The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (56 page)

“Open your eyes, O beloved homeland,” he cried (as translated by Samuel Putnam), “and behold your son, Sancho Panza, returning to you. If he does not come back very rich, he comes well flogged. Open your arms and receive also your other son, Don Quixote, who returns vanquished by the arm of another but a victor over himself and this, so I have been told is the greatest victory that could be desired.…” The ingenious knightly gentleman does not long survive the pastoral life. With Don Quixote’s sanity and
disillusion comes also his sickness. “I have good news for you, kind sire,” said Don Quixote.… “I am no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha but Alonso Quijano, whose mode of life won for him the name of ‘Good.’ ” At the point of death, he turned to Sancho. “Forgive me, my friend,” he said, “for having caused you to appear as mad as I by leading you to fall into the same error, that of believing that there are still knights-errant in the world.” “Ah, master,” cried Sancho through his tears, “don’t die, your Grace, but take my advice and go on living for many years to come; for the greatest madness that a man can be guilty of in this life is to die without good reason, without anyone’s killing him, slain only by the hands of melancholy.”

Luckily or shrewdly Cervantes had created a new form, which other authors could elaborate and embellish—a maquette for versions of the human comedy. Not only had he created a novel, he had created the Western novel. Which gave him a role among creators of our modern world comparable to that of Copernicus in the world of discoverers. But while Copernicus shifted our focus outward from the earth to the sun, Cervantes shifted our focus from the outer world inward to man. And just as the physicist Dalton would reveal many more kinds of matter than had been imagined, so Cervantes pointed literati inward to unsuspected and unexamined varieties of people. While the gatherers of statistics were finding new uniformities among groups of people, Cervantes pioneered in revealing the variety of the individual, leading the effort of modern literature to translate all experience into the novel.

The creator was moving into new territory. The novel would reach out even as it reached in. It would democratize both the audience and the subject of literary art. By “re-creating life out of life,” the novel would discover modern man to himself. What statistics and social science were to accomplish for the public experience, the art of the novel did for the private.

Since the epic sang the deeds of legendary heroes, it is not surprising that there are only about a half-dozen great epic poems in Western literature. We like to hear our epics repeated—reassurances of our shared reverence for courage, piety, love, and heroism. A new epic, then, is a kind of contradiction in terms, for the epic ties us to the deep past and nourishes us from tradition. Similarly, Cervantes’s target, the medieval chivalric romance, which had developed in twelfth-century France and spread across Europe, was highly conventional. It, too, was first written in the more easily remembered verse, and only later in prose. “Romance” first meant a work in French, derived from Latin, the language of Rome. On the European continent the word for novel, too, would be
roman
, derived from the language in which the romance had first been narrated. Romances were not chronicles
of pitched battles, like those between Greeks and Trojans, but told of legendary knights devoted to Jesus Christ and their lady loves, in tournaments and the halls of castles, with a full complement of dragons and monsters, all under the spell of magicians.

Romances, too, appealed by retelling: “The Matter of Britain” (Celtic subjects, e.g., King Arthur and his court), “The Matter of Rome” (e.g., the Trojan War or Alexander), “The Matter of France” (e.g., Charlemagne’s court), and “The Matter of England” (e.g., King Horn and Guy of Warwick). A pastiche of pagan myth, Christian lore, and feudal custom, like the American Western they flourished on fulfilled expectations. The listener (more often than the reader, in the days before printing) awaited the glorious moment of Hector, Lancelot, or Galahad, and was eager to see the devil-born Merlin captured and wicked Modred get his comeuppance.

The “novel,” from Italian
novella
(little new thing), though a modern successor to the epic and the romance, would not attract by its reciting of the traditional and the familiar. Instead, it aimed at surprise, suspense, and the unexpected. The novelist would play God on the landscape of his creation. “For me alone,” Cervantes protested against the impostor who wrote a spurious Part Two, “Don Quixote was born and I for him; it was for him to act, for me to write, and we two are one.”

Cervantes made his hero no recognizable epic figure, nor a man of wealth or high station, but only an ingenious fifty-year-old gentleman of modest means who had living with him “a housekeeper in her forties, a niece who was not yet twenty, and a lad of the field and marketplace who saddled his horse for him and wielded the pruning-knife.” By afflicting his middle-class hero with the illusion that the conventions of the familiar romance were real, he opened the window to a daily life not seen in epic or romance. Now the reader shared another person’s encounter between his inner feelings and the world out there. The novelist thus became the reader’s guide into another person. “The author of our history,” Don Quixote observes when he is told that his life story is already being circulated in books, “must be some sage enchanter for to such, nothing that they choose to write about is hidden.” Perhaps Cervantes was the better equipped to provide his maquette for the modern novel because he was not especially reflective or deeply learned or philosophical. He was in love with the colors and moments and movements of life. And his familiarity with the Spanish landscape was indispensable.

Cervantes’s Prologue declared his concern “for what that venerable Legislator, the Public, will say.” “Let it be your aim,” he agreed, “that, by reading your story, the melancholy may be moved to laughter and the cheerful man made merrier still; let the simple not be bored, but may the clever admire your originality; let the grave ones not despise you, but let
the prudent praise you.” Cervantes’s “Bible of humanity” (in Sainte-Beuve’s phrase) would have a wondrous afterlife. He has never been better applauded than by his admirer and translator, Tobias Smollett:

Four days before his death, and after he had received extreme unction, Cervantes uttered a gallant farewell, “with one foot already in the stirrup, and with the agony of death upon me.” He died on April 23, 1616, on the same day with Shakespeare. He left no will, and his grave in the Trinitarian Convent in Madrid is not marked. “Cervantes, a patient gentleman who wrote a book,” Ortega y Gasset warns us, “has been seated in the Elysian Fields for three centuries now, where he casts melancholy glances about him as he waits for a descendant to be born who shall be capable of understanding him.”

I
T
was for a new audience in a newly flourishing art form that Shakespeare produced his version of the human comedy. Now again a writer could reach his whole community with a sustained work of literary art. The drama born in ancient Greece as we have seen was a community art. Begun as ritual with the whole community dancing in the “orchestra” together, it became a spectacle in which some citizens participated only as spectators. But in the European Middle Ages the literary arts became either immured in monastic libraries or elaborated for the entertainment of courtly audiences. The troubadours (from
trobar
, to find or invent), who flourished in Provence into the thirteenth century singing the langue d’oc vernacular, were expected to entertain the noble ladies. While supposed to “invent,” in fact they only elaborated conventional tales of kings and queens, shepherds and shepherdesses, of adulterous and unrequited love. The folk music and folklore,
which no one could inhibit, remained a world apart from writers and readers.

The Renaissance city and the city theaters somehow furnished a community of spectators like that which had inspired and acclaimed the great Greek dramatists. Now the spectator was reborn. “Citizens”—inhabitants of the city—became a full-spectrum theater audience. This community became the opportunity and the inspiration for Shakespeare too, whose great works were written to be acted, not to be read.

The theater had risen in London during Shakespeare’s youth. The suddenness with which the new pastime had appeared raised the alarm of the learned and the pious. Like television in our time, theater acquired its frightening popularity within a half century. Playwrights and actors had been amateurs and the first players made their living by touring their troupes around the country. When they came to London they acted in the bear-baiting rings or in the courtyards of inns. But in 1576, when Shakespeare was a twelve-year-old schoolboy in Stratford, James Burbage built the first theater in London, and within forty years there were at least five others. The Globe, the Rose, the Swan, the Red Bull, the Fortune, and Blackfriars, specially designed for their purpose, were attracting Londoners of both sexes and all classes to an appealing and time-consuming new kind of professional entertainment. Travelers from the Continent were surprised at this feature of London life.

“By the daily and disorderly exercise of a number of players and playing houses erected within this City,” the lord mayor of London wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury in 1592, “the youth thereof is greatly corrupted and their manners infected with many evils and ungodly qualities by reason of the wanton and prophane devices represented on the stages by the said players, the apprentices and servants withdrawn from their works.” It was no wonder that in 1596 the Privy Council assented to an order “to thrust those Players out of the Citty and to pull downe the Dicing houses.” Playhouses were forced out to the suburbs, beyond the city walls, to the north and west, or, like the Globe, southward to the other side of the Thames.

When many buildings had been specially constructed for presenting plays, audiences had to be attracted. Paying from a penny to a half a crown for admission, they filled the daily performances. An Englishman visiting a playhouse in Venice in 1611 found “the house very beggarly and base in comparison of our stately playhouses in England; neither can their actors compare with us for apparel, shews and music.”

The building that James Burbage appropriately christened the Theatre still had the large round open-air arena of the baiting pit, now paved and with drains to carry off rainwater. Surrounding the arena were three super-imposed
rows of galleries. The spectators numbered altogether about three thousand. Most paid a penny to stand in the yard, others paid twopence or more for a seat in the galleries or boxes. The players, no longer crowded onto an improvised booth on stage, now enjoyed a large permanent stage with changing rooms behind, and a gallery above for a lord’s room and musicians. The roofed changing rooms supported a “hut” on its fourth story to hold suspension gear so angels or other players could fly down to the stage. An open-air arena on this plan was called a “public” theater. The alternative, the “private” theater, with a usual capacity of about seven hundred, was an indoor structure like the great halls of the Inns of Court and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, adapted from the Tudor domestic hall. A low stage protruded into the room where benches accommodated the spectators. In the larger of these “private” playhouses there were three galleries around the sides and the end. Spectators would be seated in the pit, in galleries, or in boxes, and paid sixpence or more. Until about 1606, only private playhouses were found within the City of London, and public playhouses only in the suburbs.

Playhouses were open to all who had the price of admission. But while public theaters attracted everyone, and drew mainly from the lower classes, the private theaters with higher admission prices appealed to the better educated. Publishers of plays tried to give their printed dramas a sophisticated tone by indicating on the title page that the work had been prepared for a “private” theater. The theater had its origins in performances at court, as the continuing control by the Master of the Revels indicated, but the audiences at the new theaters were anything but courtly. A sharp observer in 1579 reported:

The frequent changes of program encouraged Londoners to come back to the same theater again and again. As Shakespeare observed in the opening chorus of
Henry V:

In two weeks during the 1596 season a Londoner could have seen eleven performances of ten different plays at one playhouse, and on no day would he have had to see a repeat performance of the day before.

The burgeoning city theaters no longer provided profitable employment for amateurs. Playwriting had quickly become a growth industry and a profession. Of the twelve hundred plays offered in London theaters in the half century after 1590, some nine hundred were the work of about fifty professional playwrights.