Visor de obras.

  —[118]→     —119→  

Florida State University

The biographer of Cervantes has no easy task. There is no shortage of source material, but it is hard to deal with. Interpretation of the numerous notarial documents requires knowledge of contemporary commercial, legal, and administrative practice. The illumination they offer of Cervantes' personality is at best indirect. The information contained within Cervantes' literary works is indispensable but, because they are literature and not autobiography, of treacherous application to his life. His prologues and dedications are full of indispensable facts, but are often slanted and self-serving. Once one has used these materials there remain great gaps and unanswered questions. Finally, one must master an immense secondary literature, including, of course, the mammoth, unbalanced, and poorly-organized documentary biography of Astrana Marín. In the process, the biographer must take positions on many controversial issues, such as Cervantes' religious background and views.

This is, no doubt, why there have been so few serious biographers of Cervantes. Indeed, until Canavaggio, there has been no major contributor since Astrana Marín, and he was the first since Fitzmaurice-Kelly. It is a pleasure to report that Canavaggio has joined this small but illustrious club. He has gone through the documents, to my knowledge the first to do so since Astrana Marín⁷⁶. It is among the many pleasures of this book to have a fresh reading of two important episodes known only through legal   —120→   documents: the Ezpeleta affair (pp. 223-26), and the obscure Juan de Urbina-Luis de Molina-Isabel Saavedra relationship (pp. 232-34). Canavaggio has also read Cervantes' complete works, assimilated Astrana, and studied the subsequent contributions, in English as well as French and Spanish, up to about 1984. (The French original of this biography appeared in 1986.) Canavaggio has also dared to speculate, always intelligently, on the gaps that remain. The result is a biography that fully deserves the honors already bestowed on it.

His grounding in Spanish Golden Age culture and literature -with its foundation a knowledge not only of Don Quixote but of the theater- is unsurpassed, and a definite contrast with his predecessor William Byron. As a result, the biography is also full of fontecicas of historical context that will be of provecho to the most seasoned scholar. Some examples of these fascinating tidbits: D. Juan de Austria wanted to be king of Tunis, a city which Cervantes visited (p. 64). Cervantes' «maestro poético» Pedro Laínez was also a chamberlain of Felipe II (p. 43); his widow, who shared Cervantes' house in Valladolid, was a morisca (p. 131). Cervantes visited Lisbon (p. 101). Tomás Gutiérrez, Cervantes' friend in Seville, was a former actor who kept «a luxurious boardinghouse greatly esteemed by noble travelers» (p. 144); we thus have Cervantes living, at least temporarily, in luxury. Cervantes' excommunication was not very significant, because «in sixteenth-century Spain, excommunication was frequent because it was the only arm at the Church's disposal in conflicts that periodically set it against civil powers» (p. 146). Góngora wrote a poem on Gaspar de Ezpeleta, the nobleman murdered in front of Cervantes' residence in Valladolid (p. 223). Lope's «Arte nuevo de hacer comedias» may be an answer to the canon from Toledo (p. 266). The Parnaso was «dedicated to the son of a dishonest magistrate of the Royal Council, a fifteen-year-old adolescent named Rodrigo de Tapia» (p. 263), though one wishes Canavaggio had helped us understand why Cervantes dedicated his book to a fifteen-year-old adolescent. Fernando de Lodeña, who wrote a prefatory sonnet to the Novelas ejemplares, was the illegitimate son of his deceased sister Magdalena (p. 241). A cervantes was a deceived husband (p. 282).

Few could have written the following synopsis of the literary culture of Seville when Cervantes arrived: «Even if there never was, in the true sense of the word, a 'Sevillian school,' the Spanish Athens in the decade that followed Lepanto was home to a constellation of humanists and poets who contributed greatly to its renown. It was Miguel's bad luck that when he arrived in Andalusia, the count of Gelves's salon, which under the guidance of the 'divine' Herrera once set the tone for the rest of the city, had closed its doors eight years earlier. Juan de Mal Lara was dead; Herrera, so admired by Cervantes, was ending his days retired from the world; Juan de la Cueva, like many others, had left for Madrid; Mosquera de Figueroa, whom we glimpsed at Écija in the exercise of his office, was often required by his post as corregidor to be absent. Perhaps it was he who, during one of his stays, introduced the author of Galatea to the estimable Baltasar del Alcázar,   —121→   the Sevillian Martial. Perhaps it was Alcázar who brought Cervantes to the two or three local academies where he would later read some of his verses; perhaps Alcázar took him to the bookshops of Díaz and Clemente Hidalgo before introducing him to the celebrated sculptor Martínez Montañés. But Cervantes, subject to the unpredictability of an itinerant life, must not have been a regular visitor in this society of literary men; Francisco Pacheco, though praised by Cervantes in the 'Song of Calliope,' does not even mention our hero in his gallery of illustrious Sevillians» (pp. 164-65). There is a shorter presentation of the literary scene in Valladolid in 1605 (pp. 200-01). Strangely Canavaggio does not mention the Valladolid physician Alonso López Pinciano -«Pinciano» meant «from Valladolid»- whom Cervantes could well have known there.

It is a shame that such a thorough biography describes itself as intended for non-specialists (p. 333), and omits documentary references for the points that it discusses. Still, it is going to be the one-volume standard for a generation or more. Precisely because of its excellence, this reviewer feels the need to go through it painstakingly.

A number of Canavaggio's interpretations of the facts are questionable, and tend to accept uncritically Cervantes' self-presentation as the unrecognized and unrewarded sufferer. Cervantes' salary of twelve reales a day is laughable if one thinks of him as the author of the greatest masterpiece of Spanish literature, but it was not unreasonable for a purchasing agent who had yet to write said masterpiece (p. 145). The real question is why Cervantes was working as a purchasing agent: did he prefer it, or was he blocked from more lucrative or prestigious employment? Canavaggio understates Spain's intellectual isolation when he claims there was intellectual «exchange» with Italy and Flanders (p. 41); imports of books from Italy and Flanders were severely controlled. While Italians or Dutch could study in Spain, if they wished, Spaniards were prohibited from studying in Italy (save the Spanish college in Bologna) and in Flanders. My own research leads me to disagree with Canavaggio's statement of Italian influence on Cervantes (p. 72)⁷⁷.

Cervantes' contacts with the financial world in Valladolid, which led Carroll Johnson to call him «an active member of the business and financial community»⁷⁸, are gratuitously characterized as «shady figures» (p. 225). Considering these contacts, it would seem contradictory to describe Cervantes in Valladolid as no longer interested in the king's service and «entirely preoccupied» with the proximate publication of Don Quixote (p. 200). It is similarly forced to attribute his move to Valladolid to a need to publicize Don Quixote (p. 198). Living in a new apartment in what was by far the most expensive city in Spain, his lodgings were not luxurious, but they   —122→   were not miserable either (p. 200)⁷⁹. It is incorrect to say that «Spain will unanimously, or almost unanimously, applaud» the expulsion of the moriscos (p. 238). Few Valencians, facing agricultural ruin, favored it. Cervantes is unique not in opposing the measure -not all agree that he did oppose it-, but in putting a morisco viewpoint in print. That Cervantes read and reread Amadís in his youth (p. 208) might be true, but it seems more likely that he read and reread it, and other chivalric books, as an adult. It is incorrect to say that the books of chivalry, other than Lepolemo, were «written» by Arab chroniclers like Cide Hamete (p. 214).

It is also incorrect to say that Don Quixote's success was without precedent since Celestina (p. 216). Keith Whinnom has already pointed out that Montemayor's Diana and the Guzmán de Alfarache were much bigger successes, as was Amadís de Gaula. The list would be considerably longer if one went beyond belles lettres and added Pérez de Hita, Antonio de Guevara, Fray Luis de Granada (author of two books each more popular than Don Quijote), Pedro Mexía, the Marqués de Santillana's Proverbios, and translations such as Aesop, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses⁸⁰. The six editions in 1617 of the Persiles are perhaps less an indication of its success (p. 307) than of the interest aroused by Cervantes' previous works: not one of the six different publishers who issued the Persiles in 1617 brought out a second edition. Seventeenth-century readers may well have preferred the Novelas ejemplares to Don Quijote, but surely few of them also preferred La Galatea and Persiles (p. 7). Canavaggio has taken Anthony Close too much to heart when he states that «the seventeenth century did not have the slightest premonition of... the conflict between the Ideal and the Real» in Don Quixote (p. 216). Certainly Cervantes was aware of it: the conflict between the ideal Dulcinea and the real Aldonza is present in the text, as is that between the self-sacrificing, visionary Don Quijote and the mercenary, no-nonsense Sancho. According to Chapter 3 of Part II, some readers understood what Cervantes put in it: «los niños la manosean, los mozos la leen, los hombres la entienden y los viejos la celebran».

On one truly crucial point Canavaggio's treatment is unsatisfactory: he refuses to take a position on Cervantes' religious «class», based on which doors in society were either open or closed. His language suggests, moreover, that Jewish ancestry was a true, rather than merely a social disgrace: «we have no decisive proof of a mancha» (p. 25). One wonders how decisive proof could today be forthcoming, when the incentives for destroying and denying evidence were so powerful. Documents notwithstanding, most of   —123→   those who worked with money had Jewish ancestry; most in the medical profession, as were several of Cervantes' relatives, had Jewish ancestry; most Golden Age writers had Jewish ancestry⁸¹; Cervantes seems to have had doors closed to him. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. On the religious «class» of Don Quixote and Sancho -the latter, but not the former, loudly proclaims his cristiano viejo status- Canavaggio is silent.

Finally, I am not sure that most Cervantine scholars would agree that the «Tía fingida» is spurious (p. 249). My own work on the Cervantine canon has led me to identify Cervantes' allegedly lost Relación por las fiestas del nacimiento del príncipe (p. 222) with the book on this topic published anonymously in 1605⁸². The fragment I have (following Schevill and Bonilla) argued to be part of the Semanas del jardín does not support the common notion that it consisted of a collection of novellas (p. 309)⁸³. Unfortunately, Canavaggio missed Geoffrey Stagg's convincing assault on the validity of the Porras manuscript⁸⁴.

It might seem that this lengthy list of reparos indicates that my judgment about this biography is negative or qualified. Such is not the case. Canavaggio has written the best one-volume biography of Cervantes since that of Fitzmaurice-Kelly, published in 1913, and that one too, like every other, suffered from blind spots and limitations⁸⁵. Canavaggio's work is painstaking and original. It is indeed the starting place not just for non-specialists but for cervantistas as well.

The translation by Joseph Jones is a delight, and more accurate than the Spanish translation (an observation for which I am indebted to Jürguen Hahn). Painstaking and sensitive, it will send readers to the dictionary: «harquebus» (p. 5), «the merchants' loggia» (p. 162), «the crenellated mass of the Tower of Gold» (p. 162), «boreal» (p. 307). Novelas ejemplares is rendered Exemplary Novellas, and the Viaje del Parnaso is Journey to Parnassus. How nice it is that Spanish terms such as comedias, autores, mosqueteros are left. The maps, index, typography, and paper are better than those of the original, although the index unfortunately omits many less important names that come up in the text, among them Ariosto, Boiardo, Tasso, and   —124→   Sannazzaro. Cervantes' religious background is indexed under «purity of his blood». Misprints spotted are hidalquía (p. 26), alquacil (p. 49), Boioardo (p. 71), Cristóbel (p. 273), Montesino's cave (p. 288), and -apparently a misspelling in the French original- «zurujano» (p. 22). Whereas the French original had the familiar false portrait on the cover, the pseudo-Jáuregui, this version replaces it with an unfamiliar, unidentified one.