Michel de Cervantes
Copyright Michael D. Robbins 2005

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Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish Novelist, Playwright and Poet—Author of Don Quixote

September 29, 1547, Alcala, Spain, 12:30 AM, LMT. (Source: speculative from Marc Penfield) Died, April 23, 1616, Madrid, Spain.      



(Speculative Ascendant, Leo; speculative MC, Aries with the Moon in Aries, and Neptune in Taurus conjuncting the Aries MC; Sun widely conjunct Mars in Libra with Mercury, retrograde, also in Libra; Venus conjunct Uranus in Virgo; Jupiter in Pisces; Saturn in Sagittarius; Pluto in Aquarius)

A person dishonored is worst than dead.

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

Be a terror to the butchers, that they may be fair in their weight; and keep hucksters and fraudulent dealers in awe, for the same reason.

Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.

Drink moderately, for drunkeness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise.

Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.

Every man is the son of his own works

Fair and softly goes far.

Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.

From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment.

He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.

It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

Jests that give pains are no jests.

Laziness never arrived at the attainment of a good wish.

Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable.

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.

One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.

Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

That which costs little is less valued.

The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application.

The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity.

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.

There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wondrously removes or at least alleviates the sorrow that men would otherwise feel for the death of friends.

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.

Thou hast seen nothing yet.

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.

Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

True valor lies between cowardice and rashness.

Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water.

Valor lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome.

Alas! all music jars when the soul’s out of tune.

There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wondrously removes or at least alleviates the sorrow that men would otherwise feel for the death of friends.

Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

Remarking on Don Quixote’s “bragging and bouncing.”

Miracle me no miracles. Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.

Virtue is the truest nobility.

Born 29 September 1547, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
Died 23 April 1616 Madrid, Spain

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra [IPA: mi?el ðe ?erßantes saße(ð)ra] (September 29, 1547 – April 23, 1616), was a Spanish novelist, poet and playwright. He is best known for his novel Don Quixote de la Mancha, which is considered by many to be the first modern novel, one of the greatest works in Western literature, and the greatest in the Spanish language. It is one of the Encyclopedia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World" and the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky called it "the ultimate and most sublime word of human thinking". Cervantes is so well regarded that his face is depicted on most Spanish Euro coins, and his image is common in Spanish book stores. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion learned the Spanish language so that he could read it in the original.

Cervantes was born at Alcalá de Henares, Spain. The date is not recorded but since he was named Miguel it is believed he was born on the feast day of St. Michael (Sept 29) in 1547. He was the second son and fourth of seven children of Rodrigo de Cervantes and Leonor de Cortinas. His father was an impoverished apothecary-surgeon and came from an old family of Northern Spain. Cervantes was baptized on November 9, 1558. Although Cervantes' reputation rests almost entirely on his portrait of the gaunt country gentleman, El ingenioso hidalgo, his literary production was considerable. William Shakespeare, Cervantes' great contemporary, had evidently read Don Quixote, but it is most unlikely that Cervantes had ever heard of Shakespeare. As a child, Cervantes saw the famous actor-manager and dramatist Lope de Rueda and mentions this in the preface to his plays. This possibly ignited his passion for the theatre in later life.

Cervantes lived an unsettled life of hardship and adventure. He was the son of a surgeon who presented himself as a nobleman. Nothing is known of Cervantes' mother nor her background.[1] Little is known of his early years, but it seems that Cervantes spent much of his childhood moving from town to town, while his father sought work. After studying in Madrid (1568-1569), where his teacher was the humanist Juan López de Hoyos, Cervantes went to Rome in the service of Giulio Acquavita. In 1570, he became a soldier, and fought on board a vessel in the battle of Lepanto in 1571. He was shot through the left hand and never after had the entire use of it.

He recovered sufficiently to participate in the naval engagement against the Muslims of Navarino in October 7, 1572. He participated in the capture of Tunis on October 10, 1573 and in the unsuccessful expedition to the relief of La Goletta in the autumn of 1574.

After living a while longer in Italy, with periods of garrison duty at Palermo and Naples, he finally determined to return home in 1575. The ship was captured by the Turks, and he and his brother, Rodrigo, were taken to Algiers as slaves. Cervantes was in possession of a letter of recommendation from the Duke of Alba, whose ship he had served on. The letter was found on his person and the Turks took him for a man of some importance who might bring a hefty ransom. He was held captive for five years, since his family could not afford the overpriced sum, undergoing great suffering, some of which seems to be reflected in the episode of the "Captive" in Don Quixote, and in scenes of the play, El trato de Argel. After four unsuccessful escape attempts, he was ransomed by the Trinitarians, and returned to his family in Madrid in 1580.

In 1584, he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, 18 years his junior. He and his wife had no children, although two years before his marriage Cervantes had fathered an illegitimate daughter, Isabel, in an affair with Ana Francisca de Rojas.

During the next 20 years he led a nomadic existence, working as a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada, and as a tax collector. He was temporarily excommunicated for confiscating supplies which belonged to the dean of the cathedral of Seville. He suffered a bankruptcy, and was imprisoned at least twice (1597 and 1602) because of irregularities in his accounts, one due to a subordinate rather than himself. Between the years 1596 and 1600, he lived primarily in Seville. In 1606, Cervantes settled permanently in Madrid, where he remained for the rest of his life.

In 1585, Cervantes published his first major work, La Galatea, a pastoral romance, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost except for El trato de Argel (where he dealt with the life of Christian slaves in Algiers) and El cerco de Numancia, were playing on the stages of Madrid. La Galatea received little contemporary notice, and Cervantes never wrote the continuation for it (which he repeatedly promised). Cervantes next turned his attention to drama, hoping to derive an income from that source, but the plays which he composed failed to achieve their purpose. Aside from his plays, his most ambitious work in verse was Viaje del Parnaso (1614), an allegory which consisted largely of a rather tedious though good-natured review of contemporary poets. Cervantes himself realized that he was deficient in poetic gifts.

If a remark which Cervantes himself makes in the prologue of Don Quixote is to be taken literally, the idea of the work, though hardly the writing of its "First Part", as some have maintained, occurred to him in prison at Argamasilla, in La Mancha. Cervantes' idea was to give a picture of real life and manners, and to express himself in clear language. The intrusion of everyday speech into a literary context was acclaimed by the reading public. The author stayed poor until 1605, when the first part of Don Quixote appeared.

Cervantes tried to produce several novellas that appear as subplots of the first part. Although it did not make Cervantes rich, it brought him international appreciation as a man of letters. Cervantes also wrote some plays during this period, as well as short novels, and the vogue obtained by Cervantes's story led to the publication of a continuation of it by an unknown who masqueraded under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. In self-defense, Cervantes produced his own continuation, or "Second Part", of Don Quixote, which made its appearance in 1615. Surer of himself, this part does not feature extraneous plots.

For the world at large, interest in Cervantes centers particularly on Don Quixote, and this work has been regarded chiefly as a novel of purpose. It is stated again and again that he wrote it in order to ridicule the romances of chivalry, and to destroy the popularity of a form of literature which for much more than a century had engrossed a large proportion of those who could read among his countrymen, and which had been communicated by them to the illiterate.

Don Quixote certainly reveals much narrative power, considerable humour, a mastery of dialogue, and a forceful style. Of the two parts written by Cervantes, the first has ever remained the favourite. The second part is inferior to it in humorous effect; but, nevertheless, the second part shows more constructive insight, better delineation of character, an improved style, and more realism and probability in its action.

In 1613, he published a collection of tales, the Exemplary Novels, some of which had been written earlier. On the whole, the Exemplary Novels are worthy of the fame of Cervantes; they bear the same stamp of genius as Don Quixote. The picaroon strain, already made familiar in Spain by the Lazarillo de Tormes and his successors, appears in one or another of them, especially in the Rinconete y Cortadillo, which is the best of all. He also published the Viaje Del Parnaso in 1614, and in 1615, the Eight Comedies and Eight New Interludes, the largest group of plays written by Cervantes to have survived. At the same time, Cervantes continued working on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a Byzantine novel of adventurous travel completed just before his death, and which appeared posthumously in January, 1617.

He died in Madrid on April 23, 1616 (Gregorian calendar), the same date as the death of Shakespeare (in the Julian calendar). It is worth mentioning that the Encyclopedia Hispanica claims the date widely quoted as Cervantes' date of death, namely April 23, is the date on his tombstone which in accordance of the traditions of Spain at the time would be his date of burial rather than date of death. If this is true, according to Hispanica, then it means that Cervantes probably died on April 22 and was buried on April 23.

Cervantes's influence is seen among others in the works of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and in the works of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges.

Cervantes' historical importance and influence
Cervantes's novel Don Quixote has had a tremendous influence on the development of written fiction; it has been translated into all modern languages and has appeared in 700 editions. The first translation in English, and also in any language, was made by Thomas Shelton in 1608, but not published until 1612.

Don Quixote has been the subject of a variety of works in other fields of art, including operas by the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello, the French Jules Massenet, and the Spanish Manuel de Falla; a tone poem by the German composer Richard Strauss; a German film (1933) directed by G. W. Pabst and a Soviet film (1957) directed by Grigori Kozintzev; a ballet (1965) by George Balanchine; and an American musical, Man of La Mancha (1965), by Mitch Leigh.

Its influence can be seen in the work of Smollett, Defoe, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the classic 19th-century novelists Scott, Dickens, Flaubert, Melville, and Dostoyevsky. The theme also inspired the 19th-century French artists Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré.

 

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain's greatest literary figure, was born in Alcalá de Henares, a small university town near Madrid, where he was baptized in the church of Santa María on October 9, 1547; he died in Madrid on April 23, 1616. We know little of his early life. The fourth of seven children, Cervantes, his siblings and mother accompanied his father, an itinerant surgeon, who struggled to maintain his practice and his family by traveling the length and breadth of Spain. Despite his father's frequent travels, Cervantes received some early formal education, in the school of the Spanish humanist, Juan Lopez de Hoyos, who was teaching in Madrid in the 1560s. His first literary efforts--poems written on the death of the wife of Philip II--date from this period.

In 1569 Cervantes traveled to Italy to serve in the household of an Italian nobleman, and joined the Spanish army a year later. He fought bravely against the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, where he received serious wounds and lost the use of his left hand. After a lengthy period of recovery and further military duty, he departed Italy for Spain in 1575, only to be captured during the return journey by Barbary pirates. He was taken to Algiers and imprisoned for five years, until Trinitarian friars paid a considerable sum of money for his ransom. This experience was a turning point in his life, and numerous references to the themes of freedom and captivity later appeared in his work.

His new-found freedom and return to Spain had strings attached. He was deep in debt for the ransom paid to release him. In 1584 he married a woman almost twenty years younger (he was 37 at the time), and soon managed to obtain a position as a government official in the south of Spain, requistioning wheat and olive oil for the campaign of the Invincible Armada (1588). Within two years of the Armada's defeat, he requested permission to emigrate to the New World, most likely to improve his situation, but was turned down and told to find some gainful employment "at home."

By 1590, Cervantes was already known as a promising author. In 1585 he published his first work in prose, La Galatea, a pastoral romance which had attracted qualified praise from some of his contemporaries. He was also writing for the theater. At this time he also began to write short stories, some of which were later included in his Exemplary Tales. His most famous work, Don Quixote de la Mancha, was published in two parts in Madrid. Part I appeared in 1605; the second part in 1615. The novel was an immediate success. The first part went through six editions the year of its publication, and was soon translated into English and French. The fame of Don Quixote brought Cervantes to the attention of a wide audience. In 1613 his completed collection of short stories appeared in Madrid; his satiric poem, Journey from Parnassus was published a year later; and in 1615, Cervantes was able to publish some of his theatrical works. His final prose fiction, The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda, generally described as a Byzantine romance--whose dedication he finished four days before his death--was assessed by Cervantes as among the best of his work.