After a
critical overview of recent biographies of Cervantes, this article focuses on
scholarship concerning the crucially important five years Cervantes spent as a
captive in Algiers, examining such controversial issues as: Was Cervantes
a converso? Was he a homosexual? Why did
Cervantes's master Hasan Pasha spare his life after he attempted to escape? To
what extent was Cervantes influenced by Muslim culture?
Don Gaspar de
Ezpeleta was mortally wounded on June 27, 1605, in Valladolid, at the doorway
of the house where Cervantes lived with his family. Ever since 1886 -the year
when the transcript of the investigation of the case carried out by Judge
Villaroel was first published- Cervantes scholars have sought to prove the
innocence of the author of
Don Quixote in this matter. The present
article is not concerned with that issue, but rather seeks to contextualize the
case, fleshing out the background against which the events took place. The many
details contained in the document give us a much fuller understanding of the
activities of Cervantes, a man of whom his sister said that «he writes
and does business and, because of his good ability, has many
friends».
In his
greatest and most ambitious novels Cervantes was mindful of the famous ancient
examples of that genre, or of like genres. The present article examines how the
antecedents of the
Coloquio de los perros (The Golden Ass, Lucianesque dialogues) and of
Persiles y Sigismunda (Heliodorus's
Aethiopic History) served as a point of
departure for Cervantes's novelistic creations. What both works have in common
is that the most basic innovation is achieved through the constant interruption
of the principal narration.
Criticism of
Cervantes's poetry has been conditioned by theoretical and esthetic
presuppositions which have yet to surpass the prejudices forged by his
contemporaries and apparently consecrated by the words of the author of
Don Quixote. A biased reading of some of
his metapoetic affirmations and the comparison established between verse and
prose have distorted critical and interpretative perspectives, which can be
corrected only by reconsidering three factors: the interposition of characters
in the fictitious enunciation of most of the poems; the revision of the
esthetic and communicative problematics posed by these texts and their
narrative frame; and finally, the inclusion of Cervantine poetic writing as
part of the wider process of poetic and esthetic renovation that occurred at
the beginning of the seventeenth century.
In spite of
recent critical interest in Cervantes's poetry, there are still many
«poesías sueltas»
attributed to Cervantes for reasons that
are less than convincing. One such case is the sonnet «Maestro era de
esgrima Campuzano», which, according to a manuscript now lost, is by
Cervantes. This article reviews the different arguments employed to support the
attribution to Cervantes and compares them with those which can be made in
support of attributing the poem to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. A close reading of
the sonnet offers purely textual proofs, after which the relationship of the
text to other works by each author is considered. After some general
reflections on criteria of attribution, the conclusion proposes the likeliest
authorship.
This verse
from the Petrarchan poet Serafino Aquilano, cited in several of Cervantes's
works, often illustrated one of the most widely accepted literary precepts in
the Golden Age: that of variety as a source of beauty, in imitation of the
variety present in nature. The technique of
variatio is notably manifest in
the intercalation of secondary novels in the primary plot of Part One of
Don Quixote. As Cervantes himself
attested, these narrationes were criticized by his contemporaries, which led
him to suppress them in the Second Part of his novel; nevertheless, the author
did not renounce
variatio, but rather evolved in
its application by introducing digressions that were more closely connected to
the main plot. This evolution may have resulted not from outside criticism but
from the author's own reflections on the literary genre he had inaugurated: the
modern novel.
Don Quixote is a text conceived for dissemination through
printing, yet it still preserves many aspects of orality in its structure. The
conflict between written and oral culture, omnipresent in the novel, enables us
to account for a whole series of characteristics of Cervantes's masterpiece
-such as its peculiar system of textual coherence, the mechanisms of narrative
generation, the relationships among characters, the conception of authorial
voice, the treatment of literary authority, etc.- which distance it from
traditional narrative genres and make of it an enduring
classic.
The present
article attempts to illustrate the metaphorical use of an old symbol, the
«world as book», in Cervantes's final work,
Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda.
The novelist's playfulness is accompanied by profound meditations on the role
of art and on the well established comparison, introduced by Renaissance
treatises, of painting with poetry. Contemplating a contemporary polemic on
behalf of the liberality of painting, Cervantes reflects on the novel, and on
the exercise of novel-writing, with the metanarrative backing of history as
rendered on canvas (painting), of pilgrimage become textual
unwinding (embroidery), and of the
narrative, «book of books», as a simultaneous
becoming of narrations and narrators
(writing). The art of memory, emblematics, and the philosophical concept of the
chain of Being crown this
artistic allegory of the novel, as work
and as genre, and of the human condition.