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Miguel de Cervantes

cervantes


Miguel de Cervantes, born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547, was the son
of a surgeon who presented himself as a nobleman, although
Cervantes's mother seems to have been a descendant of Jewish
converts to Christianity. Little is known of his early years. Four
poems published in Madrid by his teacher, the humanist López de
Hoyos, mark his literary début, punctuated by his sudden departure
for Rome, where he resided for several months. In 1571 he fought
valiantly at Lepanto, where he was wounded in his left hand by a
harquebus shot. The following year he took part in Juan of Austria's
campaigns in Navarino, Corfu, and Tunis. Returning to Spain by sea,
he fell into the hands of Algerian corsairs. After five years spent
as a slave in Algiers, and four unsuccessful escape attempts, he was
ransomed by the Trinitarians and returned to his family in Madrid.
In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar,
twenty-two years younger than he, Cervantes published a pastoral
novel, La Galatea, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost
except for El trato de argel and El cerco de Numancia, were playing
on the stages of Madrid. Two years later he left for Andalusia,
which he traversed for ten years, first as a purveyor for the
Invencible Armada and later as a tax collector. As a result of money
problems with the government, Cervantes was thrown into jail in
Seville in 1597; but in 1605 he was in Valladolid, then seat of the
government, just when the immediate success of the first part of his
Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signaled his return to the
literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrd just after the return
there of the monarch Philip III. During the last nine years of his
life, in spite of deaths in the family and personal setbacks,
Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer. He published the
Novelas ejemplares in 1613, the Viaje del Parnaso in 1614, and in
1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don
Quixote, a year after the mysterious Avellaneda had published his
apocryphal sequel to the novel. At the same time, Cervantes
continued working on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, which he
completed three days before his death on April 22, 1616, and which
appeared posthumously in January 1617.


What we know of Cervantes's life is the result of a long series of
inquiries begun during the first three decades of the seventeenth
century. But the most significant contributions have been those of
scholars in the early part of this century, especially Cristóbal
Pérez Pastor. The documents that have been published through their
efforts come from public, parochial, and notarial archives, and they
generally refer to Cervantes's captivity, the posts that he occupied
in Andalusia, and certain other important events in his life. Few of
these documents, however, cast any light on his life as a writer,
much less on his personality. We need a methodical commentary on
these documents to bring up to date the sketch which James
Fitzmaurice Kelly published in Oxford in 1917: Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra; reseña documentada de su vida. We also need a critical
biography worthy of the name. Luis Astrana Marín's big book Vida
ejemplar y heroica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Madrid,
1948-1958, 7 vols.) suffers from a less-than-solid methodology as
well as a number of personal biases. Still it contains a
considerable amount of information and so remains an essential work
of reference. Rosa Rossi's essay Escuchar a Cervantes (Valladolid,
1988) attempts to do away with the idealized portrait of Cervantes
by interpreting his life as the confluence of his supposed Jewish
origins and his latent homosexual tendencies. Certain recent
biographers--such as Andrés Trapiello (Las vidas de Cervantes,
Barcelona, 1993) and, not without a hint of scandal, Fernando
Arrabal (Un esclavo llamado Cervantes, Paris and Madrid, 1996)--have
revived the tradition of romanticized biographies in which the
biographer's personality obliterates that of the writer whose life
is the supposed subject.


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