Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
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Chapter 3: The Renaissance Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
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| Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra was born in 1547, the fourth of seven children of an impoverished physician.
During Miguel’s childhood the family moved from one village to another to flee
from creditors. By 1564, when he was sixteen, the family settled in Seville, where
Miguel was enrolled in a Jesuit school, and later to have studied for a time at
the University of Salamanca. Any hopes he may have had for an academic career,
however, were blasted when he got involved, at the age of twenty-one, in a duel
within the precincts of the royal palace in Madrid. The royal court sentenced
him to lose his right hand and be exiled for ten years; Cervantes fled to Italy
to escape the execution of the sentence.
He was not to return to Spain for twelve years, and those years were filled with hardships and adventures more spectacular than any in the romances he was to parody in Don Quixote. He was thirty-three when he finally returned to Spain. He was crippled and without a job; his family was deeply in debt. He spent the next twenty-five years trying desperately to earn a meager living. He wrote a number of plays, none notably successful. During these theatrical days, he fell in love with an actress, Ana Franca de Rojas. They had a child, Isabel, whom Cervantes was left to rear when Ana deserted him. In 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, he married a nineteen-year-old girl, Catalina de Palacios y Salazar Vozmediano; he then had to support a household consisting of his wife, Isabel, his mother, his two sisters, and his widowed mother-in-law. He finally succeeded in getting a government post as a traveling agent charged with requisitioning supplies for the Invincible Armada, the massive fleet that Philip was preparing to launch against England in 1588. As a "commissary," he not only had to face angry mobs of villagers who resented the army’s appropriation of their goods but had to deal also with a government bureaucracy that at one point was two years behind with his salary. Cervantes was twice imprisoned for shortages in his accounts, owing to a combination of his superior’s own chaotic records, an untimely bank failure, and doubtless his own inadequacies as a bookkeeper. Soon after this release, Cervantes was hard at work on Don Quixote, which was first published in 1605, the year in which his contemporary Shakespeare produced King Lear. Cervantes’ book was an immediate best-seller; it went through a number of printings the first year and was very promptly translated into French, Italian, and other European languages. It success brought Cervantes little except the satisfaction of fame; he received no royalties beyond the small sum paid him by the publisher. Cervantes died on April 23, 1616; ten days later in England, Shakespeare died, also on April 23 (since the English calendar was still unreformed). Author Links
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Don Quixote |
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