Quote of the Day (Miguel de Cervantes, on How Don Quixote Went Mad)

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” —Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605)

Miguel de Cervantes—born on this day in 1547—is lucky to have stayed alive long enough to write his masterpiece. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, he suffered three grave wounds—two gunshot wounds to the chest and another that completely maimed his left hand.

As if that weren’t enough, he was captured by pirates and imprisoned for five years, then jailed on two more occasions owing money to the treasury from a shortage in his accounts.

Maybe Cervantes needed to find a laugh somehow, somewhere to get his mind off his terrible situation. In any case, he came up with one of the great satires in world literature: a parody of chivalric romances.

In the process, he offered the world one of the most indelible depictions of the clash between illusion and reality, in this scene that has become immortal:

“Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long."

"Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone."

"Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures.”

Cervantes, the greatest writer in the Spanish language, died in April 1616 on the same day as William Shakespeare, arguably the greatest writer in the English language.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the film adaptation of Man of La Mancha, with Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote.)

Quote of the Day (Miguel de Cervantes, on ‘Urgent Necessity’)

“Urgent necessity prompts many to do things, at the very thoughts of which they perhaps would start at other times.”―Spanish novelist-soldier Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Don Quixote (1605-1615)

(The image accompanying this post is from the movie of the musical adaptation of Don Quixote: Man of La Mancha, starring Peter O’Toole as Quixote and James Coco as his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panza.)

Quote of the Day (Miguel de Cervantes, Comparing Discretion and Folly)

"Folly is wont to have more followers and comrades than discretion." —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605)

Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on a Turning Point in Moslem-Christian Relations)

“Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath  
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)  
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, 
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,  
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....  
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)”--G.K. Chesterton, “Lepanto” (1915)

Even in the snippet quoted here from the considerably longer work by G.K. Chesterton, you can sense that this is the kind of old-fashioned poetry that, as the cliché goes, they don’t write anymore. There’s the rhyme, for instance (increasingly, 20^th and 21^st century major poets don’t go in for this the way they used to). There’s the wider perspective, not exclusively on the poet and his troubles (whatever they might be) but on world players and the weight of history. And then there’s the completely unapologetic, politically incorrect designation of good and evil, including the acclamation of a hero.

The Battle of Lepanto, which Chesterton is commemorating, took place on this date in 1571. It was a double watershed moment in world history: not only the last major naval engagement involving galleys in the West, but the point at which the Christian European decisively checked the advance of militant Islam into its own territory.

It shocked me—though thinking about it now, in light of the last point, it shouldn’t have—that Britain’s WWI “Tommies” could recite this poem, and take it to heart as they entered battle. Did they think of these verses on the beaches at Gallipoli, another encounter with men from the Mideast professing a different faith?

I had heard of this poem previously, but had never encountered it until I read it online. I can’t think of any poetry anthology I ever came across that contained it, and I suspect that, with the passing years, it will be even harder to find.

Part of the problem, I think, is this old-fashioned element. In his essays and Father Brown detective stories, Chesterton’s religious certainties are complemented by a genial sense of paradox not unlike his friend and frequent debate foil, George Bernard Shaw.

Not here. It all sounds terribly inconvenient to think about: Moslem ships bearing down on Mediterranean coasts, engaging in mass enslavement, putting the men to work rowing in galleys. (In fact, many of the galley rowers straining at the oars of Moslem galleys at Lepanto were Christian slaves.)

The above lines come near the end of Chesterton’s poem. Many of us feel intense sympathy for the 24-year-old soldier Miguel de Cervantes, knowing that his searing experience of being wounded (losing the use of a his left hand) would lead him down the road of disillusion to create one of the masterpieces of Western literature, Don Quixote.

But Chesterton thinks there’s an important place, too, for the likes of Don John of Austria, who, at the time of battle, was the 25-year-old illegitimate son of the late Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and half-brother of the present king of Spain, Philip II. Don John’s backing did not owe simply to his privileged position, however, as much as to his ardent backing of Pope Pius V’s call for a trans-European Holy League that would mount a last-ditch defense against the Ottoman Empire.

History depends more than a bit on contingency. In 1588, the Spanish Armada that met disaster in an encounter with the fleet of Queen Elizabeth I of England was without the services of Don John, who had died 10 years before. But in 1571, he was still around to command the fleet of the Holy League at Lepanto.

The history that got me interested in Don John was The Galleys at Lepanto, by Jack Beeching, in which the lead-ups and consequences of the battle got much more ink than the naval encounter itself. Over the last decade, however, several other histories have also considered the battle, including Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World, by Roger Crowley; Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto, by Niccolò Capponi; and a chapter in Victor David Hanson’s Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.

There is a reason for this, I suspect. I think it has much to do with the legacy of 9/11 and historians’ need to revisit the past to see how Western Europe once reacted to a prior wave of fear generated by Moslems who claimed to be doing Allah’s will in battling the West.

Lepanto, to be sure, did not end the Moslem threat, anymore than the overthrow of the Taliban, or even the death of Osama bin Laden, has done so now. But it is equally false to claim that the results of the 1571 encounter were negligible.

For years, Europeans were living amid the growing fear that Moslem navy might would sweep all before it. Lepanto punctured the myth of Moslem invincibility. That victory, owing heavily to the Holy League’s material advantage and training in gunpowder (the Turks’ advantage in number of men and ships was undermined by their reliance on bows rather than cannon), did not come without a price, however, just as the West’s War on Terror has not been filled with mistakes and casualties.

Though the Ottoman Empire was left with only a third of its original fleet and it lost 18,000 out of 30,000 men--as well as the battle--it still inflicted terrible losses on the West: 20 ships sunk, 7,000 dead out of 20,000. By the end of the day’s fighting, according to Crowley’s Empire of the Sea, the Holy League could barely sail away because the Ionian Sea was so filled with corpses from the battle.

There were also divisions among those who should have been allies. (The French, bitterly opposed to Spanish gains on the continent and elsewhere, not only refused to join the Holy League but helped finance the Turks.) Even at its best, the alliance could barely be held together.

Holding it all together was Don John, as charismatic as his half-brother Philip was ascetic. While detailing the climate of fear on the brink of this epic naval clash, Chesterton makes clear that help is on the way: “Don John of Austria is going to the war.”

Quote of the Day (Miguel de Cervantes, on Mercy)

“Though the attributes of God are all equal, to our eyes that of mercy is brighter and loftier than that of justice.”—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by John Ormsby

Among the forms of mercy practiced by my pastor this muggy summer was his sermon yesterday, which reflected the sound advice he recalled receiving from mentors as a young seminarian: “Be quick, be brief, and be gone.”

This Day in Theater History (Shakespeare Play Lost in Fire?)

September 30, 1808—It was bad enough that during the morning, the Covent Garden Theatre in London was completely consumed by fire, or that 23 firemen lost their lives in the collapse of the building. But the blaze also destroyed an organ left by Handel, a stock of wine belonging to the Beefsteak Club—and, most important, in the library, a possible manuscript of William Shakespeare. 

Yes, you read that last clause correctly. Like much else about Shakespeare’s life, the documentary trail about Cardenio is slim and tantalizing: 

* John Heminges, a longtime friend of Shakespeare’s, in charge of the King’s Men troupe, presented six plays at court, including Cardenno (Shakespeare’s age were creative about spelling!) in May 1613. 

* That same year, Heminges presented Cardenna (there they go again with the spelling!) before the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador. 

* “The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare,” was entered onto the Stationers’ Register by the London publisher Humphrey Moseley. No copies survive. 

* Lewis Theobald, a subsequent Shakespeare editor, published a tragicomedy called Double Falsehood, or, the Distrest Lovers. This, he told his audience, he had, “with great labour and pains, revised and adapted the same for the Stage.” 

How did this wondrous play end up in his hands? Let’s listen: “One of the MS. copies was above sixty years standing in the handwriting of Mr. Downes the famous old Prompter, and was early in the possession of Mr. Betterton, who designed to have ushered it into the world.” 

Do you believe that? A lot of people haven’t over the years. I mean, if he had a play by Shakespeare, of all people, why the need to “revise and adapt” it in the first place? 

We already know about the terrible Covent Garden fire. But there’s an unusual postscript to all this. 

In the 1990s, the internationally famous handwriting expert Charles Hamilton came upon an untitled, anonymous manuscript in the British Museum Library and subsequently wrote a book claiming that it was the lost Cardenio and that it was, in fact, in Shakespeare’s handwriting. 

Now, here’s the interesting thing (to me, anyway) about this play. I always thought it was one of those fascinating coincidences that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date (April 23, 1616, if you want to know), but it seems that they had something else in common. 

Most people know that Shakespeare borrowed (or, to use Mr. Theobald’s word, “adapted”) much older plays for his own purposes. But Cardenio came from an episode in Don Quixote involving two characters named Cardenio and Lucinda. 

Now this was quite a feat, because Don Quixote had only just been translated into English. Ol’ Bill was wasting no time jumping on a good story! 

 A little more about Cardenio: How much of it was attributed to Shakespeare is very much up for grabs.

The last play generally believed to be entirely written by Shakespeare was The Tempest, in 1611. After that, the man from Stratford scaled back his association with London’s theater world. 

Following The Tempest, Shakespeare’s name was paired up with John Fletcher on three other plays: Cardenio, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII. Some scholars believe that Fletcher patched these together from some loose scenarios concocted by Shakespeare. 

How appropriate that Cardenio should meet its fate by fire. Even during his lifetime, The Bard almost saw his legacy destroyed in a conflagration that utterly destroyed the Globe Theatre in July 1613.

Fortunately, some of the proudest possessions of the theater—including costumes and its playscripts for Shakespeare—were salvaged. Would that Cardenio had met a similar fate.