Miguel de Cervantes: Poet, Playwright, and Novelist
A. Cervantes – Poet
Cervantes’s poetic work is primarily limited to Journey to Parnassus and some minor, uncollected poems (in addition to the verses included in his novels and plays written in verse). As a poet, Cervantes is not considered to be as prominent as many of his contemporaries who wrote in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Journey to Parnassus is a long poem, written in chained tercets, in which he praises the poets of the period, with some irony in certain cases. The rest of his uncollected poems include the Epistle to Matthew Vazquez, also written in tercets, and a famous sonnet, To the Tomb of Philip II in Seville.
B. Cervantes – Playwright
In the prologue to his Eight Plays and Eight Interludes, Cervantes speaks of his dedication to the theater and his alleged early successes, and also of the arrival of Lope de Vega, who overshadowed his work in the Madrid literary scene. He expresses this with some resentment and irony, since the theater was the best way to make money in the literary world of the time. Cervantes was always short of financial resources and sought success in this field, but never achieved it.
Cervantes’s plays are often classified into two periods:
- First Period (1580-1587): During this time, it seems that he presented some of his tragedies, in line with attempts to create a Spanish tragedy following authors such as Juan de la Cueva and Argensola. However, most of these early works have not survived. Only two are known: El trato de Argel (The Treatment of Algiers), written around 1580, shortly after his return from captivity, which includes his experiences of those years, and The Siege of Numantia, written some years later. This work, about the famous resistance of Numantia, whose inhabitants died defending their city, is one of the best-known of Cervantes’s plays.
- Second Period (Published in 1615): His work in the second period is more important, consisting of Eight Plays and Eight Interludes. The plays do not contribute anything new to the theater of the time, which was already dominated by the theatrical formula of Lope de Vega and the hundreds of works that this author wrote. However, the eight interludes demonstrate all the grace and fluency that Cervantes possessed. Of the eight interludes, six are written in prose, with some final lines in verse, and the other two entirely in verse (The Ruffian Widow and The Election of the Mayors of Daganzo). This is where Cervantes’s expertise in depicting types, characters, situations, and classes of people is evident.
C. Cervantes – Novelist
The literary importance of Miguel de Cervantes is based on his work as a novelist. Don Quixote is not only the work that has made him famous throughout the centuries, but also his short novels (the Exemplary Novels, as he called them) and his last novel, Persiles, are among the best works of Spanish prose fiction.
The Galatea was the first work that Cervantes published, in 1585. This is a pastoral novel, with all the typical elements and features of this subgenre (idealized landscape, unhappy love affairs, and equally idealized shepherds, etc.). However, Cervantes tried to introduce some complexity, drawing from the vicissitudes of the Byzantine novel. The author promised a second part several times, but never wrote it.
Cervantes’s next novel, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, was published in 1605. The first part was written to be one of the best novels, if not the best, in the entire history of world literature. Ten years later, he published the second part with the title The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha. The success of the work was immediate; editions were produced throughout the seventeenth century and have continued ever since. It was soon translated into the main European languages (an English edition appeared in 1612), and is currently translated into almost every major language.
With this work, Cervantes intended to parody the books of chivalry, but the results far exceeded the original intention. It is difficult to summarize or comment in a small space on a work of the extent and characteristics of Don Quixote. Hundreds of books have been written about it over nearly four centuries, attempting to explain, study, and unravel its complexities.