Miguel de CERVANTES (1547-1616): Life and
Portrait
Prof. Jean Canavaggio, Director
Casa de Velázquez, Madrid
July 1997
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information.
Miguel de Cervantes, born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547, was the son of a surgeon who
presented himself as a nobleman, although Cervantes's mother seems to have been a descendant of
Jewish converts to Christianity. Little is known of his early years. Four poems published in Madrid
by his teacher, the humanist López de Hoyos, mark his literary début, punctuated by his sudden
departure for Rome, where he resided for several months. In 1571 he fought valiantly at Lepanto,
where he was wounded in his left hand by a harquebus shot. The following year he took part in Juan
of Austria's campaigns in Navarino, Corfu, and Tunis. Returning to Spain by sea, he fell into the
hands of Algerian corsairs. After five years spent as a slave in Algiers, and four unsuccessful escape
attempts, he was ransomed by the Trinitarians and returned to his family in Madrid. In 1585, a few
months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, twenty-two years younger than he, Cervantes
published a pastoral novel, La Galatea, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost except for
El trato de argel and El cerco de Numancia, were playing on the stages of Madrid. Two years later
he left for Andalusia, which he traversed for ten years, first as a purveyor for the Invencible Armada
and later as a tax collector. As a result of money problems with the government, Cervantes was
thrown into jail in Seville in 1597; but in 1605 he was in Valladolid, then seat of the government,
just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signaled
his return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrd just after the return there of the monarch
Philip III. During the last nine years of his life, in spite of deaths in the family and personal setbacks,
Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer. He published the Novelas ejemplares in 1613, the
Viaje del Parnaso in 1614, and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part
of Don Quixote, a year after the mysterious Avellaneda had published his apocryphal sequel to the
novel. At the same time, Cervantes continued working on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,
which he completed three days before his death on April 22, 1616, and which appeared
posthumously in January 1617.
What we know of Cervantes's life is the result of a long series of inquiries begun during the
first three decades of the seventeenth century. But the most significant contributions have been those
of scholars in the early part of this century, especially Cristóbal Pérez Pastor. The documents that
have been published through their efforts come from public, parochial, and notarial archives, and
they generally refer to Cervantes's captivity, the posts that he occupied in Andalusia, and certain
other important events in his life. Few of these documents, however, cast any light on his life as a
writer, much less on his personality. We need a methodical commentary on these documents to
bring up to date the sketch which James Fitzmaurice Kelly published in Oxford in 1917: Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra; reseña documentada de su vida. We also need a critical biography worthy of
the name. Luis Astrana Marín's big book Vida ejemplar y heroica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
(Madrid, 1948-1958, 7 vols.) suffers from a less-than-solid methodology as well as a number of
personal biases. Still it contains a considerable amount of information and so remains an essential
work of reference. Rosa Rossi's essay Escuchar a Cervantes (Valladolid, 1988) attempts to do away
with the idealized portrait of Cervantes by interpreting his life as the confluence of his supposed
Jewish origins and his latent homosexual tendencies. Certain recent biographers--such as Andrés
Trapiello (Las vidas de Cervantes, Barcelona, 1993) and, not without a hint of scandal, Fernando
Arrabal (Un esclavo llamado Cervantes, Paris and Madrid, 1996)--have revived the tradition of
romanticized biographies in which the biographer's personality obliterates that of the writer whose
life is the supposed subject.
The biography written by the author of this note (Jean Canavaggio, Cervantès, revised and
amplified edition, Paris: Fayard, 1997) differs from its predecessors in its pretentions. Unlike other
works, it does not attempt to plumb the depths of the irrational in order to decipher the symbolism
that Cervantes's fiction presumably contains. Rather than "explain" Cervantes, a man who
disappeared almost four centuries ago and whose creation has taken on a life of its own, this
biography aspires to "tell his story" better. We must first establish with all the necessary rigor what
is actually known of Cervantes's actions and experiences, and we must exclude the legends, such
as his having studied at the Jesuit school in Seville or his having composed the Quixote while in
prison. Then Cervantes, who was an obscure participant in a heroic adventure, a lucid observer of
a time of doubt and crisis, and a very personal interpreter of Spain at a crucial moment in its history,
must be placed in his own milieu and his own time, better known now because of the work of recent
historians. We must do our best to find that man. As we trace this life which has become a destiny
that we attempt to render comprehensible, the book offers us a likely profile of a figure who is not
the same individual that his friends and family knew, nor the "rare genius" whose profile Cervantes
himself created, nor the figure which, since his death, has arisen from a series of myths which some
day ought to be looked into. In other words, we are looking for the missing profile which we assign
to the secret narrator hidden behind his masks, this absent one who is always present, whose voice
is his alone and, through the magic of his writing, is always recognizable even among a thousand
others.
(Translation by Melvin Hinton)
Further biographical information on Cervantes.
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