A few days later, off Marseilles, his ship was taken by Turkish pirates. Cervantes, because of the important letters in his possession, was considered to be a valuable prize; consequently a high price was set for his ransom. It was five years, full of adventure, before his family could raise the large amount needed, but they finally did so. On September 19, 1580, Cervantes, already on board a ship that was to take him, as a slave, to Constantinople, instead received his freedom.
Once more back in Spain, he tried various occupations, including several attempts to write for a living. His first efforts were plays and a pastoral poem, “Galatea,” which gained him some small reputation but no riches. For the next fifteen years he struggled to support his wife and several female relatives by what we would call today civil service activities for the Spanish navy. He was not, however, very adept at keeping accounts, and he was imprisoned more than once during these years for not being able to make a proper accounting of funds that had been given him in charge.
According to tradition, Cervantes began to write Don Quixote around 1600, in the house in Esquivias whose two small rooms provided both living and working space for Cervantes and four or five women relatives. Doubtless he began by simply sitting and dreaming in the kitchen of the house, or so it is said. The women stepped around and over him, going about their business, and perhaps he told them stories of his adventures in the great world, but at any rate he pondered his life and the failure of his hopes. What could he look forward to, at the age of fifty-three, but penury, illness, and death? He laughed at that, for he was a great comic spirit.
For years he had read voraciously the popular literature of chivalry—the romances of that day—and he loved the old stories, just as everyone did throughout Spain. At first he thought he might write a chivalric romance, but then he decided to make fun of those foolish popular stories. And so he created Don Quixote, an elderly knight, as poor as a church mouse in all but books, whose brains had been addled by the reading of romances to the point where he had come to believe they were real.
The work thus began simply; Cervantes cannot have had any idea, at the beginning, of the majesty of his conception. Don Quixote sets out on his first sally, meets with a few adventures, manages to get himself made—according to his own crazy lights—a knight, and returns home again. The whole episode fills twenty pages.
Did Cervantes read the story to his womenfolk, and did they like it? At any event he determined to proceed. Don Quixote needed someone to talk to on his travels. So Cervantes created the squire, a certain Sancho Panza, a man of the neighborhood with his head screwed on tight and his feet on the ground, and sent him out to watch Don Quixote and to bring him home safely should he get into too much trouble.
The greatness of the book Don Quixote begins here, when the two, the one tall and gaunt, a dreamer, the other short and round, a realist, ride the roads of a Spain of long ago. These two immortal figures talk to one another about all the really important subjects: life, death, and immortality; the whole duty of a man; the meaning of kingship and the reality; the rules of art and poetry. Meanwhile they have adventures, in all of which Don Quixote is bested and beaten and betrayed. Finally, at the end of the book that Cervantes published in 1604, the poor old man is brought home in a cage, close to madness, and deposited before his own door. Sancho returns sheepishly to his family, but he knows that real life was out there and not here in his little village.
Don Quixote was an immediate success, being reprinted several times the first year and attracting two pirated editions in Portugal from which Cervantes, of course, received no revenues. In fact, he received almost nothing from the legitimate editions of the work. But he was pleased with himself because all Spain, and soon all Europe, was talking about the Knight of the Woeful Countenance and his faithful squire who spouted proverbs as he rode his donkey behind his master.
Cervantes did not know it, but the best was yet to come; he was not through with Don Quixote. Just as Cervantes had imitated the popular romances of the day, so now another author imitated Don Quixote. In mock rage and indignation Cervantes responded with his own genuine Second Part. This, the longer of the two parts and the greater, tells of the third and last sally of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and shows how they come truly to know one another for what they are, and to love one another, too, although each is so different from the other.
In the First Part, Cervantes had not been sufficiently confident of his characters to let them run on as he would have liked, and instead interrupted their conversations, and the narrative, with extraneous stories and unnecessary literary exercises. But now he knows that the best thing is simply to let his characters be what and as they are and so, more and more as the book progresses, they talk to one another, endless conversations that run on through day and night so that neither is able to sleep for fascination and interest.
Finally, they come to share not only friendship but an equal vision. They meet a band of wandering actors, and they reach the same conclusion, although in different words: We are, all of us, but a band of strolling players, who take our roles and play our parts as well as we can, but we take our exits, too, as our great Author wills. Thus has Sancho taught Don Quixote about the real world, and Don Quixote has taught Sancho how to dream.
At the very end of what may be the best of all books, their roles are reversed. They have returned from the third sally and Don Quixote has become ill. His illness seems to be mortal and Sancho is desolate. “Master,” he cries, “come with me yet another time, and we shall have adventures together and teach the world to love and respect knights!” “No, Sancho,” replies Don Quixote gently, “for there are no birds in last year’s nests.” It is the saddest of all the wonderful proverbs that are sprinkled throughout Don Quixote. (But heretofore it has always been Sancho Panza who has remembered the proverbs.) And so the old man dies of a broken heart because he thinks he has been a fool.
He is not a fool, of course; to find real adventures in this workaday world is the signal achievement of a noble and great spirit. Such is Don Quixote. There has never been anyone else like him. Nor has there been such a pair as those two, the old knight on his tall, skinny horse, and the short squire on his fat donkey. They wend their way, forever, in our imaginations. I wish we could call them back.
chapter six
The Renaissance,
Part Two
We are not done yet with the Renaissance, which, soon after the fall of Byzantium in 1453, took on a life of its own and became not just the rebirth of the Classics but the invention of a new world with new ideas, fears, and hopes.