Miguel de Cervantes Analysis

Miguel de Cervantes contributed to the Spanish theater in two minor ways, by stirring critical debate and through some of his dramatic works, but he had relatively little impact on the drama of the Spanish Golden Age and does not rank as a playwright with the greatest names of the period, such as Lope de Vega Carpio, Tirso de Molina, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. In the first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in 1605, Cervantes included a lengthy and impressive attack on the drama of his day. In chapter 48, the canon and the priest exchange thoughts about the Spanish stage and the plays that were most popular. Using these characters as spokespeople for his own views, Cervantes particularly criticizes the violations of the classical unities, the alterations in historical facts, the neglect of moral lessons, and even the character of some of the playwrights. This attack prompted Lope de Vega to respond with the central critical work of the age, his El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609; The New Art of Writing Plays, 1914), in which he defended himself and his plays and explained that he wrote to please his audience and deliberately violated the rules to produce more entertaining drama. In prompting this remarkable essay in which the great playwright examined his own work and his own motives, Cervantes made a unique contribution to the theater of his time and to theater history.

In his attack in Don Quixote de la Mancha, Cervantes mentions by name his own play The Siege of Numantia as one of the few plays written in accord with the classical rules to have achieved a degree of popularity with the audience. Although the play did attain a degree of success on the stage in its own day, The Siege of Numantia has been more highly praised in later times by such men as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Friedrich von Schlegel,...

Miguel de Cervantes is best known to readers in all languages as the author of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615; The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612-1620; better known as Don Quixote de la Mancha). That work was not only one of the first novels, but also the first truly modern novel (and one of the many wonders attendant upon its publication is the fact that such a book came so early in the life of the form); its influence appears in such disparate works as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Cervantes’s achievement is even more remarkable in view of the idiosyncratic nature of the book, its many and complex allusions to the history of Spain and the Jews in Spain, and the fact that most scholars believe that it did, indeed, start out as satire and only later, in part 2, complete the move from art through parody of art to art through the imitation of nature.

Cervantes’s first novel, written when he was a young man, was La Galatea (1585; Galatea: A Pastoral Romance, 1833). One eminent Cervantes scholar advises readers to forget the story, characters, and structure and imagine listening to it being read by skillful actors in a pleasant garden well furnished with wine and music. Cervantes’s last novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617;...

Cervantes belongs to that elite group of supreme literary geniuses that includes Homer, Vergil, Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare. The first to establish his greatness as a writer through the medium of prose fiction, Cervantes is acknowledged as an influential innovator who nurtured the short-story form and, more important, shaped the novel, sending it into the modern world. The list of succeeding masters of the novel who paid homage to Cervantes either through direct praise or imitation is awesome—among them Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Voltaire, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Thomas Mann,...

In what ways does Don Quixote reflect the age of Miguel de Cervantes, who began it when he was in his late middle age?

Much of Cervantes’ humor is very difficult to translate. How might a reader unfamiliar with Spanish at least partially overcome this difficulty?

Since few people today are, like Don Quixote, victims of an insatiable love of chivalric romances, how can his story impress modern readers as much as, or more than, it did readers who were very familiar with them?

Is Don Quixote a crazy old man? Does Don Quixote possess nobility?

Consider the statement that Don Quixote transforms Sancho into a better man.

What does the rich assortment of minor...