Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was
born in 1547 to a poor Spanish doctor. He joined the
army at twenty-one and fought against Turkey at sea and Italy on
land. In 1575, pirates kidnapped Cervantes
and his brother and sold them as slaves to the Moors, the longtime
Muslim enemies of Catholic Spain. Cervantes ended up in Algiers.
He attempted to escape his enslavement three times and was eventually
ransomed in 1580 and returned to Spain.
Only with the publication of the first volume of Don
Quixote, in 1605,
did Cervantes achieve financial success and popular renown. Don
Quixote became an instant success, and its popularity even spawned
an unauthorized sequel by a writer who used the name Avellaneda.
This sequel appeared several years after the original volume, and
it inspired Cervantes to hurry along his own second volume, which
he published in 1615.
Cervantes died later that year.
Many of Don Quixote’s recurring elements
are drawn from Cervantes’s life: the presence of Algerian pirates
on the Spanish coast, the exile of the enemy Moors, the frustrated
prisoners whose failed escape attempts cost them dearly, the disheartening
battles displaying Spanish courage in the face of plain defeat,
and even the ruthless ruler of Algiers. Cervantes’s biases pervade
the novel as well, most notably in the form of a mistrust of foreigners.
Funded by silver and gold pouring in from its American
colonies, Spain was at the height of its European domination during
Cervantes’s life. But Spain also suffered some of its most crippling defeats
during this time, including the crushing of its seemingly invincible
armada by the English in 1588.
The tale of the captive, which begins in Chapter XXXIX of the First
Part of Don Quixote, recounts in detail many of
the historical battles in which Cervantes himself participated.
In this sense, Don Quixote is very much a historical
novel.
Nevertheless, the novel illustrates Spain’s divergent
worlds. Spain at the time was caught in the tumult of a new age,
and Cervantes tried to create in Don Quixote a
place to discuss human identity, morality, and art within this ever-shifting
time. Though the Renaissance gave rise to a new humanism in European
literature, popular writing continued to be dominated by romances
about knights in shining armor practicing the code of chivalry.
Chivalry emphasized the protection of the weak, idealized women,
and celebrated the role of the wandering knight, who traveled from
place to place performing good deeds. Books of chivalry tended to
contain melodramatic, fantastical stories about encounters with
cruel giants, rescues of princesses in distress, and battles with
evil enchanters—highly stylized accounts of shallow characters playing out
age-old dramas.
On one level, the first volume of Don Quixote is
a parody of the romances of Cervantes’s time. Don Quixote rides
out like any other knight-errant, searching for the same principles
and goals and engaging in similar battles. During these battles,
he invokes chivalric ideals, regardless of how ridiculous his adventures
may be. On another level, however, the adventures of Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza in the novel’s First Part attempt to describe a
code of honor that could serve as an example for a Spain that was
confused by war and by its own technological and social successes.
Cervantes applies this code of values to a world in which such values
are out of date.
In the Second Part, however, Cervantes provides the answer
to questions about identity and codes of conduct in the personalities
of Don Quixote and especially his sidekick, Sancho Panza. The Second Part
is a textured work with responsive and credible characters who engage
one another in sincere and meaningful ways. Cervantes wanted to
place his novel within a literary tradition that was fluctuating
at the time, and the novel’s numerous discussions of playwriting,
poetry, and literature mark this effort to understand the changes
in the intellectual environment.
Cervantes also includes social and religious commentary
in Don Quixote. He bitterly criticizes the class
structure in Spain, where outmoded concepts of nobility and property
prevailed even as education became more widespread among the lower
classes. The arrogance of the Duke and the Duchess in the Second
Part highlights how unacceptable Cervantes found these class distinctions
to be. Likewise, the prevailing of Sancho and Teresa Panza’s wisdom
at the end of the novel is a victory for old-fashioned goodness
and wisdom in the face of a world that makes people practical but
petty. Finally, Cervantes, who was briefly excommunicated from the
Catholic church in 1587,
discusses the church in the novel as well. Sancho’s self-identification
as an “old Christian,” in particular, informs the new morality he
represents.
