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Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cervantes
(born Introduction

September Soldier and slave

29?, 1547, Civil servant and writer
Miguel de Cervantes Alcalá de
Publication of Don Quixote
Henares,
Miguel de Cervantes, engraving by E. Don Quixote and critical traditions
Mackenzie after Gregorio Ferro and Spain—died
April 22, Importance and influence
Fernando Selma; from The Imperial
Dictionary of Universal Biography 1616, Madrid) Translations
(1863).
was a Spanish
novelist,
playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in
Spanish literature. His novel Don Quixote has been translated, in full or in part, into more than 60 languages.
Editions continue regularly to be printed, and critical discussion of the work has proceeded unabated since the
18th century. At the same time, owing to their widespread representation in art, drama, and film, the figures of
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are probably familiar visually to more people than any other imaginary
characters in world literature. Cervantes was a great experimenter. He tried his hand in all the major literary
genres save the epic. He was a notable short-story writer, and a few of those in his collection of Novelas
exemplares (1613; Exemplary Stories) attain a level close to that of Don Quixote, on a miniature scale.

Cervantes was born some 20 miles (32 km) from Madrid, probably on September 29 (the day of San Miguel).
He was certainly baptized on October 9. He was the fourth of seven children in a family whose origins were
of the minor gentry but which had come down in the world. His father was a barber-surgeon who set bones,
performed bloodlettings, and attended lesser medical needs. The family moved from town to town, and little
is known of Cervantes’s early education. The supposition, based on a passage in one of the Exemplary Stories,
that he studied for a time under the Jesuits, though not unlikely, remains conjectural. Unlike most Spanish
writers of his time, including some of humble origin, he apparently did not go to a university. What is certain
is that at some stage he became an avid reader of books. The head of a municipal school in Madrid, a man
with Erasmist intellectual leanings named Juan López de Hoyos, refers to a Miguel de Cervantes as his
“beloved pupil.” This was in 1569, when the future author was 21, so—if this was the same Cervantes—he
must either have been a pupil-teacher at the school or have studied earlier under López de Hoyos. His first
published poem, on the death of Philip II’s young queen, Elizabeth of Valois, appeared at this time.

Soldier and slave

That same year he left Spain for Italy. Whether this was because he was the “student” of the same name
wanted by the law for involvement in a wounding incident is another mystery; the evidence is contradictory.
In any event, in going to Italy Cervantes was doing what many young Spaniards of the time did to further

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their careers in one way or another. It seems that for a time he served as chamberlain in the household of
Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva in Rome. However, by 1570 he had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish infantry
regiment stationed in Naples, then a possession of the Spanish crown. He was there for about a year before he
saw active service.

Relations with the Ottoman Empire under Selim II were reaching a crisis, and the Turks occupied Cyprus in
1570. A confrontation between the Turkish fleet and the naval forces of Venice, the papacy, and Spain was
inevitable. In mid-September 1571 Cervantes sailed on board the Marquesa, part of the large fleet under the
command of Don Juan de Austria that engaged the enemy on October 7 in the Gulf of Lepanto near Corinth.
The fierce battle ended in a crushing defeat for the Turks that was ultimately to break their control of the
Mediterranean. There are independent accounts of Cervantes’s conduct in the action, and they concur in
testifying to his personal courage. Though stricken with a fever, he refused to stay below and joined the thick
of the fighting. He received two gunshot wounds in the chest, and a third rendered his left hand useless for the
rest of his life. He always looked back on his conduct in the battle with pride. From 1572 to 1575, based
mainly in Naples, he continued his soldier’s life; he was at Navarino and saw action in Tunis and La Goleta.
He must also, when opportunity offered, have been familiarizing himself with Italian literature. Perhaps with a
recommendation for promotion to the rank of captain, more likely just leaving the army, he set sail for Spain
in September 1575 with letters of commendation to the king from the duque de Sessa and Don Juan himself.

On this voyage his ship was attacked and captured by Barbary pirates, and Cervantes, together with his
brother Rodrigo, was sold into slavery in Algiers, the centre of the Christian slave traffic in the Muslim world.
The letters he carried magnified his importance in the eyes of his captors. This had the effect of raising his
ransom price, and thus prolonging his captivity, while also, it appears, protecting his person from punishment
by death, mutilation, or torture when his four daring bids to escape were frustrated. His masters, the renegade
Dali Mami and later Hasan Paşa, treated him with considerable leniency in the circumstances, whatever the
reason. At least two contemporary records of the life led by Christian captives in Algiers at this time mention
Cervantes. He clearly made a name for himself for courage and leadership among the captive community. At
long last, in September 1580, three years after Rodrigo had earned his freedom, Miguel’s family, with the aid
and intervention of the Trinitarian friars, raised the 500 gold escudos demanded for his release. It was only
just in time, right before Hasan Paşa sailed for Constantinople (now Istanbul), taking his unsold slaves with
him. Not surprisingly, this, the most adventurous period of Cervantes’s life, supplied subject matter for several
of his literary works, notably the Captive’s tale in Don Quixote and the two Algiers plays, El trato de Argel
(“The Traffic of Algiers”) and Los baños de Argel (“The Bagnios [an obsolete word for “prisons”] of
Algiers”), as well as episodes in a number of other writings, although never in straight autobiographical form.
Civil servant and writer
Back in Spain, Cervantes spent most of the rest of his life in a
manner that contrasted entirely with his decade of action and
danger. He would be constantly short of money and in tedious
and exacting employment; it would be 25 years before he scored
a major literary success with Don Quixote. On his return home
he found that prices had risen and the standard of living for
Miguel de Cervantes
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Miguel de Cervantes, c. 1590. many, particularly those of the middle class, including his family,
had fallen. The euphoria of Lepanto was a thing of the past. Cervantes’s war record did not now bring the
recompense he expected. He applied unsuccessfully for several administrative posts in Spain’s American
empire. The most he succeeded in acquiring was a brief appointment as royal messenger to Oran, Algeria, in
1581. In vain he followed Philip II and the court to Lisbon in newly annexed Portugal.

About this time he had an affair with a young married woman named Ana de Villafranca (or Ana Franca de
Rojas), the fruit of which was a daughter. Isabel de Saavedra, Cervantes’s only child, was later brought up in
her father’s household. Late in 1584 he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, 18 years his junior. She had a
small property in the village of Esquivias in La Mancha. Little is known about their emotional relationship.
There is no reason to suppose that the marriage did not settle down into an adequate companionableness,
despite Cervantes’s enforced long absences from home. Neither is there any special reason to suppose that
Catalina was an inspiration or a model for characters in the poetry Cervantes was now writing or in his first
published fiction, La Galatea (1585; Galatea: A Pastoral Romance), in the newly fashionable genre of the
pastoral romance. The publisher, Blas de Robles, paid him 1,336 reales for it, a good price for a first book.
The dedication of the work to Ascanio Colonna, a friend of Acquaviva, was a bid for patronage that does not
seem to have been productive. Doubtless helped by a small circle of literary friends, such as the poet Luis
Gálvez de Montalvo, the book did bring Cervantes’s name before a sophisticated reading public. But the only
later editions in Spanish to appear in the author’s lifetime were those of Lisbon, 1590, and Paris, 1611. La
Galatea breaks off in mid-narrative; judging by his repeatedly expressed hopes of writing a sequel, Cervantes
evidently maintained a lasting fondness for the work.

Cervantes also turned his hand to the writing of drama at this time, the early dawn of the Golden Age of the
Spanish theatre. He contracted to write two plays for the theatrical manager Gaspar de Porras in 1585, one of
which, La confusa (“Confusion”), he later described as the best he ever wrote. Many years afterward he
claimed to have written 20 or 30 plays in this period, which, he noted, were received by the public without
being booed off the stage or having the actors pelted with vegetables. The number is vague; only two certainly
survive from this time, the historical tragedy of La Numancia (1580s; Numantia: A Tragedy) and El trato de
Argel (1580s; “The Traffic of Algiers”). He names nine plays, the titles of a few of which sound like the
originals of plays reworked and published years later in the collection Ocho comedias, y ocho entremeses
nuevos (1615; “Eight Plays and Eight New Interludes”). Fixed theatre sites were just becoming established in
the major cities of Spain, and there was an expanding market geared to satisfying the demands of a public
ever more hungry for entertainment. Lope de Vega was about to respond to the call, stamping his personal
imprint on the Spanish comedia and rendering all earlier drama, including that of Cervantes, old-fashioned or
inadequate by comparison. Though destined to be a disappointed dramatist, Cervantes went on trying to get
managers to accept his stage works. By 1587 it was clear that he was not going to make a living from
literature, and he was obliged to turn in a very different direction.

Cervantes became a commissary of provisions for the great Armada. Requisitioning corn and oil from
grudging rural communities was a thankless task, but it was at least a steady job, with a certain status. It took
him traveling all over Andalusia, an experience he was to put to good use in his writing. He was responsible
for finances of labyrinthine complexity, and the failure to balance his books landed him in prolonged and
repeated trouble with his superiors. There also was constant argument with municipal and church authorities,
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the latter of which more than once excommunicated him. The surviving documentation of the accountancy
and negotiations involved is considerable.

After the disastrous defeat of the Armada in 1588, Cervantes gravitated to Sevilla (Seville), the commercial
capital of Spain and one of the largest cities in Europe. In 1590 he applied to the Council of the Indies for any
one of four major crown posts vacant in Central and South America. His petition was curtly rejected.
Wrangles over his accounts and arrears of salary dragged on. He seems to have kept some contact with the
literary world; there is a record of his buying certain books, and he must have managed to find time for
reading. In 1592 he signed a contract to supply six plays to a theatrical manager, one Rodrigo Osorio. Nothing
came of this. His commissary work continued, and the litigation came to a head; in September 1592 he was
imprisoned for a few days in Castro del Río.

In 1594 Cervantes was in Madrid seeking a new post. He received an appointment that took him back to
Andalusia to collect overdue taxes. Although it was in effect a promotion, the job was no more rewarding than
the previous one and was similarly fraught with financial difficulties and confrontations. Cervantes was not by
temperament a businessman. Probably by mutual agreement the appointment was terminated in 1596. The
previous year he had won first prize (three silver spoons) in a poetry competition in Zaragoza. Back in Sevilla,
he likely started seriously writing stories at about this time, not to mention a wickedly satirical sonnet on the
conduct of the duque de Medina Sidonia, to be followed by one obliquely disrespectful of the recently
deceased king himself. Again he met with financial troubles. In the summer of 1597 discrepancies in his
accounts of three years previous landed him in the Crown Jail of Sevilla. He was confined until the end of
April 1598 and perhaps conceived there the idea of Don Quixote, as a remark in the first prologue suggests:

And so, what was to be expected of a sterile and uncultivated wit such as that which I possess if
not an offspring that was dried up, shriveled, and eccentric: a story filled with thoughts that
never occurred to anyone else, of a sort that might be engendered in a prison where every
annoyance has its home and every mournful sound its habitation?

Information about Cervantes’s life over the next four or five years is sparse. He had left Sevilla, and, perhaps
for a while in Esquivias and Madrid, later for certain in Valladolid (where the royal court established itself
from 1601 to 1606), he must have been writing the first part of Don Quixote. Early versions of two of his
stories, Rinconete y Cortadillo (“Rinconete and Cortadillo”) and El celoso extremeño (“The Jealous
Extremaduran”), found their way into a miscellaneous compilation, unpublished, made by one Francisco
Porras de la Cámara.
Publication of Don Quixote
In July or August 1604 Cervantes sold the rights of El ingenioso
hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (“The Ingenious Hidalgo Don
Quixote of La Mancha,” known as Don Quixote, Part I) to the
publisher-bookseller Francisco de Robles for an unknown sum.
License to publish was granted in September and the book came
out in January 1605. There is some evidence of its content’s
Miguel de Cervantes: Don being known or known about before publication—to, among
Quixote
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First edition of volume one of Miguel others, Lope de Vega, the vicissitudes of whose relations with
de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605). Cervantes were then at a low point. The compositors at Juan de
la Cuesta’s press in Madrid are now known to have been responsible for a great many errors in the text, many
of which were long attributed to the author.

The novel was an immediate success, though not as sensationally so as Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de
Alfarache, Part I, of 1599. By August 1605 there were two Madrid editions, two published in Lisbon, and one
in Valencia. There followed those of Brussels, 1607; Madrid, 1608; Milan, 1610; and Brussels, 1611. Part II,
Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha (“Second Part of the Ingenious Knight Don
Quixote of La Mancha”), came out in 1615. Thomas Shelton’s English translation of the first part appeared in
1612. The name of Cervantes was soon to be as well known in England, France, and Italy as in Spain.

The sale of the publishing rights, however, meant that Cervantes made no more financial profit on Part I of his
novel. He had to do the best he could with patronage. The dedication to the young duque de Béjar had been a
mistake. He had better fortune with two much more influential persons: the conde de Lemos, to whom he
would dedicate Part II and no less than three other works, and Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, archbishop
of Toledo. This eased his financial circumstances somewhat. However, it is apparent that he would have liked
a securer place in the pantheon of the nation’s writers than he ever achieved during his lifetime—he wanted a
reputation comparable to that enjoyed by Lope de Vega or the poet Luis de Góngora, for example. His sense
of his own marginal position may be deduced from his Viage del Parnaso (1614; Voyage to Parnassus), two
or three of the later prefaces, and a few external sources. Nevertheless, relative success, still-unsatisfied
ambition, and a tireless urge to experiment with the forms of fiction ensured that, at age 57, with less than a
dozen years left to him, Cervantes was just entering the most productive period of his career.

No graciousness descended on Cervantes’s domestic life. A stabbing incident in the street outside the house in
Valladolid, in June 1605, led ridiculously to the whole household’s arrest. When they later followed the court
to Madrid, he continued to be plagued by litigation over money and now, too, by domestic difficulties. The
family lodged in various streets over the next few years before finally settling in the Calle de León. Like a
number of other writers of the day, Cervantes nursed hopes of a secretarial appointment with the conde de
Lemos when, in 1610, the conde was made viceroy of Naples; once more Cervantes was disappointed. He had
joined a fashionable religious order, the Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament, in 1609, and four years later
he became a Franciscan tertiary, which was a more serious commitment. Students of Cervantes know, too, of
some increased involvement in the literary life of the capital in the form of his attendance at the Academia
Selvaje, a kind of writers’ salon, in 1612.

The next year, the 12 Exemplary Stories were published. The prologue contains the only known verbal
portrait of the author:

of aquiline countenance, with dark brown hair, smooth clear brow, merry eyes and hooked but
well-proportioned nose; his beard is silver though it was gold not 20 years ago; large moustache,
small mouth with teeth neither big nor little, since he has only six of them and they are in bad
condition and worse positioned, for they do not correspond to each other; the body between two

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extremes, neither tall nor short; a bright complexion, more pale than dark, somewhat heavy in
the shoulder and not very light of foot.

Cervantes’s claim in this prologue to be the first to write original novellas (short stories in the Italian manner)
in Castilian is substantially justified. Their precise dates of composition are in most cases uncertain. There is
some variety in the collection, within the two general categories of romance-based stories and realistic ones.
El coloquio de los perros (“Colloquy of the Dogs,” Eng. trans. in Three Exemplary Novels [1952]), a quasi-
picaresque novella, with its frame tale El casamiento engañoso (“The Deceitful Marriage”), is probably
Cervantes’s most profound and original creation next to Don Quixote. In the 17th century the romantic stories
were the more popular; James Mabbe chose precisely these for the selective English version of 1640.
Nineteenth- and 20th-century taste preferred the realistic ones, but by the turn of the 21st century the others
were receiving again something like their critical due.

In 1614 Cervantes published Viage del Parnaso, a long allegorical poem in mock-mythological and satirical
vein, with a postscript in prose. It was devoted to celebrating a host of contemporary poets and satirizing a
few others. The author there admitted that writing poetry did not come easily to him. But he held poetry in the
highest esteem as a pure art that should never be debased. Having lost all hope of seeing any more of his plays
staged, he had eight of them published in 1615, together with eight short comic interludes, in Ocho comedias,
y ocho entremeses nuevos. The plays show no shortage of inventiveness and originality but lack real control
of the medium. The interludes, however, are reckoned among the very best of their kind.

It is not certain when Cervantes began writing Part II of Don Quixote, but he had probably not gotten much
more than halfway through by late July 1614. About September a spurious Part II was published in Tarragona
by someone calling himself Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, an unidentified Aragonese who was an admirer
of Lope de Vega. The book is not without merit, if crude in comparison with its model. In its prologue the
author gratuitously insulted Cervantes, who not surprisingly took offense and responded, though with relative
restraint if compared with the vituperation of some literary rivalries of the age. He also worked some criticism
of Fernández de Avellaneda and his “pseudo” Quixote and Sancho into his own fiction from chapter 59
onward.

Don Quixote, Part II, emerged from the same press as its predecessor late in 1615. It was quickly reprinted in
Brussels and Valencia, 1616, and Lisbon, 1617. Parts I and II first appeared in one edition in Barcelona, 1617.
There was a French translation of Part II by 1618 and an English one by 1620. The second part capitalizes on
the potential of the first, developing and diversifying without sacrificing familiarity. Most people agree that it
is richer and more profound.

In his last years Cervantes mentioned several works that apparently did not get as far as the printing press, if
indeed he ever actually started writing them. There was Bernardo (the name of a legendary Spanish epic
hero), the Semanas del jardín (“Weeks in the Garden”; a collection of tales, perhaps like Boccaccio’s
Decameron), and the continuation to his Galatea. The one that was published, posthumously in 1617, was his
last romance, Los trabaios de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia setentrional (“The Labours of Persiles and
Sigismunda: A Northern Story”). In it Cervantes sought to renovate the heroic romance of adventure and love
in the manner of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus. It was an intellectually prestigious genre destined to be very

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successful in 17th-century France. Intended both to edify and to entertain, the Persiles is an ambitious work
that exploits the mythic and symbolic potential of romance. It was very successful when it appeared; there
were eight Spanish editions in two years and French and English translations in 1618 and 1619, respectively.

In the dedication, written three days before he died, Cervantes, “with a foot already in the stirrup,” movingly
bade farewell to the world. Clear-headed to the end, he seems to have achieved a final serenity of spirit. He
died in 1616, almost certainly on April 22, not on the 23rd as had been traditionally thought. The burial
certificate indicates that the latter was the day he was buried, in the convent of the Discalced Trinitarians in
the Calle de Cantarranas (now the Calle de Lope de Vega). The exact spot is not marked. No will is known to
have survived.

Edward C. Riley
Don Quixote and critical traditions
Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote has been variously interpreted as a parody of chivalric romances, an
epic of heroic idealism, a commentary on the author’s alienation, and a critique of Spanish imperialism. While
the Romantic tradition downplayed the novel’s hilarity by transforming Don Quixote into a tragic hero,
readers who view it as a parody accept at face value Cervantes’s intention to denounce the popular yet
outdated romances of his time. Don Quixote certainly pokes fun at the adventures of literary knights-errant,
but its plot also addresses the historical realities of 17th-century Spain. Although no proof has been found, it
is likely that Cervantes was a converso (of Jewish descent), given his father’s ties to the medical profession,
the family’s peripatetic existence, and the government’s denial of his two requests for posts in the Indies.
However, the author’s nuanced irony, his humanistic outlook, and his comic genius contrast notably with the
melancholy, didactic tone attributed to many other Spanish converso writers.

Cervantes’s strikingly modern narrative instead gives voice to a dazzling assortment of characters with
diverse beliefs and perspectives. His inclusion of many differing opinions constitutes a provision called
heteroglossia (“multiple voices”) by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who deemed it essential to
the development of the modern novel. Don Quixote’s comic edge illustrates another of Bakhtin’s concepts,
carnivalization, which favours the playfully positive aspects of the body over an ascetic rejection of the
carnal. Sancho Panza’s rotund shape—his name means “holy belly”—offsets Don Quixote’s elongated,
emaciated frame, and together they recall the medieval folkloric figures of an expansive, materialist Carnival
and a lean, self-denying Lent. Yet, far from depicting illusion and reality as equal opposites, their relationship
undergoes constant change: if Don Quixote assumes the lead in Part I, Sancho overtakes his master and
secures his own independence in Part II.

The differences between Part I and Part II demonstrate Cervantes’s awareness of the power of the printed
word. Don Quixote’s history began with his obsessive reading of chivalric romances; in Part II, he realizes
that his adventures are eagerly read and discussed by others. The knight’s visit in Part II to a Barcelona
printing shop, where he finds a spurious Part II in press and denounces it as injurious to the innocent reader
and to his own rightful authorship (since he stands to lose royalties from its sales), underscores the cultural
and economic impact of books of fiction. Despite his own books’ popularity, Cervantes earned little from their
sales. Nonetheless, his innovative reworkings of literary forms—from the pastoral novel La Galatea and

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exemplary short stories to the acclaimed novel Don Quixote and his one serious attempt at romance, the
posthumously published Persiles y Sigismunda—show just how well Cervantes understood not only the 17th-
century marketplace but the social effect of literature.
Importance and influence
Cervantes’s influence resonates in the popular term “quixotic”
and the immediately recognizable forms of his two major
protagonists, whose adventures reappear continually across the
cultural landscape in theatre, film, opera, ballet, and even comic
Cervantes statue books. No study of the novel can ignore the author or his most

Statue of Miguel de Cervantes.

famous work: the Hungarian theorist Gyorgy Lukács considers
Don Quixote “the first great novel of world literature,” while the
Mexican author Carlos Fuentes calls Cervantes the “founding
father” of Latin American literature. The novel form, according
to some late 20th-century critics, has no one origin but began to
exist in different countries at different times and for different
reasons. Nonetheless, Cervantes’s novel, with its innovations to
Spanish literature, is outstanding in its creation of a new
Don Quixote ballet
worldview. It is not coincidental that the writers most influenced
Don Quixote ballet, Teresa Carreño by Cervantes—Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett,
Theatre, Caracas.
to name only British novelists—initiated radical changes in their
own literary traditions.

By illuminating the many differences in and surrounding his

world, Cervantes placed in doubt the previous ways of
portraying that world, whether those were literary or historical.
Indeed, one of Don Quixote’s main tenets is that fiction and
historical truth are frequently indistinguishable, as both are
dependent on the reader’s perception. Cervantes’s approach is
Don Quixote and Miguel de frequently dubbed “dualistic” since he often opted to express
Cervantes
diverse modes of thought through the pairing of opposites, as
Bronze statues of Don Quixote and with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the talking dogs of
Sancho Panza in front of a stone
“Colloquy of the Dogs,” or the image of the baciyelmo
sculpture of Miguel de Cervantes,
Madrid, Spain.
(“basinhelmet,” as the narrator describes the bright object worn
on a distant rider’s head). Representing the opposites of reality
and illusion, baciyelmo is Sancho’s brass basin but Don Quixote’s gold helmet.

The split depicted within Cervantes’s characters—Don Quixote’s “reasoned unreason” for example—has
sometimes been attributed to the author’s intended contrast of reality and illusion (as well as of other
opposites). The question of whether the self-proclaimed knight stands for an idealism never fully attainable or
for a laughably meaningless madness continues to shadow interpretations of Don Quixote, as it has since its
introduction by the German Romantics. Opposition between idealism and realism as a leading theme in

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Cervantes’s fiction, including the Exemplary Stories and his plays, remained influential as late as the mid-20th
century.

Yet Cervantes was characteristically ambiguous on these issues, and this ambiguity inspired criticism of the
later 20th century to reconsider previous judgments on his literary prominence. Translated almost
immediately into English, French, and Italian, Don Quixote was viewed primarily as a comic work or a satire
of Spanish customs. Ironically, it was the German Romantics, selectively reading Don Quixote as a tragic
hero, who granted his author world standing. In contrast, 19th-century Spanish academics dismissed
Cervantes’s accomplishments, even though his style and language set the standard for modern Castilian. Not
until the 20th century did the acclaim of foreign critics and Spanish expatriates finally rehabilitate Cervantes
in his own country.

When Freudian psychology became popular, it engendered critical interest in the psychological force of
Cervantes’s fiction. European criticism was predisposed early on toward psychoanalytical approaches, which
stressed the Spanish author’s duality and ambiguity. From the 1970s, French and American criticism viewed
Cervantes as a fragmented character not unlike his protagonists. Both the author and his characters have been
perceived as psychoanalytical cases, with Don Quixote’s madness attributed to his “middle-age crisis” and
Cervantes’s treatment of several characters to his “subconscious sympathies.” As these critics worked to
reveal unexpressed desires, they also analyzed the roles played by women. Feminist and gender studies have
increasingly looked to Cervantes for his perceptive approach to portraying the women of 17th-century Spain.
Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Cervantes expressed great empathy toward women. Although he
stops short of a “feminist” position, numerous female characters such as Marcela and Dorotea in Don Quixote
and Isabela Castrucho in Persiles y Sigismunda speak forcefully in defense of women’s rights.

Similarly, criticism in the late 20th century began to focus on Cervantes’s preoccupations with contemporary
economic and historical events. The 1609 expulsion of the Moriscos (converted Moors), the correct
governance of Spain’s overseas colonies, and the exploitation of African slaves are often considered as
covertly polemical topics for Don Quixote’s alert readers. The Exemplary Stories and plays have been
plumbed for their engagement with political and economic factors. Documented in Don Quixote and Persiles
y Sigismunda, Cervantes’s knowledge of and interest in the New World are central to his perception of a
different world, one equally as cross-cultural and multilingual as that of the 21st century.

Anne J. Cruz
Translations
Among the many translations of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha and Segunda parte del
ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha are the early The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-
Errant Don Quixote of the Mancha (1612–20), translated by Thomas Shelton; and The History and
Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote (1755, reissued 1997), translated by Tobias Smollett. A modern
version best adapted to 17th-century English is presented in Don Quixote: The Ormsby Translation Revised,
Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism (1981), edited by Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas. Don Quijote: A
New Translation, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism (1999), translated by Burton Raffel and edited by
Diana de Armas Wilson, is at times disconcertingly modern but well-paced and accurate.

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14/08/2024, 10:20 Miguel de Cervantes -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

For Primera parte de la Galatea there are two older translations: Galatea: A Pastoral Romance (1867),
translated by Gordon Willoughby James Gyll, and Galatea (1903), translated by H. Oelsner and A.B. Welford.

The classic translation of Novelas exemplares is Exemplarie Novells (1640), translated by Don Diego Puede-
Ser (James Mabbe). A fine modern translation is Exemplary Stories (1972, reprinted in 1984), translated by
C.A. Jones.

A good modern translation, without annotations, of Los trabaios de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia
setentrional is The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (1989), translated by Celia Richmond
Weller and Clark A. Colahan.

As for theatre, an older translation of La Numancia is Numantia: A Tragedy (1870), translated by Gordon
Willoughby James Gyll. For Ocho comedias, y ocho entremeses nuevos, there is S. Griswold Morley’s
translation, The Interludes of Cervantes (1948), and the excellent Interludes (1964), translated by Edwin
Honig.

Cervantes’s satirical poem, Viage del Parnaso, has no 20th-century translations. Two 19th-century translations
are: Voyage to Parnassus (1870), translated by Gordon Willoughby James Gyll, and Journey to Parnassus
(1883), translated by James Gibson. Some of his burlesque sonnets have been translated in Adrienne Martín’s
Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet (1991).

Edward C. Riley Anne J. Cruz

Citation Information
Article Title: Miguel de Cervantes
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 01 May 2024
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/biography/Miguel-de-Cervantes
Access Date: August 14, 2024

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