It has been 400 years since Shakespeare and Cervantes died. Together, they defined the boundaries of time and the conventions that keep everyday life separate from fantasy.
We respectfully mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Savedro; it may be worth mentioning that, as is generally accepted, these two literary giants died on the same day, April 23, 1616; however, this did not actually happen. From 1616, Spain began to use the Gregorian calendar, while England still operated according to the Julian, and was 11 days behind. (England stuck to the old Julian dating system until 1752, and when the change finally came, there were riots, it is said, and mobs in the streets shouting, "Give us back our 11 days!"). Both the coincidence of the dates and the differences in the calendars would undoubtedly delight the playful, erudite sensibilities of the two fathers of modern literature.
We don't know if the two of them knew about each other, but they had a lot in common, starting right in the "I don't know" zone, because they were both secretive people; there are missing years in biographies and, more strikingly, missing documents. Neither of them left behind much personal material. Very little or nothing in the way of letters, work logs, abandoned drafts; only colossal, completed works. "The rest is silence". Consequently, both have fallen prey to idiotic theories that seek to challenge their authorship.
A cursory search on the Internet "reveals", for example, that Francis Bacon not only wrote the works of Shakespeare, but also wrote "Don Quixote". (My favorite crazy theory about Shakespeare is that he didn't write his plays, but someone else, with the same name.) And of course, Cervantes, who faced the challenge of authorship in his lifetime, when someone under the pseudonym Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, whose identity still uncertain, published a false sequel to "Don Quixote" and encouraged Cervantes to write the real second book of the famous novel, whose characters are aware of the plagiarist Avellaneda and treat him with much contempt.
Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the more closely you look at the pages they left behind, the more echoes you hear. The first, and in my opinion the most valuable shared idea, is the belief that a work of literature need not only be comic or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time.
Take a look at the opening scene of "Hamlet". Act one, scene one is a ghost story. "Do you still think that it's just an illusion to us?" Bernardo asks Horatio, and of course the play is much more than that. Act one, scene two brings intrigue at the court of Elsinore: the angry scholar king, his mother, recently widowed, directed at his uncle ("Damned urgency, with such dexterity and haste to rush into the defiled bed!"). Act one, scene three, and here is Ophelia, speaking to her suspicious father, Polonius, about the beginning of what will become a sad love story: "Ah, father, he has only in an honest way touched me with his love". And in scene four, it's a ghost story again, and something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
As the play progresses, it metamorphoses, becoming, by twists and turns, a suicide story, a murder story, a political conspiracy, and a revenge tragedy. There are comedic moments and a play within a play. It contains some of the greatest lines ever written in the English language and ends melodramatically, in a pool of blood.
This is what we who came later inherited from the bard: the knowledge that one work can be everything at once. The French tradition, more serious, separates tragedy (Rasin) and comedy (Moliere). Shakespeare makes mush out of them, and so, thanks to him, can we too.
In his famous essay, Milan Kundera suggests that the novel has two forefathers, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy; both of these sprawling, encyclopedic novels show the influence of Cervantes. Sterne's Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are openly modeled after Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, while Richardson's realism owes much to Cervantes for discrediting the foolish medieval literary tradition whose delusions keep Don Quixote in thrall. In Cervantes's masterpiece, as in Shakespeare's work, the mundane coexists with the noble, pathos and sentiments with indecency and meanness, culminating in an infinitely moving moment when the real world emerges and the Knight of the Sad Character accepts that he was a foolish, mad old man, "in looking for this year's birds in last year's nests".
Both are self-conscious writers, modern in a way that most modern masters would recognize; one who creates plays that are acutely aware of their theatricality; the other creates prose that is, in fact, aware of its fictional nature, even to the point of inventing an imaginary narrator, in Sid Amet Benendzheli - a narrator, interestingly, with Arab roots.
Both of them like, and are skilled in, the world of morally unacceptable, bums, as well as the world of high ideas; their galleries of scoundrels, whores, cutthroats and drunkards will be at home in the same bars. That firm grounding is what reveals them both as realists in the grand style, even when they present themselves as fantasists, and so, again, we who come after can learn from them that magic has no meaning, except when it is in the service of realism - was there ever a more realistic magician than Prospero? - and what a realist can do with a healthy dose of a fairy tale writer. In the end, although both used tropes derived from folktales, myths and fairy tales, they refuse to moralize, and in this they are, above all, more modern than many who came after them. They do not tell us what to think or feel, but show us how to do it.
Of the two, Cervantes was the man of action, fighting in battles, being seriously wounded, losing his left arm, being captured by pirates in Algeria and held for five years until his family raised the ransom money. Shakespeare had no such plays in his personal experience; however, of the two he seems to have been the writer more interested in war and warfare. Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, they are all stories about men at war (in themselves, yes, but on the battlefield, too). Cervantes used his painful experiences, for example in the stories of the days of captivity in Don Quixote and in several plays, but the battle that Don Quixote embarks on is - to use modern vocabulary - more absurd and existentialist than "real". Strangely, the Spanish warrior wrote about the comic futility of going into battle and created the great cult figure of the fool warrior (think Heller's 'Clock 22' or Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse 5' for more recent explorations of this theme), while the English poet-playwright's imagination plummeted (as in Tolstoy, Mailer) towards war.
In their differences, they embody very contemporary opposites, just as in their similarities they agree on much that is still useful to their successors.
Translation of lines from "Hamlet": Milan Bogdanović
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