Exemplary Stories [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares or Exemplary Stories, published in 1613 between the first and second parts of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), are judged by critics to be the work of the author which most nearly approaches his masterpiece. Certainly, among the considerable volume of works of all kinds, poetry and drama as ¦well as fiction, which Cervantes wrote, these stories most deserve to be rescued from the neglect from which all but the Quixote have suflfered, except of course at the hands of the Cervantes specialist or the professional student of literary types. TTie Exemplary Stories were certainly written over a considerable period of time, and at least two of them, and two of the best, were already in existence by the time Part I of the Quixote appeared, the first of them being in fact mentioned in the first part of the novel. These two stories were included, along with another which has often been attributed to Cervantes, The Feigned Aunt, in a miscellaneous collection of literary pieces prepared about 1604 by a certain Licencíate Porras de la Cámara for the entertainment of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Seville, during a summer vacation. The type of short story which we find in the 1-613 collection made its appearance interpolated in the longer works of Cervantes, the most famous being perhaps The Curious Impertinent, which was included in the first part of Don Quixote. There is something to be said for the view that the short story in fact represents the essential unit of composition for Cervantes who, far from making novels out of plays, as one critic suggested, might well have turned some of his prose pieces into dramatic form for the sake of producing some at least of the Interludes which appeared in 1615. The order in which the stories in the 1613 edition appeared is not chronological, and attempts to suggest other reasons for their arrangement are never very convincing, and sometimes frankly bizarre, one theory being that they represent the whole gamut of attitudes to love, set out according to a formula that is very