Publication of Don Quixote

In July or August 1604 Cervantes sold the rights of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (“The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha,” known as Don Quixote, Part I) to the publisher-bookseller Francisco de Robles for an unknown sum. License to publish was granted in September and the book came out in January 1605. There is some evidence of its content’s being known or known about before publication—to, among others, Lope de Vega, the vicissitudes of whose relations with Cervantes were then at a low point. The compositors at Juan de la Cuesta’s press in Madrid are now known to have been responsible for a great many errors in the text, many of which were long attributed to the author.

The novel was an immediate success, though not as sensationally so as Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, Part I, of 1599. By August 1605 there were two Madrid editions, two published in Lisbon, and one in Valencia. There followed those of Brussels, 1607; Madrid, 1608; Milan, 1610; and Brussels, 1611. Part II, Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha (“Second Part of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha”), came out in 1615. Thomas Shelton’s English translation of the first part appeared in 1612. The name of Cervantes was soon to be as well known in England, France, and Italy as in Spain.

The sale of the publishing rights, however, meant that Cervantes made no more financial profit on Part I of his novel. He had to do the best he could with patronage. The dedication to the young duque de Béjar had been a mistake. He had better fortune with two much more influential persons: the conde de Lemos, to whom he would dedicate Part II and no less than three other works, and Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, archbishop of Toledo. This eased his financial circumstances somewhat. However, it is apparent that he would have liked a securer place in the pantheon of the nation’s writers than he ever achieved during his lifetime—he wanted a reputation comparable to that enjoyed by Lope de Vega or the poet Luis de Góngora, for example. His sense of his own marginal position may be deduced from his Viage del Parnaso (1614; Voyage to Parnassus), two or three of the later prefaces, and a few external sources. Nevertheless, relative success, still-unsatisfied ambition, and a tireless urge to experiment with the forms of fiction ensured that, at age 57, with less than a dozen years left to him, Cervantes was just entering the most productive period of his career.

No graciousness descended on Cervantes’s domestic life. A stabbing incident in the street outside the house in Valladolid, in June 1605, led ridiculously to the whole household’s arrest. When they later followed the court to Madrid, he continued to be plagued by litigation over money and now, too, by domestic difficulties. The family lodged in various streets over the next few years before finally settling in the Calle de León. Like a number of other writers of the day, Cervantes nursed hopes of a secretarial appointment with the conde de Lemos when, in 1610, the conde was made viceroy of Naples; once more Cervantes was disappointed. He had joined a fashionable religious order, the Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament, in 1609, and four years later he became a Franciscan tertiary, which was a more serious commitment. Students of Cervantes know, too, of some increased involvement in the literary life of the capital in the form of his attendance at the Academia Selvaje, a kind of writers’ salon, in 1612.

The next year, the 12 Exemplary Stories were published. The prologue contains the only known verbal portrait of the author:

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of aquiline countenance, with dark brown hair, smooth clear brow, merry eyes and hooked but well-proportioned nose; his beard is silver though it was gold not 20 years ago; large moustache, small mouth with teeth neither big nor little, since he has only six of them and they are in bad condition and worse positioned, for they do not correspond to each other; the body between two extremes, neither tall nor short; a bright complexion, more pale than dark, somewhat heavy in the shoulder and not very light of foot.

Cervantes’s claim in this prologue to be the first to write original novellas (short stories in the Italian manner) in Castilian is substantially justified. Their precise dates of composition are in most cases uncertain. There is some variety in the collection, within the two general categories of romance-based stories and realistic ones. El coloquio de los perros (“Colloquy of the Dogs,” Eng. trans. in Three Exemplary Novels [1952]), a quasi-picaresque novella, with its frame tale El casamiento engañoso (“The Deceitful Marriage”), is probably Cervantes’s most profound and original creation next to Don Quixote. In the 17th century the romantic stories were the more popular; James Mabbe chose precisely these for the selective English version of 1640. Nineteenth- and 20th-century taste preferred the realistic ones, but by the turn of the 21st century the others were receiving again something like their critical due.

In 1614 Cervantes published Viage del Parnaso, a long allegorical poem in mock-mythological and satirical vein, with a postscript in prose. It was devoted to celebrating a host of contemporary poets and satirizing a few others. The author there admitted that writing poetry did not come easily to him. But he held poetry in the highest esteem as a pure art that should never be debased. Having lost all hope of seeing any more of his plays staged, he had eight of them published in 1615, together with eight short comic interludes, in Ocho comedias, y ocho entremeses nuevos. The plays show no shortage of inventiveness and originality but lack real control of the medium. The interludes, however, are reckoned among the very best of their kind.

It is not certain when Cervantes began writing Part II of Don Quixote, but he had probably not gotten much more than halfway through by late July 1614. About September a spurious Part II was published in Tarragona by someone calling himself Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, an unidentified Aragonese who was an admirer of Lope de Vega. The book is not without merit, if crude in comparison with its model. In its prologue the author gratuitously insulted Cervantes, who not surprisingly took offense and responded, though with relative restraint if compared with the vituperation of some literary rivalries of the age. He also worked some criticism of Fernández de Avellaneda and his “pseudo” Quixote and Sancho into his own fiction from chapter 59 onward.

Don Quixote, Part II, emerged from the same press as its predecessor late in 1615. It was quickly reprinted in Brussels and Valencia, 1616, and Lisbon, 1617. Parts I and II first appeared in one edition in Barcelona, 1617. There was a French translation of Part II by 1618 and an English one by 1620. The second part capitalizes on the potential of the first, developing and diversifying without sacrificing familiarity. Most people agree that it is richer and more profound.

In his last years Cervantes mentioned several works that apparently did not get as far as the printing press, if indeed he ever actually started writing them. There was Bernardo (the name of a legendary Spanish epic hero), the Semanas del jardín (“Weeks in the Garden”; a collection of tales, perhaps like Boccaccio’s Decameron), and the continuation to his Galatea. The one that was published, posthumously in 1617, was his last romance, Los trabaios de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia setentrional (“The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story”). In it Cervantes sought to renovate the heroic romance of adventure and love in the manner of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus. It was an intellectually prestigious genre destined to be very successful in 17th-century France. Intended both to edify and to entertain, the Persiles is an ambitious work that exploits the mythic and symbolic potential of romance. It was very successful when it appeared; there were eight Spanish editions in two years and French and English translations in 1618 and 1619, respectively.

In the dedication, written three days before he died, Cervantes, “with a foot already in the stirrup,” movingly bade farewell to the world. Clear-headed to the end, he seems to have achieved a final serenity of spirit. He died in 1616, almost certainly on April 22, not on the 23rd as had been traditionally thought. The burial certificate indicates that the latter was the day he was buried, in the convent of the Discalced Trinitarians in the Calle de Cantarranas (now the Calle de Lope de Vega). The exact spot is not marked. No will is known to have survived.