The Life of Cervantes

by Albert Frederick Calvert

Miguel de Cervantes came of a good, if not noble family, which traced its origin back to the tenth century. Poverty, as he himself has said, may cloud, but cannot wholly obscure nobility; and although his parents appear to have possessed an indifferent share of this world’s goods, they ranked among the hidalgos of Alcala de Henares, in New Castile, where Miguel was born, in 1547. To-day Alcala is a dull, featureless little town, decaying by the sleepy waters of the Henares, memorable only by reason of the mighty names which are associated with its history. Here Charles V. entertained his royal prisoner Francis I.; here Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, in 1510, founded its university; and, in 1517, superintended the printing of the Complutensian Bible, which was produced at a cost of 80,000 ducats; and here the body of the great Cardinal Statesman lies beneath a princely monument in the Colégio Mayor.

From 1616 until 1748 the identity of Cervantes’ birthplace was lost. The place of Don Quixote’s nativity, it will be remembered, was obscured by his inventor, in order that “all the towns and villages of La Mancha might contend among themselves for the honour of giving him birth and adopting him for their own, as the Seven Cities of Greece contended for Homer,” and for over 130 years he was himself the subject of a similar uncertainty. Until 1748, when the discovery of his baptismal registrar in the Parish Church of Saint Mary the Creator, at Alcala de Henares, made an end of the mystery that had existed on the point, seven cities of Spain contended fiercely for the honour of claiming Cervantes for their own. But the pretentions of Madrid, Seville, Toledo, Lucena, Esquívias, Alcazar de San Juan and Consuegra were disposed of by this documentary evidence, and speculation was shifted from Cervantes’ birthplace to his place of education; indeed the little that is known of the author’s

PORTRAIT OF THE FIGURE IN PACHECO’S PICTURE AT SEVILLE, SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT CERVANTES.

early days leaves ample scope for conjecture. Tradition says that he spent two years at the University of Salamanca, and the house in which he is supposed to have resided, in the Calle de Moros, is still regarded as one of the lions of this once famous seat of learning. The city is now without learning, society, or commerce—a ruin of its former greatness. Yet in the fourteenth century its university boasted 10,000 students, and in Cervantes’ youth some 5,000 students resorted thither. But the University of Alcala was also at that time a famous centre of learning, and it is unlikely that Cervantes, having regard to the financial status of his family, would go further afield for his collegiate course. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, who does not believe that he was a student of any university, regards the assumption that he was sent to the distant University of Salamanca, as something like mockery.

All that we can ascertain, concerning his student life, is that he learnt grammar and the humanities under Lopez de Hoyos, a man of culture and a teacher of some distinction in his age and generation. In 1568, upon the death of Isabel de Valois, the third wife of Philip II., Cervantes, among Hoyos’ pupils, won much commendation for some verses written in commemoration of the national bereavement, and we find his master alluding to the youthful poet as his “dear and beloved pupil,” and eulogising the “elegant style,” “rhetorical colours,” and “delicate conceits” of his literary exercises. These compositions, together with many other early poetical effusions of the author, are to be found in some Spanish editions of Cervantes’ works, but the general reader will be content to take them as read. Their author, in his reference to these immature effusions in his Journey around Parnassus, admits that “from his tenderest years he had loved the sweet art of poesy,” he volunteers the information that he had produced an endless variety of ballads and sonnets of varying degrees of merit, and modestly confesses that “Heaven had not granted him the poet’s grace.”

Cervantes was still a stripling when he first evinced that interest in the acted drama, which he never entirely lost. Lope de Rueda, who did so much to produce order out of chaos in the drama of Spain, was at that time an actor-manager at the head of his own company of strolling players. It was this gold-beater of Seville, “admirable in Pastoral Poetry,” distinguished alike “for his acting and for his intelligence,” who brought comedies “out of their swaddling clothes and gave them habitation, and attired them decently and handsomely.” Cervantes must have attended the performances of the Rueda Company when they were in the neighbourhood of Segovia, in 1558; and in the preface to his volume of Comedies and Farces, published a year before his death, he gives us some interesting particulars of the theatrical impedimenta in use at that time. The performances were given in the morning and afternoon in the public square, and the only decoration of the theatre was “an old blanket drawn aside by two ropes, which made what they call the green-room; behind which were the musicians, singing some old ballad without a guitar.” The properties consisted of “four benches arranged in a square, with five or six planks on top of them, raised but four handsbreadth from the ground;” while the whole apparatus of a manager of plays, was contained in a sack, and consisted of “four white sheep-skin dresses, trimmed with gilt leather, and four beards, wigs, and crooks, more or less.”

In 1568, an event occurred which altered the trend of Cervantes’ life, and carried him for a period of twelve years from his native land. In that year, the young and cultured Cardinal Acquaviva came to the Court of Philip II. on a ceremonial mission from the Pope. Though received with scant courtesy by the King, the learned envoy was warmly welcomed by the men of letters of Madrid. By one of these, it is suggested by Cardinal Espinosa to whom Cervantes had dedicated some of his verses, the poet was presented to Acquaviva; and when the Papal legate brought his visit to an end, Cervantes returned with him to Rome in the capacity of camarero, or page. Mr. Kelly treats at some length, if with scant credulity, the vague legend, that in his early youth Cervantes held some minor post at Court; and while he attaches no importance to the traditions that he left Spain to escape the consequences of having wounded a courtier in a duel, or of having had some love passages with a lady about the Court, he takes it for granted that he “fled to Italy in half-voluntary, half-compulsory exile.” Whether that was so or not, he only remained for little more than a year in the service of his ecclesiastical patron, and in the beginning of 1570 he entered the Spanish Army as a private soldier in the company of the famous captain, Don Diego de Urbina.

While it is generally recognised that Cervantes, the author and philosopher, was in advance of his age, Cervantes, the man, was, it would appear, the natural product of his generation and his environment. In the university city of Alcala, “in that fruitful harvest-time of Spanish literature,” he cultivated the muses; in Italy—which, at that period, was dominated by Spain—surrounded, as he was, on all sides by the indomitable Spanish infantry, who “made the earth tremble with their firelocks,” the spirit of Cervantes was fired with military ardour. Christendom, too, was at perpetual war with the Turks, and to a youth of Cervantes’ chivalrous temperament the prospects offered by a career which united the services of both Church and King would prove irresistible. He was present, in 1570, at the ineffectual attempt to relieve the Island of Cyprus, a failure which led up to the formation of the Holy League of Spain, Venice, and Rome against Selim II., and found its crowning glory in the Battle of Lepanto.