Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was a
boy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period for
Spain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. The new Spain was the
mightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire and it had not
yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of
Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the
Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who
had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the
Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen
the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been swept
away, and the only function that remained to the Cortes was that of
granting money at the King's dictation.
The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la Vega
and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had brought back
from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature, which took
root and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the native growths.
Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had been fairly naturalised in
Spain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for investing
with an air of novelty the idea of a dispairing shepherd and inflexible
shepherdess. As a set-off against this, the old historical and
traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of
peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the
cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But the
most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was the
flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the press
ever since Garci Ordonez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis of Gaul" at
the beginning of the century.
For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no
better spot in Spain than Alcala de Henares in the middle of the
sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town,
something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a
very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcala the
traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and
medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town
itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light
literature, and as a producer of books Alcala was already beginning to
compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and Seville.
A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings
might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcala at that
time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop where
the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be,
what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy,
that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion,"
could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one
of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply
and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to
embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father of
the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively
at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis
of "Don Quixote."