History of Spanish Literature, vol. 2 (of 3)Ticknor, George
History
History of Spanish Literature, vol. 2 (of 3)
Ticknor, George
Spanish literature -- History and criticism
From this time we hear little of Cervantes and nothing of his hero,
till eight years afterwards, in July, 1613, when he wrote the Preface
to his Tales, where he distinctly announces a Second Part of Don
Quixote. But before this Second Part could be published, and, indeed,
before it was finished, a person calling himself Alonso Fernandez de
Avellaneda, who seems, from some provincialisms in his style, to have
been an Aragonese, and who, from other internal evidence, is suspected
to have been a Dominican monk, came out, in the summer of 1614, with
what he impertinently called “The Second Volume of the Ingenious
Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha.”[179]
[179] Cervantes reproaches Avellaneda with being an Aragonese,
because he sometimes omits the article where a Castilian would
insert it. (Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 59.) The rest of the
discussion about him is found in Pellicer, Vida, pp. clvi.-clxv.;
in Navarrete, Vida, pp. 144-151; in Clemencin’s Don Quixote,
Parte II. c. 59, notes; and in Adolfo de Castro’s Conde Duque de
Olivares, Cadiz, 1846, 8vo, pp. 11, etc. This Avellaneda, whoever
he was, called his book “_Segundo_ Tomo del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don
Quixote de la Mancha,” etc., (Tarragona, 1614, 12mo), and printed
it so that it matches very well with the Valencian edition,
1605, of the First Part of the genuine Don Quixote;--both of
which I have. There are editions of it, Madrid, 1732 and 1805;
and a translation by Le Sage, 1704, in which,--after his manner
of translating,--he alters and enlarges the original work with
little ceremony or good faith. The edition of 1805, in 2 vols.
12mo, is expurgated.
Two things are remarkable in relation to this book. The first is,
that, though it is hardly possible its author’s name should not have
been known to many, and especially to Cervantes himself, still it is
only by remote conjecture that it has been sometimes assigned to Luis
de Aliaga, the king’s confessor, a person whom, from his influence at
court, it might not have been deemed expedient openly to attack; and
sometimes to Juan Blanco de Paz, a Dominican friar, who had been an
enemy of Cervantes in Algiers. The second is, that the author seems
to have had hints of the plan Cervantes was pursuing in his Second
Part, then unfinished, and to have used them in an unworthy manner,
especially in making Don Alvaro Tarfe play substantially the same
part that is played by the Duke and Duchess towards Don Quixote,
and in carrying the knight through an adventure at an inn with
play-actors rehearsing one of Lope de Vega’s dramas, almost exactly
like the adventure with the puppet-show man so admirably imagined by
Cervantes.[180]
[180] Avellaneda, c. 26.
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