Life and Outlook

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, in 1547. His father was a poor surgeon with a large family. Little is known for certain about his education, save that he completed it at the humanist academy of Juan López de Hoyos in Madrid. In 1569, he suddenly left Spain for Italy, possibly in order to escape the legal consequences of having wounded a man in a duel. By 1571, he had enlisted in the allied expeditionary force being assembled by Venice, Spain and the Papacy for a major attack on the Turkish fleet. In that year, he fought in the historic sea-battle of Lepanto, which he describes in the prologue to Don Quixote Part II as ‘the most exalted occasion seen by ages past, present or to come’, and suffered wounds that permanently crippled his left hand. After more military action in the Mediterranean, he was captured by Berber pirates while returning from Naples to Spain by sea, and spent the next five years, from 1575 to 1580, in captivity in Algiers; contemporary records testify to his fortitude and kindness to fellow captives during that ordeal, and also to his defiant courage, displayed by four unsuccessful escape attempts. This ‘heroic’ decade of Cervantes's life, from 1570 to 1580, is recalled in the captive's story in Don Quixote I, 39–42.

Ransomed in 1580, he returned to Spain, settled in Madrid and began a moderately successful literary career. He was one of a circle of well-known poets, and published a pastoral romance, La Galatea (1585), which, like other such romances, served partly as a framework for the author's poems. For that reason, the genre is designated as ‘libros de poesía’ (books of poetry) in the critical scrutiny of Don Quixote's library (DQ I, 6; p. 84). La Galatea is also typical of its genre by virtue of its self-referential character; beneath their pastoral guise, the shepherds stand for the author and his literary friends.

Though the book was not a flop, going through two re-editions in Cervantes's lifetime, he felt that it did not receive the recognition that it deserved. This can plainly be deduced from the priest's comment upon it in the abovementioned chapter of Don Quixote. .