Miguel de Cervantes

The life and works of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra form one of the great paradoxes in the history of literature. He is universally recognized as the founding father of the modern novel, the author of a book so influential that an entire language is named after him, yet he spent almost the whole of his earthly existence in obscurity, poverty, and disappointment. He was a soldier before he was a writer, a slave before he was famous, a tax collector and a failed playwright and a debtor who saw the inside of more than one prison cell. He was past the age of fifty-seven when the book that would make him immortal first appeared in print, and even then the money and the security he had chased for decades never truly arrived. To ask what Miguel de Cervantes is famous for is to receive a deceptively simple answer, Don Quixote, and then to discover behind that answer a life of almost unbelievable hardship, adventure, courage, and stubborn creative will.

Cervantes wrote a great deal besides the novel that carries his fame. He produced pastoral romance, a dozen polished shorter fictions, a long allegorical poem, plays both serious and comic, and a final adventure-romance completed on his deathbed. But it is the two-part history of the deluded country gentleman who reads too many books of chivalry and rides out to revive a vanished age of knighthood that changed the course of Western storytelling forever. Don Quixote is commonly called the first modern novel, and with good reason. In it Cervantes invented, or perfected, nearly every technique that later novelists would treat as their birthright, the unreliable narrator, the play of fiction within fiction, the deep interior life of characters who change and grow, the mingling of comedy and pathos, the ironic distance between an author and his story. Writers from three centuries and dozens of countries have acknowledged the debt.

This is the story of the man who wrote that book, told as far as the surviving records allow. Cervantes left no diary and few personal letters, and much of what is known about him comes from dry legal documents, ransom papers, baptismal registers, tax accounts, and the testimony of others. Yet from these fragments emerges a portrait of remarkable consistency, a man of unshakeable good humor, generous and forgiving, brave to the point of recklessness, endlessly resilient in the face of misfortune, and possessed of a wisdom about human folly that he could only have earned by living through a great deal of it himself. The biography of Cervantes is, in the end, the necessary prologue to his masterpiece, for the patience, irony, and tenderness that fill the pages of Don Quixote were forged in the events of an extraordinarily difficult life.

The Spain of Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes was born into the most powerful nation on earth and lived to watch its first long decline. The Spain of his lifetime, the realm assembled by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella and expanded by their Habsburg heirs Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, was the center of an empire on which, in the famous phrase, the sun never set. Spanish galleons carried the silver of the Americas across the Atlantic; Spanish soldiers garrisoned the Low Countries and Italy; Spanish bishops and inquisitors guarded the purity of the faith; and Spanish ambition reached from the Pacific shore of Mexico to the spice islands of the East. To be a Spaniard in the middle of the sixteenth century was to belong, at least in theory, to the master nation of Christendom.

The reality on the ground was more complicated and far harsher. The wealth that poured in from the New World passed through Spain without enriching it, draining away to pay for endless wars and the interest on the crown's enormous debts. The kingdom was repeatedly bankrupt. Prices rose relentlessly while wages lagged, and ordinary Spaniards, especially in the dry interior of Castile where Cervantes grew up, knew hunger and uncertainty as constant companions. The country bristled with hidalgos, members of the lesser nobility who possessed the precious status of gentleman but often not the means to live like one, men whose pride forbade them to work with their hands and whose poverty forbade them anything else. Don Quixote himself is exactly such a figure, and Cervantes understood that particular brand of genteel desperation from the inside.

Spain was also a society obsessed with religious and racial purity. The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the forced conversion of the Muslims had left the country full of conversos and Moriscos, descendants of converts whose sincerity was perpetually suspected. Limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, became a prerequisite for offices, honors, and entry into many institutions, and the Inquisition watched over orthodoxy with a vigilance that shaped what could be thought, printed, and said. At the same time this was the golden age of Spanish art and letters, the age of the painter El Greco, the mystics Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, the dramatist Lope de Vega, and the poets Góngora and Quevedo. Cervantes lived his whole life inside this paradox of a brilliant culture flowering on top of a struggling and anxious society, and the tension between glittering ideals and grubby realities runs through every page he wrote.

Looming over the western Mediterranean throughout his youth was the rival empire of the Ottoman Turks. The struggle between Habsburg Spain and the Ottoman sultans for control of the inland sea was the defining geopolitical conflict of the era, fought with great fleets of galleys and with the relentless raiding of corsairs who carried Christian captives off to the slave markets of North Africa. That conflict would not remain an abstraction for the young Cervantes. It would maim his body at one of history's most celebrated naval battles and then, a few years later, swallow five years of his life in a prison in Algiers. The wars of his century were not, for him, a backdrop. They were the central experience of his early manhood, and they left their mark on everything he became.

Early Life and Family Origins

Miguel de Cervantes was born in the autumn of 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a university town some twenty miles to the northeast of Madrid, in the heart of Castile, in the kingdom of Spain. No record of his birth survives, but his baptism is documented. He was baptized on the ninth of October, 1547, in the parish church of Santa María la Mayor, and since it was a common custom to name a child for the saint on whose feast day he was born, and since the twenty-ninth of September is the feast of the archangel Michael, biographers have long supposed that Cervantes came into the world on or about that day. He himself never recorded the date, an omission entirely characteristic of a man who left the world to guess at the details of his private life.

The family into which he was born was respectable but poor, and it was burdened with a history of decline. The Cervantes line could point to ancestors of some distinction, and the surname Saavedra, which Miguel would later add to his own, carried an aura of old Castilian gentility. But by the time of Miguel's birth the family fortunes had long since dwindled. His paternal grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, had been a lawyer of real ability who had risen to positions of trust and even served as a senior magistrate, yet his career had been turbulent and his personal life stormy, and the security he achieved did not pass down to his descendants. The Cervantes family belonged to that large and uncomfortable class of Spaniards who possessed the memory of status without the substance of wealth.

Miguel's father was Rodrigo de Cervantes, a man whose working life embodied the family's reduced circumstances. Rodrigo practiced as a barber-surgeon, a trade that in the sixteenth century combined the cutting of hair with the setting of bones, the dressing of wounds, the letting of blood, and a range of minor medical procedures. It was an honest and useful occupation, but it was a craft, a thing done with the hands, and as such it sat awkwardly with the family's pretensions to gentle birth. Rodrigo was, moreover, hard of hearing, a disability that cannot have helped him in a trade requiring the confidence of clients, and he was chronically short of money. More than once in Miguel's childhood the family's goods were seized for debt, and Rodrigo himself was at one point imprisoned by creditors.

Miguel's mother was Leonor de Cortinas, a woman from a family of small landowners in the village of Arganda, near Madrid. The surviving records say little about her directly, but what they do reveal is the portrait of a determined and capable woman who would later play a crucial role in the most desperate episode of her son's life. It would be Leonor, scraping together money and petitioning the authorities, who labored hardest to free Miguel from captivity in Algiers. Whatever the strains of poverty, the Cervantes household seems to have been a close one, and Miguel grew up surrounded by a large family.

He was the fourth of seven children. His brothers and sisters included an elder sister, Andrea, who would prove a resourceful and loyal ally throughout his life; another sister, Luisa, who entered a convent and became a Carmelite nun; a younger sister, Magdalena; and a younger brother, Rodrigo, who would follow Miguel into soldiering, share his captivity in Algiers, and remain his closest companion in arms. The family was held together by mutual loyalty and by the constant, grinding effort to stay afloat. From his earliest years Miguel de Cervantes knew what it was to belong to a household perpetually one misfortune away from ruin, and that knowledge, absorbed in childhood, never left him.

The Shadows in the Record

Anyone who sets out to write the life of Miguel de Cervantes works in a strange half-light. The man who created the most fully and intimately known characters in the history of fiction left, of his own self, only the dimmest of traces. He kept no diary that survives. He wrote almost no personal letters that have come down to us. He produced no memoir. Nearly everything that is securely known about his life comes from cold administrative paper, baptismal and marriage registers, ransom contracts, military pay records, tax accounts, lawsuits, and the depositions of witnesses. From these dry documents a skeleton of dates and places can be assembled, but the living man must be guessed at, inferred from the spaces between the records and from the spirit that breathes through his books.

The uncertainty reaches even to the most basic facts. For a long time after his death the very birthplace of Cervantes was disputed, and several Spanish towns competed for the honor of having produced him, with claims advanced on behalf of Madrid, Seville, Esquivias, Alcázar de San Juan, and others. The question was settled only generations later, in the eighteenth century, when scholars patiently searching the parish registers found and identified the baptismal entry of October 1547 in the church of Santa María la Mayor in Alcalá de Henares. Since then Alcalá has been honored without challenge as the town that gave the world Cervantes, but the long confusion is a useful reminder of how thin the documentary record really is.

A deeper and still unresolved scholarly debate concerns the ancestry of Cervantes. Some influential scholars of the twentieth century, most notably the historian Américo Castro, argued that Cervantes descended from conversos, families of Jewish origin who had been converted, often under pressure, to Christianity. The evidence offered for this is entirely circumstantial, the family's involvement in trades such as medicine, cloth, and surgery that were often associated with converso families, certain turns of attitude, and above all the way Cervantes's writing treats the Spanish obsession with purity of blood and inherited honor with an irony so pointed that some have read it as the irony of an outsider. The hypothesis can be neither proved nor disproved on the surviving evidence, and it remains genuinely contested. What is beyond dispute is that Cervantes wrote about the persecuted and suspected minorities of his country, the Moriscos, the conversos, the wandering Roma, with a breadth of human sympathy that was rare in his time and place.

There are, finally, simple blank spaces, years for which the record falls almost silent and the biographer can only conjecture, the gap between the early poems of the late 1560s and the documented arrival in Italy, the exact movements of the years just after the return from Algiers, the precise nature of the work and the wanderings of certain seasons. The effect of all these shadows is a curious one. We possess the inner life of Don Quixote and of Sancho Panza in overwhelming, inexhaustible detail, and the inner life of the man who imagined them hardly at all. Almost everything personal we have of Cervantes, we have because he chose, glancingly and with characteristic good humor, to slip it into the prologues of his books and into the fiction itself. He hid himself, and then left his self-portrait scattered, in fragments, through his work.

A Wandering Childhood

The childhood of Miguel de Cervantes was a childhood without a fixed home. Because Rodrigo de Cervantes could never establish a settled and prosperous practice, the family moved repeatedly in search of work and in flight from debt, dragging their few possessions from town to town across central and southern Spain. This restless, uprooted boyhood gave the future novelist something that no university could have provided, an intimate, ground-level knowledge of the Spanish kingdom in all its variety, its roads and inns, its market towns and city quarters, its dialects and trades and social types. The Spain that fills the pages of Don Quixote, observed with such loving and exact particularity, was first observed by a boy traveling its dusty highways in a barber-surgeon's struggling household.

The family's movements can be traced, if only roughly, through surviving documents. In 1551, when Miguel was about four, the Cervantes household left Alcalá de Henares for Valladolid, then one of the principal cities of Castile and frequently the seat of the royal court. It was in Valladolid that Rodrigo's financial troubles reached an early crisis; he was jailed for debt and the family's goods were embargoed. By the later 1550s the family had moved again, this time to the great southern city of Córdoba, where Rodrigo's own father, the old lawyer Juan de Cervantes, had connections. There the young Miguel may have received some of his first formal schooling.

It is likely, though not certain, that Cervantes attended a school run by the Jesuits during the family's southern years. The Society of Jesus, founded only a few years before his birth, had quickly become the most dynamic educational force in Catholic Europe, and its colleges offered a rigorous grounding in Latin grammar, rhetoric, and the classics. In one of his later works Cervantes wrote with evident warmth of a Jesuit schooling, praising the order's teachers, and many scholars take this as a veiled memory of his own boyhood. Whatever the precise institutions, it is clear that the young Cervantes acquired a real if irregular education, a love of reading that amounted to a passion, and a familiarity with both the learned and the popular literature of his day.

By the middle of the 1560s the family had moved north again, and by 1566 the Cervantes household had settled, for a time, in Madrid. The choice was significant. In 1561 King Philip the Second had fixed his court permanently in Madrid, transforming a modest town into the administrative heart of a world empire, and the city drew to itself the ambitious, the hopeful, and the desperate from every corner of Spain. For a young man of literary inclination, Madrid offered the stimulation of a place where books were printed, plays were staged, and reputations were made. It was here that the first documentary trace of Cervantes the writer appears.

In 1567 a respected humanist scholar named Juan López de Hoyos was commissioned to oversee a memorial volume marking the death of Philip the Second's young queen, Isabel de Valois, who had died in 1568. The volume, published in 1569, included several poems by pupils of López de Hoyos, and among them were verses by Miguel de Cervantes, whom the editor warmly described as his dear and beloved pupil. These poems are the earliest of Cervantes's writings to survive, and they prove that by his early twenties he had attached himself to literary circles and was being encouraged by an established teacher. They are juvenile and conventional, but they mark the true beginning of a literary career, and they suggest that Cervantes was being recognized as a young man of promise.

Education and the Road to Italy

For all the promise of those early verses, the next phase of Cervantes's life remains the most shadowy and the most debated. Sometime around 1569, when he was about twenty-one or twenty-two, Miguel de Cervantes left Spain for Italy, and the circumstances of his departure have never been fully resolved. The most dramatic explanation rests on a legal document of September 1569, in which the Spanish crown ordered the arrest of a certain Miguel de Cervantes who had wounded a man named Antonio de Sigura in a duel in Madrid. The sentence prescribed for the offender was severe, the public cutting off of the right hand and ten years of exile. If this Miguel de Cervantes was indeed the future novelist, then his flight to Italy was the flight of a fugitive escaping a brutal punishment.

The identification is plausible but cannot be proved beyond doubt, for the name was not uncommon. What is certain is that by the end of 1569 Cervantes was in Rome, and that he had entered the service of Giulio Acquaviva, a young Italian nobleman and rising churchman who would soon be made a cardinal. Cervantes served in Acquaviva's household, probably in the capacity of a chamberlain or gentleman attendant, and although the position was modest it placed him at the very center of Renaissance Italy. For a young Spaniard with a hunger for literature and beauty, Italy in these years was an education in itself.

The impact of Italy on Cervantes was profound and lasting. He immersed himself in the Italian language and in Italian literature, reading the great poets of the Renaissance, Ariosto, whose vast chivalric epic Orlando Furioso would echo through Don Quixote, and the writers of Italian prose tales whose example would shape his own shorter fiction. He absorbed the visual splendor of Italian cities, the painting and architecture, the elegance of Italian manners and Italian thought. Decades later, in his fiction, he would return again and again to Italian settings, and he would write of the country with the affectionate familiarity of a man recalling a place where he had once been young and free. Italy gave Cervantes a second cultural homeland and a model of literary sophistication that he would carry back to Spain.

But Cervantes did not remain long in the comfortable service of a cardinal's household. The young man who had perhaps fled Spain under threat of mutilation was drawn instead toward a far more dangerous arena. By 1570 he had enlisted as a soldier in the Spanish army stationed in Italy, joining one of the infantry companies, or tercios, that garrisoned the peninsula and formed the most formidable fighting force in Europe. The decision is revealing. Cervantes might have stayed safely in a great man's service; instead, he chose the soldier's life, with its hardship, its danger, and its chance of honor. He served in the company of a captain named Diego de Urbina, part of the tercio of Miguel de Moncada, and he threw himself into the military life with an enthusiasm that he never afterward disowned.

This choice placed Cervantes, almost at once, at the heart of the great event of his age. The Mediterranean was on the brink of a vast confrontation. The Ottoman Empire, having seized the Venetian island of Cyprus, had provoked the formation of a grand alliance of Catholic powers, the Holy League, uniting Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Papacy, and other Italian states in a combined effort to break Ottoman naval power. A great fleet was being assembled, and command of it was given to Don John of Austria, the dashing young half-brother of King Philip the Second. The soldier Miguel de Cervantes, twenty-four years old, was about to take part in one of the most famous battles in the history of the world.

The Battle of Lepanto

On the seventh of October, 1571, the combined fleet of the Holy League met the navy of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras, off the western coast of Greece, near a place the Christians called Lepanto. It was the largest naval battle the Mediterranean had seen in centuries and one of the last great battles fought primarily between fleets of oared galleys. Hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men were locked together in a struggle that raged through the hours of a single autumn afternoon, and when it ended the Ottoman fleet had been shattered, with the loss of nearly its entire force of galleys and many thousands of men killed or captured. For Christian Europe, long fearful of seemingly unstoppable Ottoman expansion, Lepanto was a deliverance and a triumph, celebrated with bonfires and thanksgiving across the continent.

Miguel de Cervantes was there, aboard a galley named the Marquesa. And he very nearly was not in the fight at all, for on the morning of the battle he was lying below decks, sick with a fever. His comrades and his captain urged him to stay where he was, out of danger, since no one could expect a man weakened by illness to bear arms. Cervantes refused. According to the testimony later given by those who served with him, he declared that he would rather die fighting for God and his king than keep himself safe under cover, and that his family would rather hear he had fallen in battle than that he had hidden from it. He insisted on being given a post of danger, and he was placed in command of a small detachment of soldiers stationed in the ship's skiff, an exposed and perilous position in the thick of the action.

Cervantes fought through the whole of the battle, and he paid for his courage with his body. He received three gunshot wounds. Two of them struck him in the chest. The third, and the one that would mark him for the rest of his life, shattered his left hand, destroying its use permanently. He did not lose the hand; it remained attached but crippled, the nerves and muscles ruined, useless ever afterward. From this wound came the nickname by which he was known to his own age and is remembered still, El manco de Lepanto, the one-handed man, or the maimed man, of Lepanto.

Cervantes wore that wound, and that nickname, as a badge of the highest honor for the rest of his days. He never expressed the slightest regret for the loss of his hand, and when, decades later, the anonymous author of a spurious sequel to Don Quixote mocked him as an old and crippled man, Cervantes answered with magnificent pride. He wrote that his wounds had not been received in some tavern brawl but in the greatest occasion that past or present ages had seen, or that future ages could hope to see, and that the loss of his left hand was for the greater glory of his right, since the maimed hand was the witness of his service. He counted it, he said, among his deepest satisfactions to have taken part in that battle.

The pride was not mere bravado. Lepanto was, for Cervantes and for his contemporaries, a moment of genuine historical grandeur, an event in which an ordinary soldier could feel that he had stood at the hinge of history. The young man who fought in the skiff of the Marquesa had been present at the breaking of Ottoman sea power, and he never forgot it. The experience of that single afternoon, the noise and smoke and blood of it, the comradeship and the terror and the exaltation, became part of the bedrock of his identity. He had been a soldier in the greatest battle of his time, and he had not flinched. Whatever humiliations and failures the rest of his long life would bring, and they would be many, no one could take Lepanto away from him.

Soldier of the Mediterranean

The shattering of his left hand did not end Cervantes's military career. After the battle he was carried to a hospital in Messina, on the island of Sicily, where he spent some months recovering from his wounds. The Spanish crown granted him supplementary pay in recognition of his service and his injuries, and as soon as he was fit he returned to active duty. Far from being discharged as an invalid, Cervantes remained a soldier for several more years, taking part in the continuing campaigns of the Mediterranean war against the Ottomans and their North African allies.

In 1572 he joined the company of a captain named Manuel Ponce de León and took part in further naval expeditions. He was present at operations off the coast of Greece, including a campaign in the waters near Navarino and Modon, where the Holy League sought, without decisive result, to follow up the victory of Lepanto. In 1573 he served in the expedition led by Don John of Austria that captured the city of Tunis on the North African coast, and he was probably present the following year when an Ottoman counterattack retook Tunis and the nearby fortress of La Goleta. These were the ordinary experiences of a professional soldier of the age, long voyages, hard garrison duty, the boredom of waiting and the sudden violence of action, the constant companionship of other fighting men.

Cervantes spent much of these years stationed in Italy, in the great Spanish military centers of Naples and Sicily, and he came to know the southern Italian world intimately. Naples in particular, then a Spanish possession and one of the largest cities in Europe, made a deep impression on him, and he would later write of it with unmistakable affection as a place of beauty and pleasure. It was during these Italian years, too, according to later evidence, that Cervantes may have fathered a child, though the details are obscure; what is reasonably certain is that his years as a soldier in Italy were, for all their dangers, a time he remembered with warmth.

By 1575 Cervantes had decided that the time had come to return home to Spain. He had served the crown for some five years; he had been wounded gloriously; and he hoped that his record would now win him advancement, perhaps the command of a company of his own. To strengthen his case he had obtained letters of recommendation of the highest possible value, including a letter from Don John of Austria himself and another from the Duke of Sessa, the Spanish viceroy in the region. With these precious documents, attesting to his courage and his service, the soldier Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo, who had also been serving in the army, boarded a galley called the Sol to sail from Naples back to Spain. They expected the letters to open the door to honor and reward. Instead, those very letters were about to make Cervantes's life immeasurably worse.

Five Years a Captive in Algiers

In late September 1575 the galley Sol, carrying the Cervantes brothers homeward, was set upon by a squadron of Ottoman corsairs as it neared the coast of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain. The Mediterranean of the sixteenth century was infested with such raiders, operating out of the North African ports of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, who preyed on Christian shipping and coastal towns and carried their human plunder back to be sold or ransomed. After a fight the Sol was overwhelmed, and Miguel and Rodrigo de Cervantes, along with the other survivors, were taken prisoner and carried to Algiers, the greatest of the corsair cities, to begin their captivity.

For Miguel the captivity would last five years, from the autumn of 1575 to the autumn of 1580. Algiers in this period was a teeming, cosmopolitan, and brutal city, a slave economy on a vast scale, holding at any one time many thousands of Christian captives drawn from every nation of Europe. The fate of a captive depended above all on money. A captive thought to be poor and of low rank might be worked to death, or set to labor at an oar or in a quarry; a captive believed to be rich, or well connected, was a valuable property, to be kept reasonably safe and treated with a certain rough care until a ransom could be extracted from his family or his sovereign.

It was here that the precious letters of recommendation worked their cruel irony. When Cervantes was searched, his captors found upon him the letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke of Sessa, documents addressed to the most powerful men in the Spanish world. To his captors this meant only one thing: this prisoner, plainly, was a personage of importance, a man whose freedom the great would pay handsomely to secure. The ransom demanded for Miguel de Cervantes was accordingly set very high, far higher than his impoverished family could readily raise. The letters meant to win him honor at home had instead doomed him to a long and costly captivity.

Cervantes became the property of a renegade in Ottoman service, the corsair captain Dali Mami, and was later held in connection with Hassan Pasha, the Venetian-born renegade who governed Algiers as its bey. As a presumed gentleman of value, Cervantes was generally kept in conditions less murderous than those endured by the wretched galley slaves, and he was held in the bagnios, the great prison-barracks of the city. But captivity was captivity, and the years dragged on while his family in Spain struggled, and largely failed, to find the enormous sum required.

What sets the Algiers captivity apart in the story of Cervantes, and what reveals most vividly the kind of man he was, is the record of his conduct as a prisoner. Cervantes did not endure his captivity passively. Over the five years of his imprisonment he organized and led no fewer than four separate attempts to escape, not only for himself but for groups of his fellow captives, and each attempt, when it failed, exposed him to the gravest danger of torture and death.

The first attempt, made in 1576, involved an overland march toward the Spanish-held outpost of Oran, but the guide who was to lead the captives abandoned them, and they were forced to return. The second attempt, in 1577, was more elaborate. Cervantes and a group of companions arranged for a ship to come secretly to a hidden spot on the coast and carry off a party of captives concealed in a cave near the city. The plan was betrayed before it could succeed. A third scheme involved sending a messenger overland to the Spanish authorities in Oran to arrange a rescue, but the messenger was caught and killed, and Cervantes himself was punished. A fourth and final plan, in 1579, to arrange escape by sea for as many as sixty captives, was likewise betrayed by an informer.

Through all of this, one extraordinary fact stands out. Each time a plot was discovered, Cervantes stepped forward and took the entire blame upon himself, insisting to his captors that he alone had organized the escape and that his companions had merely followed. He did this in full knowledge that the leader of such a plot could expect to be tortured horribly and put to death. And each time, by some combination of his own composure, his evident courage, and perhaps a grudging respect on the part of his captors, he escaped with his life. The ruler of Algiers himself was reported to have said that so long as he kept the maimed Spaniard secure, he could consider his captives, his ships, and his whole city safe, a remarkable tribute to the dangerous spirit of a single unarmed prisoner.

These five years left a permanent mark on Cervantes's imagination. The experience of captivity in Algiers, the world of renegades and corsairs, of Christian slaves and Muslim masters, of betrayal and loyalty and the longing for home, returns again and again in his later writing. He dramatized it directly in early plays about Algerian captivity, and most famously he wove it into Don Quixote itself, in the long and moving Captive's Tale told by a character whose adventures clearly draw on Cervantes's own. The patience he had to summon, the courage he had to sustain, and above all the close and unsentimental knowledge he gained of human beings under extreme pressure, masters and slaves, the brave and the cowardly, the faithful and the treacherous, became part of the raw material of his art.

Ransom and the Return Home

The freeing of Miguel de Cervantes from Algiers was the work of his family's devotion and of the religious orders that had made the redemption of Christian captives their special mission. In Spain, his mother Leonor de Cortinas and his sisters labored without rest to assemble money for the ransom, selling property, borrowing, and petitioning. Leonor at one point presented herself as a poor widow, though her husband still lived, in order to qualify for charitable assistance, a small and forgivable deception that measures the family's desperation. The sums raised were never enough to meet the high price set on Miguel, and the negotiations dragged on year after year. His brother Rodrigo was ransomed and freed in 1577, and carried home the family's hopes, but Miguel remained behind.

The decisive help came from the Trinitarians, a religious order founded centuries earlier for the express purpose of ransoming Christians held in captivity by Muslim powers. In 1580 a party of Trinitarian friars, led by Fray Juan Gil, traveled to Algiers with funds gathered from charity and from the families of captives, and set about redeeming as many prisoners as their money would allow. The case of Cervantes was urgent, for his master Hassan Pasha was about to return to Constantinople and intended to take his valuable captive with him, which would have carried Cervantes far beyond the reach of any Spanish rescue. At the last possible moment, with Hassan's ship reportedly already preparing to sail, the friars and the family scraped together the final amount, some five hundred gold escudos, and the ransom was paid.

Miguel de Cervantes was freed in the autumn of 1580, after five years of captivity, and he returned to Spain at last. He came home a free man but not a fortunate one. He was thirty-three years old. He had given the best years of his young manhood to the service of his king, and he had to show for it a crippled left hand, five lost years, a family driven still deeper into debt by the cost of his ransom, and a set of recommendations and certificates of service that he would spend the next several years presenting, with little result, to an indifferent bureaucracy. The honors and rewards he had sailed home to claim in 1575 were as far away as ever.

And yet he had also brought home something that no amount of official ingratitude could take from him. He had survived. He had passed through battle and slavery, through wounds and the constant nearness of death, and had emerged with his good humor intact, his courage proven, and his understanding of the human heart immeasurably deepened. He had not yet written anything that the world would remember. He was, in worldly terms, a failure approaching middle age. But the experiences crowded into his first thirty-three years, the wandering childhood, the splendor of Italy, the glory of Lepanto, the long ordeal of Algiers, had given Miguel de Cervantes the one fortune he would never lose, a store of lived knowledge so rich and so hard-won that, once he learned to turn it into art, it would be enough to make him immortal.

Marriage, La Galatea, and the First Plays

The Spain to which Cervantes returned in 1580 was a country at the height of its imperial confidence. In that very year King Philip the Second was completing the annexation of Portugal, uniting the entire Iberian Peninsula and the two greatest seaborne empires of the age under a single crown. There was no shortage of work for a soldier, and Cervantes, still hoping that the state would reward his service, took up arms again briefly. He carried dispatches to Oran in North Africa on a royal mission in 1581, and he may have served with the forces that secured Portuguese possessions in the Azores. But the great rewards he sought, a captaincy, a pension, an official appointment worthy of his record, did not come. The Spanish crown had thousands of deserving veterans and very few favors to dispense, and a maimed infantryman with influential letters but no powerful patron stood near the back of a very long line.

By the early 1580s Cervantes had reached a decisive turning point. The military road to advancement was closed, or at least hopelessly slow. Approaching the age of thirty-five, he turned his energies instead toward literature, the one field in which his gifts were genuinely extraordinary. He settled for a time in Madrid, attached himself once more to its literary world, and began to write in earnest. He frequented the theaters and the gatherings of poets, and he set himself two tasks at once, the writing of plays for the rapidly growing commercial stage, and the composition of a long prose romance that he hoped would establish his name.

It was during these years that Cervantes also entered into the entanglements of his private life. In the early 1580s he had a love affair in Madrid with a married woman named Ana Franca de Rojas, and from this relationship a daughter was born, Isabel de Saavedra, the only child Cervantes is known to have fathered. He acknowledged Isabel, and in later years she would live in his household and be the cause of both comfort and trouble; the story of his relations with his daughter is one of the more tangled threads of his domestic history. Cervantes was no plaster saint, and the human messiness of his own life gave him a tolerant, unjudging eye for the failings of others that shines through all his fiction.

Then, in December 1584, Miguel de Cervantes married. His bride was Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, a young woman of the small town of Esquivias, in the wine country of La Mancha south of Madrid. Catalina was about nineteen years old; Cervantes was thirty-seven. She came from a family of modest landowning gentry and brought with her a small dowry of land, vines, and household goods. The marriage took place in the parish church of Esquivias, and it would last, on paper, for the rest of Cervantes's life, more than thirty years. By all the evidence it was not a passionate union, and the couple spent long stretches living apart as Cervantes's work carried him across Spain. They had no children together. Yet the marriage endured, and at the end Catalina was at his side, and it was she who saw his final book through the press. The country town of Esquivias, with its inns and vineyards and small gentry, gave Cervantes a close, sustained view of exactly the rural Manchegan world in which he would set the adventures of his immortal knight.

In 1585 Cervantes published his first book, La Galatea. It was a pastoral romance, a fashionable literary form in which idealized shepherds and shepherdesses, who are really courtiers in disguise, wander through an exquisite imaginary countryside discoursing at length on the joys and torments of love, their conversations interspersed with poems. The pastoral was an artificial and learned genre, and La Galatea is an accomplished example of it, elegant, ambitious, and full of fine verse. Cervantes was proud of the book, and he loved it to the end of his life; he repeatedly promised a second part and was still promising it, unfinished, on his deathbed thirty-one years later. La Galatea did not make him famous, but it announced him as a serious writer and gave him a foothold in the world of letters.

At the same time Cervantes was writing for the theater, and writing a great deal. He later claimed to have composed twenty or thirty plays in this period, and to have seen them performed without the customary pelting of cucumbers or other missiles from a hostile audience, a modest boast of competence. Most of these early plays are lost. Two survive, and they are revealing. One, The Siege of Numantia, is a tragedy on a grand and sombre theme, the heroic mass suicide of the inhabitants of an ancient Spanish town rather than surrender to the conquering Romans, a patriotic and intensely moving work. The other, The Traffic of Algiers, draws directly on Cervantes's own captivity to portray the sufferings of Christian slaves in the corsair city. Both plays show real power. But Cervantes's career as a popular dramatist was about to be eclipsed.

In the later 1580s the Spanish stage was conquered, swiftly and completely, by the genius of a younger man, Lope de Vega. Astonishingly prolific, writing with a fluency and an instinct for popular taste that no one could match, Lope created a new kind of fast-moving, crowd-pleasing drama and effectively drove every older style off the boards. Cervantes, whose plays were more deliberate and more demanding, could not compete. He bore Lope little personal malice and praised his rival's gifts generously, calling him a prodigy of nature, but the commercial theater closed against him. The stage, like the army, had failed to provide Cervantes with a living. He needed money, and he needed it urgently, and so, around 1587, he took the job that would consume the next fifteen years of his life and nearly destroy him.

The Lean Years: Commissary of the Armada

In 1587 Miguel de Cervantes was appointed a royal commissary, an agent of the crown charged with requisitioning supplies for the king's armed forces. His first great task was to gather provisions, above all wheat, barley, and olive oil, in the rural districts of Andalusia in the south of Spain, to victual the enormous fleet that King Philip the Second was assembling for the invasion of England. This was the famous Spanish Armada, the Invincible Armada, which would sail in 1588 to its catastrophic defeat in the waters of the English Channel and the storm-lashed seas around the British Isles.

The job of a commissary was thankless, exhausting, and morally treacherous. Cervantes traveled endlessly through the dusty towns and villages of Andalusia, lodging in wretched inns, riding from district to district, requisitioning grain and oil from a rural population that had little to spare and bitterly resented being stripped of it. He was, in effect, the hard and visible point of a remote and demanding state, the man who arrived with official papers and carried off the harvest. The work brought him into constant friction with local authorities and with the Church, and at least once it brought him into serious trouble: in the course of his duties Cervantes requisitioned grain belonging to the cathedral of Seville, and for laying hands on Church property he was excommunicated, a sanction soon lifted but a measure of how unpopular and exposed his position was.

For a man of Cervantes's temperament and gifts these were bleak and humiliating years. He had dreamed of honor and of literary fame, and instead he spent his forties as a minor functionary of a clumsy bureaucracy, perpetually on the road, perpetually short of money, perpetually entangled in disputes over accounts and quantities and receipts. His pay was small and often in arrears. Yet these same years gave Cervantes something priceless. As he crisscrossed Andalusia and La Mancha, sleeping in roadside inns and dealing with muleteers, innkeepers, peasants, priests, petty officials, and travelers of every description, he was, without knowing it, conducting the most thorough field study any novelist ever made of the ordinary life of his country. The inns and roads of Don Quixote, the muleteers and serving-girls and shepherds, the whole vast human comedy of common Spanish life that fills his great book, were observed during the weary years of the commissary.

It was during this period, too, that Cervantes made one last attempt to escape his treadmill by a route that thousands of his countrymen had taken before him. In 1590 he submitted a formal petition to the Council of the Indies, asking to be appointed to one of several vacant administrative posts in Spanish America, in the New World across the Atlantic. He asked, in effect, to be allowed to start his life over in the colonies, perhaps in the region of modern Guatemala or in the territories of New Granada. The response, scrawled on his petition by an official, was curt and final: let him look for something closer to home. The man who would write one of the supreme works of the human imagination was judged unworthy of a clerkship in the colonies. Spain kept Cervantes at home, on its dusty roads, and in doing so, all unknowing, kept him where Don Quixote could be written.

Tax Collector and Prisoner

In the 1590s Cervantes moved from requisitioning supplies to the even more hazardous work of collecting taxes and crown debts. He was based for much of this time in Seville, the booming, brawling commercial capital of the Spanish Atlantic empire, the port through which the silver of the Americas flowed into Europe. Seville was a city of merchants and sailors, of immense wealth and conspicuous crime, of beggars and rogues and adventurers, and Cervantes came to know its underworld and its commercial machinery intimately. The city would furnish the settings for several of his finest shorter fictions.

The work of a tax collector in sixteenth-century Spain was perilous in a very specific way. The money a collector gathered had to be conveyed, accounted for, and handed over to the treasury, and the records had to balance to the satisfaction of suspicious auditors. Any shortfall, whether caused by theft, by miscalculation, by the failure of a debtor, or by the collapse of a banker, fell as a personal liability on the collector himself. Cervantes, who was careless with paperwork and unlucky in his associates, fell repeatedly into exactly this trap. On one occasion he entrusted a sum of collected tax money to a banker in Seville named Simón Freire, and the banker failed, or absconded, taking the money with him. The loss was charged against Cervantes.

The consequence was prison. In the autumn of 1597 Miguel de Cervantes was arrested over the irregularities in his accounts and confined in the Royal Prison of Seville, a notorious and overcrowded place. He was held there for some months. It was not the first time, nor the last, that Cervantes saw the inside of a cell; there had been an earlier brief imprisonment, and there would be later detentions. But the imprisonment in Seville in 1597 has a special place in literary history, because of a famous remark Cervantes himself made about the origins of his masterpiece.

In the prologue to Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote that his book had been engendered, or begotten, in a prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound makes its dwelling. Generations of readers have taken this to mean that the idea of Don Quixote first came to Cervantes during his imprisonment in Seville, that the figure of the mad knight was first imagined behind bars. Whether the words are to be read so literally is debated, and Cervantes may have meant something more general about the difficult circumstances of the book's conception. But the image is irresistible and not implausible: the supreme comedy of the Spanish language conceived by a failed soldier, failed playwright, and disgraced tax collector, sitting in a filthy prison in Seville at the age of fifty, with most of his life behind him and almost nothing to show for it.

The years around the turn of the century were the lowest point of Cervantes's worldly fortunes. He was old by the standards of his time, poor, encumbered with debts and disputes, his accounts still tangled, his family scattered and struggling. His mother had died; his marriage was distant; his daughter was a source of worry. He had published one book fifteen years earlier and written plays nobody now performed. By every measure the world could apply, the life of Miguel de Cervantes was a long story of effort defeated. And it was precisely at this moment, out of this wreckage, that he produced the book that would place him among the immortals.

The Books of Chivalry

To understand the book that Cervantes was about to write, it is necessary first to understand the books that he was writing against. The romances of chivalry, the libros de caballerías, were the dominant popular literature of sixteenth-century Spain, and they had been for several generations. The arrival of the printing press had transformed them from a courtly luxury into a mass entertainment, cheap, abundant, and devoured at every level of society. The fountainhead of the genre was Amadís of Gaul, which appeared in its definitive printed form at the beginning of the century and was reprinted, expanded, and imitated without end. After Amadís came a swelling tide of sequels and rivals, the Palmerín cycle and dozens of others, the supposed sons and grandsons and cousins of Amadís, each book recounting impossible feats of arms in remote and fabulous kingdoms.

The formula was fixed and instantly recognizable. A knight of more than human strength and virtue rides through a world of giants and dwarfs, dragons and monsters, wicked enchanters and benevolent sages, magic castles and enchanted forests. He fights innumerable single combats, all of which he wins; he loves, from a worshipful distance, a lady of flawless and superhuman beauty; he wanders endlessly in search of adventures by which to prove his worth and earn her favor. The prose was archaic and inflated, the geography pure fantasy, the morality simple, and the appeal enormous. These books were read by nobles and soldiers, by servants and merchants, by men and women alike, and read aloud in groups so that even those who could not read might follow the adventures. The young woman who would become Saint Teresa of Ávila confessed that as a girl she had devoured them in secret; Spanish adventurers carried their imagery to the New World, and the name of California itself was lifted from the pages of a chivalric romance.

The romances also had powerful enemies. Moralists, humanists, and churchmen denounced them, decade after decade, as a flood of harmful lies, a corruption of the young, a frivolous waste of the hours that ought to be spent on devotion or useful learning, and a danger to a reader's grip on truth. The authorities made periodic efforts to restrain their printing and to forbid their export to the American colonies, on the grounds that the impressionable population there ought not to be fed on fables. By the time Cervantes sat down to write, around the year 1600, the genre, though still loved by a wide and faithful public, was visibly past its peak, beginning to seem old-fashioned and faintly disreputable, the very emblem of an exhausted literary fashion.

This was at once Cervantes's target and his opportunity. He himself plainly knew and had loved these books, for no one mocks so precisely and so thoroughly what he does not know from the inside, and Don Quixote is, among a hundred other things, a connoisseur's affectionate farewell to a whole genre. The premise of his novel, a man so saturated in chivalric romance that he can no longer tell its world from the real one, could only work because every reader in Spain already knew exactly what such books were and exactly how absurd their conventions had come to look. Cervantes's great joke needed no explanation. And in mocking the romances so completely and so memorably, he effectively destroyed them; after Don Quixote, no one in Spain could write or read a straight book of chivalry again without hearing the laughter. Cervantes killed the genre that had given him his subject, and put in its place a new one that would outlast every kingdom of his age.

The Birth of Don Quixote

Sometime around the year 1600, Miguel de Cervantes was at work on a story that began, as far as can be told, as a modest comic idea. The literary culture of Spain was saturated with books of chivalry, immense, fantastical romances about wandering knights who slew giants and dragons, rescued princesses, and performed impossible feats of arms in honor of impossibly perfect ladies. These books, of which the most famous was Amadís of Gaul, had been enormously popular for generations. They were also, by 1600, beginning to seem old-fashioned and absurd to sophisticated readers, and they were a standing target for moralists who complained that they filled people's heads with lies.

Cervantes's initial idea seems to have been a satire, a short, sharp comic tale mocking these books of chivalry. He would invent a reader so addicted to chivalric romances, so steeped in their nonsense, that his wits gave way, and he came to believe that the whole apparatus of knight-errantry was real and that he himself was called to revive it. This deluded gentleman would put on a suit of rusty ancestral armor, mount a broken-down old horse, and ride out into the perfectly ordinary, unromantic Spain of Cervantes's own day in search of adventures, with comic and humiliating results. The joke would be the collision between the knight's grand chivalric fantasy and the dusty, prosaic reality of inns, windmills, and farmyards.

But as Cervantes wrote, something happened that he could not have fully planned, and that no writer before him had ever quite achieved. The comic puppet began to come alive. The mad gentleman of La Mancha, who calls himself Don Quixote, acquired depth, dignity, eloquence, and pathos. He became not merely a figure of fun but a figure of strange nobility, a man whose madness consists precisely in his refusal to accept that the world is as base and disenchanted as it is, who insists, against all evidence and to his own constant injury, on courage, honor, justice, and devotion. And alongside him Cervantes set a companion who balanced and completed him, a local peasant named Sancho Panza, earthy, shrewd, proverb-spouting, cowardly and loyal and humane, whom Don Quixote recruits as his squire with the promise of an island to govern.

The relationship between these two, the gaunt idealist and the round realist, master and servant, the man who sees giants and the man who sees windmills, became one of the supreme creations of world literature, and it carried the book far beyond the limits of its original satirical purpose. Cervantes had set out to mock the romances of chivalry. He ended by writing the first modern novel, a book about the nature of reality and illusion, about the dignity and absurdity of the human attempt to live by ideals, about friendship, about Spain, about the act of reading itself. The satire of chivalry remained, but it had become the doorway to something incomparably larger.

Don Quixote, Part One

In 1605 the first part of Don Quixote was published in Madrid, under the title The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. It was printed by Juan de la Cuesta and financed by the bookseller Francisco de Robles, and it appeared with the customary apparatus of the age, royal licenses, dedications, and prefatory verses. Cervantes dedicated the book to a young nobleman, the Duke of Béjar, in hopes, as so often, of patronage. He was fifty-seven years old. After a lifetime of failure, he had written a book that, almost at once, the public adored.

The success of Don Quixote was rapid and remarkable. The first edition sold out, and further editions followed in quick succession, in Madrid and in other Spanish cities, and soon in Lisbon and Valencia and beyond. Within a very short time the book had been pirated, translated, and carried across Europe. Translations into English and French appeared within a decade; the book reached England, where it would profoundly influence the development of English fiction, and France, and Italy, and far beyond. The two central figures became instantly famous. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza appeared in popular festivals and pageants, recognizable to people who had perhaps never read the book, as images of a universally understood comic and human truth. Cervantes had created, at last, a genuine popular triumph.

What had he actually written? The first part of Don Quixote tells how Alonso Quixano, an aging and impoverished gentleman of a village in La Mancha, has so addled his brain by reading books of chivalry that he resolves to become a knight-errant. He renames himself Don Quixote, dubs his bony old horse with the grand name Rocinante, designates a robust farm girl from a neighboring village as the peerless lady of his heart, calling her Dulcinea del Toboso, and sets out to right wrongs and win glory. After a first short, disastrous sally alone, he persuades the peasant Sancho Panza to come with him as his squire.

What follows is a sequence of adventures, most of them ending in beatings, humiliation, and confusion, in which Don Quixote's chivalric imagination transforms the ordinary objects of the Spanish countryside into the furniture of romance. In the most famous episode of all, he charges a row of windmills, convinced that they are monstrous giants, and is hurled to the ground when a sail catches his lance. He mistakes inns for castles, flocks of sheep for armies, a barber's basin for a magical golden helmet. He frees a chain-gang of convicts in the name of liberty, and is stoned by them for his trouble. Through it all Sancho Panza follows, alternately exasperated, frightened, and devoted, supplying a running commentary of peasant common sense and an inexhaustible flow of proverbs.

But Don Quixote, Part One, is far more than a string of comic misadventures. Cervantes filled the book with other stories, interpolated tales of love and adventure that the main characters encounter or overhear on the road, including the moving Captive's Tale, drawn from Cervantes's own years in Algiers. He filled it with conversation, with the long, searching, often beautiful dialogues between the knight and his squire in which the two characters explore and reveal themselves. And he filled it with a constant, sophisticated play of irony about the act of storytelling itself. Cervantes pretends that the true history of Don Quixote was written by an Arab historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, and that he, Cervantes, is merely the editor of a translated manuscript, a device that allows him to comment slyly on the reliability of his own narrative and to draw the reader into a game about truth and fiction that has fascinated novelists and critics ever since.

Above all, Cervantes had created characters who live. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are not types or puppets; they are human beings of inexhaustible depth, contradictory, surprising, capable of folly and wisdom in the same breath, and they change as the book proceeds, shaped by their experiences and by each other. This was something genuinely new. The vivid inner life of these two figures, and the tender, ironic, deeply humane vision of the author who hovers behind them, lifted Don Quixote out of the category of comic satire and made it the foundation stone of the modern novel. Cervantes had finally found the form that could hold everything he knew about human beings, and he had filled it to overflowing.

The Exemplary Novels

The triumph of Don Quixote, Part One, transformed Cervantes from an obscure and disappointed writer into the most celebrated literary figure in Spain. It did not, however, make him rich. By the conventions of the age an author sold his manuscript and his rights for a flat sum and saw nothing of the profits of subsequent editions or of the rampant piracy that a popular book inevitably attracted. Cervantes remained, as he had always been, a man of modest means, dependent on the uncertain favor of aristocratic patrons. But the fame was real, and it gave him, in the last decade of his life, an extraordinary final burst of creative energy. The years from 1605 to 1616 were, after a lifetime of frustration, the most productive of his career.

In 1613 Cervantes published the Exemplary Novels, a collection of twelve shorter works of prose fiction. The book was a landmark. The Italian word novella described a short, shapely tale, and Italian writers had produced great collections of such tales; but Cervantes claimed, with justified pride, that he was the first to write novelas in the Spanish tongue, that the dozen stories in his collection were his own original inventions, neither imitated nor stolen, and that he was opening up a new path for Spanish literature. He was right. The Exemplary Novels established the short narrative as a serious literary form in Spain.

The twelve tales display an astonishing range. Some are stories of romance and adventure in the idealized manner, with noble lovers, mistaken identities, shipwrecks, and happy endings. Others are works of sharp, unsentimental realism. The Little Gypsy Girl tells of a noble youth who joins a band of Roma to win the love of a girl among them. Rinconete and Cortadillo, one of the masterpieces of the collection, follows two boy vagabonds into the criminal underworld of Seville and offers a brilliant, amused, exact portrait of an organized brotherhood of thieves. The Glass Graduate concerns a brilliant young man who, poisoned, falls into the delusion that he is made of glass and, in his madness, speaks nothing but devastating truths. The Dialogue of the Dogs gives the power of speech to two dogs who recount their lives in the service of a string of masters, an inspired vehicle for satire of every level of society.

The word exemplary in the title was partly a defensive gesture; Cervantes insisted that each tale carried a useful moral lesson, that a profitable example could be drawn from every one, a claim that protected the book from the censorious and was not entirely false, though the stories are far too alive and various to be reduced to their morals. What the Exemplary Novels really demonstrate is the full maturity of Cervantes as a master of prose fiction. He could do the idealized and the realistic, the comic and the grave, the fantastic and the documentary, and he could do all of them with a control, a wit, and a humanity that no Spanish writer had matched. Several of these tales, especially Rinconete and Cortadillo and The Dialogue of the Dogs, are counted among the finest short fictions in the language.

The Journey to Parnassus

In 1614 Cervantes published a long poem, the Journey to Parnassus. It is a work of literary fantasy and criticism, written in flowing verse, in which the poet recounts an allegorical voyage to Mount Parnassus, the mythical home of the Muses, where the god Apollo is mustering the true poets of Spain to defend the sacred mountain against an invading horde of bad poets, poetasters, and versifying frauds. The poem is a vehicle for Cervantes to survey, praise, and gently or sharply mock the crowded literary scene of his day, naming his contemporaries and passing judgment on them.

The Journey to Parnassus is also, in places, unexpectedly personal and moving. Cervantes had always had a complicated relationship with poetry. He loved it and practiced it all his life, scattering verse through all his prose works, yet he knew, with painful honesty, that he was not a poet of the first rank, that the divine lightning of great lyric gift had not struck him. In the poem he confronts this knowledge directly. He writes, with a famous and touching candor, of the labor he has spent through sleepless nights trying to seem a poet, of the grace that heaven did not see fit to give him. It is a rare moment of open self-assessment from a writer who almost never spoke plainly about himself, and it shows the wry, clear-eyed humility that lived alongside his pride.

The Theater of Cervantes

Of all the literary forms in which Cervantes worked across his long career, the theater was the one he loved earliest and most ardently, and the one that disappointed him most consistently. The stage had captured his imagination when he was still a boy. In one of his late prefaces he set down a vivid and tender recollection of the rudimentary traveling theater of an earlier generation, of the actor-manager Lope de Rueda, whose simple plays were performed on a few boards laid across benches, with a blanket for a curtain and the whole wardrobe of the company carried in a single sack. Cervantes never lost the hope of conquering that magical, transient world, and he returned to it again and again throughout his life.

In the 1580s, in the years after his return from Algiers, he wrote for the stage with real energy, claiming later to have composed twenty or thirty plays in this period and to have seen them performed with reasonable success. Almost all of them are lost. Two survive from this first period of dramatic work, and they are strikingly different from each other. The Siege of Numantia, often called simply La Numancia, is a tragedy of severe and sombre grandeur. It dramatizes the historical episode in which the Celtiberian town of Numantia, besieged for years by the armies of Rome, chose collective destruction over surrender, the inhabitants putting their own city and themselves to death so that the conquerors should find nothing alive to triumph over. The play has no single hero; its protagonist is an entire people, and it rises to a tragic and patriotic sublimity that has no real parallel in the Spanish theater of its century. It would be revived, centuries later, as a stirring symbol of a population enduring siege. The other surviving play of these years, The Traffic of Algiers, draws directly on Cervantes's own captivity to put the sufferings of Christian slaves in the corsair city upon the stage.

Then the Spanish theater was transformed, almost overnight, by the genius of Lope de Vega. Lope created what came to be called the new comedy, a fast-moving, flexible, crowd-pleasing drama that mixed the comic and the tragic freely, set popular taste above classical rule, and could be produced at a speed no rival could approach. Cervantes had his own ideas about how plays ought to be written; he inclined toward more restraint, toward some respect for the old classical disciplines of unity and decorum. But ideas did not fill the open-air playhouses of Madrid, and Lope's irresistible formula did. Cervantes was simply driven from the boards, and he accepted the defeat, as he accepted so many defeats, with a generosity that did him honor, publicly hailing his triumphant rival as a monster of nature and a prodigy of the age.

In 1615, near the end of his life, Cervantes made a last, quietly defiant gesture toward the stage that had shut him out. Since no company of players would perform his plays, he printed them, publishing a volume with the title Eight Comedies and Eight New Interludes, Never Performed, a title in which the closing words carry a wry and unmistakable confession. The eight full-length comedies in the volume are interesting and uneven. The true treasures of the book are the eight entremeses, the short comic interludes designed to be played in the gaps between the acts of a longer drama. These brief sketches, among them The Cave of Salamanca, The Jealous Old Husband, The Marvelous Puppet Show, and The Watchful Sentinel, are perfect of their kind, swift, funny, sharp-eyed, and humane, crowded with the rogues, dupes, scolds, schemers, and dreamers of everyday Spanish life. They are, in miniature, animated by the same comic genius that fills the pages of Don Quixote, and unlike his full-length plays they have never left the stage. The man who failed throughout his life as a commercial playwright became, through a printed book that no theater had been willing to perform, one of the enduring masters of Spanish comic drama.

The False Quixote: the Avellaneda Affair

In 1614, while Cervantes was still at work on the second part of Don Quixote, an extraordinary thing happened, one of the most famous incidents of literary piracy in history. A book appeared in the Spanish town of Tarragona bearing the title Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. It was a complete, unauthorized continuation of Cervantes's novel, written by another hand, carrying Don Quixote and Sancho Panza off on new adventures. Its author hid behind a pseudonym, calling himself the licentiate Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, of the town of Tordesillas, and the true identity of this man has never been established with certainty, despite four centuries of scholarly detective work.

The false sequel would have been galling enough on its own. What made it worse was its tone. In a prologue, the unknown Avellaneda did not merely continue Cervantes's story; he attacked Cervantes personally, and with real cruelty. He mocked the great writer for his age, jeered at him for the crippled hand he had earned at Lepanto, sneered at his poverty and his lack of friends, and accused him of envy, in particular envy of the triumphant Lope de Vega. It was a calculated insult, aimed at an old, poor, and vulnerable man, and it stung Cervantes deeply.

Cervantes's response was a model of how a great artist answers a small one. He did not descend into a shouting match. Instead, he absorbed the insult into his art and turned it into one of the most brilliant strokes in the whole of Don Quixote. He was about three-quarters of the way through writing his own genuine second part when Avellaneda's book appeared, and he simply incorporated the imposter into his story. In the closing chapters of Cervantes's authentic Part Two, the characters become aware that a false history of their adventures is in circulation. Don Quixote meets a gentleman who has actually read Avellaneda's book and is able to tell the knight to his face that the counterfeit account is full of errors and gets everything wrong. Don Quixote, outraged at the impostor who has slandered him and his lady Dulcinea, deliberately changes his travel plans, announcing that he will not go to the city of Zaragoza, because the false Don Quixote went there, and will go instead to Barcelona, precisely in order to expose the lie and prove the counterfeit a counterfeit.

It was a masterstroke. Cervantes made the very existence of the forgery a part of his own fiction, used it to deepen the book's endlessly playful meditation on truth and falsehood and storytelling, and in the process buried his rival completely. In the prologue to his own Part Two, Cervantes answered Avellaneda's personal abuse with a dignity that has been admired ever since. Far from raging, he wrote with calm and even with a kind of pity, expressing sorrow that the unknown author should be ashamed to give his name, and turning the jeers about his wounded hand into a fresh statement of pride, that the loss of his hand at the greatest battle of the age was a wound he would not exchange for any honor. The episode shows Cervantes at his most characteristic: provoked, wounded, and yet answering malice with wit, generosity, and superior art.

Don Quixote, Part Two

In 1615, ten years after the first part and partly spurred by the appearance of the false sequel, Cervantes published the second and concluding part of Don Quixote, under the title The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha. It is, in the judgment of very many readers and critics, even greater than the first part, a richer, deeper, more subtle, and more moving book, and one of the supreme achievements of the literary imagination.

Part Two is built on an idea of remarkable sophistication. In the world of the second part, the first part of Don Quixote has already been published and has become a bestseller. This means that the characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza now live in a world where everyone they meet has already read about them. They are famous. People recognize them on the road. And this changes everything. In the first part, Don Quixote's adventures arose from his own deluded misreading of an indifferent reality. In the second part, the people he encounters know exactly who he is and what he believes, and they deliberately stage elaborate deceptions to play along with his madness, to amuse themselves at his expense, or, in some cases, out of a more complicated mixture of cruelty and affection.

The central section of Part Two takes place at the country estate of a wealthy Duke and Duchess, who, having read and loved the first part, decide to entertain themselves by receiving Don Quixote and Sancho as if knight-errantry were entirely real. They construct, at enormous expense, a whole series of false adventures, processions, enchantments, and pageants, designed to deceive the knight and his squire. The most striking result of their cruel game is that Sancho Panza is, at last, actually given the governorship of an island, a town renamed for the joke, in fulfillment of the promise Don Quixote made him at the very beginning. And Sancho, governing his pretend island, turns out to be wise, just, shrewd, and humane, dispensing judgments worthy of a Solomon, before he wearily renounces the office, having learned that he is happier as a poor man free than as a governor burdened. It is one of the great comic and humane sequences in all of literature.

As Part Two proceeds, its tone darkens and deepens. The reader begins to feel an uneasiness about the elaborate jokes played on Don Quixote, to sense the cruelty in the laughter, and to feel a growing tenderness and respect for the deluded knight, whose madness, whatever follies it produces, is rooted in an unbreakable commitment to goodness, courage, and faith. Cervantes, who had begun a decade earlier by inviting readers to laugh at his hidalgo, now leads them, with consummate art, to love him.

The end of the book is one of the most beautiful and affecting passages Cervantes ever wrote. Don Quixote, defeated in combat on the beach at Barcelona by a friend disguised as a knight, the Knight of the White Moon, who has tracked him down precisely in order to defeat him and send him home for his own good, is bound by the rules of chivalry to lay down his arms and return to his village. He goes home beaten, exhausted, and heartsick. And there, in his own bed, at the very end, his sanity returns to him. Don Quixote dies as Alonso Quixano the Good, lucid and calm, renouncing the books of chivalry that deranged him, recognizing his folly, making his will, and dying a quiet Christian death surrounded by the few people who love him, while the faithful Sancho Panza, who had finally come to share something of his master's dream, weeps and begs him not to die. Cervantes, having created Don Quixote, killed him deliberately and finally, so that no second Avellaneda could ever again carry the knight off on counterfeit adventures. The death of Don Quixote is the death of a hero, and readers across four centuries have closed the book with tears.

Persiles and Sigismunda

Even with the two parts of Don Quixote, the Exemplary Novels, the Journey to Parnassus, and the published plays behind him, Cervantes was not finished. In the last months of his life, old, ill, and aware that his time was short, he raced to complete one more book, a long prose romance of adventure titled The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda. It is a work utterly different from Don Quixote, an idealized, far-flung tale of two noble lovers who, under assumed names, undertake an immense pilgrimage across northern Europe and through Spain and Italy toward Rome, surviving shipwrecks, captures, separations, and perils without number before they are at last united.

Cervantes regarded Persiles as one of his finest achievements. He believed, with a confidence that the modern world has not entirely shared, that it was a book that would either be the worst or the best of those composed in his language, and he hoped it would crown his reputation. Modern readers have generally preferred the earthy comedy and human truth of Don Quixote to the elaborate idealism of Persiles, but the book has its admirers, and it stands as a remarkable testament to the creative will of a dying man. He completed it only days before his death. Its dedication, written almost on his deathbed, is one of the most moving documents in literary history, and it will be quoted in its place below. The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda was published in 1617, the year after Cervantes died, seen through the press by his widow, Catalina.

Final Years and Death

The last years of Cervantes were spent in Madrid, to which the royal court had returned in 1606 after a brief and disruptive removal to Valladolid. Cervantes lived in the literary quarter of the capital, in modest circumstances, surrounded by the world of writers and printers and theaters. Fame had come to him, and with it the respect of his fellow authors and the curiosity of readers, but never real wealth or security. He depended in his final decade on the patronage of two great noblemen in particular, the Count of Lemos, to whom he dedicated several of his late books, and the Archbishop of Toledo, whose support helped keep want from the household.

In these years Cervantes turned increasingly toward religion. In 1613 he was received into the Third Order of Saint Francis, a lay branch of the Franciscan order that allowed devout men and women to follow a religious rule while living in the ordinary world. In the last days of his life he took the full vows of the order. His turn to a deepened piety was entirely in keeping with the conventions of his time and place, and there is no reason to see in it anything but the sincere devotion of a man preparing himself, with characteristic steadiness, for death.

By the early spring of 1616 Cervantes was seriously and visibly ill. The disease that killed him was almost certainly diabetes, which his contemporaries could neither name precisely nor treat, and which produced in him the unquenchable thirst and the swelling and exhaustion that the records of the time describe. He knew that he was dying, and he met the knowledge with the same humor and courage that had carried him through battle and slavery and prison and poverty. He kept working on Persiles to the very end.

Four days before his death, on the eighteenth of April, 1616, Cervantes received the last sacraments. And then, with death visibly near, he sat down and wrote the dedication of Persiles to the Count of Lemos. It is among the most extraordinary things he ever wrote, serene, affectionate, gently humorous, entirely without self-pity, the farewell of a man at peace. He quoted an old verse, with one foot already in the stirrup, in the anguish of death, and went on to tell his patron that his time was short, that his pulse was failing and would, he reckoned, finish its course that very Sunday, and that he was making the patron's acquaintance only to take his leave of life. He wrote that he still had in his soul further projects he would have loved to complete, a second part of Galatea among them, and he said farewell to grace, farewell to wit, farewell to his merry friends, for he was dying and hoped to see them soon, contented in the next life. A man writing his own death notice could hardly do it with more grace, more courage, or more sweetness of temper.

Miguel de Cervantes died in Madrid, in the kingdom of Spain, on the twenty-second of April, 1616. He was sixty-eight years old. In accordance with his wishes as a member of the Franciscan Third Order, his body was carried, with his face uncovered as was the custom of the order, through the streets of Madrid and buried in the church of the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians, the Trinitarias Descalzas, a fitting resting place, since it was the Trinitarian order that had ransomed him from Algiers thirty-six years before. He was buried on the twenty-third of April, and that date, the date of his burial, was for centuries mistakenly recorded as the date of his death.

A curious coincidence has long been attached to that date. The twenty-third of April, 1616, is also recorded as the date of the death of William Shakespeare, the supreme genius of the English language, in England. The two greatest writers of their respective tongues thus appear to have died on the very same day. The coincidence is, in strict fact, an illusion, because Spain and England were by then using different calendars, the reformed Gregorian calendar in Spain and the older Julian calendar in England, so that the two dates labelled the twenty-third of April were in reality some days apart. And Cervantes, as noted, most likely died on the twenty-second. But the symbolic coincidence proved irresistible, and in modern times the twenty-third of April has been adopted as World Book Day, an annual celebration of reading and authorship that honors, among others, both Cervantes and Shakespeare.

There is a final irony, characteristic of a life so full of them. Cervantes was buried in the Trinitarian convent, but in the centuries that followed, the convent was rebuilt and altered, and the precise location of his grave was lost. The most famous writer in the history of the Spanish language lay in an unmarked and unknown spot. Only in our own time, in a search conducted in 2014 and 2015 using modern forensic methods, were bone fragments recovered from the convent that researchers concluded were consistent with the remains of Cervantes and members of his circle, including, in all probability, his wife Catalina. A monument now marks the place. The man who had wandered Spain all his life, homeless and unrewarded, was at last given a settled resting place, four hundred years after his death.

Don Quixote and the Birth of the Modern Novel

To understand why Miguel de Cervantes occupies the place he does in the history of literature, it is necessary to look more closely at the claim made for his masterpiece, that Don Quixote is the first modern novel. The claim is large, and it requires explanation, because storytelling, of course, is far older than Cervantes. The ancient world had its epics and its prose romances; the Middle Ages had their chivalric tales; and Cervantes's own Spain produced, a few decades before Don Quixote, the picaresque tale of Lazarillo de Tormes. What, then, was new?

The answer lies in a cluster of innovations that Cervantes brought together for the first time in a single work, and that became the permanent equipment of the novel ever afterward. The first is the creation of characters with genuine interior depth, who are not fixed types embodying a single quality but living minds, full of contradiction, capable of self-deception and self-knowledge, and, crucially, capable of change. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza grow and develop over the course of the book. They influence each other; the realist Sancho is gradually touched by his master's idealism, and the idealist Don Quixote is gradually sobered toward the world. Characters who change in response to experience are the heartbeat of the novel as a form, and Cervantes was the first to put them at the center of a long prose narrative.

The second innovation is the engagement with ordinary, contemporary reality. The romances of chivalry were set in never-never lands of pure fantasy. Cervantes set his story in the real, recognizable, unglamorous Spain of his own day, on its actual roads, in its real inns, among muleteers and innkeepers and barbers and priests and farm girls. He brought the full, dense texture of common life into serious literature, and he treated that ordinary world as worthy of the closest and most loving attention. This rootedness in the observed real world is the second great mark of the novel as Cervantes invented it.

The third innovation is the extraordinary self-consciousness of the book about its own nature as fiction. Cervantes never lets the reader forget that a story is being told, and he plays endless, dazzling games with the machinery of storytelling, the invented Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, the supposed translated manuscript, the discussion within Part Two of the published Part One, the absorption of the false sequel into the genuine one. This is not idle cleverness. It is a profound exploration of the relationship between fiction and truth, between books and the people who read them, and it has fascinated and influenced novelists, from the eighteenth century to the most experimental writers of the present day.

The fourth innovation is the blending of tones. Before Cervantes, comedy and tragedy, the high and the low, the serious and the absurd, were largely kept in separate compartments. Don Quixote mingles them inextricably. The same episode can be hilarious and heartbreaking at once; the reader laughs at the knight and, in the same moment, honors him. This refusal to separate the comic from the serious, this insistence that real life is a tissue of both, is fundamental to the modern novel, and Cervantes was its great originator.

For these reasons the major novelists and critics of the modern era have, again and again, traced their art back to Don Quixote. The form Cervantes created in a Spanish prison and on the dusty roads of La Mancha, out of a joke about chivalric romances, became the dominant literary form of the modern world, the instrument by which writers in every language have explored the human condition for four hundred years. When the novel is called the characteristic art of the modern age, it is Cervantes who is being named as its father.

Themes and Meanings of Don Quixote

Beyond its formal innovations, Don Quixote endures because it is inexhaustibly rich in meaning, and every age has read it anew and found in it something its own. The book is, on its surface, a comedy, and Cervantes's first readers in the early seventeenth century took it overwhelmingly as a comedy, a marvelously funny book about a ridiculous old madman. But beneath the comedy lies a meditation on the deepest questions of human life, and later ages, especially the Romantic age of the nineteenth century, swung perhaps too far the other way and read the book as a profound tragedy of the noble soul crushed by a base world. The truth is that Don Quixote is genuinely both, comedy and tragedy at once, and it is the refusal to be reduced to either that keeps it alive.

The central theme is the relationship between idealism and reality, between the world as we wish it to be and the world as it stubbornly is. Don Quixote insists on living by the noble code of knight-errantry, on seeing giants where there are windmills, enchanted princesses where there are farm girls, castles where there are inns. He is, by every practical measure, deluded, and his delusion brings him beating after beating. And yet there is something in his refusal to accept the meanness of the ordinary world that the reader cannot simply dismiss. The phrase quixotic has entered the languages of the world to describe the pursuit of noble but impractical ideals, and the very existence of that word records a permanent human ambivalence: we know that the quixotic is foolish, and we cannot help admiring it.

A second great theme is the relationship between the two central characters, and through it the question of how human beings complete and balance one another. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have become one of the eternal pairs of world literature, the tall and the short, the thin and the fat, the idealist and the realist, the man of the spirit and the man of the body, the master who dreams and the servant who calculates. But the genius of Cervantes is that the pair is not a static contrast. Over the course of two long books the two men educate each other, and each takes on something of the other, in what scholars have called the Quixotization of Sancho and the Sanchification of Quixote. Their friendship, deepening through hardship and absurdity, is one of the most tender and convincing portraits of human love, of the unromantic, loyal love of companionship, in all of fiction.

A third theme is the power and the danger of books, of reading, and of fiction itself. Don Quixote is, at bottom, a book about a man destroyed and remade by reading. His madness comes out of a library; the famous early chapter in which the priest and the barber examine and burn the knight's books of chivalry is a comic literary debate; and the whole novel is saturated with discussion of stories, authors, translations, and readers. Cervantes, who had spent his life among books and had been both rescued and tormented by the literary life, wrote in Don Quixote the first great novel about the act of reading, a book endlessly aware of itself as a book.

And finally, Don Quixote is a portrait of a nation and an age. It is the great panorama of Spain in its golden age and the beginning of its decline, the whole society laid out along the roads of Castile, every rank and trade and type, observed with an affection and an irony that belong to a man who had seen his country from the bottom up, as a wandering soldier, a commissary, a tax collector, and a prisoner. To read Don Quixote is to travel through the Spain of Philip the Third in the company of the wisest and most humane of guides.

The Style and Language of Cervantes

The greatness of Cervantes is not only a matter of structure and theme; it is a matter of language, of the actual texture of his prose, and it is here that something is inevitably lost to readers who do not know Spanish. Cervantes is, for the Spanish-speaking world, what Shakespeare is for the English-speaking world, the supreme model and measure of the language, and Spanish itself is often affectionately called la lengua de Cervantes, the language of Cervantes.

His prose has a quality that is very difficult to describe and impossible to imitate, a flexible, flowing, conversational ease that can rise to grave eloquence or descend to broad farce within a single sentence, and that always carries the warm presence of a humane and amused intelligence. He had an extraordinary ear. The speech of Sancho Panza, tumbling with proverbs, malapropisms, and peasant shrewdness, is a comic invention of the highest order; the speech of Don Quixote, when he expounds the ideals of chivalry, has a sonorous, archaic beauty that is both genuinely moving and gently mocked. Cervantes could write the formal rhetoric of the learned and the rough talk of the road, and he could place them side by side and let them strike sparks.

Above all, the prose of Cervantes is suffused with irony, but it is irony of a peculiar and benevolent kind. It is never merely destructive. The Cervantine irony holds two things in view at once, the folly of a character and the dignity of that same character, the absurdity of an action and its pathos, and it asks the reader to feel both together. This double vision, this refusal to let the reader settle into simple laughter or simple tears, is the essence of Cervantes's style and the source of its inexhaustible humanity. It is why readers who return to Don Quixote at different stages of their lives find a different book each time, lighter in youth, graver and more tender in age.

Legacy and Influence

The influence of Miguel de Cervantes on the literature of the world is so vast that it is difficult to measure, because so much of it has become invisible, absorbed into the very assumptions of how stories are told. Every novelist who has created characters with an inner life, who has mixed comedy and seriousness, who has set fiction in the recognizable real world, who has played with the relationship between an author and a tale, is working with tools that Cervantes either invented or decisively perfected. The novel as a form is, in a real sense, his descendant.

The line of direct influence can be traced with precision. In England, Don Quixote shaped the eighteenth-century writers who established the English novel; Henry Fielding openly modeled his fiction on the manner of Cervantes, and the comic-pathetic strain in English fiction runs back to La Mancha. In France, the realist masters of the nineteenth century looked to Cervantes; Gustave Flaubert kept Don Quixote constantly in mind, and the deluded romantic dreamer at the center of his own greatest novel is a daughter of Don Quixote. In Russia, the influence was overwhelming. The supreme Russian novelists revered Cervantes; one of them called Don Quixote the saddest book ever written and named it the kind of book that humanity might hold up at the Last Judgment as its defense, and the figure of the holy fool, the absurd man who is also the best of men, runs from Don Quixote straight into the heart of the Russian novel.

In the twentieth century, the writers of Latin America, working in the language of Cervantes, took the master as their direct ancestor and their constant companion, and the playful, fantastical, self-aware fiction of the Spanish-speaking Americas is unimaginable without him. One of the most famous of all modern short stories imagines a writer who sets out, with total seriousness, to compose Don Quixote again, word for word, a fantasy that is at once a joke and a profound tribute to the book's bottomless depth. Across the world, in language after language, the great novelists have acknowledged the debt, and when, in the year 2002, a large group of distinguished writers from many countries was polled on the finest work of fiction ever written, Don Quixote was placed at the head of the list by a wide margin.

The reach of Cervantes extends far beyond the printed novel. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have become universal images, instantly recognizable across cultures to people who have never read a word of the book, the gaunt knight on his bony horse and the round squire on his donkey. They have been drawn and painted and sculpted countless times; the illustrations made for the book by a great nineteenth-century French artist fixed their appearance in the world's eye forever. The story has been made into operas, ballets, symphonic poems, films, and a celebrated musical of the modern stage, which gave the world a song about dreaming an impossible dream that carries the spirit of Cervantes's knight to millions who may not know its source. The windmills of La Mancha have become a permanent metaphor; to tilt at windmills is a phrase understood everywhere, the very emblem of brave and futile struggle against imaginary enemies.

And the influence works at the level of language and idea as well as image. The word quixotic exists, in one form or another, in many of the world's tongues, a single adjective carrying the whole complex meaning of Cervantes's creation, idealistic, impractical, noble, absurd, admirable, doomed. No writer can ask for a surer sign of immortality than to have given the languages of the world a new word for a permanent human possibility.

Within the Spanish-speaking world the standing of Cervantes is something more than literary fame; it is a foundation of cultural identity. The most important prize for literature in the Spanish language bears his name, the Cervantes Prize, regarded as the highest honor a Spanish-language writer can receive. The worldwide network of institutions established by Spain to teach its language and spread its culture is named the Instituto Cervantes, the Cervantes Institute. His birthplace, Alcalá de Henares, is a place of literary pilgrimage and a site recognized for its world heritage value, and the house identified as his birthplace is preserved as a museum. Statues of Cervantes, and of his knight and squire, stand in cities across Spain and the Spanish-speaking Americas and beyond. For hundreds of millions of people, Cervantes is not merely a great writer of the past but the living patron and symbol of their common language.

Don Quixote Through Four Centuries of Readers

One of the surest signs of a truly great book is that every generation reads it differently, finding in it the questions that its own age most needs to ask, and by this measure Don Quixote is among the greatest books ever written. The history of how the novel has been read across four hundred years is very nearly a history of the modern imagination itself.

The first readers, in the early seventeenth century, read Don Quixote as comedy, pure, broad, and simple. To Cervantes's own contemporaries the book was a wonderfully and uproariously funny story about a ridiculous old madman who got himself beaten on every road in Spain, and they laughed at the windmills and the blanket-tossings and the tumbling proverbs of Sancho, and asked for more. This comic reading was the dominant one, in Spain and across Europe, for well over a century, and it should never be forgotten, because the book genuinely is funny, and any interpretation that loses the laughter has lost something essential.

The Romantic age changed everything. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, especially among German thinkers and then among Russian and English writers, an entirely new Don Quixote came into view, a figure no longer merely absurd but tragic and even sublime, the noble idealist broken on the wheel of a vulgar and unfeeling world, the solitary soul who keeps faith with a dream that everyone around him has abandoned. The German Romantics raised the book into a profound philosophical symbol; the great Russian novelists saw in the deluded knight a holy fool, an image of innocence and goodness too pure for the world. The book was now read as a tragedy wearing the costume of a comedy, and the knight became a hero to weep for.

Scholarship of the twentieth century sought a more balanced and a more searching view, recovering the comic Cervantes without surrendering the profound one, and bringing to the center of attention what critics came to call the book's perspectivism, its insistence that reality looks different from every position a person can stand in, that the same humble object is a barber's basin to one man and an enchanted golden helmet to another, and that the novel itself, with a deep and deliberate art, refuses to hand down a final verdict on which of them is right. Don Quixote came to be understood as the first work of fiction to make the instability of truth, and the gap between what is and what is believed, its central and abiding subject.

And still the book went on generating new life. It was translated, and retranslated, into every major language of the world, and into a great many minor ones; English readers had it within a decade of its first appearance, and fresh translations continue to be made in every generation, each one an admission that the last had not exhausted the original. Painters, illustrators, composers, choreographers, and filmmakers returned to it endlessly. The tributes and the honors accumulated, and the poll of distinguished writers from many nations that, early in the present century, placed Don Quixote first among all the works of fiction ever composed did no more than confirm a standing that had long since been settled. To read the four-century reception history of Don Quixote is to watch a single book serve as a mirror in which age after age of readers has seen, looking back, its own changing face, the surest possible proof that Cervantes built far better than even he, in his deepest pride, can have known.

Cervantes and Shakespeare

It is one of the pleasing symmetries of literary history that the two writers most often named as the founders of modern Western literature were exact contemporaries. Miguel de Cervantes, the supreme master of Spanish prose, and William Shakespeare, the supreme master of English drama, lived in the same years, did their greatest work in the same decade, and departed the world, according to the dates recorded in the calendars then in use, in April of 1616, their burials entered in the registers on the same day of the month, the twenty-third.

The symmetry, looked at closely, dissolves into a string of qualifications, and honesty requires that they be stated. The calendars of the two countries were not the same, for Spain had adopted the reformed Gregorian calendar while England still kept the older Julian one, so the shared date of the twenty-third of April is in plain fact an accident of timekeeping, and the two deaths were some days apart; Cervantes, moreover, most probably died on the twenty-second and was buried on the twenty-third. The two men almost certainly never heard each other's names. They wrote in different forms and in different countries that were, for much of their lives, open enemies at war.

And yet there is one slender, tantalizing thread that does connect them. The first part of Don Quixote was translated into English by Thomas Shelton and published in London in 1612, and within a year or two a play was performed for the English court under the title Cardenio, a play now lost, generally attributed to Shakespeare working in his last years together with his younger collaborator John Fletcher. Cardenio is the name of a character in the first part of Don Quixote, a young man whose unhappy love story forms one of the interpolated tales that the knight and his squire encounter in the mountains. It appears, then, that at the very close of his career Shakespeare read, or heard read, the work of Cervantes, and shaped a portion of it into a drama. The two greatest writers of their respective tongues brushed past one another exactly once, in a vanished play, across the gulf of language and the enmity of their nations.

The deeper kinship between them is one of sensibility. Both men possessed an almost superhuman power to create characters more vividly alive than most of the people who walk the earth, and to love those characters without the smallest illusion about their faults. Both mingled the comic and the tragic in open defiance of the rules that lesser writers obeyed. Both looked upon human folly with an irony that never once curdled into contempt. And both became, for their respective languages, not merely great writers but the very embodiment of the language itself, so that English is sometimes called the tongue of Shakespeare exactly as Spanish is called the tongue of Cervantes. Between the two of them, the player from Stratford and the soldier from Alcalá, they divided the modern literary imagination of the West, the one taking the stage and the other the novel for his province, and the world has been reading their pages and watching their scenes, without a single interruption, from their day to our own.

The Man Behind the Work

After all the works and all the influence, it is worth pausing on the man himself, as far as the records allow him to be seen, because the character of Cervantes is, in its quiet way, as remarkable as his genius. The dominant impression left by every source, by the testimony of those who knew him, by the prefaces in which he speaks in his own voice, and by the spirit that breathes through all his fiction, is of a man of extraordinary good nature, a man whom suffering made wiser and gentler rather than bitter and small.

Consider the facts of his life. He was wounded and maimed in the service of his king and never adequately rewarded. He was enslaved for five years and saw his family ruined by the cost of his ransom. He was excommunicated and imprisoned over the thankless drudgery of provisioning fleets and collecting taxes. He failed as a playwright and watched a younger man seize the stage. He lived almost his whole life in poverty, dependent on patrons. He was robbed of the fruits of his one great success by piracy. He was personally and cruelly insulted, in his old age, by an anonymous literary thief. Any one of these blows might have soured a man for life. Cervantes absorbed them all, and the writing that came out of him is the least bitter, the most forgiving, the most humane and good-humored body of work in the literature of his nation.

He seems to have been brave to the point of recklessness, as Lepanto and the four escape attempts in Algiers attest, and at the same time gentle, sociable, and warm, a man who loved conversation and friends and the literary fellowship of Madrid. He was self-aware, capable of judging his own gifts with painful honesty, knowing that he was not a great poet and that his plays had failed, and capable also of a just and unshakeable pride in what he had truly achieved, his wounds at Lepanto and his incomparable Don Quixote. He was generous to rivals, praising Lope de Vega even as Lope's success shut him out. He was, in his prefaces, one of the most charming and companionable voices in all of literature, chatting directly to the reader, mocking literary pretension, including his own, drawing the reader into a relationship of warmth and trust.

The portrait that Cervantes gives of his own appearance, in the preface to the Exemplary Novels, is itself a small masterpiece of humane self-irony. He describes, since no friend had provided an engraved portrait for the book, a man of aquiline face, chestnut hair, a smooth and untroubled brow, cheerful eyes, a nose curved though well proportioned, a beard of silver that twenty years before had been gold, large mustache, small mouth, and only six teeth, and those in poor condition and badly placed. He describes himself as of middling height, neither tall nor short, of good color, rather fair than dark, somewhat heavy in the shoulders and not very nimble of foot. And then, with the pride that never left him, he adds the one thing that mattered, that this was the author who had lost his left hand in the naval battle of Lepanto. It is the self-portrait of a man entirely without vanity and entirely without shame, looking at himself, his bad teeth and his glorious wound alike, with the same amused, accepting, clear-eyed honesty that he turned upon the whole of humankind.

CONCLUSION

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra lived sixty-eight years, and for the great majority of them he was, by every standard the world could apply, a failure. He sought military glory and gained a crippled hand. He sought royal reward and was told to look closer to home. He sought success on the stage and was driven from it. He sought security and respectability and spent his life instead in poverty, on the road, and more than once in jail. He published his first book and then fell silent, in print, for twenty years. He was past the middle of his fifties before the world heard from him again.

And then, in the last eleven years of that long, hard, disappointed life, this maimed and impoverished old man poured out a torrent of work that changed literature forever. He wrote the two parts of Don Quixote, the book that founded the modern novel and that has been called, by the considered vote of the world's writers, the greatest work of fiction ever composed. He wrote the Exemplary Novels and gave Spain the art of the short story. He wrote the Journey to Parnassus and the eight comedies and eight interludes and, with his dying strength, The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda. He took everything that his terrible and wonderful life had taught him, the wandering childhood, the splendor of Italy, the smoke of Lepanto, the bagnios of Algiers, the inns and roads of Spain, the prisons, the failures, the friendships, the unbreakable good humor, and he transmuted it all into art of the highest and most enduring kind.

The lesson of his life, if a life so singular can be said to teach a lesson, is the lesson that Don Quixote himself embodies, the refusal to let the meanness of circumstance defeat the dignity of the human spirit. Cervantes was beaten by the world again and again, exactly as his knight is beaten on every road in La Mancha, and like his knight he simply rose, dusted himself off, and went on. He never received in his lifetime a fraction of what he had earned. He died in modest rooms in Madrid, was carried face-uncovered through the streets in the habit of a Franciscan tertiary, and was buried in a convent grave that the world then promptly lost for four hundred years.

But the man who could write his own death notice with a joke and a blessing, who could answer the cruelty of an anonymous enemy with wit and pity, who created out of the wreckage of his fortunes the laughing, weeping, dreaming figure of the knight of La Mancha, had understood his own destiny better than the world that ignored him. He had told his merry friends farewell, and said he hoped to see them, content, in the life to come. Four centuries later, in every language on earth, readers still take down the history of the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, and laugh, and are moved, and close the book changed. The poor soldier who could not win a clerkship in the Indies had written one of the few books that humanity would not consent to lose. Miguel de Cervantes had become, as he always quietly knew he might, immortal.