32
PARTISAN REVIEW
ture began at the end of the century. Madrid in the days of
Cervantes's literary apprenticeship, from 1583 onward, was alive
with needy rhymesters and producers of more or less polished Cas–
tilian prose. There was, as I have already said, Lope de Vega, who
completely overshadowed the playwright Cervantes and could write
an entire play within twenty-four hours with all the jokes and deaths
necessary. There was Cervantes himself-a failure as a soldier, as a
poet, as a playwright, as an official (he was paid sixty cents a day for
requisitioning wheat for the luckless Spanish Armada)-and then,
in 1605, he produced the First Part of
Don Quixote.
It may be worthwhile to cast a rapid glance over the world of
letters between 1605 and 1615, in which years both parts of
Don
Quixote
were produced. One thing catches the fancy of this observer:
it is the almost pathological orgy of sonnet making throughout
Europe, in Italy, Spain, England, Poland, France; the queer, but not
wholly contemptible, urge to cage an emotion, an image, or an idea
within a cell of fourteen lines, behind the gilt bars of five or seven
rhymes, five in the Latin countries, seven in England.
Let us glance at England . In the tremendous afterglow of the
Elizabethan period the great series of Shakespeare's incomparable
tragedies-Hamlet
(1601),
Othello
(1604) ,
Macbeth
(1605),
King Lear
(1606)-were or had just been produced . (Indeed , while Cervantes
was making his mad knight, Shakespeare might have been making
his mad King.) And in Shakespeare's oakshade Ben Jonson and
Fletcher and a number of other dramatists grew-a dense under–
growth of talent. Shakespeare's sonnets, the ultimate reach of this
type of thing, were published in 1609 and that influential monument
in prose , King James's version of the Bible, came out in 1611.
Milton was born in 1608, between the publication dates of the First
and the Second Part of
Don Quixote.
In England's Virginia colony
Captain John Smith produced his
A True Revelation
in 1608 and
A
Map oj Virginia
in 1612. He was the teller of the tale of Pocahontas, a
rude but robust narrator, this country ' s first frontier writer.
For France this decade was a short period of slump between two
great eras, immediately after the admirable colorful era of Ronsard
the poet and of Montaigne the essayist. Poetry was dying a decorous
death at the hands of pale perfectionists, perfect rhymesters but
impotent visionaries, such as the famous and influential Malherbe.
Such inept sentimental novels as
L 'Astree
by Honore d'Urfe were the
fashion. The next really great poet, La Fontaine, was not yet born ,
