for the Reform of Customs states that a woman named Ledesma "was living in concubinage with Don Francisco de Quevedo and they have children". On September 25 Don Pedro Téllez-Girón died in prison, and Quevedo lamented it in some celebrated sonnets. In 1627 Quevedo wrote, in flattery of the Count-Duke, his comedy Cómo ha de ser el privado. But his confrontation with the Carmelites over the question of the patronage became ever more virulent; at the end of February 1628 he wrote his Memorial por el patronato de Santiago, and it was printed in Madrid with as much success as the Buscón or the Sueños, and he was again banished to the Torre, although in December he was authorized to return once more to the Court; Quevedo tried to ingratiate himself with the Count-Duke by dedicating to him on July 21, 1629, his edition of the poetic Obras of Fray Luis de León. The prologue contains a new attack against the Gongorists sponsored by the Duke of Lerma:

In all languages only those deserved universal acclaim who gave light to the obscure and ease to the difficult; for to obscure what is clear is to erase, not to write, and whoever speaks what others do not understand first confesses that he does not understand what he speaks

The economic reforms of the new favorite soon aroused opposition, and Quevedo composed in his defense, under the name of "Licenciado Todosesabe", El chitón de las taravillas (Huesca, January 1630). Lope de Vega wrote, scandalized, to the Duke of Sessa:

It is the most satirical and venomous thing that has been written since the beginning of the world, and enough to kill the guilty person, who must be very guilty indeed, since he gave such occasion.

In May the libel was anonymously denounced to the Inquisition, apart from as seditious, as "scandalous, dogmatizing, injurious, a mocker of sacred things". The denunciation also includes a judgment on the anonymous author, whom it clearly identifies with Quevedo:

It cannot be disguised, because the style of speaking, the indecency of reasoning, the license of satirizing, the impiety of feeling, and the irreverence in treating sovereign and sacred things, say manifestly that he is the same author of the Infierno enmendado, of the Sueño del juicio, of the Infierno del Marqués de Villena en la redoma, of El alguacil endemoniado and many others.

The work was withdrawn that same year. In 1631 Quevedo himself denounced his works to the Inquisition, since the booksellers had printed without his permission many of his satirical pieces that circulated in manuscript, getting rich at his expense. In this way he sought to frighten and scare them off and to prepare the way for a definitive edition of his works that never appeared. On the other hand, he led a somewhat disorderly private life as an old bachelor: he smoked a great deal, frequented taverns (Góngora accused him of being a consummate drunkard, and in a satirical poem he is called don Francisco de Quebebo), and frequented brothels, even though he lived in concubinage with the said Ledesma. Nevertheless, he was even appointed secretary to the monarch in 1632, which was the summit of his courtly career. It was a post subject to all kinds of pressures: his friend, the Duke of Medinaceli, was pressed by his wife to force him to marry, against his will, Doña Esperanza de Mendoza, lady of Cetina, a widow with children, and the marriage, contracted in 1634, barely lasted three months. He led an active cultural life and became friends with the Hispano-Portuguese soldier and writer Francisco Manuel de Melo, with whom he exchanged an intense correspondence; Melo would reciprocate posthumously by making him a character in his dialogue Hospital de letras (1657). He gave himself over to a feverish creative activity and in 1634 published La cuna y la sepultura and the translation of Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life; from between 1633 and 1635 date works such as De los remedios de cualquier fortuna, the Epicteto, Virtud militante, Las cuatro fantasmas, the second part of Política de Dios, the Visita y anatomía de la cabeza del cardenal Richelieu and the Carta a Luis XIII.

Intrigue against Don Francisco de Quevedo in the gardens of the Palace of Buen Retiro (c. 1876) by Antonio Pérez Rubio. Oil on canvas, Museo del Prado

In 1635 there appeared in Valencia the most important of the numerous libels intended to defame him, El tribunal de la justa venganza, erigido contra los escritos de Francisco de Quevedo, maestro de errores, doctor en desvergüenzas, licenciado en bufonerías, bachiller en suciedades, catedrático de vicios y protodiablo entre los hombres, published under a pseudonym that perhaps conceals one of his numerous enemies, Luis Pacheco de Narváez. In addition, the poet Juan de Jáuregui wrote a Memorial to Philip IV in that same year, in which he also attacks Quevedo, and he also printed his comedy El retraído (Barcelona, Sebastián de Comellas, 1635), in which he attacked La cuna y la sepultura, published a year earlier. In this comedy El retraído (that is, the man who has taken sanctuary because he is sought by the civil justice) the character of the Censor attacks each of the points upheld by Quevedo in his work, trying to show that he is a heretic, the diabolical inspiration of the work and his attack on the royal favorites, whom he considers unworthy, condemning their illicit enrichment; it also seems to him that his Christian piety is false, because it conceals satire; what is more, he manipulates the texts he quotes; Jáuregui even stoops to mentioning his lawsuits with Torre de Juan Abad (which he makes a character in the work) and his participation in the Conspiracy of Venice, and mentions his scant knowledge of Greek; undoubtedly, it does not seem accidental that this comedy was published at the same time as El tribunal de la justa venganza. Quevedo did not resign himself to so much infamy: he called them "doctors without light, who give off smoke with the dead wick of their censures, who bite and do not read". In 1636 he separated from his wife, who would die in 1641, and, deeply disillusioned, he wrote his moral fantasy La hora de todos y la Fortuna con seso.

On December 7, 1639, on account of a memorial that appeared under the King's napkin, Sacra, católica, real Majestad..., in which the policy of the Count-Duke is denounced, he was arrested by the procedure of reserved order at the house of the 7th Duke of Medinaceli, his books were confiscated, and, barely dressed, he was taken to the cold Convent of San Marcos in León, where he remained until the fall of the favorite and his retirement to Loeches in 1643. Quevedo complained that no trial was opened against him nor any statement taken, in the dedication "A Juan Chumacero Carrillo" of his Vida de San Pablo (1644):

No charge was ever brought against me nor was any statement taken, nor, after my release, was anything found juridically written...

Arrests of this kind could be carried out by means of the procedure of absolutism known as the reserved order. Quevedo himself described how harsh his situation was, ill as he was with bone tuberculosis:

"On December 7, the eve of the Conception of Our Lady, at half past ten at night. I was brought in the rigor of winter without a cloak and without a shirt, at sixty-one years of age, to this Royal Convent of San Marcos, where I have been all this time in most rigorous imprisonment, sick with three wounds, which, with the cold and the nearness of a river that I have at the head of my bed, in a land where all year long it is most rigorous winter, have become cancerous, and for lack of a surgeon, not without pity they have seen me cauterize them with my own hands; so poor that out of charity they have clothed me and sustained my life. The horror of my sufferings has frightened everyone."

In 1972 it was shown, through a letter from the Count-Duke of Olivares to King Philip IV found by his biographer J. H. Elliot, that the accusation weighing on Quevedo had been made by his friend the Duke of the Infantado: he accused him of being an informer for the French. He would be released in June 1643 and shortly afterwards, in September 1645, he died. In the monastery of San Marcos Quevedo devoted himself to reading, as he relates in the Carta moral e instructiva, written to his friend Adán de la Parra, describing to him hour by hour his imprisonment and the life he led in it:

From ten to eleven I say some devotions, and from that hour until twelve I read good and bad authors; for there is no book, however contemptible it may be, that does not have something good, just as the most highly regarded has some blemish. Catullus has his errors, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus his arrogances, Cicero some absurdity, Seneca a good deal of confusion; and finally, Homer his blindnesses, and the satirist Juvenal his blunders; while Hegesias does not lack some conceits, Sidonius middling subtleties, Ennodius success in some comparisons, and Aristarchus, insipid as he is, propriety in a good many examples. From one and the other I try to profit: from the bad so as not to follow them, and from the good so as to try to imitate them.

The suspicious Memorial of the napkin was composed of dodecasyllables in rhyming couplets: a learned old verse in a popular stanza, of pounding and sententious rhythm, never used by Quevedo. There are, however, some elements in common with Quevedo's style, although what is most characteristic of it is renounced. The Count-Duke of Olivares is not attacked directly. The author identifies himself as a tax-paying commoner and an anonymous old farmer of Castile, eaten up by taxes, the extravagance of the nobles and corruption in all orders of government, who asks the King to stop listening to toxic flattery and to pay attention to the people:

Yours is the remedy: apply it, my lord. / So may God make you, from Great, the Greatest. / Great you are, Philip, in the manner of a pit; / see this that I say, I support it with reason: / whoever takes more from the pit makes it greater; / look at who orders it, you will see whom it pleases. / For all the rest is mere compliment / of civil folk who live on the wind.

Quevedo was a satirical writer, but he himself was also the object of his own criticism through a severe psychological self-punishment of religious and existential roots. He meditated deeply on time and sought the consolation of Stoic philosophy by reading Zeno of Citium, Epictetus and Seneca; in his Salmos is found the purest expression of this longing for spiritual purity:

A new heart, a new man / my soul has need of, Lord: / strip me of myself, for it could be / that I would pay your mercy what I owe!...

But Quevedo had already come out of confinement in June 1643, ailing and very ill; he had his nephew Alderete very worried about his health; in 1644 he nevertheless published the Primera parte de la vida de Marco Bruto and La caýda para levantarse, el ciego para dar la vista, el montante de la Iglesia en la vida de San Pablo Apóstol. At last he renounced the Court to retire definitively in November of that same year to Torre de Juan Abad. It was in its vicinity (and after writing in his last letter that "there are things that are only a name and a figure") that he died in the convent of the Dominican fathers of Villanueva de los Infantes on September 8, 1645.

Remains of Francisco de Quevedo

It is said that his tomb was desecrated days later by a gentleman who wished to have the golden spurs with which he had been buried, and that this gentleman died shortly afterwards in just punishment for such audacity. In 2009, his remains were identified in the crypt of Santo Tomás in the church of San Andrés Apóstol of the same town.

His works were very poorly collected and edited in 1648 by the humanist José Antonio González de Salas, who had no qualms about retouching the texts: El Parnaso español, monte en dos cumbres, dividido con las nueve Musas castellanas; but it is the most reliable edition; worse is the edition by Quevedo's nephew and the recipient of his inheritance, Pedro Alderete, in 1670: Las tres Musas últimas castellanas; in the 20th century José Manuel Blecua edited them rigorously.

In 1663 the first biography of Francisco de Quevedo was printed, by the Italian Pablo Antonio de Tarsia, a member, like Quevedo, of the Neapolitan Academia de los Ociosos. He took his information, rich in anecdotes, from his nephew Alderete, whom he interviewed personally in Torre de Juan Abad; later came those of Aureliano Fernández Guerra in the 19th century, in which he is depicted as a statesman, and that of Jauralde Pou (1998) in the 20th century.

Analysis of his work

Title page of the Epicteto y Phocílides en español con consonantes by Francisco de Quevedo; it may have inspired El gran teatro del mundo, an auto sacramental by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

The most original aspect of Quevedo's literary work lies in its style, linked to Baroque Conceptismo and therefore very fond of concision, of ellipsis and of the courtly play of wit with words through the abuse of amphibology. A lover of rhetoric, he sometimes essayed an oratorical style full of symmetries, antitheses and isocola, which he displayed more than ever in his Vida de Marco Bruto. With a very abundant vocabulary, he also created many neologisms by derivation, compounding and stereotypy, and, as Rafael Lapesa noted in his Historia de la lengua española (1942), he made the mechanism of specifying apposition in Castilian notably more flexible ("clérigo cerbatana, zapatos galeones..."), a mechanism that later Baroque writers imitated from him. In his satire he sometimes comes close to the aesthetics of expressionism by degrading people through reification or objectification, and animalization. It has also been pointed out, as a characteristic feature of his verse, the stichomythia, that is, the tendency to transform each line into a maxim of complete meaning, which makes his poems very dense in meaning, as was a priority in his poetics, rooted in the principles of what was later called Baroque conceptismo.

Most of Quevedo's poetic production is satirical, but, as the abbé José Marchena already noted, his satires are poorly aimed and, although he was aware of the true causes of the general decline, it is for him more a mere exercise in style than anything else. It is directed against the lower classes more than against the nobility, in which he did not have the daring of, for example, the other great satirist of his time, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, 2nd Count of Villamediana. He also cultivated a refined courtly lyric, producing a songbook that is Petrarchist in themes, style and topoi, practically perfect in technique and substance, around the figure of Lisi, who should not be identified, as some have wished, with any specific lady, but with a quintessential archetype of woman, whom he also christened with other names. His metaphysical sonnets and his psalms stand out above all, in which his most intimate existential desolation and his anguish at the passing of time are set forth. The vision given by his philosophy is profoundly pessimistic and has pre-existentialist features. The preferred channel for the abundant satirical vein he displayed is above all the romance, but also the letrilla ("Poderoso caballero es Don Dinero"), vehicle of a social criticism from which the deepest causes of the decline of Spain are not hidden, and the sonnet. He abhorred the aesthetics of Culteranismo, whose principal exponent, Luis de Góngora, was violently attacked by Quevedo in personal satires, although in time he came to tolerate an aesthetic that had become general and even cultivated it himself in a merely token way, as Borges said, to indicate "that he too knew how to play that game". However, against the pedantry and obscurity he imputed to it, he also set out to edit the works of the Renaissance poets Francisco de la Torre and Fray Luis de León.

Quevedo's love poetry, considered the most important of the 17th century, is the author's most paradoxical production: a misanthrope and misogynist, he was nevertheless the great singer of love and of woman. He wrote numerous love poems (more than two hundred are preserved), dedicated to various women's names: Flora, Lisi, Jacinta, Filis, Aminta, Dora. He regarded love as an unattainable ideal, a struggle of opposites, a pained and painful paradox, in which pleasure is ruled out. His masterpiece in this genre is undoubtedly his "Amor constante más allá de la muerte".

As scholars of antisemitism in Spain have pointed out, Quevedo was a fierce anti-Jew and his Judeophobia was reflected "in all kinds of writings, including his satirical poems", but it was "in the years of his struggle against Olivares that he wrote his two most important antisemitic texts": Execración contra los judíos and La Isla de los Monopantos (although this last satirical tale was not printed until 1650, within the book La Fortuna con seso y la hora de todos).

His work shows his obsession with defending the hegemony of the Hispanic Monarchy in the world, taking part in "... the tradition of the laus Hispaniae, established by Saint Isidore and used by Quevedo himself to try to recover the values that, he thought, had made the nation powerful... in his España defendida, he praised the greatness of his most prestigious compatriots, highlighting Spanish superiority in the field of letters, visible in authors such as Fray Luis de León, Jorge Manrique or Garcilaso de la Vega, but also in the art of war". Javier Martínez-Pinna and Diego Peña.

Works

Engraved title page of El Parnaso español, published in Madrid by Diego Díaz de la Carrera, 1648, engraving by Juan de Noort after an idea by the compiler, Juan Antonio González de Salas. Double portrait of the writer, crowned by the Muses and in a medallion held by a satyr, symbol of his double inspiration, sacred and profane.

Literary work

Poetry

Quevedo's poetic work, which consists of some 875 poems, offers examples of almost all the subgenres of his time: satirical-burlesque, amorous, moral and immoral poetry, a parody of heroic poetry (the Poema de las necedades y locuras de Orlando, unfinished), occasional, descriptive, religious poems (among which his impressive Salmos stand out) and funerary ones. But it also includes metaphysical and philosophical poems of a Neostoic character. Approximately 40% of his texts are satirical; if one adds to this the fact that many of them circulated publicly during the author's lifetime through manuscript copies, it explains the fame as a severe and biting critic of his time by which Quevedo is, in part, known.

The first printing of his poems took place in 1605, in the anthology known as Primera parte de las flores de poetas ilustres de España; it includes seventeen poems. But the rest was published posthumously in two works: El Parnaso español (1648) and Las Tres Musas Últimas Castellanas (1670). Two manuscripts that collected his works are also preserved: the so-called Cancionero antequerano and the Cancionero de 1628.

Quevedo twice tried to publish his poetic works. The first, in 1613, was the consequence of a great spiritual crisis. He was working on the second when death overtook him.

In 1613 he finished, but did not publish, his Heráclito cristiano, which its author revised under the title Lágrimas de un penitente. It only appeared in the printed edition of 1670, twenty-five years after his death; it includes the famous sonnet "Miré los muros de la Patria mía", corrected in the posthumous edition of his works.

The second attempt left the poems in the hands of his friend José Antonio González de Salas to make a posthumous edition, whose first part came out in Madrid in 1648 with the title El Parnaso español, monte en dos cumbres dividido, con las nueve Musas. He stated in it that he had respected the arrangement that Quevedo had left at his death. It was a thematic classification in nine sections or "Muses". Clio contained the encomiastic poems and those dedicated to past or present persons, or to cities; for example "Buscas en Roma a Roma, ¡oh peregrino!", which portrays the decline and ruin of the capital of the Roman Empire. Polyhymnia contains moral poems, some among the author's best, such as the sonnet "¡Ah de la vida...! ¿Nadie me responde?" or the indispensable Epístola satírica y censoria al Conde Duque de Olivares sobre las costumbres de los castellanos:

I will not keep silent, however much with your finger, / now touching your mouth, now your forehead, / you may warn me to be silent or threaten fear. / Must there not be one valiant spirit? / Must one always feel what is said? / Must one never say what one feels? / Today, without fear that its freedom will scandalize, / wit can speak, assured / that no greater power will frighten it [...] / Most excellent lord, my weeping / no longer admits margins or banks: / a flood shall be that of my song. / Now I see my cheeks submerged, / my sight poured out through two urns, / upon the altars of the two Castiles...

Poem ¿Ves, con el oro? (Leiden)

Individual and collective corruption, luxury, vanity, the superficiality of women's fashions, culteranismo and in general the decline of Spain in all orders are attacked. Melpomene is devoted to funerary poetry: epicedia of famous figures. The fourth muse, Erato, is divided into two parts, both devoted to love poetry. Starting from the Petrarchan songbook, Quevedo joins love and death, the themes of the two parts of the Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarca, into one. The second part of this section is titled "Canta sola a Lisi", the poet's supposed lover, who is in reality an archetype of woman, and it contains what is perhaps its author's best sonnet: "Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera / sombra que me llevare el blanco día..." (Amor constante más allá de la muerte). The fifth and sixth Muses—Terpsichore and Thalia—are devoted to satirical and burlesque poems, dances and jests.

González de Salas died in 1651 without publishing the second part, so Quevedo's nephew and heir, Pedro Aldrete or Alderete, son of his sister Margarita, published Las tres Musas últimas castellanas. Segunda cumbre del Parnaso español... (1670). He was a somewhat careless editor, because he repeated some poems that had already appeared in the first part and introduced a certain disorder, but he followed the plan of the Muses: Euterpe, the seventh, prolongs the cycle of love poems concerning Lisi. The eighth, Calliope, heads satirical letrillas and moral silvas, a meter that he had introduced even before Góngora himself. They represent typically Baroque values through their subject matter on the passing of time and death as the end. Notable are the letrillas "Poderoso caballero es don Dinero", "Solamente un dar me agrada, / que es el dar en no dar nada" and "Es amarga la verdad":

Since truth is bitter, / I want to spit it out of my mouth; / and if its gall touches the soul, / to hide it is folly. / Let it be known, then: liberty / has begotten in my laziness / poverty....

It is doubtful whether Quevedo intended to make an independent collection of them. Urania, the ninth Muse, is devoted to religious poetry, closing this volume. Notable are the "Salmos", in which new poetic summits of the author appear:

Well do I see you run, swift time, / like a careened ship across the wide sea / at full flight, like an arrow or a bird / that passes leaving no trace or path....

Prose

Satirical-moral works

First edition of the Sueños y discursos, Barcelona, Esteban Liberós, at the expense of Juan Sapera, 1627.

• Sueños y discursos, composed between 1606 and 1623, circulated abundantly in manuscript but were not printed until 1627. They are five short narratives of Lucianesque inspiration in which various customs, trades and popular figures of his time are reviewed. They are, in this order, El Sueño del Juicio Final (called, from the publication of Juguetes de la niñez, the expurgated version of 1631, El sueño de las calaveras), El alguacil endemoniado (renamed El alguacil alguacilado), El Sueño del Infierno (that is, Las zahúrdas de Plutón in its expurgated version), El mundo por de dentro (which always kept its name) and El Sueño de la Muerte (known as La visita de los chistes).
• Of the lineage of the Sueños are two so-called "moral fantasies", the Discurso de todos los diablos and La hora de todos. Both are also Lucianesque satires with a characteristic serio-comic tone, although in their craftsmanship and creativity they surpass the Sueños:
  • Discurso de todos los diablos o infierno emendado (1628), published in some versions as El peor escondrijo de la muerte and, from 1631, in the expurgated version in which the five Sueños also appear with the changed titles listed above, with the title El entremetido y la dueña y el soplón. It is a new breviary of misanthropic disillusionment:

To be rich, you must be a thief. To be brave, you must be a traitor, a drunkard and a blasphemer. To be married, you must be a cuckold. If you are poor, no one will know you; if you are rich, you will know no one. If a man lives little, they say he came to nothing; if he lives long, they say he has lost his senses. If he goes to confession every day, they say he is a hypocrite; if he does not confess, he is a heretic; if he is cheerful, they say he is a buffoon; if sad, that he is tiresome. If he is courteous, they call him a flatterer; if discourteous, shameless.

• • La hora de todos y la Fortuna con seso, a variation on the theme of the world upside down or adynaton in which the goddess Fortuna recovers her judgment and gives each person what he really deserves, causing such great upheaval and confusion that the father of the gods must return everything to its primitive disorder, which was in reality an order.

Plaque dedicated to El Buscón in Segovia.

• The picaresque novel Historia de la vida del Buscón llamado don Pablos; ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños appeared in print in Zaragoza in 1626, but there are three more versions of the work with great textual divergences. The problem is complex, since everything seems to indicate that Quevedo retouched his work several times. The oldest version is manuscript 303 bis (olim Artigas 101) of the Menéndez Pelayo Library, on account of the collation of the variants and the way in which some witnesses group together against others. The 1626 printing was accepted, if not controlled, by Quevedo, as the author himself declares in his memorial Su espada por Santiago (1628), and the sincerity of his words is confirmed by other data, so that in reality it cannot be maintained that it was done without the author's permission. But this version was not the last, since Don Francisco returned to it to retouch some narrative details, amplify the satirical portrait of several secondary characters and soften the expressions judged irreverent or blasphemous by the authors of two anti-Quevedo libels, the Memorial sent to the Inquisition against Quevedo's writings (1629) and El Tribunal de la Justa Venganza (1635). The other manuscripts bear witness to these retouchings. The Buscón is a divertimento in which the author takes pleasure in ridiculing the vain efforts at social ascent of a poor devil belonging to the lower classes; to this end he courtly displays his wit by means of a brilliant conceptista style that degrades everything it touches by objectifying or animalizing it, using a pre-expressionist aesthetic that comes close to Goya, Solana and Valle-Inclán and not shrinking from the most repugnant jokes. Characterization barely exists: it is only a vehicle for the author's aristocratic display.

Festive works

Luther: subject taken from Quevedo's El sueño del Infierno (1858), oil by Francisco Sans Cabot

• Premática y aranceles, hechas por el fiel de las putas, Consejos para guardar la mosca y gastar la prosa, Premática del tiempo, Capitulaciones matrimoniales and Capitulaciones de la vida de la Corte are satires of the bureaucratic genres customary in chanceries, applied to grotesque subjects.
• Cartas del caballero de la Tenaza (1625), a humorous description of the letters exchanged between an extremely stingy gentleman and his lover, who wants to get money out of him by any means.
• Libro de todas las cosas y otras muchas más. Compuesto por el docto y experimentado en todas materias. El único maestro malsabidillo. Dirigido a la curiosidad de los entremetidos, a la turbamulta de los habladores, y a la sonsaca de las viejecitas.
• Gracias y desgracias del ojo del culo. A jocular little work on the pleasures and ailments relating to that organ.

Theater

Detail of Luther: subject taken from Quevedo's El sueño del infierno, by the Catalan painter Francisco Sans Cabot.

There is no definitive catalog of the theatrical work attributable to Quevedo, and not only because of the difficulty of establishing his authorship but because of the difficulties of considering some texts as theatrical. In any case, the following works are considered certain and fully theatrical:

• The comedy Cómo ha de ser el privado
• The entremeses Bárbara, Diego Moreno, La vieja Muñatones, Los enfadosos, La venta, La destreza, La polilla de Madrid, El marido pantasma, El marión, El caballero de la Tenaza, El niño y Peralvillo de Madrid, La ropavejera and Los refranes del viejo celoso.

In addition, various fragments of lost comedies, a loa and ten bailes are also taken into consideration.

Non-literary work

Statue of Quevedo in Alcalá de Henares.

Political works

• España defendida, y los tiempos de ahora, de las calumnias de los noveleros y sediciosos, better known as España defendida..., which remained incomplete and unpublished, written circa 1609 and definitively abandoned in 1612, was first published in 1916 in the Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia by the Hispanist Robert Selden Rose. It is a defense of the merit of humanism and of Spanish letters that anticipates the Black Legend which was already beginning to take shape, and from which he cites in particular the works of Girolamo Benzoni, Gerardus Mercator and Joseph Justus Scaliger.
• Política de Dios, gobierno de Cristo. Its first part was written around 1617 (in the dedication to Olivares, of 1626, he tells him that "it is the book I wrote ten years ago") and printed in 1626 with the title Política de Dios, gobierno de Cristo y tiranía de Satanás. The second part, written around 1635, was published in 1655. The two parts together were published under the heading Política de Dios, gobierno de Cristo, sacada de la Sagrada Escritura para acierto del Rey y del reino en sus acciones. It is a hybrid between two disciplines: Theology and Politics.
• Mundo caduco y desvaríos de la edad (1621, published 1852).
• Grandes anales de quince días (1621, published 1788), an analysis of the transition between the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV.
• Memorial por el patronato de Santiago (1627, published 1628), Su espada por Santiago, manuscript of 1628.
• Lince de Italia y zahorí español (1628, published 1852).
• El chitón de las tarabillas (1630), printed many times with the title Tira la piedra y esconde la mano. It defends the economic measures of the Count-Duke of Olivares, from whom he would later distance himself. It was denounced to the Inquisition and withdrawn that same year.
• Execración contra los judíos (1633), an antisemitic tract containing a veiled accusation against Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares and favorite of Philip IV.
• Carta al serenísimo, muy alto y muy poderoso Luis XIII, rey cristianísimo de Francia (1635).
• Breve compendio de los servicios de Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, duque de Lerma (1636).
• La rebelión de Barcelona ni es por el güevo ni es por el fuero. 1641, a pamphlet against the Catalan revolt of 1640.
• Vida de Marco Bruto, 1644, a gloss on the life of the famous assassin of Caesar written by Plutarch, written with algebraic rigor and an elevation of conceptista style that is all but inimitable. So declares one of his admirers, Jorge Luis Borges, copying this rhetorical paragraph:

They honored a brow with a few laurel leaves; they gave satisfaction to a lineage with an emblem on its shield; they paid for great and sovereign victories with the acclamations of a triumph; they rewarded almost divine lives with a statue; and so that the branches and the herbs and the marble and the voices should not fall from the prerogatives of treasure, they did not allow them to pretension, but to merit.

Ascetic works

• Vida de Santo Tomás de Villanueva, 1620.
• Providencia de Dios, 1641, a treatise against atheists that attempts to unify Stoicism and Christianity.
• Vida de San Pablo, 1644.
• La constancia y paciencia del santo Job, published posthumously in 1713.

Philosophical works

• Doctrina moral del conocimiento propio, y del desengaño de las cosas ajenas (Zaragoza, 1630).
• La cuna y la sepultura para el conocimiento propio y desengaño de las cosas ajenas (Madrid, 1634), which is a rewriting of the previous work, published without his authorization, in which he amplified and stylistically improved the preceding text.
• Epicteto, y Phocílides en español con consonantes, con el Origen de los estoicos, y su defensa contra Plutarco, y la Defensa de Epicuro, contra la común opinión (Madrid, 1635).
• Las cuatro pestes del mundo y los cuatro fantasmas de la vida (1651).

Literary criticism

• La aguja de navegar cultos con la receta para hacer Soledades en un día (1631), a satirical onslaught against the poets who use Gongorist or culterano language.
• La culta latiniparla. Cathecismo de vocablos, para instruir á las mugeres Cultas y Hembrilatinas. Lleva un disparatario como vocabulario para interpretar y traducir las damas jerigonzas que parlan el Alcorán macarrónico, con el laberinto de las ocho palabras. Compuesto por Aldrobando Anatema Cantacuzano, graduado en tinieblas, docto á obscuras, natural de las Soledades de Abaxo. Dirigido a Doña Escolástica Poliantea de Calepino, Señora de Trilingüe y Babilonia (1624), a burlesque and misogynistic manual for speaking in Gongorist language, to which corresponds this witty dedication:

Your Grace being better known for your circumlocutions than for the topknots of such pretty synecdoches and cacophonies, and so graceful in hyperboles and so Nebrija-like in words that you have more nominatives than suitors; and being the lady of the most Art (of Antonio) ever seen, more merlicocaica than Merlin, the obligation falls upon the most expert (and it is no fruit) to raise you up to the inaccessible principles of another esteem, if not so sidereal, applauded, though of less trisulcate pain (may Plautus be deaf), directing to you this oil lamp for walking through lugubrious prose. Your Grace is a perennial riddle, and you have enigma rain, and at your least visit ordinands may be examined. Your Grace is more repeated for your style than that aforesaid hidalgo who lets no line rest in lawsuits. Your Grace and gibberish are more alike than frying and raining. Yesterday I, an Armenian bishop and two gypsies, and almost an astrologer and half a doctor, read a paper of yours: we went through it as much in the dark as if we were reading chasms, and we nearly killed ourselves on an obstacle and two shipwreckers that were at the turn of the page. Neither construing it nor studying it was enough: and so we conjured it, and by dint of exorcisms two half-lines were discovered that went about in the habit of pacubros, and we cast out its obsoletes like spirits. I cast a thousand Thucydideses upon Your Grace like blessings, for you discourse so much as to snuff out candles that we may call you a discreet paulina. If Your Grace, writing so much a porta inferi, finishes darkening yourself, you will say that your language is as black as a wolf's mouth, with as much propriety as a bad night, and that one cannot go through Your Grace's conversation without a lantern. May God dawn upon Your Grace, and take you out of being Princess of darkness, which is relative of the devil, since he is its Prince. Farewell in cultured style, not in a notary's crossing-out. Pridie Idus (Your Grace already understands, and if not, pretend you are hearing it)

• La Perinola (1633, published in 1788), an attack against the Para todos of Juan Pérez de Montalbán.
• Cuento de cuentos (1626), a reductio ad absurdum of the colloquialisms most empty of meaning.

Philological work

• Memorial de don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas dado a la Inquisición General sobre los libros del Monte Santo de Granada, in which he dismantles the imposture of the so-called Plomos del Sacromonte and suggests that they be destroyed so that they are not sent to Rome, making Spain look ridiculous before the Pope.

Correspondence

It was edited by Luis Astrana Marín in 1946; this correspondence included 43 unpublished letters from the last ten years of the author's life, which he wrote to his friend Sancho de Sandoval of Beas (Jaén).

Translations

Quevedo associated with humanists such as the distant Justus Lipsius and the closer José Antonio González de Salas; both transmitted to him their fervor for Propertius. As a Hellenist, Quevedo's translations from Greek leave a good deal to be desired; he nevertheless dared to translate, very poorly, Anacreon (a translation that circulated in manuscript and was not printed during Quevedo's lifetime, but in 1656), the pseudo-Phocylides and the Life of Marcus Brutus by Plutarch for his Marco Bruto. Of greater merit are his Lamentations of Jeremiah from the Hebrew, or his versions, as an excellent Latinist, of the satirists Martial, Persius and Juvenal; his works are also studded with reminiscences of Virgil, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Statius and, especially, Seneca, of whose Letters to Lucilius he mentions having translated ninety in the prologue to the Marco Bruto, although only eleven have been preserved. Seneca and the satirists, then, are the authors he reread most and who most permeated his works; his erudition in the Bible is also great, although he undoubtedly preferred the Book of Job, which one of his models, Fray Luis de León, had translated. He also made excellent versions from Italian and French; in the latter language, he knew the work of lyric poets such as Joachim du Bellay and read and admired that of Montaigne, and it is even possible that he translated the first book of his Essais. To his credit are:

• Introducción a la vida devota, by Saint Francis de Sales.
• De los remedios de cualquier fortuna (1638), a free version of Seneca.
• El Rómulo, 1632, by the Marquis Virgilio Malvezzi.

Lost works

• The second part of the Vida de Marco Bruto, mentioned by Quevedo in his last letters, in 1644.
• Historia de don Sebastián, rey de Portugal.
• La polilla de las repúblicas.
• Historia del año 1631.
• Dichos y hechos del Duque de Osuna en Flandes, España, Nápoles y Sicilia.

Literary and film character

Statue of the monument to Quevedo in the square of the same name in Madrid (A. Querol, 1902).

As the prototype of the courtly intellectual who displayed his wit and often liked to scandalize, Quevedo passed into popular literature as a character in frequently coarse jokes, becoming a figure of urban legends like others given to épater le bourgeois, for example Camilo José Cela.

He was likewise a character in a great number of plays and novels; during his own life he had to endure being the target of attacks in Juan de Jáuregui's comedy El retraído (1635). And Diego de Torres Villarroel resurrected him at the beginning of the 18th century in his Sueños morales, visiones y visitas de Torres con Don Francisco de Quevedo por Madrid, and in the 19th he is the main character of the dramas ¿Quién es ella? by Bretón de los Herreros; La corte del buen Retiro (1st and 2nd parts) and También los muertos se vengan by Patricio de la Escosura; Don Francisco de Quevedo (1848) by the Romantic poet Eulogio Florentino Sanz, undoubtedly one of the great successes of Spanish Romantic drama; Una broma de Quevedo and the zarzuela Cuando ahorcaron a Quevedo, by Luis de Eguílaz; Una noche y una aurora by Francisco Botella y Andrés and La boda de Quevedo by Narciso Serra. In the 20th century, he is the protagonist of El caballero de las espuelas de oro, by Alejandro Casona.

In the same way he tempted the historical novel: in the 19th century Francisco José Orellana wrote Quevedo (1857) and Antonio de San Martín his serialized novel Aventuras de don Francisco de Quevedo (1883–1884).

Character in the Captain Alatriste novels

Francisco de Quevedo is also, together with other historical figures of the Spain of Philip IV, a secondary character in the saga known as Las aventuras del capitán Alatriste (1996), by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and in the film based on it, Alatriste (2006), directed by Agustín Díaz Yanes, in which the character of Quevedo is played by the actor Juan Echanove. In this work of fiction, Quevedo is presented as a personal friend of the so-called Captain Don Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, a veteran of the wars in Flanders, who earns his living as a hired sword in 17th-century Madrid. Quevedo's first appearance comes in the first title of the saga, El capitán Alatriste (1996), where he is depicted as a witty, passionate man and an excellent swordsman, who regularly has to make use of the herreruza (sword) to settle the constant conflicts in which he becomes involved, whether because of the unfortunate verses he dedicates to numerous people (including renowned personalities) or because of those related to his friend Alatriste.

In narrative terms, Francisco de Quevedo represents in the work the cheerful and uninhibited counterpoint to Alatriste's reserved and rough personality, bringing to the reading of the text fresh moments and an elegant and imaginative humor, although he also plays the role of a determining factor in many of the events of the work, especially in the second volume of the saga, Limpieza de sangre (1997). It should be noted that in the work, as in its numerous epilogues, some works (mostly sonnets) appear that are "attributed" to this character, among which stands out the one that "Praises military virtue, in the person of Captain Alatriste". This poem, which Quevedo would have dedicated to Alatriste, narrates allegorically the life and character of the character, praising his courage and composure.

In music

In music, the singer Francisco 'Paco' Ibáñez set four of his poems to music: the satirical letrillas "Poderoso caballero Don Dinero", "Es amarga la verdad" and the comic romance that "Pinta a un doctor en medicina que se quería casar".

See also

• Spanish literature
• Order of Santiago
• Golden Age
• Conceptismo
• Luis de Góngora
• Baroque

Notes and references

Bibliography

• Agulló y Cobo, Mercedes (1970). Documentos sobre escritores de los siglos XVI y XVII (in español). Madrid. pp. 44 ff.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

• Arellano, Ignacio (1999). Rostros y máscaras: personajes y temas de Quevedo (in español). Pamplona: EUNSA. ISBN 84-313-1737-X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Ayala, Francisco (1984). Cervantes y Quevedo (in español). Barcelona: Ariel. ISBN 84-344-8374-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Carreira Vérez, Antonio; Schwartz, Lidia (1997). Quevedo a nueva luz (in español). Málaga: Universidad de Málaga. ISBN 84-7496-637-X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Ettinghausen, Henry (1972). Francisco de Quevedo and the Neostoic movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-815521-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Garciasol, Ramón de (1976). Quevedo (in español). Pseudonym of Miguel Alonso Calvo. Pozuelo de Alarcón: Espasa Calpe. ISBN 84-239-1608-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Gutiérrez, Carlos M. (2005). La espada, el rayo y la pluma: Quevedo y los campos literario y de poder (in español). West Lafayette: Purdue UP. ISBN 1-55753-361-X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Iffland, James, ed. (1982). Quevedo in perspective: eleven essays for the quadricentennial: proceedings from the Boston Quevedo Symposium, October 1980. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta. ISBN 0-936388-17-X.
• Jaramillo Cervilla, Manuel (1981). Personalidad y pensamiento político de Quevedo (in español). Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada. ISBN 84-500-4396-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Jauralde Pou, Pablo (1998). Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) (in español). Madrid: Castalia. ISBN 84-7039-796-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Lázaro Carreter, Fernando (1966). Estilo barroco y personalidad creadora: Góngora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega (in español). Salamanca: Anaya. ISBN 978-84-376-0022-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Martinengo, Alessandro (1992). La astrología en la obra de Quevedo: una clave de lectura (in español). Pamplona: EUNSA. ISBN 84-313-1192-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
• Pérez-Reverte, Arturo (1996). El capitán Alatriste (in español). Madrid: Ediciones Alfaguara. ISBN 978-84-204-8353-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)

External links

• Portrait of Francisco de Quevedo in Retratos de españoles ilustres (1791).
• Page devoted to Francisco de Quevedo at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.
• Digitized works of Francisco de Quevedo in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain
• Website of the Fundación Francisco de Quevedo – Devoted to spreading knowledge of Quevedo's life and work.
• Francisco de Quevedo, episode of the TVE series Paisaje con figuras.
• Francisco de Quevedo: broadcast of January 13, 2015, of Música antigua, a program of Radio Clásica.