The Man From La Mancha -- Episode 2 (part 2 of 3). The man Miguel de Cervantes.

This is the story of how one of the greatest books ever written, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, became one of the most successful musicals in broadway history, which of course was The Man from La Mancha by Dale Wasserman.

The year is 1579, and a solider being held in an Algerian prison, and he’s about to make his 4th, and failed, attempt to escape.  And this is only one of a multitude of life mishaps that makes it very unlikely the solider even survived.  And it wasn’t until the age of 58 that the solider, then prisoner, then tax collector, would write the world’s first novel.

 What utterly impossible set of circumstances had to happen for this prisoner to even get out of prison, much less become one of the greatest writers of all time?

 Flash forward 350 years to the mid-1960s where a playwright is looking to convert a stage play into a musical, he has an acquaintance who is a psychic, so the writer asks whether the musical will be a successful endeavor.  The psychic predicts not only that it will, and will soon overwhelm the writer’s life.

Both predictions are entirely accurate.

This is a 3 part dive into Don Quixote.  In part 1 we looked at the impact of the book and what made it so important.  Take home points are that it is  a really big deal, and it had a lot of important ideas wrapped around a really funny and accessible story.

In this part we’ll look at the star-crossed life of Cervantes, including the ominous predictions surrounding 1588, his deeply ironic relationship with the greatest playwright of his day, and try to answer the question of how someone with his life could possibly write comedy.

In part 3 we’ll ask how that narrative, 350 years later, get translated into one of the most successful musicals in broadway history?

What series of impossible and unlikely events had to happen for the world to inherit Don Quixote?

Transcript

Year is 1579 and a soldier being held in an Algerian prison is about to make his fourth, and failed, attempt to escape. And this is one of only a multitude of life mishaps that made it very unlikely that this soldier would even survive. And it wasn't until the age of 58 that this soldier, then a prisoner, then a tax collector, would write what would be the world's first novel.

What series of impossible and unlikely events had to happen for the world to inherit Don Quixote? Here we'll start answering that question by looking at the life of Miguel de Cervantes. 

***** Intro *****

Some quick bookkeeping, the music that you're listening to is a collaboration between myself and a guy named Andrew Howitt. He's a fantastic guitarist. He's a philosophy professor at Cal State Fullerton. He's a good friend and he's got a great ear for music.  He recorded almost everything that you're going to hear. 

If you listened to episode one, you know I stumbled over the author's qualifications a couple of times, the full citations, I'm going to put in the notes on the webpage. And I'll also try to do a better job of letting you do something about the author.

The first time that I introduced them also in the first episode, I referenced the podcast as shoddy research about great musicals, which is a concept I’m quite taken with. That phrase probably captures what this podcast is all about. While that characterization is in the main accurate, I should clarify that I am a professional researcher, but I have no real theater background, and I am not a musicologist.

I'm not a dramaturge, although who doesn't like that phrase. So I'm doing what we can, what we call in the academic biz, second hand research, that is, I'm finding out what other smart people have to say. Everything will be accurate to the best of my ability to discern it, but not complete because I haven't spent an entire career on each subject as each of these authors I’ll be citing have done.

And I should also say, if you were to be a researcher, the highest level you can do is when you're the person actually out there collecting the data, doing the original research, writing the books, and that we call firsthand research. Secondhand research is where you read the stuff by the people who do and try to sort through what consensus there is there and what the other experts have to say.

And then the third level is when you read what other people have to say about the primary research. The lowest, the lowest form of research is Google and Wikipedia. It's there, it has its purpose, but it's definitely a different creature. I will be relying on all of that as I go through our topics. Anyway, what I'm trying to give you in this podcast is a deep dive, a pretty thorough review of some, but not all of the concepts, that are out there in primary research with a few good reviewers to guide the way.  And, for a few brief, desperate, and shallow moments I will not be proud of, Wikipedia pages.

And so, I'll take a great play and glace over the thousands and thousands of pieces of research out there. I'll pick the ones that are of greatest interest to me. I'll convey those to you. We'll call it a podcast.  Shoddy research on great musicals, that’s me.

I also talk kind of fast. So I'm going to try slowing down a little bit as I speak. I probably am failing so far, but I will try to keep that under control.

So for this episode, I'm going to lean quite heavily on Malveena McKendrick's biography. McKendrick is a scholar of literature at a college, which I believe is an affiliate of Cambridge university.  While I haven't read everything that there is out there on Don Quixote, that IS probably impossible. I DO believe that it's possible to read Don Quixote every year and find something new in it as William Faulkner says he did.  Lord Byron and Harvard professor Mary Gaylord claimed to re-read the book every year.

But while you can continually re-read the book and not get bored, is not possible to read everything that's ever been written about Don Quixote, the book, because that is literally millions of pages of books, special issues of journals, translations, and interpretations. Dale Wasserman, the guy who wrote the man from La Mancha, the musical has nine pages of single spaced double-column lists of musical adaptations.

And those are just the attempts to put the story to music. If you look at, for example, the Norton edition of Don Quixote, it's got a selected bibliography that is two pages of single spaced lists of books, all of which are a couple hundred pages each.  There's just too much out there that you could read if you try to read everything.

So this episode will not get you everything there is to know about Don Quixote and definitely not everything there is to know about Miguel de Cervantes, but you will get what I encountered and what I think is pretty fun. I'm going to break his life into about five parts here, his life before he was a soldier, his life as a soldier, his life as a prisoner, what he did after he got out of prison but before he became a great author, which is mostly tax collector or commissary.

And then finally we’ll get to his life as an author. Okay. So without any more preliminary stuff, let's go ahead and dive into the question of who was Miguel de Cervantes and how he eventually produced the book Don Quixote. 

Okay. Part number one of his life, his youth. He was born in 1547. Basically he came from a large family that was lower middle class and they moved around a lot.

His dad was what I guess they called a barber of the day, which is sort of what we would now might call an EMT. It was kind of a quasi medical profession, but it wasn't very stable. And so the family moved to several different cities, wherever it was his dad felt he could get some work. He did not have much formal education, but there's some evidence that he was associated with the universities for at least some time.

Now there are those who would fight me on that, and there are people who have dedicated careers to proving that he worked with one particular university, one specific big wig or the other, but I'm going to call it about a year of high school is what his education was. It's safe to say that he didn't finish a university degree.

And I'm going to say it's about a year of high school for reasons that will become clear in the next episode.  That year of high school sets up a really strange coincidence that I would like to pursue. And this was basically his life until he entered the military in his early 20s. He was following his family around.

He was trying his hand at different things. He had some education, but he was hardly what you would call a man of letters. He had probably some exposure to university level learning, but was not like anybody's star student or the top of his class, or even somebody who got in and was doing well, and then tragically had to leave for economic reasons, he just had sort of a passing time and spent some of it at universities.

Which gets us to part two of his life, his life as a soldier and particularly the battle of Lepanto. Christendom and Islam are in constant conflict around this period in the middle of the 1500s, 16th century. And the Islamic forces generally have the upper hand at sea and the battles are going on and off.

The Spanish have the much better army and the Islamic forces have the much better naval resources. And all this came to a head in 1571 in a battle at the Gulf of Lepanto. The Ottomans have a huge number advantage, and as I just mentioned, they're generally better at sea. But the Christians have come together in what's called a Holy League, which is a bunch of different nationalities have come together to fight for cause of Christendom.

And they're led by a guy named Don John, who is the King of Spain's half brother. He's 24 years old. He is dashing. He is clever. All accounts sort of characterize him this way. 

Now, the Spanish have a better infantry, which you wouldn't think would necessarily help you in a sea battle, but this is a battle between galley ships.  The way that works,  and I’m also not as a military historian, but from what I can tell a galley ship is long and skinny, what they mostly have on them is a bunch of soldiers. And then they encounter each other in the water and essentially shoot at each other and then ram enemy ships so that they can cross board and then the soldiers can fight each other.

So having a better infantry is actually not as irrelevant as you think it might be. In addition to this advantage, Don John promises that he'll free any slave if they win the battle. And then he came up with another tactic that also improved the accuracy of his cannons. 

One of the those soldiers is our hero, Miguel de Cervantes.  He's enlisted as a soldier. He's on one of these galleyboats and he's there to fight with his brother, Rodrigo. So the battle starts and Miguel de Cervantes is sick. He's basically told, “you need to sit this one out.” You'll be around for another battle. And he adamantly refuses. He's like, I'm going to go into the battle.

The ships collide. He's part of the charge or trying to repel a charge, but at any rate, he has shot twice in the chest and once in his left hand, which will cause him to lose the use of his left hand and never regain it. By all accounts, he showed valor beyond the pale in the exchange. We'll get to this a little bit later when we see what happens to him after he gets out of prison, but 12 comrades from his battle will all come forward and testify about how brave he was in this fight.

The Spaniards win it. It becomes the last big galley battle. If you had a thought about what a late medieval naval battle was like, it was probably something like pirates of the Caribbean, that's kind of the vision which I had, but those ships you’re thinking of were larger, more maneuverable ships that had better cannons and went a lot faster.

The naval battles of the day were galley ships, which were not really designed to be quite so maneuverable or have so much cannon-based firepower. Those bigger and better ships will end galley warfare, so it's sort of interesting that Cervantes suffers his wounds and plays his part as an infantryman in what proves to be the last big galley battle before better technology would result in better ships.  He found himself, accidentally, at a turning point in military history.

It is 1571 is when this battle happens. And so we've got a Spanish Armada that's coming up just over a decade later. And this is where the naval power has shifted from the Islamic forces to the Spanish forces. For our future author, this event establishes bravery and a heavy dose of the worst human experience.

Very few soldiers have come away thinking “hey that war renewed my faith in humanity.” They all come away talking about the horrors of war and the terrible things that humans could do to one another. That's definitely in full effect for Cervantes at this point. So he has those experiences. He's sort of crowned a hero and he keeps kicking around as a soldier and finally finds himself in Naples in 1575, about four to five years after Lepanto.

He's now in his late twenties. And he's without the use of his left hand.  That ends part two of his life. His life as a soldier. And he's now about to enter part three of his life, his life as a prisoner. 

So it's now about 1575 and he's going to be a prisoner until about 1580. So guy in his late twenties which might be the prime of your life, and he’s about to spend a serious chunk of his early adult life behind bars.

He had set his mind on a military career. As I mentioned, he wanted to be a captain, which by the way, was way better than being a member of the infantry. The soldiering life was much more mercenary at that time than it is today. A captain was of course, in charge of their unit and they had pretty much free reign to control the payroll and could determine who did, and who didn't get promoted and pretty much anything else.

So as long as it wasn't resulting in mutinies and it wasn't resulting in big problems for the generals, captains were sort of free to do whatever it was that they wanted to do. And it was possible, of course, to engage in graft, but it was also possible just to legitimately have a fairly lucrative career.

So a miliary career was a pretty solid option if you could become a captain. In search of a captaincy, Cervantes goes out and he gets themselves two letters of recommendation that he's going to take from the King. One of them comes from Don John, the leader of the battle of Lepanto and one from the Duke of Sessa.

I’m not quite sure what the relationship was with Sessa, but Duke's a pretty high ranking title, so it’s a letter worth having. The plan is to take these two letters to the King to get himself appointed as a captain. On this trip, he's still with his brother, Rodrigo. They'd fought together. They kicked around for the various posts that they have been going to and from, and on this three-hour tour they find themselves together. 

And as I mentioned, he's found himself in Naples and he wants to go back to Spain. He sets out in September in a little convoy from Naples to Spain. And although there's a bunch of ships traveling together for protection, they are captured by a pirate named Dali Mani and taken to Algiers where they will be held for ransom.

So now if you are still thinking of Pirates of the Caribbean, you're dead on this time.  The ship's traveling in a convoy precisely because they were afraid of the pirates. And despite that, the pirates successfully took the ship. So now the ship and everyone on it is being taken to Algiers by this pirate Lord pirate King named Dali Mani.

Now, by law, all Spanish soldiers were to be ransomed. That was, if you agreed to serve in the Spanish army, then the nation of Spain agreed that if you ever got captured, they would pay your ransom to have you released. Which was something that you wanted to have happen. 

Miguel and Rodrigo are being taken to Algiers, which is by all accounts, a slave city.  The city has some other stuff going on, but most of their trade is in humans, which includes traditional slavery, as you might be thinking of it. 

When they get to Algiers and there's two tiers of slaves there. There are what are called non ransom slave for whom it definitely sucked more. When you think medieval dungeon, this is what you're thinking about. They are put in dungeons. They're taken out to do difficult manual labor. They have no real chance of release.  The second group is actually held at court and were still slaves in all sense of the word, although these so-called “ransom slaves” are soldiers or other notable people were intended to be ransomed back to their families.

Their conditions were still pretty harsh. For ransom slaves, they had to literally carry around a ball and chain, but they got to go out each day and move through the city. Cervantes, in fact, had to find his own food in his own clothes, which of course he couldn't do tied up in a dungeon.

So he was actually released in the city to meet people, tried to do odd jobs or find a way to get his family to send him some money so that he could afford to eat and he could afford to clothe himself. 

What was really jacking Cervantes, was that he’s in this group of ransoms. What they have going for them is that if you kill your ransom slave, then you've lost your ransom.  If I’m a slave owner, I want to ransom him to the King of Spain for a lot of money.

But what I don't want to do is have him go back to the King and say, these people were so wicked and evil, we must immediately invade them and free all of the other slaves. You want the slaves to be treated reasonably well, if you're a ransom slave. And Cervantes problem was when he was captured, he had these two letters with him, again, one from Don John and one from the Duke of Cessa.

And so his captors take a look at him and think, this guy's important. This guy knows Dukes. This guy knows princes. We are going to be able to get a ton of money for him. And Cervantes was fully aware of this. 

And he knew that, in fact, the Cervantes family was this lower middle class. There was a group of people and his family, they'd had some marriages. They'd had some better and worse fortune, but there were definitely not having the kind of money that the duke had. So his captors are thinking we're going to get 6,000 Dukats for this guy. And his family's thinking we can scrape together 600 Dukats to get him released. All this means that Cervantes is going to have to stay in prison for a LONG time while the different parties figure out the price.

While he's a captive, Cervantes is aware that his ransom is probably not going to be paid, or it'd be way more of a hardship on his family than they could probably muster. So most of what he did was he go into the town, try to meet different people, and he try to escape. 

How many times did Miguel de Cervantes try to escape?

Well, if you read Dale Wasserman, he's the guy who wrote the famous musical, The Man from La Mancha, which we'll talk about in episode three, he says it's seven. But he doesn't include any reference, no footnotes. My research is shoddy, but at least you can look it up and see if I'm wrong. He's got nothing that references where he got the number 7 from.

Femi Oyibode, who published with Cambridge University Press, says there were “multiple” scape attempts. And he noted that some people have speculated that he was not punished for those attempts more harshly because he had a homosexual relationship with his captor. He also notes there is little to no evidence of that whatsoever.  The reasoning is apparently, “Oh, he wasn't put to death and we tried to escape must have been a homosexual relationship.” I don't know what that says about society, but it is something that has creeped up in even scholarly articles.  Anyway, it smells like random speculation to me.

I've read other people who say he attempted to escape three times, but the author I'm going to be leaning on most heavily in this episode, as I talked about before, is Malveena McKendrick, who wrote a thorough biography, and she puts the number at four.

And I think that this is the most convincing account. There are other biographers. They may have different amounts, but I do think that there are four attempts. And those four times McKendrick has outlined for us. So let's go through them one at a time.

Here is escape attempt number one. He's captured in 1575 so in 1576 he is attempting escape number one. He hired a guide to take him and a small group of people to a city called ORAN, O-R-A-N, to catch a boat from there to Spain, but they get halfway down on their journey, the guide abandoned them, they realized that Oran was like 200 miles away, so they just kind of turned around and they went back.

So you, you know, you're a slave, you try to escape, you go back to your captor. They're probably not going to say “Oh, well, thanks for coming back.” There's more to it than that. His security was increased, which was bad. If you have to walk around in the ball and chain, having to be more heavily restrained was not good.  

But there was no corporal punishment.  He wasn't whipped. He wasn't beaten probably because they still thought that he was worth lots of money and they did not want to damage the captive that they thought they could ransom. So escape number one does not go well. 

We are now at escape number two. It's 1577. So within a year of his first escape attempt.  He makes this plan with about 18 other people. The idea is that they're going to all leave where during the day because that’s when they’re allowed to go out. They're going to hide in a cave until a getaway ship can arrive. Cervantes organized all this and he joined them in the cave when it was about a week out.

But of course, you've got 18 guys in a cave. You need to get them food and you need to get them water. So they had people that were bringing them these supplies. [drama] The boat shows up, they get to the beach, they can see the boat, the boat gets spooked because they think that their position has been given away and it turns around and goes away.

Just imagine these 18 guys on the beach taking this huge risk to try to get themselves to escape from slavery to get back home. They can see the boat in the harbor.  But the boat turns around, it runs away, and that's not the worst thing that happens to the boat. The boat does turn around and come back two days later. But they are betrayed by one of the guys who was helping them hide in the cave and bringing the food and the water. Having been tipped off, the captors set up what is essentially a sting operation so that they try to get the boat to come to the shore. The boat does come to the shore. The captors jumped the boat. They take all18 prisoners back and they are re imprisoned.

Now at this point, Dali Mani is away. In his absence the town is being run by the Pasha, that's the title, with the proper name is Hassan. So Pasha Hassan, is kind of the head honcho in Algeria. They don't have like traditional royalty ranks, or whatever, but you can think of him as the king, the head, the gang lord, who's now essentially the top guy in Algiers.

He interrogates Cervantes. Cervantes does not spill the names of his fellow escapees and who it was that tried to help him. He's also not whipped or killed, which is good for him because others are not so lucky and one of the other escapees is hung by one foot upside down until he dies. But Cervantes escapes punishment. That incident shows the prison is still a mid 1500s slave prison.  This is not a great place to be. Escape attempt number two has thus failed. 

To summarize: Cervantes organized the escape attempt successfully. He was caught. Under interrogation, he stood by his fellow prisoners and did not give up their names as others were being killed. And that's sort of the take home point for number two.  He earned the respect of his fellow captives.  As a footnote to this, about the same time, his brother Rodrigo is successfully ransomed to his family back home.  

Pasha Hassan now buys servants and slaves from Dali Mani. Since Cervantes is a slave, he could be bought and sold. And the guy who captured him, Dali Mani, sells him to Pasha Hassan.  Escape attempt #2 is over, Rodrigo is gone, and Cervantes now reports to Pasha Hassan and not Dali Mani.

That was 1577. Now we're at Escape attempt number three in 1578. This one doesn't go well and it almost never gets out the ground.

Cervantes just sends a letter by courier to Iran asking for a rescue party to come and get them. The courier is caught. Cervantes name is on the letter. He is sentenced to 2, 000 lashes, which will surely kill him. If he's lashed 2, 000 times, he's not going to survive that. But once again, he's interrogated.  Once again he escapes the really harsh punishment. He's not given any lashes. Probably once again, this is because he is seen as being a valuable prisoner that they don't want to damage or kill. This might embolden him for another attempt, now that tried and failed three times but not suffered severe physical punishment due to the attempts.

As a footnote here, both Don John and the Duke of Cessa die in December 1578, and you'd think that would change the status significantly. The reason he's being held is because his captors think they can get huge ransom money from Don John and the Duke of Sessa. But now both of those guys have died in 1578.

Among other things, if you were fighting the battle for Christendom as a true believer, which by all accounts, the Cerantes was doing, to have those two famous leaders pass away does not look good for your cause. And if you know the reason that you've been escaping punishment, which is also ironically the reason that you can't get out is because you have letters of recommendation, those two guys, that's gotta change your thinking a little bit.

Which gets us to escape number four. It's 1579. So he’s clipping along at one escape attempt a year, every year. This time he rallies 60 prisoners and he gets a ship by a renegade captain in Algiers to take them. They're not waiting for rescue ship show up and instead they have hired their own ship.

He's got 60 prisoners that he's corralled to go with them. So, it went from, he was escaped from a couple of guys, to a group of 18, and now it's up to group 60. But he is betrayed by a fellow Christian, somebody who goes by the title and name Dr. Juan Blanco de Paz, probably not really a doctor, and de Pas sold out the entire operation.

Everyone gets caught.  All 60 of them. One story is that Cervantes is again interrogated and again, refuses to talk or to name names. In fact, there's also a version of the story that says he would diverts all the blame on himself so that others can escape. And once again, he's interrogated by Hassan. And this time Hassan puts him in non-ransom prison.

Up till then he has been a ransom prisoner, which means he's in the better accommodations and he has some limited freedom. Finally, Hassan just says, you've tried escaping four times. You are going into the non-ransom prison. It might also be due, I guess, the death of his benefactors. But his circumstances have changed for the worse, and he's got a lot of reasons to be seriously bummed at this point, both Don John and the Duke of Cessna are dead.

Which makes it really bad timing that Hassan decides that he's leaving for Constantinople. And if he does that and he takes the slaves, if he does that then Cervantes is almost surely never getting back to Spain. While he's in Algiers, he could try to get ransomed. He could try to escape. But if Pasha Hassan goes into Constantinople, they're going into the heart of the Ottoman empire and Cervantes chances of ever getting out go way down. 

So it's August of 1580. He's been a prisoner since 1575. His life for the last five years has been that of a slave and a prisoner. And here we enter a real hero. It is Friar Juan Gil. Gil is a hostage negotiator, which is actually a job you could have as a friar, especially given the legal requirements for ransoming soldiers in the 1500s.

His job is to go into Spainand talk with the Spanish authorities and the families of hostages and try to scrape together the money to get them released. Then, the job is to go to Algiers and then trade their money to get the hostages out. He's sort of an in between intermediary go between, but he's he's also there sort of as the one guy that everybody trusts to both be honest about the money, be honest about the release of prisoners, and to account for the entire transaction.

This is what leads to Cervantes final exit. Is like he's been in prison for five years. I'm going to read this directly from McKendrick's text. It's goes to page 85.  Quote begins:

“by the 3rd of August, 1580, 108 prisoners had been ransomed. They set sail that day for Valencia with Antonio de la Bella arriving there two days later in a prodigious storm.

Juan Gil, our friar hero stayed behind to complete the negotiations between 8th of August and 8th of September. He successfully bargained for seven more prisoners. And Cervantes himself acted as the witness for one of the deeds of sale. What anguish must he have felt as he did so? The ransom friars always operated understandably on a basis of quantity rather than quality, ransoming as many slaves as they could with the money available.

The operation was a complex one with the funds deriving as they did from so many different sources and destined as they were for so many different ends. And careful calculations and hard bargaining were necessary to spend the money to the best possible effect. Juan Gil carried with him only 300 Ducats designed specifically for Cervantes.

Yet the asking price was almost 600. The plight of Hassan’s Slave was becoming more urgent, for he was about to leave for Constantinople on the 19th of September, and so Juan Gil concentrated on bargaining with a redoubtable Pasha. Hassan, however, claimed all his slaves were gentlemen, and he swore that he would not settle for less than 600 ducats for any of them, insisting, as usual, on payment in gold escudos.

He would, in any case, need galley slaves for his trip to Constantinople, and he was therefore not set upon selling them. For Miguel, the conclusion when it came was hair raising due to its closeness to disaster. On the 19th of September, Cervantes, in irons, was taken on board along with Hassan's other slaves.

As the sails were being raised, Juan Gil, unable to meet the sums being asked for some of the other Christians on board, turned up with the 600 Ducats, Asked for Cervantes, the family's contribution having been supplemented by two small sums from the private and the general alms at his disposal and by funds destined for the ransom of the Christians that he had been able to trace.

But even now, there was a hitch. Hassan was adamant that the money should be in gold. And so as the minutes ticked away, Juan Gil had eased up more of his precious funds, buying the gold escudos from the traders at an unfavorable rate of exchange. At last, however, he was able to rush back to the galleys, clutching his bag of gold coins, Cervantes describing the deed of ransom as quote, a man of middling stature, heavily bearded and with a maimed left hand and arm, and he was immediately set free.

End of Quote

He'd been a captive for almost exactly five years. You know, if you were going to write a romance novel and come up with an exciting escape pirates-of-the-Caribbean style, I don't know that you could do too much better than a tale that, on the last ship out the Friar finally negotiates for one more guy to be released, and that guy is Miguel de Cervantes. 

One month later, he's in Spain in the fall of 1580. And there is one more coda to this chapter. De Paz, the guy who had sold them out of escape number four, figures out that he's in trouble if the 60 guys who sought to escape figure out that he was the rat. So he decides he's going to blame the whole thing on Cervantes by posing as a representative of the inquisition and starting the proceedings.

So. Let's pause because we'll get back to this a little bit later. This is, from what I can tell, the first and only time Cervantes ever faces anything like the Spanish Inquisition. And what's happening is the guy who sold out their escape attempt is looking for a patsy that he can blame the failed escape on.  He has picked Cervantes, which turns out to be a bad choice for him. As he is pretending to be a representative of the Inquisition and starting the proceedings, Friar Gil, our hero, the guy who ransomed Cervantes off the boat, calls him out and De Paz can't establish that he's acting on the inquisitional authority or actually any other authority.

Cervantes and Gll swear out an affidavit of the true events, to which 12 others sign on.  Those 12 guys all were there at the battle of Lepanto and the 12 accounts do differ somewhat, but they all hold that Cervantes is a good, honorable, brave guy who shielded them from harsher punishment. And that also his bravery is beyond question based on how he acquitted himself at the battle of Leponto.

His time as a prisoner is now done, but there are some take home points. The first of these is that he's very courageous. I'm going to read one much shorter quote this time from Kendrick. Quote, “However one looks at it, Cervantes record in Algiers was a remarkable one. The repeated escaped attempts. The resistance to intimidation and threats of torture and the constant support for his fellow captives reveal a character of unusual initiative, stamina and energy, persuasive as well as resolute, cautious as well as daring, realistic as well as optimistic, above all, a character capable of standing up to adversity in a way that few others can.

And, I gotta say, that does sort of resonate with me.  Having failed to escape three times. Being threatened with torture, death, watching other people hung upside down by one foot until they died, being sold out by others. Given all that, I might not have been super excited myself about trying that fourth attempt. But the fact that he was able to do so, and that he was able to get more people to try to join him says a lot about what this guy was.

That ends the third part of his life. He starts out having a youth with a middling education. He becomes a soldier who, in his only real action, proves himself to be brave, but doesn't stick out in the army and then spends as much time as a prisoner of war and a slave as he does as a soldier. 

We now enter the fourth part of his life: Tax collector and mediocre playwright. He got out of prison in 1580, 25 years before he publishes Don Quixote, which he'll do in 1605. So what does he do this time? He's got a quarter century to kill. Well, he tries writing and in 1585, he publishes a book under the title La Galatea, and it’s a pastoral romance. A chivalric romance we talked about a little bit in episode 1.

When La Galatea is published They're still around and they think about Arthurian legends with quests and magicians. You might get your leg cut off, but a magic spell can put it back. There's always a damsel in distress, probably dragon.  That’s a chivalric romance.  But now this spinoff genre of pastoral romance is now replacing them. This one focuses more on love and on nature.

And I believe McKendrick says. To our modern mind, the difference would be very difficult to discern, but it’s quite meaningful at the time. Romances focus on love. So people are still falling in love. There are still extended romances where people try to court each other. What makes the newer books pastoral is that they now focusing on nature.

Action takes places with beautiful outdoor scenery behind it. If you watch the Lifetime Movie Network channel, which I do disturbing amount of the time, you might be struck by how every single house Is perfectly cleaned all the time. Now, I don't know why that resonates so much with lifetime movie network.  I'm pretty sure I'm not their target audience for most of the time, but let's just imagine it’s middle aged suburban dwellers. That background is definitely a part of what those stories are like. In lifetime network movies they're still affairs. They're still murderers. They're still detectives, but by God they always happen in a spotless house that does not need to be vacuumed. The counters are always perfectly clean. And that is part of the appeal, I think, of the Lifetime movie, for those that are drawn to them. In the same way, the pastoral romance rings true for the 16th century audience in a way that improves it over the chivalric romance, and in a way we probably don't quite understand.

But what's important is that when Cervantes starts writing, that's the type of thing he's writing. It's still a romance and it is, Ironically enough, mostly the kind of book that he will later critique and say that he's critiquing when he writes Don Quixote. The big life change is that he's written a book and it's a big thing to get it published.

He probably makes some money on it, but definitely not enough that he can now become a professional writer, but he can't say that he is now a published author of a major book. The other artistic thing that he tries doing is to write and sell plays. In the 1580s, he writes between 20 and 30 of them.

And we'll talk about how many of them survive, and some of them do. Apparently they all got staged. Theater is becoming a big thing in Spain at the time. If you think about what is16th century entertainment, there's no internet, there's not movie theaters, there's not recorded music, there aren't rock concerts, pretty much if you're going to go out and engage in some entertainment, it's going to be live theater. 

This makes the stage very popular and increasingly lucrative. Cervantes is trying to get a foothold writing these plays. He wants to follow the classical formula with tropes like proportion and balance. So if, you know, you're going to read Qintillian and figure out what makes terrific drama, you can turn to classical literature they've got kind of the classical formula.

And that is what Cervantes wants to do. His stuff doesn't fail but also doesn’t catch on. And there is a reason that it doesn't catch on. And that reason, is Lope Felix DeVega, who I'll just be calling either Lope or DeVega from here on out. DeVega started writing what were popular dramas. They were action packed, and they were nationalistic.

They trashed the classical tropes and they were smash hits. They were what the Rolling Stones were to Lawrence Welk and Glenn Miller. New, exciting, more energetic, more popular appeal. And it was so successful that it displaced all other dramas, including Cervantes work.  Cervantes just couldn't adapt.  Other playwriters adapted their writing to a new style, but Cervantes would never do that. He wrote, and he continued to try to sell his traditional plays. But he'd never make enough money either to become a professional writer or really to compete with DeVega. As Cervantes was trying to break in as a playwright, he was completely displaced by DeVega.

He's now forced into a second endeavor. He had been a soldier, but he couldn't use his left hand. So in these 25 years in between when he gets out of prison and before he writes Don Quixote, he's repeatedly asked to be given a bureaucratic post. And where he wants to get this post is in the new world. He wants to sail to America.  

We're sort of in the post conquistador era, the conquistadors have gone to the new world.  They've made their fortunes there. In fact, their problem is they've been so successful. They bring all this gold and silver back to Spain, which is causing inflation, but Cervantes knows the money's in the new world. That's where he wants to go. And he's repeatedly denied. So in 1587, let's remember that year, 1587, he starts a series of jobs as a commissary and a tax collector.

A commissary is essentially a procurement officer for the military. Cervantes went out and he would get stuff. So he'd roll into a town and he'd say, we need grain, we need oil, we need lumber, whatever it was he had been told that he needed to acquire, and then he'd have to buy or requisition it from whatever city that he moved into.

And then, we all know what tax collectors would have to do. They'd come in and they'd say, all right, you X, you owe this amount of tax. I'm here. You got to give it to me. Neither post is super popular, right? If, either of these guys shows up to your town, it means they're going to take your stuff, and if you get paid anything for it, it won’t be very much.

As a commissary, the theory is that you're going to pay for what you requisition, but the Spanish bureaucracy is just infamous for not being able to pay their bills on time, either unwilling or unable to, but the fact that the King of Spain or the Spanish government owed you money probably meant that you were never going to see it.

At least you weren't going to see all of it. So it is now 1587. It’s been seven years out of captivity. It's two years since he wrote La Galatea, but it is one year before 1588 1588. It's not supposed to go well. I'm going to read you another quote here. This is the start of chapter five, and I wish McKendrick would have been more specific.  “Throughout Europe, the year of 1588 had long been designated by mathematicians, astrologers, and scholars versed in biblical numerology as a year of doom and disaster.” Man, come on. Malveena McKenna, give us some more specifics there. Who were these mathematicians? Who are these astrologers? 

Well, my crack research, which involved Googling the term and then going to a Wikipedia page, let me know there was a guy named Reggio Montanus who made such a prediction. He died in 1476, a century before. My research also uncovered that he probably had really weird looking Marty Feldman bug eyes. And he predicted the end of the world in 1588. He ended up being wrong about that, but apparently a whole bunch of people believed him.

Now Miguel de Cervantes working to help the Spanish government acquire materials for its military endeavors in the year 1587, and the particular military endeavor Is [pause] the Spanish Armada.  The King of Spain is going to build a fleet. They're going to sail it up to England, take out the United Kingdom, or I guess it was called England at the time.

And Cervantes job is to beg, borrow and steal to get corn and other supplies. Now it is notable that this job he had, commissary tax collector, was rife with corruption. It was not uncommon that a commissary would show up to a town, take all their stuff, or whatever they could get from them, and then they'd keep a bunch and give the rest of it to the Spanish government, Spanish king, or Spanish army.

Although this job was notorious for having charlatans, there's no doubt that Cervantes was honest. His immediate supervisor trusted him and When allegations that he had engaged in wrongdoing came up, he got an entire city council to completely exonerate him. 

Here’s how it plays out: He goes into this city.  He took their stuff. He was accused of stealing it. He was outraged that he would be falsely charged. He went to the people that he had taken it from, and they all swore that he was an honest guy, had done his job well, had not stolen their stuff and treated them fairly. He himself was not paid often, he was not paid fairly and he was not paid on time, but he was a Patriot.

He wanted Spain to succeed. There was a lot of excitement in Spain that the Armada was in fact going to be a huge victory and it was supposed to be invincible and he was totally invested in that. But then, of course, it turns out the predictions of bug eyed friend, Reggio Montanus, were prescient if not totally true.

The Spanish Armada was a complete failure. Its invasion has gone down in history as one of the most horrid failures of the 1588.  The prowess of the Armada was over claimed. It was never that great. It had incompetent leadership that included people who probably who had never led a battle before.  It was plagued by bad bureaucracy, which Spain was sort of famous for.  The same reason that Cervantes wasn't getting paid was the reason that everything else wasn't getting done correctly.

In fact, in many cases, the grain that Cervantes had got to supply the Spanish Armada had never got out of granaries, never made it onto the ships. So he had done an incredible amount of work was not getting paid. And everyone was pretty much angry at him all the time.

Nonetheless, managed to do his job. Well, fend off false allegations that he had stolen stuff. And when all that was done, all of his work, not only resulted in a huge military failure, in many cases, what he’d commissioned hadn't even made it onto the ships. 

It is also notable that twice during the time that he was acting as a commissary, he would roll into a town with orders to get grain and supplies, and he would look around, and the people who had the grain and supplies were the Catholic Church.

So he said, all right, I'm here on the orders of the King of Spain. My job is to get the grain from the people who have it in this town. The people who have it in this town are the local Catholic church. I am taking it from the Catholic church. This was not popular with the Catholic church, even though they did in fact, have it in, in fact, they probably had more than they needed for themselves.

And he probably should have taken more from the church than the local population. So Cervantes was doing exactly what he should have been doing. For this outstanding service, the Catholic church excommunicated him.  Twice.  In two different cities. In both cases, he was restored to the faith, but think about the Catholic church at the time around the inquisitions.  To be excommunicated with essentially to be kicked out of all social life, you were persona non grata.  If you could not go to mass when that was, literally, what everyone did and, and did without question. 

In the end, twice he is excommunicated, essentially for doing his job, twice he contests it, twice he is restored to the faith, he becomes and remains a devout Catholic for the rest of his life.

On many occasions, the accounts of most of the commissaries and tax collectors would get audited.  Cervantes got audited twice he was thrown into prison, either for personal bankruptcy, or because he couldn't account for what his books showed he'd collected. And what he delivered in one case was just a bunch of the money.

That was the government's money because he had collected it in his role as tax collector. He put it in the bank. The bank went bankrupt. The government said to Cervantes, where's their money? And he said, all the money's gone. He was then called into account for that. It’s easy to see a pattern; here's a hard working guy who's doing honest work when others around him are corrupt.

He is rewarded with a series of false accusations for doing his job well. The church that he believes in is excommunicating him, while others who have been corrupt are not called into account. He's thrown under the bus, or the 16th century cart, even though it's probably not his fault. His books, some historians have have written, we're probably off by something, but he was definitely not embezzling huge amounts of money to get great personal wealth. 

This period of his life is now coming to an end. Here's the big question that comes up in my mind as I'm reading about this period of his life. How did this guy end up writing comedy?

He was a soldier who'd been shot, wounded, and lost the use of a hand. He was a courageous prisoner who had led escapes, but others tried to paint him as a charlatan. In fact, he was twice sold out by his fellow prisoners who helped get him recaptured. And he was being held because the. Captors thought that he could pay more money than it really could.

That is not just, I had to spend five years in medieval prison, but I had to spend five years in medieval prison for no good damn reason. And as I attempted to lead my comrades to freedom, they kept selling me out. 

He did get out of prison and his true passion was as a playwright, but he was getting no traction for that. He was an honest commissary and tax collector when corruption was rampant.  But twice he got jailed for his largely honest work. Twice also he was excommunicated also for honest work and twice he had to get himself restored to him. Yet, as Duncan Bruce, the renowned contemporary philosopher, movie maker, and lead singer of Chumba Wumba might have said, he got knocked down, but he got back up again.

This is an impressive guy. And I'm just going to pause to comment on his character to say that there have been attempts to make him into the things that he was not. He was a critic of religion and the establishment. He definitely makes fun of that in Don Quixote, and that's part of why the book is so successful.

But he's also a devout Catholic.  And he’s no revolutionary.  He remains a patriot to the King.

For others, he has been made out as a champion of the oppressed Moors. As backstory, the Moors were an ethnic minority group that got expelled from Spain, when they were being scapegoated basically for the incompetence of the administration of the crown. The administration fails, so they blame an unpopular ethnic minority.  Sound familiar?

And he was okay with it, or at least if nothing else, kind of silently, complicitly, he understood the human tragedy and the unfairness of being falsely accused.

But it wasn't like he was standing up and championing the cause of the Moors, as some have painted him out to be doing. He has also been painted out as a victim of the Inquisition. And while it's true that he was excommunicated twice for his work as a commissary and tax collector, his troubles were always really about the money and not iconoclastic beliefs.  

And his status was restored in both cases. Catholic church excommunicated him. Not because he was Jewish or for his heretical beliefs, but because they didn't like him taking their grain, which he was supposed to be doing. 

And this follows a pattern where later others made him into a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a Nietzschean.  P. E. Russell of Oxford and an essay titled Don Quixote is a funny book includes this observation. And I'm quoting here. “We can require the critics to declare, frankly, as our backs, in fact, does that some of the meaning the book has for him are ones about which Cervantes himself could have had no inkling.  End quote.

I wrestled with whether the book succeeded because it was funny. And we talked about that a little bit in episode one.  But I think Russell's point, which is well taken, is that there's so much that is so well done in the book Don Quixote that subsequent people can come along and find whatever ideological message they're looking for in the book.

And then they can ascribe that to Cervantes. And all of that, I would like the readers, the authors, the listeners and author of this podcast, to take with a grain of salt.  It's easy to make Don Quixote, the book, into more than it was. And it's easy to make Cervantes into more than he was. 

What he was he?  This is my takeaway.

He was the triumph of optimism and the human spirit in the face of repeated setbacks that would surely wear out other 58 year old people. To have faced all in your life that Cervantes did, it would not be hard to get bitter. It would not be hard to say I'm not at the age of 58 going to now start writing a 1500 page novel.  I took my shot with La Galatea. I failed as a playwright. I'm going to give it all up, but that was never him. And Don Quixote is poignant and it is biting, but it is not bitter and it's not defeatist. That optimism that comes through in the text is evident in the life of Cervantes. 

Okay. We are now up to the final part of Cervantes life, his life as a writer that takes hold in 1605.  this podcast, I've promised we'll never miss an opportunity to take a look at a weird coincidence or a cosmic connection between pupils Cervantes, you would think you would think the cosmic connection was with Shakespeare. And here's the side quest.

There are two things that I have noticed in my life as a PhD, as an intellectual, Human beings have two terrible tendencies. The first one is the joy of knowing things other people don't. People just love quoting the wrong thing when they think they know something nobody else does.  My area of research is not musical theater and it's not Cervantes and it's not Don Quixote or the man from La Mancha, but it is political speech giving. What everyone loves saying is, “did you know that on the radio, Richard Nixon defeated JFK in their 1960, their first televised debate that proves the TV was the seminal moment where style started trumping substance.”  

That entire sentence is completely wrong.  Nixon did not beat Kennedy on the radio. And in fact, Nixon did better on TV than Kennedy did for the rest of the campaign. And he probably would have beat Kennedy if it had gone only a little longer. And he probably did beat Kennedy, except that Kennedy got the Chicago bop to steal a bunch of votes for him. Be that as it may, what I have noticed, what our point is here, is that people have the joy of knowing things.

The second thing that people just love doing is debunking. They really like pointing out everyone else is wrong about something that they think is clever. Mary Shelley in the opening of Frankenstein quotes, a Dr. Darwin, and people just love saying, you think, you think that's Charles Darwin, but it's really his dad who really was experimenting with dead bodies. 

So the two things that people just love doing are knowing things others don’t and they love debunking things.  And, those may be my guilty pleasures as well.

Here is what people love knowing about Shakespeare and Cervantes. Shakespeare, of course, is one of the most influential authors ever of the English language. Cervantes is undeniably the most influential author of the Spanish language. You would think that they might have a strange mystical connection.

And the joy of knowing is that many people say that Shakespeare and Cervantes published Hamlet and Don Quixote on the same day. And they both died on the same day.  This os trumped only by the joy of debunking these things other people know and pointing out that there was actually a different calendar in use. Although there are documents that have the same date of their death, they actually died on different days because the calendars were using different dates.

They actually died about a week apart, but undeniably they did die pretty much about the same time. So kind of unusual mystical, cosmic, perhaps supernatural connection exists between Shakespeare and Cervantes. 

But, other than dying at about the same time, there's no clear connection between these guys.  There's no doubt that Shakespeare knew about Cervantes. It's less clear if Cervantes would have known anything about Shakespeare, but otherwise their lives were really nothing alike. It wasn't like their paths kept crossing or they had some weird connection or the universe was playing jokes on them.

What really did happen is that between 1600 and 1602 Cervantes and Lope de Vega, the very successful playwright who had essentially crushed the career of Cervantes earlier by being better than him, formed some sort of friendship. They were hanging out together. They got along, they were kind of, uh, at first let's, let's just call them friends.

But by 1602, something had gone badly wrong and they hated each other.  It's not clear whose fault it was, but Devega had no real reason to resent Cervantes cause he wasn't successful enough really for Devega to even care about. Cervantes, however, definitely had a reason to be pretty sour about Devega, for kind of putting a dagger to his own career.

And what Cervantes could never get over that de Vega was writing this rolling stones type of stuff when Cervantes was like, I am playing for the British Philharmonic Orchestra. How dare you play your three chord rock and become more popular than I am. For whatever reason, by 1602, de Vega and Cervantes have a huge falling out.

Three years later in 1605, Cervantes really catches up. He pulls off his coup and he writes. The first novel of all time.  In Episode one I talked about this more. As I babbled about at the beginning of that episode, but it's the second most popular book in the history of the world. And it was an immediate popular success. At the end of the book, Cervantes kind of promises a part two or at least leaves it open at the end of part one of the book, but for now he just lets it sit there.  Part 1 is doing just fine. And in the prologue to part 1, as more evidence that deVega and Cervantes hate each other, Cervantes goes after deVega and mocks him in prolouge. The battle now rages in the open.

DeVega responds by writing an insulting sonnet. And then just in case Cervantes didn't get to read it, he sent it to Cervantes in a carriage that he didn’t pay for, sticking Cervantes with the bill while leaving him an insult.

The two are now out in open war. It’s not a fair fight.  DeVega is way more rich and way more popular. And for this reason, Cervantes is never really part of the inner literary circle of Spain. Although history would remember him as the greatest Spanish author of all time, during his lifetime, he was mostly just one of the penniless courtesans in Spain.

Now you would think that if you were Cervantes, the memo from God would read, “Hey dude, write more novels. You've tried your hand as a playwright and it didn't go well. You wrote that pastoral romance that didn't go so well, but then he started making fun of pastoral romances. You wrote the first novel in Western history.  It became an immediate success.  Dude, right? More novels, not more plays.”  

What Cervantes does instead is write a series of novellas. He writes a book reviewing the literature of his day written in verse. And so between 1608 and 1612, that gap between 1605, when part one of Don Quixote comes out and 1615, when the second part will come out, he's writing drama, he's writing poetry, and he's writing prose, but he's not writing a novel, and he's not writing the second part to Don Quixote.

And all of it is a continued series of failures. Playwriting is no more successful now than it was In 1580.  By 1610, things kind of cool off with deVega, probably because now Cervantes is a big enough deal that he could afford to be more magnanimous, but they went from friends to bitter enemies to now probably something more like frenemies.

The turning point is 1615.  There's a guy named Avenida. He publishes a false second part. Boy, is that ballsy. I don't even have a name for it. I thought my wife who got her PhD at MIT and is, by the way, and is the smartest person I know, would have a word.  So I was asked her. Hey, what do you call it when, JK Rowling's taking too long to write Deathly Hallows part two so you say I'm going to write the Deathly Hallows part two and release that book in advance of her? What  would you call that?” We came up with character piracy, universe piracy, or, I guess malicious early fan fiction. I don't have a great name for it, but it's definitely a low blow. And Avenida is definitely cashing in on the popularity that he did not earn.

That hacked off Cervantes enough that finally he published the second part of Don Quixote.  That joint text is now what we regard as the book Don Quixote. That is the book that is the big deal that has rewritten Western literature and become the second greatest story ever told. 

But he can’t give up his theater addiction.  In the same year he publishes a book called Eight Plays and Eight Interludes which are self published because nobody else would pick it up to produce the plays.  That’s the way that you did it at the time.

You would go to the theater manager, you'd pitch your idea, They would say, okay, I'm commissioning you to write some plays. You would give them the script. They would then pay you the second half when it went into production. You would just write a play and pitch it to a theater. He had tried eight times. He had failed eight times.  No one would do his plays.

And so he was self publishing them because nobody else would pick them up. And there's some suspicion that maybe part of the reason they couldn't get his plays produced, even though he now had some stature, was that DeVega and he were hated each other. And DeVega was the guy on the inside who had all the friends.

DeVega could basically call the shots of the theater world. It's like, if I'm trying to do a movie and Steven Spielberg says, don't do that guy's movie, Spielberg kind of wins. DeVega was Spielberg, and Cervantes couldn’t get into theaters.

So thinking back to 1605 and that 25 years before he had published Don Quixote, he had all that tragedy that happened to him. And yet he was still clever.  He was still insightful and he was still funny. He wrote a funny book, a book that became one of the greatest works of literature because it was funny. And between then and 1615, all that stuff kind of happened again. 

In fact, he was again falsely accused and again in prison the same year that his book had come out.  Here's that story. His book comes out in January and by June, there's a sex scandal, but not involving him. There's another guy who's having an affair and then he’s caught, you know, running out of the lover's bedroom. The husband finds out and there's a duel that happens; the loverman is injured in the duel and runs to Cervantes house.

Now you would think the big deal would be there was an affair, but it's not that. What is illegal is dueling. And so the guy hides in Cervantes house, the event blows over. There's no legal action taking against anybody, except that the magistrate imprisons Cervantes and his whole family thinking they had something to do with it.

That happened as soon as he had published Done Quixote. He hadn't even really cashed the second royalty check and he's already back in prison a third time in his life for a false reason in Spain. The years between 1605 and 1615 aren't that much better. Like he still can't get his plays published.  He's still been falsely accused. His best work got pirated.

But he writes part two, which is a book that is once again, clever, once again, insightful. And once again, funny.  No matter what life threw at Cervantes, it did not seem to break his spirit. Okay. Now I don't want to over-sell this. He had a very 16th century set of ethics.

He definitely had a daughter out of wedlock. He did not immediately claim her. When the Moors were ejected he was hardly their champion. He was a devoutly Catholic at a time when the Catholic church had a lot to answer for, especially in the treatment of the Moors, for example, but also the Jews.  And frankly, anybody who disagreed with the Catholic church.  Including Cervantes.  He is not a saint and he was a soldier, right? And people liked him for being brave, which meant he was killing other people on the other side, who believed just as devoutly in their side of the war. 

But setting that aside and acknowledging that he was a product of his time, this guy definitely had a spirit that you could admire.  He did not seem to be broken that for all the misfortune that he endured, and in fact that only seemed to spark in him a desire to look forward in a way that others would find amusing.  His work spoke to the human spirit.

Not all great writers, not a great artists, are great people.  You can be a coward and yet a great artist, but Cervantes Definitely had a spirit that you can admire And, and I do think it is fair to say that part of what makes Don Quixote such a great book is the spirit of its author and the unique way that this guy could respond to adversity with tongue in cheek humor.

Okay. We are now at our epilogue. This is our Dirk Gently moment. This is where we see how it's all connected. This is where we look for our cosmic lesson. The connection is not between Shakespeare and Cervantes. It's between de Vega, Cervantes, and the irony is thick. De Vega challenged orthodox theater, and he was despised by Cervantes because it was De Vega who was willing to break the orthodoxy of what a theater production should be.

Cervantes wrote the first great novel in 1605 that was successful precisely because it broke the conventions of what a book was supposed to be. So Cervantes hated de Vega for breaking the conventions of theater, and de Vega hated Cervantes for breaking the convention of book length literature. That's a little ironic.

And in this tassel, round one definitely went to Vega. He had success during his lifetime, while Cervantes had a series of misfortune, his life was star crossed, and if the two clashed, de Vega definitely won. DeVega died rich, happy guy with a very successful contemporary career. Cervantes never really knew financial freedom in his lifetime and was always an outsider.

Round two definitely goes to Cervantes because history remembers him as what fellow sports fans would call the GOAT, the greatest of all time. And you know, De Vega survives.  If you're into theater and theater history, especially Spanish theater history, you definitely know De Vega. He had streets named after him. There's a De Vega museum.  

BUT he's far less renowned than Miguel de Cervantes, right?  Everyone knows Don Quixote. It's a very specialized audience that even remembers De Vega at all. The irony keeps wrapping around itself. In 1997, the Spanish language version of the musical, The Man from La Mancha, was performed in Spain un the theater in Madrid, which was called the Lope de Vega theater.

Round two definitively goes to Cervantes. Round three definitively goes to the universe. It ends like this. Both de Vega and Cervantes had monuments and streets named after them. And on the Calle de Cervantes, the street named after Miguel de Cervantes, there is the Lope DeVega Museum.  Cervantes is now buried in a convent on a site that sits on the Calle deVega.

So in the words of Vena McKendrick, quote “Cervantes is buried in Lope de Vega and Vega died in the Calle Cervantes.”  That is not irony coming back in a circle that it coming back as a full Mobius strip. And what I take from all this is that fate and history will outlive us all. The universe has its own cadence that will march to its own beat, regardless of what wind mills we want to wave our swords at.

Ideas will outlive us. They will outlive our petty battles. They will outlive our art, whatever art we produce, even the greatest of our art. Chaos and change will be the only constants. And great art is part of that chaos, whether the authors know it or not. And the petty differences between Cervantes and de Vega disappeared over time.

The innovations they had in theater and literature, those will survive. And of course, there's a second, much more obvious lesson that is. 50 years old is not too old to start something new. In fact, you might just change the world forever with what it is. You can start at the age of 58. In fact, this is now exactly my second podcast is I speak.  And, let's see. I myself am now 58 years old. So hopefully that is a good portent for what will become of this podcast. 

And that'll do it. We are interested in this book after all, because it became a great musical. It did so with mystical origins. In fact, there was a psychic at the very beginning of this musical project.

What did the psychic say? Would the predictions the psychic made come true? How did the show move from its first showing as a live TV production with an actual horse on a TV set to a modest run in Connecticut to an off Broadway theater built on a graveyard to a smash Broadway hit. I'll take on these questions and more in the next episode of theater histories and mysteries.