Miguel de Cervantes

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

Miguel de Cervantes
Portrait attributed to Juan de Jáuregui, also called the Pseudo-Jáuregui. It has not been authenticated, and no purported portrait of Cervantes exists whose authenticity has been established.
Born	(1547-09-29)September 29, 1547 Alcalá de Henares, Spain
Died	April 22, 1616(1616-04-22) (aged 68) Madrid
Resting place	Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians
Alma mater	Estudio de la Villa
Occupations	Novelist, soldier, accountant, poet and playwright
Spouse	Catalina de Salazar y Palacios
Partner	Ana de Villafranca
Children	Isabel de Saavedra
Writing career
Language	Castilian (mother tongue: Middle Spanish)
Period	1585–1616
Genres	Novel, poetry and theater
Movement	Golden Age
Cause of death	Type 2 diabetes mellitus
Other name	El manco de Lepanto ("the One-Handed Man of Lepanto")
Parent(s)	Rodrigo de Cervantes Leonor de Cortinas
Signature

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Alcalá de Henares, September 29, 1547 – Madrid, April 22, 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet, playwright and soldier.

He is widely regarded as one of the greatest figures of Spanish literature. He was the author of Quixote, the novel that made him known worldwide and which many critics have described as the first modern novel, as well as one of the finest works of world literature, whose number of editions and translations is surpassed only by the Bible. Cervantes has been given the epithet of «Prince of Wits».

Life

Childhood and youth

Tower of the Church of Santa María la Mayor in Alcalá de Henares, where Miguel de Cervantes was baptized. It was destroyed in a fire during the Spanish Civil War.

Since the 18th century it has been accepted that Miguel de Cervantes's birthplace was Alcalá de Henares, since he was baptized there, according to his baptismal record, and since he stated that he was a native of that place in the so-called Información de Argel (1580). The exact day of his birth is less certain, although he most likely was born on September 29, the feast day of the Archangel Saint Michael, given the tradition of receiving the name of the saint of one's day of birth. Miguel de Cervantes was baptized on October 9, 1547, in the parish of Santa María la Mayor. The baptismal record reads:

Sunday, the ninth day of the month of October, in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred and forty-seven, Miguel, son of Rodrigo Cervantes and his wife doña Leonor, was baptized. He was baptized by the reverend señor Bartolomé Serrano, priest of Our Lady. Witnesses, Baltasar Vázquez, Sacristan, and I, who baptized him and signed with my name. Bachiller Serrano.

The writer's father was Rodrigo de Cervantes (1509–1585), married to Leonor de Cortinas, about whom almost nothing is known, except that she was a native of Arganda del Rey. Cervantes's siblings were Andrés (1543); Andrea (1544); Luisa (1546), who became Prioress of a Carmelite convent; Rodrigo (1550), also a soldier, who accompanied him in his Algerian captivity; Magdalena (1554); and Juan, known only because his father mentions him in his will.

The surname Saavedra, in the opinion of the historian Luce López-Baralt, which the author began to use after his captivity, comes from «shaibedraa», which in Maghrebi Arabic dialect is pronounced almost as in Spanish and means «crippled or damaged arm», so that in Algiers Cervantes may have been called «shaibedraa», that is, «one-handed». It has also been a common surname in Algeria for centuries. By contrast, the Hispanist María Antonia Garcés attributes the adoption of the Galician surname Saavedra to the reinvention of himself that Cervantes carried out upon his return from slavery; it is the name he himself gives to the hero of his drama El trato de Argel, and to the protagonists of his El gallardo español and of The Captive's Tale (chapters 39–41 of Don Quixote); Gonzalo Cervantes Saavedra was a distant relative, also a veteran of Lepanto and a writer, whose life had remarkable parallels with his own; furthermore, the prominent Saavedra (or Sayavedra) family of Seville, who fought against the Moors for hundreds of years on the frontier, may have been emblematic for Cervantes, who may have seen himself as the moral descendant of Juan de Sayavedra, a medieval hero celebrated in epic ballads and also taken captive by the Moors.

According to Américo Castro, Daniel Eisenberg and other Cervantes scholars, Cervantes had converso ancestry on both sides of his family; his father was a surgeon, his grandfather a lawyer and his great-grandfather a rag dealer. By contrast, his latest biographer, Jean Canavaggio, states that such ancestry has not been proven, in comparison with the documents that support this ancestry beyond any doubt for Mateo Alemán; in any case, the Cervantes family was very well regarded in Córdoba and held important offices there and in its surroundings.

Miguel de Cervantes imagining Don Quixote, Mariano de la Roca y Delgado (1858).

His paternal grandparents were the licentiate in law Juan de Cervantes and Leonor de Torreblanca, daughter of Juan Díaz de Torreblanca, a physician from Córdoba; his father, Rodrigo de Cervantes, was born in Alcalá de Henares by chance: his father was working there at the time. He was trained to be a surgeon, a trade closer to the old title of medical assistant than to our idea of a physician. Don Rodrigo could not pursue continuous studies, not only because of his deafness but also because of the restless and itinerant character of his family, which moved between Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, Cuenca, Alcalá de Henares, Guadalajara and Valladolid, as far as is known; nevertheless, he learned surgery from his maternal grandfather from Córdoba and from his stepfather, also a physician, who succeeded him, although he never came to hold an official title. Around 1551, Rodrigo de Cervantes moved with his family to Valladolid. Because of debts, he was imprisoned for several months and his property was seized. In 1556 he went to Córdoba to collect the inheritance of Juan de Cervantes, the writer's grandfather, and to flee from his creditors.

There are no precise data on Miguel de Cervantes's early studies, which undoubtedly never reached university level. It seems that he may have studied in Valladolid, Córdoba or Seville.

In 1566 he settled in Madrid. He attended the Estudio de la Villa, run by the professor of grammar and Erasmus sympathizer Juan López de Hoyos (who in 1569 published a book on the illness and death of Queen Elisabeth of Valois, third wife of Philip II). López de Hoyos includes in that book two poems by Cervantes, whom he calls «our dear and beloved disciple», considered by some Cervantes scholars to be his first literary works. In those youthful years his fondness for the theater is documented: he attended the performances of Lope de Rueda, as he states in the prologue he wrote for his Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses (1615):

Commemorative plaque of Miguel de Cervantes's studies on Calle de la Villa (Madrid).

I remembered having seen the great Lope de Rueda perform, a man distinguished in acting and in understanding [...] And although, being a boy at the time, I could not form a firm judgment of the excellence of his verses, from some that remained in my memory, seen now at the mature age I have reached, I find what I have said to be true; and were it not for keeping to the purpose of a prologue, I would set down here some that would prove this truth. In the time of this celebrated Spaniard, all the equipment of a theater manager fit into a sack, and amounted to four white sheepskin coats trimmed with gilded embossed leather, and four beards and wigs and four shepherd's crooks, more or less. The plays were colloquies, like eclogues, between two or three shepherds and some shepherdess; they dressed them up and stretched them out with two or three interludes, now of a Black woman, now of a ruffian, now of a fool, and now of a Biscayan: all four of these figures and many others the said Lope played with the greatest excellence and propriety imaginable. There were in those days no stage machinery, nor challenges between Moors and Christians, on foot or on horseback; there was no figure that came out or seemed to come out of the center of the earth through the hollow of the stage, which consisted of four benches arranged in a square with four or six boards on top, raising it four palms off the ground; nor did clouds with angels or souls descend from heaven. The decoration of the stage was an old blanket, drawn by two cords from one side to the other, which formed what they call the dressing room, behind which were the musicians, singing without a guitar some old ballad.

And, as he declares in the second part of Quixote through the mouth of his main character, in his youth «his eyes would follow the traveling players» (Don Quixote, II, 12).

Journey to Italy and the Battle of Lepanto

The Battle of Lepanto (unknown artist). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

An order of Philip II dating from 1569 has been preserved, in which he orders the arrest of Miguel de Cervantes, accused of wounding in a duel one Antonio Sigura, a master builder. If this really was Cervantes and not a namesake, it might have been the reason that led him to go to Italy. He arrived in Rome in December of the same year. There he read the chivalric poems of Ludovico Ariosto, which would greatly influence Don Quixote according to Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, and the Dialogues of Love of the Sephardic Jew Leone Ebreo (Yehuda Abrabanel), of Neoplatonic inspiration, which would determine his idea of love. Cervantes became imbued with the style and art of Italy, and always kept so fond a memory of those states that at the beginning of El licenciado Vidriera, one of his Exemplary Novels, he provides little less than a tourist guide to the country:

They arrived at the beautiful and most lovely city of Genoa; and, disembarking in its sheltered harbor, after having visited a church, the captain and all his comrades went to an inn, where they put all past storms out of mind with the present gaudeamus. There they came to know the smoothness of the Trebbiano, the worth of the Montefiascone, the strength of the Asprino, the generosity of the two Greek wines Candia and Soma, the greatness of the Cinque Terre [...] Finally, the host named more wines, and gave them more, than Bacchus himself could have kept in his cellars. Good Tomás also admired the fair hair of the Genoese women, and the elegance and gallant bearing of the men; the admirable beauty of the city, which seems to have its houses set among those rocks like diamonds set in gold. [...] And in five [days] he arrived at Florence, having first seen Lucca, a small city but very well built, and in which, more than in other parts of Italy, Spaniards are well regarded and welcomed. Florence pleased him extremely, both for its agreeable setting and for its cleanliness, sumptuous buildings, cool river and peaceful streets. [...] And then he departed for Rome, queen of cities and mistress of the world. He visited its temples, venerated its relics and admired its grandeur; and, just as by the claws of the lion one comes to know its size and ferocity, so he gathered that of Rome from its shattered marbles, half and whole statues, from its broken arches and fallen baths, from its magnificent porticoes and great amphitheaters; from its famous and holy river, which always fills its banks with water and blesses them with the countless relics of the bodies of martyrs that found burial in them; from its bridges, which seem to be gazing at one another, which by their name alone gain authority over all those of the other cities of the world: the Via Appia, the Flaminia, the Julia, and others of that kind. Nor did he admire any less the division of its hills within the city itself: the Caelian, the Quirinal and the Vatican, with the other four, whose names show the greatness and majesty of Rome. He also noted the authority of the College of Cardinals, the majesty of the Supreme Pontiff, the throng and variety of peoples and nations.

He entered the service of Giulio Acquaviva, who would become a cardinal in 1570 and whom he had probably met in Madrid. He followed him through Palermo, Milan, Florence, Venice, Parma and Ferrara, an itinerary that also appears admiringly described in El licenciado Vidriera. He soon left him to take a post as a soldier in the company of Captain Diego de Urbina, of the Tercio of Miguel de Moncada (later the Tercio de la Liga). He embarked on the galley Marquesa. On October 7, 1571, he took part in the Battle of Lepanto, «the loftiest occasion that past centuries have seen, or present ones, or future ones hope to see», as part of the Christian fleet led by don John of Austria, «son of the thunderbolt of war Charles V, of happy memory», and half-brother of the King, and in which one of the most famous seamen of the age took part, Álvaro de Bazán, who resided in La Mancha, in Viso del Marqués. A legal deposition drawn up eight years later states:

Cervantes at Lepanto, as imagined by the painter Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau in 2016.

When the Turkish fleet was sighted, in the said naval battle, the said Miguel de Cervantes was ill and feverish, and the said captain... and many other friends of his told him that, since he was sick and feverish, he should stay quietly below in the galley's cabin; and the said Miguel de Cervantes replied, what would they say of him, and that he would not be doing his duty, and that he would rather die fighting for God and for his king than go below deck, and that with his health... And he fought as a valiant soldier against the said Turks in the said battle at the position of the skiff, as his captain commanded and ordered him, with other soldiers. And when the battle was over, as the lord don Juan learned and understood how well the said Miguel de Cervantes had done and fought, he raised his pay and gave him four ducats more... From the said naval battle he came out wounded by two arquebus shots, in the chest and in one hand, from which he was left maimed in the said hand.

From this comes the nickname Manco de Lepanto ("the One-Handed Man of Lepanto"), since his left hand became stiff when he lost the movement of it after a piece of lead severed a nerve. Those wounds must not have been too serious since, after six months in a hospital in Messina, Cervantes resumed his military life in 1572. He took part in the naval expeditions of Navarino (1572), Corfu, Bizerte and Tunis (1573). In all of them he served under the command of Captain Manuel Ponce de León and in the battle-hardened Tercio of Lope de Figueroa, who appears in El alcalde de Zalamea by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

He then traveled through the main cities of Sicily, Sardinia, Genoa and Lombardy. And he finally remained for two years in Naples, until 1575.

Captivity in Algiers

During his return from Naples to Spain aboard the galley Sol, a Turkish flotilla commanded by Arnaut Mami took Miguel and his brother Rodrigo prisoner on September 26, 1575. They were captured off Cadaqués de Rosas or Palamós, in an area now known as the Costa Brava, and taken to Algiers. Cervantes was assigned as a slave to the Greek renegade Dali Mami. The fact that letters of recommendation from don John of Austria and from the Duke of Sessa were found in his possession led his captors to believe that Cervantes was a very important person for whom they could obtain a good ransom. They demanded five hundred gold escudos for his freedom.

Statue of Miguel de Cervantes at the National Library of Spain, in Madrid.

The years in Algiers constitute what Alonso Zamora Vicente called «a fundamental fact in the life of Cervantes», which divides it «into two halves». According to Juan Goytisolo, they lie «at the central core of the great literary invention».

During almost five years of imprisonment, Cervantes, a man not at all given to accommodation and with a strong spirit and motivation, tried to escape on four occasions, organizing all four attempts himself. To avoid reprisals against his fellow captives, he took responsibility for everything before his enemies and preferred torture to informing on others. Thanks to the official deposition and to the book by Friar Diego de Haedo, Topografía e historia general de Argel (1612), there is important information about his captivity. These records are complemented by his plays El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel and by the story known as «The Captive's Tale», inserted in the first part of Don Quixote, between chapters 39 and 41.

However, it has long been known that the work published by Haedo was not his, something he himself already acknowledges. According to Emilio Sola, its author was Antonio de Sosa, a Benedictine who was Cervantes's fellow captive and a speaker in the dialogues of the same work. Daniel Eisenberg has proposed that the work is not by Sosa, who was not a writer, but by the great writer held captive in Algiers, with whose writings Haedo's work shows very extensive similarities. If this is true, Haedo's work ceases to be an independent confirmation of Cervantes's conduct in Algiers, and is merely one more of the writings of Cervantes himself extolling his heroism.

The first escape attempt failed because the Moor who was to guide Cervantes and his companions to Oran abandoned them on the first day. The prisoners had to return to Algiers, where they were chained and watched more closely than before. Meanwhile, Cervantes's mother had managed to gather a certain sum of ducats in the hope of ransoming her two sons. In 1577 negotiations were arranged, but the sum was not enough to ransom both. Miguel preferred that his brother Rodrigo be set free, and he returned to Spain. Rodrigo carried a plan drawn up by his brother to free him and fourteen or fifteen other companions. Cervantes joined the other prisoners in a hidden cave, awaiting a Spanish galley that was to come and pick them up. The galley did indeed arrive and tried twice to approach the beach, but in the end it was captured. The Christians hidden in the cave were also discovered, owing to the betrayal of a treacherous accomplice nicknamed El Dorador. Cervantes declared himself solely responsible for organizing the escape and inducing his companions. The bey (Turkish governor) of Algiers, Azán Bajá, locked him up in his «bagnio» or prison, loaded with chains, where he remained for five months. Cervantes devised the third attempt with the aim of reaching Oran by land. He sent a trusted Moor there with letters for Martín de Córdoba, general of that stronghold, explaining the plan and asking for guides. However, the messenger was captured and the letters discovered. They showed that it was Miguel de Cervantes himself who had planned everything. He was sentenced to receive two thousand blows, a sentence that was not carried out because many interceded for him. The last escape attempt was made possible by a large sum of money given to him by a Valencian merchant who was in Algiers. Cervantes acquired a frigate capable of carrying sixty Christian captives. When everything was about to be settled, one of those who were to be freed, the former Dominican doctor Juan Blanco de Paz, revealed the whole plan to Azán Bajá. As a reward the traitor received an escudo and a jar of lard. Azán Bajá moved Cervantes to a more secure prison, in his own palace. He then decided to take him to Constantinople, where escape would be an almost impossible undertaking. Once again, Cervantes assumed full responsibility.

In May 1580, Mercedarian and Trinitarian friars arrived in Algiers (religious orders that sought to free captives, even exchanging themselves for them if necessary). Friar Antonio departed with an expedition of ransomed captives. Friar Juan Gil, who had only three hundred escudos, tried to ransom Cervantes, for whom five hundred were demanded. The friar undertook to collect the missing amount among the Christian merchants. He gathered it when Cervantes was already on one of the galleys on which Azán Bajá was to sail for Constantinople, bound with «two chains and a shackle». Thanks to the 500 escudos so arduously gathered, Cervantes was freed on September 19, 1580. On October 24 he at last returned to Spain with other captives who had also been ransomed. He arrived at Denia, from where he moved to Valencia. In November or December he returned to his family in Madrid.

This experience would leave a mark on Cervantes that can be seen in El trato de Argel, La Galatea and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda.

Return to Spain

Title page of La Galatea (1585), the first work published by Miguel de Cervantes.

Statue of Cervantes, in the square of the University of Valladolid.

In May 1581, Cervantes moved to Portugal, where the court of Philip II was then located, with the aim of finding something with which to rebuild his life and pay the debts his family had incurred to ransom him from Algiers. He was entrusted with a secret commission in Oran, since he had extensive knowledge of the culture and customs of North Africa. For that work he received 50 escudos. He returned to Lisbon and at the end of the year went back to Madrid. In February 1582, he applied for a vacant post in the Indies, without success.

It is very likely that between 1581 and 1583 Cervantes wrote La Galatea, his first literary work of substantial volume and significance. It was published in Alcalá de Henares in 1585. Until then he had only published some compositions in other people's books, in ballad collections and songbooks that gathered the works of various poets. La Galatea appeared divided into six books, although he wrote only the «first part». Cervantes never abandoned the intention of continuing the work; however, it was never printed. In the prologue the work is described as an «eclogue» and emphasis is placed on the fondness Cervantes had always had for poetry. It belongs to the genre of the pastoral novel, which had been established in Spain by Diana by Jorge de Montemayor. Reminiscences of the reading he did while a soldier in Italy can still be observed.

At that time, the writer had a love affair with Ana Villafranca (or Franca) de Rojas, married to Alonso Rodríguez, a tavern keeper. From the relationship a daughter was born, baptized as Isabel Rodríguez y Villafranca on April 9, 1584, in the Parish of Saints Justus and Pastor in Madrid. When Isabel was orphaned, she was taken in by Magdalena, Cervantes's sister. He recognized her as Isabel de Saavedra a year later, when she was sixteen. Father and daughter did not have a good relationship.

In mid-September 1584, Cervantes went to Esquivias, summoned by Doña Juana Gaytán, who wanted him to take charge of publishing the Cancionero, a collection of poems by her late husband, Pedro Laínez. On September 22 of that year, before the attorney Ortega Rosa, Juana Gaytán signed the power of attorney granted to Cervantes. Three months later, on December 12, 1584, Cervantes married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios in the Toledo town of Esquivias. Catalina was a young woman not yet twenty who brought a small dowry. The marriage with his wife did not work out, and two years after marrying, Cervantes began his extensive travels through Andalusia. The couple had no children. Cervantes never speaks of his wife in his many autobiographical texts, despite being the one who introduced into Spanish literature the theme of divorce, then impossible in a Catholic country, with the interlude El juez de los divorcios. It is assumed that the marriage was unhappy, although in that interlude he maintains that «the worst agreement / is better than the best divorce».

Last years

In 1587, he traveled to Andalusia as a commissary of provisions for the Invincible Armada. During his years as commissary, he traveled again and again along the road from Madrid to Andalusia, passing through Toledo and La Mancha (present-day Ciudad Real). That is the itinerary of Rinconete y Cortadillo.

Interior of the cave of the house of the Medrano family in Argamasilla de Alba, where, in the 19th century, some theories held that Cervantes had been imprisoned.

He settled in the city of Seville on January 10, 1588. He would travel through municipalities of the Province of Seville such as Carmona, Écija, Estepa, Arahal, Marchena and La Puebla de Cazalla collecting products such as olives, olive oil, wheat and barley as a commissary of supplies for the royal ships. The seizure of Church property led the Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Seville to issue a sentence of excommunication against Cervantes and to order the vicar of Écija to post the excommunicated man's name on the public notice boards.

From 1594, he would be a collector of overdue taxes (tercias and alcabalas), a job that would bring him numerous problems and disputes, since he was the one in charge of going from house to house collecting taxes, which were for the most part intended to cover the wars in which Spain was involved.

At the end of 1594, he made a journey to the Kingdom of Granada with the obligation of collecting in Málaga, Ronda and Vélez-Málaga the 2,557,029 maravedís owed to the Crown. In Vélez-Málaga he was to collect a total of 277,040 maravedís, which were never collected, as in that Málaga city he only managed to reach 136,000 maravedís. Three years later, the Council of Finance found that the accounts did not balance, and by royal order of September 6, 1597, Cervantes was required to account within 30 days for the 79,804 maravedís that were missing. This discrepancy in the account books led him to spend several months in the Royal Prison of Seville.

He was imprisoned in 1597, between September and December of that year, after the failure of the bank where he deposited the collected funds. Cervantes had allegedly appropriated public money and was discovered after several irregularities were found in the accounts he kept. In prison he «begot» Don Quixote, according to the prologue to that work. It is not known whether by that term he meant that he began writing it while imprisoned or simply that the idea came to him there.

The other documented imprisonment of Cervantes was very brief, in Castro del Río (Córdoba) in 1592. There is no record that he was ever held in the cave of the house of the Medrano family in Argamasilla de Alba.

At that time Miguel de Cervantes began his dramatic career on Renaissance and classicist principles: respect for the three Aristotelian unities and not mixing the tragic and the comic, as Horace recommended in his Epistle to the Pisos or Ars Poetica. We have already seen how Cervantes loved the theater from his childhood (dialogue abounds in Quixote). He took risks with some innovations, such as reducing plays to three acts or using allegorical characters, and had a certain success until Lope de Vega triumphed with a more modern formula (expressed in 1609, when he published his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo), and everyone followed him, so that no theater impresario («autor» in the language of the time) wanted to buy Cervantes's plays anymore, as they seemed old-fashioned. Lope de Vega noticed the grudge Cervantes held against him because of this, expressed in the classicist criticisms of his theater contained in Don Quixote (I, 48), but Cervantes later reluctantly accepted the new formula («times change things / and perfect the arts», he would write in the dialogue between Comedy and Necessity in his play El rufián dichoso) and would begin to write plays according to the new formula. Later (1615), in the melancholy prologue he wrote for his Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca representados, he would speak of his theatrical experience:

In the theaters of Madrid were seen performed Los tratos de Argel, which I composed; La destruición de Numancia and La batalla naval, in which I dared to reduce plays to three acts from the five they used to have; I showed, or, better said, I was the first to represent the imaginings and hidden thoughts of the soul, bringing moral figures onto the stage, to the general and delighted applause of the audience; in this period I composed some twenty or thirty plays, all of which were performed without any offering of cucumbers or other missiles being made to them; they ran their course without whistles, shouts or uproar. I had other things to occupy me; I put down the pen and the plays, and then in came that monster of nature, the great Lope de Vega, and seized the comic monarchy; he subjugated all the actors and placed them under his jurisdiction; he filled the world with plays of his own, felicitous and well reasoned, and so many that those he has written exceed ten thousand sheets, and all of them (which is one of the greatest things that can be said) he has seen performed, or heard said, at least, that they have been performed; and if some, and there are many, have wanted to share in the part and glory of his labors, all together they do not reach, in what they have written, half of what he alone has. [...] Some years ago I returned to my old idleness, and, thinking that the ages in which my praises were sung still lasted, I again composed some plays, but I found no birds in last year's nests; I mean that I found no theater manager who asked me for them, even though they knew I had them; and so, I put them away in a chest and consecrated and condemned them to perpetual silence. At this time a bookseller told me that he would have bought them from me had a titled theater manager not told him that much could be expected of my prose, but of my verse, nothing; and, to tell the truth, it certainly grieved me to hear it, and I said to myself: «Either I have changed into someone else, or the times have improved greatly; though it always happens the other way round, for past times are always praised». I ran my eyes over my plays again, and over some interludes of mine that had been put away with them, and saw that they were not so bad that they did not deserve to come out of the darkness of that manager's mind into the light of other managers less scrupulous and more discerning. I grew weary of it and sold them to the said bookseller, who has put them in print as he offers them to you here.

As a playwright Cervantes excelled in one genre: the entremés, as well as in the plays in which he describes his personal experiences as a captive slave of the Muslims in Algiers: El trato de Argel, its reworking Los baños de Argel and La gran sultana, which belong to the subgenre called «captive plays». His tragedy El cerco de Numancia (1585) and the comedy El rufián dichoso can also be considered masterpieces. Recently a tragedy that was considered lost has been recovered, the Jerusalén, also quite remarkable.

In 1604 he settled in Valladolid (at that time the Royal Court—since 1601—of Philip III). In that same year of 1604 Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Chronicler of the Indies and Censor of the work of Miguel de Cervantes, authorized its printing. And in January 1605 he published the first part of what would be his principal work: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. This marked the beginning of realism as a literary aesthetic and created the literary genre of the modern novel, the polyphonic novel, of enormous subsequent influence, through the cultivation of what he called «an unfettered writing» in which the artist could show himself «epic, lyrical, tragic, comic» in the genuine crucible of the parody of all genres. The second part did not appear until 1615: El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha.

Both works earned him a place in the history of world literature and made their author, together with Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne and Goethe, a canonical author of Western literature. A year earlier, an apocryphal continuation by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda appeared in print. It is a novel that may have been written, as has been proposed, by the circle of friends of Lope de Vega or by the Aragonese Jerónimo de Pasamonte.

House occupied by the writer in Valladolid between 1604 and 1606, a period coinciding with the publication of the first edition of Quixote in 1605. Here he would work on the second part of the novel and would also write El coloquio de los perros, El licenciado Vidriera and La ilustre fregona. It is now a museum.

Between the two parts of Quixote, the Exemplary Novels appeared in 1613, a collection of twelve short narratives, some of them composed many years earlier. Their source is his own and original. In them he explores different narrative formulas such as Lucianic satire (El coloquio de los perros), the picaresque novel (Rinconete y Cortadillo), the miscellany (El licenciado vidriera), the Byzantine novel (La española inglesa, El amante liberal) or even the detective novel (La fuerza de la sangre). Of two of them, such as El celoso extremeño, there is a second version attested by the so-called manuscript of Porras de la Cámara, discovered and soon destroyed in the 19th century. This collection of novels alone could in itself have earned him a very prominent place in the history of Castilian literature.

Literary criticism was a constant in his work. It appears in the Galatea and in Quixote, and he devoted to it the Viaje del Parnaso (1614), a long poem in terza rima. In 1615, he published Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos nunca representados, but his most popular drama today, La Numancia, as well as El trato de Argel, remained unpublished until the 18th century.

A year after his death, the novel Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda appeared. Its dedication to Pedro Fernández de Castro y Andrade, 7th Count of Lemos, his patron for years, to whom the second part of Quixote and the Exemplary Novels are also dedicated, and which he signed barely two days before he died, is one of the most moving pages in Spanish literature:

Sir; those old verses that were celebrated in their time, which begin: «With my foot already in the stirrup», I would rather they did not fit so aptly in this epistle of mine, because with almost the same words I can begin it, saying:

With my foot already in the stirrup,

with the throes of death,

great lord, I write you this.

Yesterday they gave me extreme unction, and today I write this. Time is short, my anguish grows, my hopes wane, and, with all this, I carry on living by the desire I have to live, and I would wish to hold on until I kiss the feet of Your Excellency, for it might be that the joy of seeing Your Excellency well in Spain would be so great that it would restore me to life. But, if it is decreed that I must lose it, let the will of heaven be done and, at least, let Your Excellency know this desire of mine and know that you had in me a servant so devoted to serving you that he wished to go even beyond death in showing his intention. With all this, as if in prophecy, I rejoice at the arrival of Your Excellency; I delight in seeing you pointed out with the finger and I rejoice anew that my hopes, extended by the fame of Your Excellency's virtues, have come true. There still remain in my soul certain remnants and glimmers of the Semanas del Jardín and of the famous Bernardo. If by chance, through my good fortune (which would now be nothing short of a miracle), heaven should grant me life, you shall see them, and, with them, the end of the Galatea, of which I know Your Excellency is fond, and with these works my desire carried on; may God keep Your Excellency as He can, Miguel de Cervantes.

Persiles is a Byzantine novel which, according to the author, sought to compete with the classical Greek model of Heliodorus; it was successful, as it went through several more editions in its time, but it was forgotten and overshadowed by the undisputed triumph of his Don Quixote. Cervantes uses a group of characters as the guiding thread of the work, instead of two. He also anticipates so-called magical realism by admitting some fantastic elements. In a certain way, he Christianizes the original model by using the topos of the homo viator, the climax being reached at the end of the work with the anagnorisis of the two main lovers, until then called Periandro and Auristela, in the holy city of Rome:

Our souls, as you well know and as I have been taught here, are always in continuous motion and cannot come to rest except in God, as in their center. In this life desires are infinite, and some are chained to others and linked together, and go on forming a chain that sometimes reaches heaven and sometimes sinks into hell.

In fact, Persiles is a novel of very complex structure and intentions that still awaits a satisfactory interpretation.

Cervantes's influence on world literature has been such that the Spanish language itself is often called the language of Cervantes.

Death and tomb of Cervantes

Sculpted plaque dedicated to Miguel de Cervantes on the north façade of the Convent of the Trinitarians in Madrid, where he was buried.

In commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Cervantes's death, the Lions of the Congress of Deputies wear spectacles, eyeglasses, or quevedos, to read Quixote.

Cervantes died on April 22 and was buried the following day, which is why the register of the parish of San Sebastián states that he died on April 23, 1616:

On April 23, 1616, Miguel zerbantes Sahavedra died, married to Doña Catalina de Salazar. Calle del León. He received the Holy Sacraments from the hand of Licentiate Francisco López; he ordered that he be buried with the Trinitarian nuns. He ordered two masses for his soul and the rest at the will of his wife, who is executrix, and of Licentiate Francisco Martínez, who lives there.

On April 23 the King and Queen of Spain present the Cervantes Prize in the auditorium of the University of Alcalá.

Various scholars, such as the Frenchman Jean Canavaggio and the Spaniards Francisco Rico, Martín de Riquer and Luis Astrana Marín, state that he died on April 22 and that what appears in the register is the date of burial.

Cervantes died in Madrid at the age of 68 of diabetes, in the well-known House of Cervantes, located on the corner of Calle del León and Calle Francos, in the aforementioned Barrio de las Letras or Barrio de las Musas, in the area of the well-known Madrid de los Austrias. Cervantes wished to be buried in the church of the Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians, in the same neighborhood, since when he was taken prisoner in Algiers, the Trinitarian congregation had helped, acting as intermediaries and collecting funds so that he and his brother Rodrigo could be freed.

The present convent was built in different phases. At the time Cervantes was buried there, the convent had a small chapel with access from Calle Huertas, but a larger church was later built on the same site and the people who had been buried in the earlier one were moved to this new church. Cervantes's body was also moved, but its exact location was unknown. In July 2011 news broke that the historian Fernando de Prado intended to find Cervantes's remains, leading a team of experts in exploring the different parts of the convent, covering 3,000 square meters, in order to learn more about his physical appearance and the causes of his death.

On January 24, 2015, a team of archaeologists led by the forensic expert Francisco Etxeberria announced that it had found a coffin bearing the initials «M. C.», which was studied to determine precisely whether the bones it contained were those of the writer, although the following day the UAM epigraphist Alicia M. Canto urged caution, since the letters could in fact be read as «M. G.», and their type and technique corresponded rather to the 18th century. The following day it was announced that «the scientific committee meeting at the excavations concluded that the bones do not correspond to those of the writer, since they would belong to younger persons». Finally, on March 17, 2015, the experts announced that «following the evidence from the historical, archaeological and anthropological tests, it has been possible to narrow down the location of the remains to a concentration of fragmented and deteriorated bones, corresponding to seventeen people, among which those of Cervantes and his wife are possibly found», although there was no shortage of other critical opinions, such as that of Professor Francisco Rico, who declared: «There is no such finding. We know the same as we knew before».

Physical appearance

Cervantes was portrayed in his time by the Sevillian painter Juan de Jáuregui.

Assembly hall of the Royal Spanish Academy.

In 1910 a portrait was discovered on which «Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra» was written at the top and «Iuan de Iauregui Pinxit, año 1600» at the bottom. Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Alejandro Pidal y Mon and Mariano de Cavia defended its authenticity, but Juan Pérez de Guzmán y Gallo, Ramón León Maínez, Raymond Foulché-Delbosc, James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Julio Puyol y Alonso and others questioned it. The portrait was hung in the assembly hall of the Royal Spanish Academy, beneath a portrait of Philip V.

After Cervantes's death many other portraits have appeared, considered false.

The only allusion to the Jáuregui portrait is found in the self-description the author placed at the beginning of his Exemplary Novels, published in 1613, when Cervantes was already 66 years old. The description reads as follows:

... This friend could well, as is the use and custom, have had me engraved and sculpted on the first page of this book, for the famous don Juan de Jáurigui would have given him my portrait, and with this my ambition would have been satisfied, as well as the desire of some who would like to know what face and figure belongs to one who dares to come out with so many inventions into the marketplace of the world, before the eyes of the people, putting beneath the portrait: This man you see here, with an aquiline face, chestnut hair, a smooth and open forehead, cheerful eyes and a hooked though well-proportioned nose; a silver beard, which not twenty years ago was golden, a large mustache, a small mouth, teeth neither small nor large, for he has only six, and those in bad condition and worse placed, for they do not match one another; a body between two extremes, neither large nor small, a lively complexion, fair rather than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very light of foot. This, I say, is the face of the author of La Galatea and of Don Quijote de la Mancha, and of the one who wrote the Viaje del Parnaso,... and other works that wander about astray and, perhaps, without the name of their owner. He is commonly called Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. He was a soldier for many years, and five and a half a captive, where he learned to have patience in adversity. In the naval battle of Lepanto he lost his left hand to an arquebus shot, a wound which, though it may seem ugly, he holds to be beautiful, having received it on the most memorable and lofty occasion that past centuries have seen, or future ones hope to see, fighting beneath the victorious banners of the son of the thunderbolt of war, Charles the Fifth, of happy memory.

From a letter by Lope de Vega it is also known that Cervantes used spectacles (pince-nez) to read, an instrument then so expensive that, when the lenses broke, he would not have them repaired.

Artistic achievements

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by Honoré Daumier. Oil on canvas. Neue Pinakothek.

Cervantes is extremely original. By parodying a genre that was beginning to decline, that of the books of chivalry, he created another extremely vigorous genre, the polyphonic novel, in which worldviews and points of view are superimposed until they rival reality itself in complexity, even resorting to metafictional games. At the time epic could also be written in prose, and with the precedent in the theater of Lope de Vega's scant respect for classical models, it fell to him, in sum, to forge the formula of realism in narrative, as it had been foreshadowed in Spain by an entire literary tradition since the Cantar de mio Cid, offering it to Europe, where Cervantes had more disciples than in Spain. The entire realist novel of the 19th century is marked by this mastery. On the other hand, another great masterpiece of Cervantes, the Exemplary Novels, shows the breadth of vision of his spirit and his desire to experiment with narrative structures. In this collection of novels the author experiments with the Byzantine novel (La española inglesa), the detective or crime novel (La fuerza de la sangre, El celoso extremeño), the Lucianic dialogue (El coloquio de los perros), the miscellany of maxims and witticisms (El licenciado Vidriera), the picaresque novel (Rinconete y Cortadillo), the narrative built on an anagnorisis (La gitanilla), etc.

Works of Cervantes

Novels

Miguel de Cervantes cultivated, though in his own original way, the narrative genres customary in the second half of the 16th century: the Byzantine novel, the pastoral novel, the picaresque novel, the Moorish novel, Lucianic satire and the miscellany. He renewed a genre, the novela, which was then understood in the Italian manner as a short story, free of rhetoric and of greater significance.

Chronological order:

• La Galatea (1585)
• El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605)
• Novelas ejemplares (1613)
• El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha (1615)
• Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617)

La Galatea

Main article: La Galatea

La Galatea was Cervantes's first novel, in 1585. It belongs to the pastoral subgenre (an «eclogue in prose», as the author defines it), triumphant in the Renaissance. Its first publication appeared when he was 38, under the title Primera parte de La Galatea. As in other novels of the genre (similar to La Diana by Jorge de Montemayor), the characters are idealized shepherds who recount their sorrows and express their feelings in an idyllic natural setting (locus amoenus).

La Galatea is divided into six books in which one main story and four secondary ones unfold, beginning at dawn and ending at nightfall, as in traditional eclogues, but, in the same way as in the bucolic poems of Virgil, each shepherd is in fact a mask representing a real person.

Don Quixote

Main article: Don Quixote

First edition of Quixote (1605).

Illustration by Gustave Doré.

It is the supreme novel of literature in the Spanish language. Its first part appeared in 1605 and met with great public acclaim. It was soon translated into the main European languages and is one of the most translated works in the world. In 1615 the second part was published.

At first, Cervantes's aim was to combat the popularity that books of chivalry had achieved, satirizing them with the story of a hidalgo from La Mancha who lost his sanity from reading them, believing himself to be a knight-errant. For Cervantes, the style of the chivalric novels was dreadful, and the stories they told were absurd. Despite this, as the work progressed the initial purpose was surpassed, and he came to build a work that reflected the society of his time and human behavior.

Cervantes was probably inspired by the Entremés de los romances, in which a farmer loses his mind because of his fondness for the heroes of the Romancero viejo.

Exemplary Novels

Main article: Exemplary Novels

La gitanilla (F. Coullaut-Valera, 1960). Detail of the monument to Cervantes in the Plaza de España in Madrid.

Between 1590 and 1612, Cervantes wrote a series of short novels (for the term novela was used at the time in the same sense as its etymon, the Italian novella, that is, what we now call a short novel or long story), which he would later gather in 1613 in the collection of the Exemplary Novels, given the great reception he had obtained with the first part of Quixote. They were initially called Novelas ejemplares de honestísimo entretenimiento.

Since there are two versions of Rinconete y Cortadillo and of El celoso extremeño, it is thought that Cervantes introduced into these novels some variations with moral, social and aesthetic purposes (hence the name «exemplary»). The more primitive version is found in the so-called manuscript of Porras de la Cámara, a miscellaneous collection of various literary works among which is a novel also usually attributed to Cervantes, La tía fingida. Moreover, some short novels are also inserted in Quixote, such as «El curioso impertinente» or a «Historia del cautivo» that contains autobiographical elements. In addition, another novel already composed is alluded to, Rinconete y Cortadillo.

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda

It is Cervantes's last work. It belongs to the subgenre of the Byzantine novel. In it he wrote the dedication to Pedro Fernández de Castro y Andrade, 7th Count of Lemos, on April 19, 1616, four days before his death, in which he bids farewell to life by quoting these verses:

With my foot already in the stirrup,
with the throes of death,
great lord, I write you this.

The author clearly sees that he has little life left and bids farewell to his friends; he has no illusions. Nevertheless, he wishes to live and finish works he has in his head, whose titles he writes: Las semanas del jardín, El famoso Bernardo and a second part of La Galatea. In the genre of the Byzantine novel, Cervantes says, he dares to compete with the model of the genre, Heliodorus.

The novel, inspired by the chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus and Olaus Magnus and by the fantasies of the Jardín de flores curiosas by Antonio de Torquemada, tells of the pilgrimage undertaken by Persiles and Sigismunda, two Nordic princes in love who pass themselves off as siblings, changing their names to Periandro and Auristela. Separated by all kinds of misadventures, they undertake a journey from northern Europe to Rome, passing through Spain, for the purpose of expiation before marrying. The work is important because it represents a certain distancing on the author's part from the realist formulas he had cultivated until then, since such extraordinary events appear as a woman jumping from a bell tower and escaping being dashed to pieces thanks to the parachute formed by her skirts, or characters who foretell the future. The main characters appear somewhat faded, and the work is in fact led by a group, which includes two Spaniards abandoned on a desert island, Antonio and his son, raised on the island as a sort of barbarian archer in contact with nature. The last passages of the book are little polished, since the author died before revising them. The work had some success and was reprinted several times, but it was forgotten in the following century.

Poetry

Cervantes strove to be a poet, although he came to doubt his ability, as he himself said before his death in Viaje del Parnaso:

I, who always toil and lie awake / so as to seem to have the poet's / gift that heaven would not grant me

Almost all the verses that were not included in his novels or plays have been lost or have not been identified; although he is often called the inventor of versos de cabo roto (verses with truncated endings), in reality it was not he. Cervantes declares that he composed a great number of ballads, among which he particularly valued one about jealousy. Indeed, around 1580 he took part, together with other great contemporary poets such as Lope de Vega, Góngora or Quevedo, in the imitation of the old ballads that gave rise to the Romancero nuevo, so called in contrast to the traditional and anonymous Romancero viejo of the 15th century.

He began his poetic work with the four compositions dedicated to the Exequias de la reina Isabel de Valois. Other poems were: A Pedro Padilla, A la muerte de Fernando de Herrera and A la Austriada de Juan Rufo. As a poet, however, he stands out in the comic and satirical vein, and his masterpieces are the sonnets Un valentón de espátula y greguesco and Al túmulo del rey Felipe II, whose last lines became famous:

He pulled down his hat, reached for his sword, / looked askance, went off, and nothing happened.

The Epístola a Mateo Vázquez is a forgery written by the 19th-century scholar Adolfo de Castro, as is the prose pamphlet El buscapié, a vindication of Quixote also written by this scholar. He established some innovations in metrics, such as the invention of the stanza called the ovillejo and the use of the sonnet with an estrambote.

Viaje del Parnaso

Cervantes's only long narrative poem is Viaje del Parnaso (1614), composed in terza rima. In it he praises and criticizes some Spanish poets. It is in fact an adaptation, as the author himself says, of the Viaggio di Parnaso (1578) by Cesare Caporali di Perugia or Perusinus. In eight chapters it narrates the author's own journey to Mount Parnassus aboard a galley captained by Mercury, on which some praised poets try to defend it against the poetasters or bad poets. Gathered on the mountain with Apollo, they emerge victorious from the battle and the protagonist returns home again. The work is completed with the Adjunta al Parnaso, in which Pancracio de Roncesvalles delivers to Cervantes two epistles from Apollo.

Theater

First folio of the Comedia del çerco de Numancia, manuscript 15000 of the National Library of Spain.

Given his economic hardships, the theater was Cervantes's great vocation; he declared that he had written «twenty or thirty plays», of which the titles of seventeen and the texts of eleven survive, not counting eight interludes and some others attributed to him. He writes that when he was a young man «his eyes would follow» the players' cart and that he attended the austere performances of Lope de Rueda. However, his success, which he did have, since his works were performed «without an offering of cucumbers», as he says in the prologue to his Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca representados, was short-lived in the face of the tremendous success of Lope de Vega's new dramatic formula, bolder and more modern than his own, which made the impresarios dismiss Cervantes's plays and prefer those of his rival. Cervantes's theater had a moral purpose, included allegorical characters and sought to abide by the three Aristotelian unities of action, time and place, whereas Lope's broke with those unities and was morally more shameless and uninhibited, as well as better and more variedly versified. Cervantes was never able to come to terms with this failure and showed his displeasure with the new Lopean theater in the first part of Quixote, whose theatrical character is well established owing to the abundance of dialogues and interlude-like situations interspersed in the plot. And it is, indeed, in the entremés that Cervantes's dramatic genius shines in all its splendor, so that it can be said that, together with Luis Quiñones de Benavente and Francisco de Quevedo, Cervantes is one of the finest authors of the genre, to which he brought greater depth of character, inimitable humor and greater depth and significance in its themes. That there was an interconnection between Cervantes's theatrical and narrative worlds is shown by the fact that, for example, the theme of the interlude El viejo celoso appears in the exemplary novel El celoso extremeño. At other times Sancho Panza-like characters appear, as in the interlude Elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo, whose protagonist is as good a taster or «mojón» of wines as Sancho. The Baroque theme of appearance and reality is shown in El retablo de las maravillas, which adapts the medieval tale by Don Juan Manuel (which Cervantes knew and had read in a contemporary edition) of the naked King and gives it a social content. El juez de los divorcios also touched on Cervantes's own life, and in it the conclusion is reached that «the worst agreement / is better than the best divorce». Also of interest are the interludes El rufián viudo, La cueva de Salamanca, El vizcaíno fingido and La guarda cuidadosa. For his interludes Cervantes adopts both prose and verse, and some others are attributed to him, such as Los habladores.

In his major pieces, Cervantes's theater has been unjustly little appreciated and staged, with some not premiered to date (2015), with the exception of the one that represents the most accomplished example of imitation of classical tragedies: El cerco de Numancia, also titled La destrucción de Numancia, which stages the patriotic theme of collective sacrifice in the face of the siege by the general Scipio Africanus and in which hunger takes the form of existential suffering, with allegorical figures added that prophesy a glorious future for Spain. It is a work in which Providence seems to have the same role that it had for Aeneas, escaped from burning Troy, in Virgil. Other plays have a similar patriotic inspiration, such as La conquista de Jerusalén, recently discovered. Other plays of his deal with the theme of captivity in Algiers, which the author suffered so directly and to which allusion is even made in a passage of his last work, the Persiles, such as Los baños de Argel, El trato de Argel (also titled Los tratos de Argel), La gran sultana and El gallardo español, in which some have also sought to find a denunciation of the situation of former soldiers like Cervantes himself. Of a more novelistic theme are La casa de los celos y selvas de Ardenia, El laberinto de amor and La entretenida. Pedro de Urdemalas and El rufián dichoso are picaresque in character.

Cervantes gathered his unperformed works in Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca representados; in addition, other works are preserved in manuscript: El trato de Argel, El gallardo español, La gran sultana and Los baños de Argel.

Lost and attributed works

Cervantes mentioned on several occasions plays of his that were performed successfully and whose texts have been lost, as well as other works he was writing or intended to write.

Among the unwritten or unfinished works are the second part of La Galatea, El famoso Bernardo (perhaps a book of chivalry about Bernardo del Carpio) and Las semanas del jardín. It is also possible that he thought of writing a continuation of the book of chivalry Belianís de Grecia.

The lost plays that Cervantes lists are La gran Turquesca, La batalla naval, La Jerusalem, which is now believed to be the recovered La conquista de Jerusalén; La Amaranta o la del mayo, El bosque amoroso, La única, La bizarra Arsinda and La confusa, which was still in the repertoire of the theater manager Juan Acacio in 1627. Also his was a play called El trato de Constantinopla y muerte de Selim.

There are various works that have been attributed to Cervantes, on varying grounds. Among the best known are:

• La tía fingida, a narrative in the style of the Exemplary Novels.
• Diálogo entre Cilenia y Selanio sobre la vida del campo, which is supposed to be a fragment of Cervantes's lost work Las semanas del jardín.
• Auto de la soberana Virgen de Guadalupe, an auto sacramental concerning the discovery of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
• The Topografía e historia general de Argel, a work edited and published in Valladolid in 1612 by Friar Diego de Haedo, Abbot of Frómista, which is known not to be his work. The work was actually written by the Portuguese cleric and friend of Cervantes, Doctor Antonio de Sosa, while he was a captive in Algiers between 1577 and 1581. The scholar Sosa was a close friend of the young Cervantes during the captivity of both in Barbary in the 1570s. Sosa was also Cervantes's first biographer; his account of the "episode of the cave", in which he describes Cervantes's second attempt to escape from his Algerian prison, appears in his Diálogo de los mártires de Argel.

In 1992, the Italian Hispanist Stefano Arata published the text of a manuscript of the play La conquista de Jerusalén por Godofre de Bullón. In his preliminary study Arata claims to have found Cervantes's lost La Jerusalén. This study was followed by another article in 1997, and since then it has been published virtually as an attributed work. In 2009 a critical edition was printed by Cátedra Letras Hispanas, and in 2010 Aaron M. Kahn published a theory of attribution showing that, of all the candidates for the authorship of this drama, Cervantes is without doubt the most likely. This play certainly stands out greatly among the others of its time, but, without conclusive proof, it remains only attributable to Cervantes.

Relationship with other figures

Wax figure of Cervantes in the Wax Museum of Madrid.

It is often said that Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died on the same day. However, the deaths would not have coincided in time, since, although the date was the same, Great Britain used the Julian calendar, while Spain had already adopted the Gregorian calendar, and when Shakespeare died, it was May 3 in Spain. This day, April 23, was named World Book Day by UNESCO in 1995.

What is known with certainty is that Shakespeare read the first part of the Quijote and wrote a play that takes up the character of Cardenio, who appears in the novel.

Cervantes not only knew the illustrious writers Francisco Quevedo and Lope de Vega, but they were neighbors on the same streets of the Barrio de las Letras in Madrid.

The Quijote is a book that has left its mark on many figures. Orson Welles, who spent periods of time in Spain, had great interest in making a film titled Don Quijote, and although he began it, he could not complete it, so since 1992 it has been shown as edited and finished by the director and screenwriter Jesús Franco.

The Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion learned Spanish in order to read Don Quijote de la Mancha in its original language, as did the Russian poet, playwright and novelist Alexander Pushkin.

Thought of Cervantes

Anti-establishment Cervantes

For the historian Emilio Sola, there are numerous signs in Cervantes's work that reveal him as an anti-establishment and even libertarian writer. According to Sola, the most common readings of Cervantes's work have left a "neutralized" Cervantes in which "his most powerful depth charges" remain hidden. These charges would be Cervantes's rejection of professional politics (he would regard politicians as "shameless and flattering courtiers"); the feminist protest of Marcela (who maintains that she was born free and that she is not responsible for the suicide of her harasser, Crisóstomo); or his comparison of modern enterprises with corsair galliots (money and corruption would be the new gods).

Cervantes and religion

Because of the implicit consequences in the novel El curioso impertinente, included in the Quijote, some authors have interpreted that Cervantes defended the "impossibility of religious debate or polemic between Christians and Muslims." This controversy between religions would be impossible because it cannot be carried out with "palpable, easy, intelligible, demonstrative, indubitable examples, with mathematical demonstrations that cannot be denied [···]". Because of this difficulty, pointed out by Cervantes, of Christians and Muslims being able to convince one another, a "skeptical, tolerant or peacemaking" stance is attributed to him as possible, one which the author himself would have adopted "without any kind of doubt and in spite of specific phrases or formulations [···] highlighted as a defense against possible suspicions."

For some Cervantes scholars, the author of the Quijote can be placed as a "precursor" of the iusnaturalism of the 17th century. This would be justified by the need, present in Cervantes according to Emilio Sola, for a "natural right/law above the different 'laws' of the classical religions."

Cervantes in film

• Cervantes, directed by Vincent Sherman (1969), with Francisco Rabal, Gina Lollobrigida, José Ferrer and Horst Buchholz in the role of Cervantes.
• Cervantes (TV series), Spanish television series, broadcast by TVE in 1981.
• Miguel and William, directed by Inés París (2007). Juan Luis Galiardo is the one who plays Miguel de Cervantes.

Honors

First Bank of Spain banknote dedicated to Cervantes (1878).

In 1916, Spain issued the first postage stamp with the image of Cervantes.

There are numerous awards, sculptures, buildings and institutions dedicated to the memory of Miguel de Cervantes.

Cervantes House

There are at least five Cervantes Houses: in Alcalá de Henares, in Valladolid, in Esquivias (Toledo), in Madrid, in Vélez-Málaga, in Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real) and in Cartagena (Spain).

Awards

• The Miguel de Cervantes Prize is the most important award for literature in the Spanish language.
• Cervantes Chico Prize, dedicated to children's and young adult literature.
• Cervantes Gastronomic Prize, dedicated to people from the world of cooking.
• Cervantes Trophy, a friendly football tournament held in Alcalá de Henares.

Monuments

Statue of the writer in the Plaza de Cervantes of Alcalá de Henares

Monument to Miguel de Cervantes in the Abelardo Sánchez Park of Albacete

• In Albacete: Monument to Miguel de Cervantes in the Abelardo Sánchez Park.
• In Alcalá de Henares: sculpture in the square that bears his name, in the Glorieta del Chorrillo, and in the Miguel de Cervantes Sports Center of the Paratrooper Brigade.
• In Madrid: Monument to Miguel de Cervantes in the Plaza de España, sculpture in the Plaza de las Cortes, sculpture at the National Library of Spain, and commemorative plaque of his burial.
• In Valladolid: Statue of Cervantes, Cervantes House Cervantes House (Valladolid).
• In Santiago de Compostela: Sculpture in the square that bears his name.
• In Seville: Monument to Cervantes consisting of a bronze half-length statue with a pedestal.
• In Ciudad Real: full-length seated sculpture in the square of the same name.
• In La Paz, Bolivia: sculpture in the Plaza España.

Bust of Cervantes erected in 1905 in Burgos

Bust of Miguel de Cervantes on the Paseo de los Poetas, El Rosedal, Buenos Aires.

Monument to Cervantes in Bucharest.

Cultural institutions

• Instituto Cervantes for the promotion and teaching of the Spanish language.
• Miguel de Cervantes European University in Valladolid.
• Teatro Cervantes. There are at least 14 in five different countries: in Spain (Almería; Málaga; Alcalá de Henares; Santa Eulalia, in Alicante; Béjar, in Salamanca; Jaén; Murcia; Petrel, in Alicante; Segovia; and Valladolid); in Morocco (Tangier); in Mexico (Teatro Cervantes (Guanajuato); in Chile (Teatro Cervantes (Putaendo); and in Argentina (Buenos Aires).
• Liceo de Cervantes; Colombian private Catholic boys' school.
• Instituto de Bachillerato Cervantes in Madrid.
• Miguel de Cervantes University in Santiago de Chile.
• Acción Cultural Miguel de Cervantes in Barcelona.
• Miguel de Cervantes Autonomous Cultural Body of Villarrobledo.
• Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library for the dissemination of Ibero-American culture.
• Miguel de Cervantes University Library of the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences of the Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid.
• Cine Cervantes of Seville.

Health institutions

• Miguel de Cervantes Health Center in Alcalá de Henares.

Publications

• Cervantes, Ibero-American magazine published between 1916-1920.
• Cervantes, journal of the Cervantes Society of America, since 1981.

Vessels

• ARA Cervantes (D-1), destroyer of the Argentine Navy between 1925 and 1961.
• Light cruiser Miguel de Cervantes belonging to the Spanish Navy, in service between 1928 and 1964.
• Brigantine-schooner Cervantes Saavedra launched in 1934.

Places

• Alameda de Cervantes in Soria.
• Avenida de Cervantes in Málaga, and in Meco.
• Barrio de Cervantes in Granada.
• Glorieta de Cervantes (Seville).
• Plaza Cervantes in Alcalá de Henares, Badajoz, Lérida and Santiago de Compostela.
• Piazzale Miguel Cervantes in Rome.

Celebrations

• Semana Cervantina is a festival held in several cities in Spain in honor of Cervantes.
• Festival Cervantino, an annual celebration in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

Coins

• Spanish euro coins.

Astronomy

• Cervantes, impact crater on Mercury.
• Cervantes, star formerly called Mu Arae, around which the planets Quijote, Dulcinea, Rocinante and Sancho orbit.

See also

• Spanish literature
• Spanish Baroque literature
• Golden Age

Bibliography

• Alonso A.: "Las prevaricaciones idiomáticas de Sancho", in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, II, 1948.
• Alvar, Carlos; Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino; Sevilla Arroyo, Florencio: Cervantes, cultura literaria, Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 2001. ISBN 84-88333-15-3.
• Álvarez Vigaray, Rafael: El derecho civil en las obras de Cervantes, Comares, Granada, Spain, 2001. ISBN 84-86509-16-5.
• Anderson, Ellen and Pontón Gijón, Gonzalo: La composición del Quijote, Rico, 1998.
• Arrabal, Fernando: Un esclavo llamado Cervantes, Espasa-Calpe, 1996.
• Astrana Marín, Luis: Vida ejemplar y heroica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Instituto Editorial Reus, 1958.
• Bajtin, Mijail: La cultura popular en la Edad Media y en el Renacimiento. El contexto de François Rabelais, Alianza, 1987.
• Braschi, Giannina: Cinco personajes fugaces en el camino de Don Quijote, Cuadernos Hispanoaméricanos, No. 328, 1977.
• Canavaggio, Jean: Cervantes, Espasa-Calpe, 2004.
• Castro, Américo: El pensamiento de Cervantes, Crítica, 1987.
• Castro, Américo: Hacia Cervantes, Taurus, 1967.
• Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quijote de la Mancha, 4th Centenary edition (RAE), Alfaguara, 2004.
• Close, Anthony J.: Cervantes: pensamiento, personalidad, cultura, Rico, 1998.
• Cotarelo y Mori, Emilio: Efemérides cervantinas ó sea resumen cronológico de la vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Tipografía de Revista de Archivos, 1905.
• Cotarelo y Mori, Emilio: Los puntos obscuros en la vida de Cervantes, Tipografía de Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos", 1916.
• Duran, Manuel and Rogg, Fay R.: Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote, Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-300-11022-7.
• Eisenberg, Daniel: La interpretación cervantina del Quijote, Compañía Literaria, 1995.
• Fernández Álvarez, Manuel: Cervantes visto por un historiador, Espasa-Calpe, 2005.
• Fernández de Navarrete, Martín: Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Atlas, 1943.
• Frenk, Margit: Entre la voz y el silencio (la lectura en tiempos de Cervantes), Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1997.
• Garcés, María Antonia: Cervantes en Argel: Historia de un cautivo, Madrid, 2005.
• García Alonso, Agustín: Antología "Cervantes" de poesía, Castrocalbón, Spain, 2001. ISBN 84-404-7944-1.
• González de Amezúa y Mayo, Agustín: Cervantes creador de la novela corta española, 2nd edition, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain, 2001. ISBN 84-00-05227-7.
• Iffland, James: De fiestas y aguafiestas: risa, locura e ideología en Cervantes y Avellaneda, Universidad de Navarra-Iberoamericana-Verbuert, 1999.
• Lázaro Carreter, Fernando: Las voces del Quijote, Rico, 1998.
• Maestro, Jesús G.: La escena imaginaria. Poética del teatro de Miguel de Cervantes, Vervuert, 2000.
• Maestro, Jesús G.: Crítica de los géneros literarios en el Quijote, Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2009.
• Maganto Pavón, E.: Isabel de Saavedra. Los enigmas en la vida de la hija de Cervantes, Editorial Complutense, Madrid 2013. ISBN 978-84-9938-155-8.
• Martín Morán, José Manuel: Cervantes: el juglar zurdo de la era Gutenberg, Cervantes, 1997.
• Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio: Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Espasa-Calpe, 1972.
• Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino: Cultura literaria de Miguel de Cervantes y la elaboración del Quijote, Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1905.
• Pellicer, Juan Antonio: Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, with the editions of the Quijote by Gabriel Sancha, Madrid, 1797-1800.
• Rey Hazas, Antonio and Sevilla Arroyo, Florencio: Cervantes: vida y literatura, Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1996.
• Riley, Edward C.: Teoría de la novela de Cervantes, Taurus, 1966.
• Riquer, Martín de: Para leer a Cervantes, Acantilado, 2003.
• Rodríguez Marín, Francisco: Estudios cervantinos, Atlas, 1952.
• Rodríguez-Luis, Julio: Novedad y ejemplo de las Novelas de Cervantes (essay), José Porrúa Turanzas, S.A. Librería-Editorial, Madrid, Spain, 2005. ISBN 84-7317-088-1.
• Rosales, Luis: Cervantes y la libertad, Gráficas Valera, 1960.
• Rosenblat, Ángel: La lengua del Quijote, Gredos, 1971.
• Sánchez, Alberto: Cervantes: bibliografía fundamental (1900-1959), C.S.I.C., 1961.
• Sánchez Moltó, M. V. (coordinator). Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). IV Centenario. Alcalá de Henares: IEECC; 2016. ISBN 978-84-88293-36-7
• Sola Castaño, Emilio (2016). Cervantes libertario: Cervantes antisistema o por qué los anarquistas aman a Cervantes (in español). Madrid/Granada: F.A.L. Fundación de Estudios Libertarios Anselmo Lorenzo / Corazones Blindados. ISBN 978-84-8686495-8.
• Zimic, Stanislav: El teatro de Cervantes, Castalia, 1992.
• Zimic, Stanislav: Las "Novelas Ejemplares" de Cervantes, Siglo XXI, 1996.
• Lucía Megías, José Manuel (2015). La juventud de Cervantes: una vida en construcción (in español). ISBN 978-84-414-3616-9.
• Jurado, Augusto (2007). Juan de la Cuesta, impresor de El Quijote por encargo del librero Francisco de Robles y breves noticias de ambos y del autor de la obra Miguel de Cervantes (in español). Comunicación Gráfica. ISBN 8461158385.

External links

• Miguel de Cervantes Portal at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library
• Website dedicated to Miguel de Cervantes. Archived January 19, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
• Cervantes at the University of Alcalá de Henares
• Digitized works of Miguel de Cervantes at the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica
• Buscando a Miguel de Cervantes Portal at the Memoriademadrid Digital Library.