He has a comic awareness of the human condition. To what can you attribute this guy, living in this time period, given this really difficult life, being able to bring this sense of empathy and comedy to his writing?
There's no question that we lucked out in a way—he was exactly the right man at exactly the right moment in history, he was put into exactly the right situations, many of them life-threatening, and thank god we didn't lose him at any point of the many points that we could have along that way, to finally become a late middle-aged man who sat down and started writing what he wrote.
A person a generation prior to what Cervantes had been born into, the world that his father had been born in, would have been itinerant to a certain degree, but nothing like what Cervantes was allowed from the s to the s. He was permitted by history to become the worldly, traveled man that he became, and certainly under very, very difficult circumstances.
He didn't choose to leave Madrid at He got himself into a mess with the law for wounding another man when it was clearly illegal to be dueling, and he had to make a run for it. And that run happened at precisely that moment when the Spanish empire was expanding outside of its geographical boundaries in Spain, when the Mediterranean was opening up as a theater of warfare.
This allowed Cervantes, who a few years earlier probably would have just gone somewhere else in Spain to hide, to be out in the theater of the world. And having fought in the Mediterranean, after having almost died in battles against the Turkish empire, after having been imprisoned by an enemy culture in North Africa for five years and surviving it and making it back to Spain—he still considered things like moving to the other side of the world to work for the Spanish government in the Indies.
We're talking about an exploding expanse of horizons for people. That was a major, major factor, but at the same time, this exploding expanse of horizons being experienced by Cervantes was also being experienced in a particular way. He had a world of information coming to him through the printing press, through the theaters, and a society and a government that largely succeeded in painting a picture of what the world under the Spanish empire was really like.
And it didn't correspond at all to what Cervantes was finding out about the world. There was this fundamental disconnect between what his experience as a newly roving man were telling him and what was being told to him about how the world was supposed to be.
He was hearing things about what the infidel was like, but then he went and landed in the infidel's lap and had a completely different experience. They weren't positive necessarily, but they were human. They weren't caricatures.
What he ended up doing was spending his writing life skewering caricatures, and by skewering caricatures, he was creating characters. Those characters were suddenly people who could have an imagination about how things were and get it wrong, and that believing something and getting it wrong becomes the fundamental common theme of everything that he writes.
He has a good sense of humor about it. It's extremely funny, but at the same time that it's funny, it's also human. In a way that's more palpable and real and convincing than anything that had been written beforehand. You mentioned the theater, and you devote a chapter in your book to the relationship between Cervantes and Spanish theater, but could you speak a little more about the Spanish theater during his time and the reality it created?
I ask because the relationship between staged narratives and what we call reality has and hasn't changed all that much with our own understanding of what is real as it is produced by theater, cinema, or television today.
How could we possibly be talking about the 16th century? That the preconditions for us encountering a story in the way that we encounter it today, namely images cast up on a screen when we sit in a dark box looking at them, the preconditions for this were created years ago during the rise of what I call the theatrical industry during the 16th century, and this is in cultural terms the most important change that took place at the time.
First it was the printing press a little bit earlier, but then it was the rise of the theater for all the reasons that I talk about in what was my first book, How the World Became a Stage. The world became a stage in a very serious sense, in a very physical and architectural sense, even, for Cervantes. In he moved to Castille where he then spent some of his early years being a valet for a priest.
He stayed in the city until , when he finally saw military service on board the Marquesa. During the Battle of Lepanto, Cervantes was shot in the left arm, which was later amputated, leading him to be called the 'Cripple of Lepanto'. He continued to serve with the army up until In this year, he was captured by some Algerian corsairs while on the voyage back to Spain and held to ransom. He was taken to Algiers where he was enslaved for 5 years, unable to escape despite his numerous attempts.
Fortunately, his parents with the help of a Catholic order named the Trinitarians, managed to find enough money to pay the ransom and have him released.
On his release, Miguel de Cervantes then returned to Madrid and his family where he began traveling and working, trying to help his family pay off the debts that they had incurred trying to free him. His first significant piece of work was in the form of a pastoral novel entitled La Galatea , published in Miguel de Cervantes then settled in Seville where he worked for a number of different people including a bank as a collector of owed taxes.
In a spurious Don Quixote , Part II, was published by an anonymous author identifying himself only by his place of origin, Avellaneda. Since perhaps before the publication of Don Quixote , Part I, Cervantes was at work composing what he would consider to be his masterpiece, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda , which Cervantes would complete right before his death, and which would be published posthumously in Canavaggio, Jean.
Translated from French by J. New York: W. Instructor Log In. In , a team of forensic experts located what they claim to be the bones of Miguel de Cervantes alongside those of his wife and 16 other people. Unfortunately, DNA testing and the search for signs of the injuries he suffered in battle have so far been unable to confirm for certain that his remains are among those found. But many believe this is the end of the year-old mystery.
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