Don Quixote

Anyone who reads Don Quixote for the first time inevitably has some

preconceptions about it, beginning with the dictionary def

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA was born in Alcala de Henares in Spain

near Madrid in 1547. Nothing is certainly known about his education,

but by the age of twenty-three, he enrolled in the army as a private

soldier. He was maimed for life in the battle of Lepanto and was taken

captive by the Moors on his way home in 1575. After five years of

slavery, he was ransomed; and two or three years later, he returned to

Spain. He settled in Madrid and began a moderately successful literary

career, in which he wrote poetry, published a pastoral romance, La

Galatea(1585), and had some twenty to thirty plays performed without,

as he puts it, “offerings of cucumbers or other throwable matter.”

Failing to attain financial success, he obtained an employment in the

Government office as a commissioner of food supplies for the Armada

expedition. He later became a tax collector, a position that he held

until 1597, when he was imprisoned for a shortage in his accounts due

to the dishonesty of an associate. The imprisonment on this occasion

lasted until the end of the year, and, after a period of obscurity, he

issued, in 1605, his masterpiece, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de

La Mancha (The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha). Cervantes

confesses to having ‘engendered’ Don Quixote in the prison. Its

success was great and immediate, and its reputation soon spread beyond

Spain. The enthusiastic reception of Part І spurred him to unchecked

literary activity until his death- a gloriously creative old age in

which he completed Don Quixote Part ІІ (1615), his twelve Exemplary

Novels (1613), ...

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...’ position, the female

characters such as Marcella and Dorothea in Don Quixote speak

forcefully in defense of women's rights. Loose in structure and uneven

in workmanship, it remains unsurpassed as a masterpiece of witty

humor, as a picture of Spanish life, as a gallery of immortal

portraits. It has in the highest degree the mark of all great art, the

successful combination of the particular and the universal: it is true

to the life of the country and age of its production, and true also to

general human nature everywhere and always. With reference to the

fiction of the Middle Ages, it is a triumphant satire; with reference

to modern novels, it is the first and the most widely enjoyed. In its

authorÂ’s words: “It is so conspicuous and void of difficulty that

children may handle it, youths may read it, men may understand it, and

old men may celebrate it.”