Two of the most important sections of our collection are devoted to a pair of writers who were contemporaries but probably never met: William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. Our talent for seeing constellations of distant and usually dead stars spills over into other areas of our conscious life. We group together in the same imaginary cartography dissimilar geographical landmarks, isolated historical facts, people whose only common point is a shared language or birthday. We create circumstances whose explanation can only be found in astrology or palmistry, and from these incantations we try to answer old metaphysical questions about chance and fortune. The fact that the dates of Shakespeare and Cervantes almost coincide with each other means that we not only associate these two singular characters in obligatory official celebrations, but we also look for a shared identity in these very different beings.
From a historical point of view, their realities were notoriously disimilar.
Shakespeare’s England lay between the authority of Elizabeth and that of James, the former of imperial ambitions and the latter of primarily domestic concerns, qualities reflected in plays such as Hamlet and Julius Caesar on the one hand, and Macbeth and King Lear on the other. The theatre was considered a lesser art in England: when Shakespeare died, having written some of the plays we now universally regard as indispensable to our imagination, there were no official ceremonies at Stratford-upon-Avon, none of his European contemporaries wrote an elegy in his honour, and no one in England proposed that he should be buried in Westminster Abbey where celebrated writers such as Spencer and Chaucer lay. Shakespeare was (according to his near-contemporary John Aubrey) the son of a butcher, and as a teenager he liked to recite poems to the astonished meat merchants. He was an actor, a theatrical impresario, a tax collector (like Cervantes) and we are not sure if he ever travelled abroad. The first translation of one of his works appeared in Germany in 1762, almost a century and a half after his death.
Cervantes lived in a Spain that extended its authority over the part of the New World granted to the Spanish crown by the Treaty of Tordesillas, with the cross and the sword, slitting the throats of an “infinite number of souls,” says Father Las Casas, to “swell themselves with riches in very short days and rise to very high states and without proportion to their persons” with “the insatiable greed and ambition they have had, which has been greater than in the world could be.” Through successive expulsions of Jews and Arabs, and then of converts, Spain had sought to invent a pure Christian identity, denying the reality of its intertwined roots. In light of these facts, Don Quixote can be seen as a subversive act: the authorship of what would become the greatest work of Spanish literature is handed over to a Moor, Cide Hamete, and it is left to the Moorish Ricote to denounce the infamy of the expulsions. Miguel de Cervantes (he himself tells us) “was a soldier for many years, and five and a half years a captive. In the battle of Lepanto he lost his left hand from an arquebus, a wound which, although it seems ugly, he considers beautiful”. He had commissions in Andalusia, was a tax collector (like Shakespeare), suffered imprisonment in Seville, was a member of the congregation of Slaves of the Blessed Sacrament and later a novice of the Third Order. His Quixote made him so famous that when he wrote the Second Part he could make the bachelor Carrasco say, and without exaggeration, “that my belief is there are more than twelve thousand volumes of the said history in print this very day. Only ask Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where they have been printed, and moreover there is a report that it is being printed at Antwerp, and I am persuaded there will not be a country or language in which there will not be a translation of it.”
Shakespeare’s language had reached in the Elizabethan era its highest point.
An interweaving of Germanic and Latin languages, the very rich vocabulary of sixteenth-century English allowed Shakespeare a vast musical range and an astonishing epistemological depth. (Shakespeare himself contributed numerous words that are in common use today.) An instrument of the Reformation, the English language was subjected to severe scrutiny by the censors. In 1667, in his History of the Royal Society of London, Bishop Sprat warned of the seductive dangers of the extravagant labyrinths of the baroque and recommended a return to the primitive purity and brevity of language, “when men communicated a certain number of things in an equal number of words”. Despite the magnificent examples of English baroque — Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Shakespeare himself — the Anglican church prescribed exactness and conciseness that would enable the elect to understand Revealed Truth, as the team of Bible translators had done by order of King James. Shakespeare, however, managed to be miraculously baroque and exact, expansive and scrupulous at the same time. The accumulation of metaphors, the profusion of adjectives, the shifts in vocabulary and tone deepen rather than dilute the meaning of his verse. Hamlet’s perhaps too famous monologue would be impossible in Spanish since it requires a choice between ser and estar. In six English monosyllables the Prince of Denmark defines the essential concern of every conscious human being; Calderón de la Barca, on the other hand, required thirty Spanish verses to say the same thing.
Cervantes’s Spanish is carefree, generous, profligate.
Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, it is in the flow of words that we travel the roads of his dusty and difficult Spain, and follow the violent adventures of the vigilante hero, and recognise the living characters of Don Quixote and Sancho. The inspired and heartfelt declarations of the former and the vulgar and no less heartfelt words of the latter take on dramatic vigour in the verbal torrent that carries them along. In an essential way, the whole literary machine of Don Quixote is more plausible, more comprehensible, more vigorous than any of its parts. Cervantine quotations taken out of context seem almost banal; the whole work is perhaps the best novel ever written, and the most original.
If we want to indulge our associative impulse, we can see these two writers as opposites or complements. We can see them, one in the light (or shadow) of the Reformation, the other in the shadow (or light) of the Counter-Reformation. We can see the one as a master of a popular genre of little prestige, and the other as a master of a prestigious popular genre. We can see them as equals, both artists trying to use the means at their disposal to create enlightened and brilliant compositions, without knowing that they were enlightened and brilliant. Shakespeare never assembled the texts of his plays (the task was left to his friend Ben Jonson) and Cervantes was convinced that his fame would depend on his erudite Voyage to Parnassus and cumbersome Persiles and Segismunda.
Did these two monsters know each other?
We suspect that Shakespeare heard of Don Quixote and that he read it or at least the episode of Cardenio which he later turned into a now lost play: Roger Chartier, a member of our Board, has investigated this tantalising hypothesis in detail. Probably not, but if they did, it is possible that neither Cervantes nor Shakespeare recognised in the other a star of universal importance, or that they simply did not admit another celestial body of equal intensity and size into their orbit. When Joyce and Proust met, they exchanged three or four banalities, Joyce complaining of his headaches and Proust of his stomach aches. Perhaps with Shakespeare and Cervantes something similar would have happened.