CERVANTES AND SHAKESPEARE - PART 2

Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries, but to my knowledge there's no evidence they knew of each other's existence.

But imagine if globalization existed back then. What would have been the consequence for their careers? I think it would have been disastrous for one of them, maybe for both.

Shakespeare didn't invent the Elizabethan drama, not even the genres such as history and comedy, not even the basic plots for most of his plays, not even the iambic pentameter scansion. A lively dramatic environment already existed when he came on the scene, and if he had never written a word we would still call that time the golden age of English theater because of figures such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Thomas Kyd.

But while the English theater was prosperous and artistically sophisticated, it was also a very small world. London. A handful of companies. But what if one season Don Quioxte appeared on the London stage, adapted from the book with all the attendant publicity that precedes an international bestseller? Maybe it would have been the blockbuster of the day, eclipsing whatever Shakespeare was working on. Well, what was he working on? Don Quixote was published in 1605. This was around the time of the premieres of Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.

With such a funny, popular and exotic story playing down the road maybe the English public would have lost its patience for tragedy. Perhaps British printers would have seen no reason to publish his earlier plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Or perhaps a well-translated and marketed edition of Don Quioxte would have popularizing the novel in England a century before Richardson and Fielding. Perhaps novelists would have marginalized playwrights as they would do in the twentieth century.

And what of Cervantes? What if the Elizabethan stage had come to Madrid and Seville? What if Hamlet and King Lear had wowed the Spanish critics, who then declared that serious writers wrote tragedy for the stage, not thousand page pop culture satires? Would Cervantes have forsaken his man of La Mancha for uninspired attempts at Nordic angst? Maybe he could still sell some books, but who among the literati were going to take his rambling prose seriously compared with Shakespeare's poetry?

Competition isn't always a good thing, especially in the arts. It wasn't good for Leonardo and Michaelangelo, who wasted creative energy battling each other. It wasn't good for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, or Dickens and Thackery, who were wise enough to stay out of each other's way. It wasn't good for Shelly and Byron, who lost their ghost story competition to a young woman who would never write a second book. Ignorance allowed Cervantes and Shakespeare, and their genres, and their markets to flower without outside pressures. We see what an outside pressure like the plague did to the English theater. The blockbuster novel might have done similar damage. And in Spain the spectacle of Shakespeare's plays might have left Castillians little patience to read, just as movies have done for modern readers.

In the end of course globalization allowed Cervantes to be translated around the globe and Shakespeare to be performed on all the world’s stages. But that was after their death. In life they were like tortoises in the Galapagos, able to wander patiently in their own worlds rather than succumb prematurely to foreign predators.