The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

On the 12th of December in the same year that his Galatæa was published, Cervantes married, at Esquivias, a young lady who was of one of the first families of that place, and whose charms had furnished the chief subject of his amatory poems; she was named Donna Catalina de Salazar y Palacios y Vozmediano. Her fortune was but small, and only served to keep Cervantes for some few months in idleness; when his difficulties began to harass him again, and found him as a married man less able to meet them. He then betook himself to the drama, at which he laboured for several years, though with very indifferent success. He wrote, in all, it is said thirty comedies; but of these only eight remain, judging from the merits of which, we do not seem to have sustained any great loss in the others not having reached us.

It may appear strange at first that one who possessed such a wonderful power of description and delineation of character as did Cervantes, should not have been more successful in dramatic writing; but, whatever may be the cause, certain it is that his case does not stand alone. Men who have manifested the very highest abilities as romance-writers, have, if not entirely failed, at least not been remarkably successful, as composers of the drama; and of our own time, who so great a delineator of character, or so happy in his incidents, or so stirring in his plots, as the immortal Author of Waverley? Yet the few specimens of dramatic composition which he has left us, only serve to shew that, when Waverley, Guy Mannering, Ivanhoe, and the rest of his romances are the delight of succeeding generations, Halidon Hill and the House of Aspen will, with the Numancia Vengada of the author of Don Quixote, be buried in comparative oblivion.

In 1588 Cervantes left Madrid, and settled at Seville, where, as he himself tells us, "he found something better to do than writing comedies." This "something better" was probably an appointment in some mercantile business; for we know that one of the principal branches of his family were very opulent merchants at Seville at that time, and through them he might obtain some means of subsistence less precarious than that which depended upon selling his comedies for a few "reals." Besides, two of the Cervantes-Saavedra of Seville were themselves amateur poets, and likely therefore to regard the more favourably their poor relation, Miguel of Alcala de Henares, to whom they would gladly intrust the management of some part of their mercantile affairs. The change, however, of life did not prevent Cervantes from still cultivating his old passion for literature; and we accordingly find his name as one of the prize-bearers for a series of poems which the Dominicans of Saragoza, in 1595, proposed to be written in praise of St. Hyacinthus; one of the prizes was adjudged to "Miguel Cervantes Saavedra of Seville."

In 1596 we find two short poetical pieces of Cervantes written upon the occasion of the gentlemen of Seville having taken arms, and prepared to deliver themselves and the city of Cadiz from the power of the English, who, under the famous Earl of Essex, had made a descent upon the Spanish coast, and destroyed the shipping intended for a second armada for the invasion of England. In 1598 Philip II. died; and Cervantes wrote a sonnet, which he then considered the best of his literary productions, upon a majestic tomb, of enormous height, to celebrate the funeral of that monarch. On the day that Philip was buried, a serious quarrel happened between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Seville; and Cervantes was mixed up in it, and was in some trouble for having dared to manifest his disapprobation by hissing at some part of their proceedings, but we are not told what.

In 1599 Cervantes went to Toledo, which is remarkable as being the place where he pretended to discover the original manuscript of Don Quixote, by the Arabian Cid Hamet Benengeli. It was about this time, too, that he resided in La Mancha, where he projected and executed part, at least, of his immortal romance of Don Quixote, and where he also laid the scene of that "ingenious gentleman's" adventures. It seems likely that, whatever may have been Cervantes' employment at Seville, it involved frequent travelling; and this may account for the very accurate knowledge which he displays of the different districts which he describes in his tale; for it is certain that the earlier part of his life could have afforded him no means of acquiring such information. Some have thought also that he was occasionally employed on government business, and that it was whilst on some commission of this sort that he was ill-treated by the people of La Mancha, and thrown into prison by them at Argasamilla. Whatever may have been the cause of his imprisonment, he himself tells us in the prologue to Don Quixote, that the first part of that work was composed in a jail.

But for fifteen years of Cervantes' life, from 1588 to 1603, we know but very little of his pursuits; the notices we have of him during that time are very few and unsatisfactory; and this is the more to be regretted because it certainly was then that his great work was conceived, and in part executed. Soon after the accession of Philip the Third, he removed from Seville to Valladolid, probably for the sake of being near the court of that monarch, who, though remarkable for his indolence, yet professed himself the patron of letters. It was whilst living here that the first part of Don Quixote was published, but not at Valladolid; it appeared at Madrid, either at the end of 1604, or, at the latest, in 1605.

The records of the magistracy of Valladolid afford us some curious particulars of our author's mode of life about the time of the publication of Don Quixote. He was brought before the court of justice, on suspicion of having been concerned in a nightly brawl and murder, though he really had no share in it. A Spanish gentleman, named Don Gaspar Garibay, was stabbed about midnight near the house of Cervantes. When the alarm was raised, he was amongst the first to run out and proffer every assistance in his power to the wounded man. The neighbourhood was not very respectable, and this gave rise to our author's subsequent trouble in the matter; for it was suspected that the ladies of his household were, from the place where they lived, persons of bad reputation, and that he himself had, in some shameful affray, dealt the murderous blow with his own hand. He and all his family were, in consequence, directly arrested, and only got at liberty after undergoing a very minute and rigid examination. The records of the court tell us that Cervantes asserted that he was residing at Valladolid for purposes of business; that, by reason of his literary pursuits and reputation, he was frequently honoured by visits from gentlemen of the royal household and learned men of the university; and, moreover, that he was living in great poverty; for we are told that he, his wife, and his two sisters, one of whom was a nun, and his niece, were living in a scanty and mean lodging on the fourth floor of a poor-looking house, and amongst them all had only one maid-servant. He stated his age to be upwards of fifty, though we know that, if born in 1547, he must in fact have nearly, or quite completed his fifty-seventh year at this time. In such obscurity, then, was the immortal author of Don Quixote living at the time of its publication.

The First Part of this famous romance was dedicated to Don Alonzo Lopez de Zuniga, Duke of Bexar or Bejar, who at this time affected the character of a Mecænas; whose conduct, however, towards Cervantes was not marked by a generosity suited to his rank, nor according to his profession, nor at all corresponding to the merits and wants of the author. But the book needed no patron; it must make its own way, and it did so. It was read immediately in court and city, by old and young, learned and unlearned, and by all with equal delight; "it went forth with the universal applause of all nations." Four editions (and in the seventeenth century, when so few persons comparatively could read, that was equivalent to more than double the number at the present time)—four editions were published and sold in one year.

The profits from the sale of Don Quixote must have been very considerable; and they, together with the remains of his paternal estates, and the pensions from the count and the cardinal, enabled Cervantes to live in ease and comfort. Ten years elapsed before he sent any new work to the press; which time was passed in study, and in attending to his pecuniary affairs. Though Madrid was now his fixed abode, we often find him at Esquivias, where he probably went to enjoy the quiet and repose of the village, and to look after the property which he there possessed as his wife's dowry.

In 1613 he published his twelve Novelas Exemplares, or 'Exemplary Novels,' with a dedication to his patron the Count de Lemos. He called them "exemplary," because, as he tells us, his other novels had been censured as more satirical than exemplary; which fault he determined to amend in these; and therefore each of them contains interwoven in it some error to be avoided, or some virtue to be practised. He asserts that they were entirely his own invention, not borrowed or copied from any other works of the same sort, nor translated from any other language, as was the case with most of the novels which his countrymen had published hitherto. But, notwithstanding this, we cannot fail to remark a strong resemblance in them to the tales of Boccaccio; still they are most excellent in their way, and have always been favourites with the Spanish youth for their interest and pure morality, and their ease and manliness of style. The titles of these novels are, The Little Gipsey, The Generous Lover, Rinconete and Cortadillo, The Spanish-English Lady, The Glass Doctor, The Force of Blood, The Jealous Estremaduran, The Illustrious Servant-Maid, The Two Damsels, The Lady Cornelia Bentivoglio, The Deceitful Marriage, and The Dialogue of the Dogs. They have all been translated into English, and are probably not unknown to some of our readers.