Recent twentieth-century criticism of Spanish Golden Age literature has changed from a biographical approach, which emphasizes the life of the author as seen in his work, to the structural approach, which concentrates on the work itself. Navarro Ledesma’s book is an example of the older approach, for it is a translation of the Spanish version published in 1905 during the tercentenary of the first edition of the Quixote. Forcione’s work is an example of the structural approach and embodies all of the latest scholarship. It is a companion piece to his Cervantes, Aristotle, and the “Persiles” (Princeton, 1970).
Forcione’s work is an excellent, precise, and detailed interpretation of the value of the Persiles, which previous critics felt lacked unity and coherence. Forcione convincingly revises that evaluation, pointing out that one must study sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary theory to understand the Persiles. He notes that Cervantes’s guides were A. López Pinciano and Torquato Tasso who wrote late sixteenth-century poetic theories based on Aristotle and Horace. Cervantes’s model was Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, said to be flawless according to Renaissance literary values. Forcione takes on some of the best critics of Spanish literature—A. Farinelli, M. Singleton, H. Hatzfeld, and J. Casalduero—and comes out on top in his explanation of the Persiles. His is a masterful work that makes for somewhat heavy reading, but he rewards the persevering reader with many insights into Cervantes’s work. Forcione deserves our congratulations.
Navarro Ledesma’s book in many ways is just the opposite of Forcione’s. It is very light reading, contains no footnotes indicating the author’s sources, fictionalizes the gaps in the information on Cervantes’s life to make the story interesting, and tends to jump to conclusions on little or no evidence. As an example of the latter, the author notes that Cervantes does not appear in Francisco Pacheco’s book of portraits of well-known Spaniards published in 1599, and thus concludes that Cervantes “belonged to the caste of the satirists, the independents, the poverty-stricken, the antiburgesses, the antiacademics” (p. 224). He also says that in the Quixote “Sancho never says anything clever or witty” (p. 239), a statement few critics would agree with. Elsewhere, he asserts that Mateo Alemán read his novel Guzmán de Alfarache to Cervantes while both were in debtors’ prison in Sevilla (p. 219). Some authors conjecture that perhaps the two knew each other when they were in the same prison, but few dare to state that Alemán actually read Guzmán to Cervantes, and then give no proof for this assertion.
Writing for the general reader, Navarro Ledesma provides a very light and interesting introduction to Cervantes, but he is not to be recommended to the historian who is looking for precise scholarship. Don and Gabriela Bliss’s good translation is a labor of love, for Mrs. Bliss is Navarro Ledesma’s niece. They have provided a useful set of notes explaining the names and places mentioned in the book.
