The purpose of this research is to examine the means by which Cervantes conveys fantasy in his works. The plan of the research will be to position the literary and historical context in which Cervantes wrote, and then to discuss ways in which his writing portrays his sense of fantasy.
The salient facts of Cervantes's life are alluded to by virtually all critics of his writing. Born in 1547 in Spain, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra had a career as a soldier, galley slave, wanderer, quartermaster for the ill fated Spanish Armada, and minor bureaucrat in the Spain of Philip II. Throughout what critics and biographers characterize as a checkered career (Duran refers to his "vagabond life"), which included a colorful household (one wife, one mistress, one illegitimate child) and a public life that ran afoul from time to time of the Inquisition, Cervantes nursed his ambition to be a writer. He was a poet, playwright, and writer of prose fiction, his most famous and contemporaneously successful work being Don Quixote, which appeared in two volumes published several years apart. Although he achieved a degree of recognition as a writer, he lived on the edge of poverty until he died, on the same day as William Shakespeare, in 1616.
To the degree Cervantes had and acted on a range of interests, he may be described as a Renaissance man. This may also partly explain his liberal use of fantasy elements in his writing. Broadly speaking, these elements emerge in two forms: farce and parody. The two overlap and converge, particularly in Don Quixote; however, the farcical aspect of fantasy as a device in such a play as The Cave of Salamanca, while it is an effect realized in the fantasy that is fundamental to the parody in Don Quixote. In the short farce play The Cave of Salamanca, one of Cervantes's Interludes, the playwright shows the folly of fantasy and exploits the comic potential in the duping of an innocent. Thus it is that the cuckolded husba...