Caption: "Cervantes, Don Quixote, 'The world's greatest and most typical novel' - Havelock Ellis, Printed by Juan De La Cuesta, Madrid, 1608. Miguel de Cervantes, poet, novelist, and dramatist, was endowed with a rich imagination, keen wit, penetrating intellect, and great knowledge of life and mankind. Poverty had forced him to enlist in war service against the Turks and African Corsairs. He was captured and enslaved for seven years before being ransomed. These experiences seemed to strengthen the natural faculties of Cervantes. In 1605, when the author was fifty-eight years of age, the first part of Don Quixote, the work that immortalized his name, appeared. Havelock Ellis in his essay on Don Quixote writes, 'It leads us into an atmosphere in which the ideal and the real are at home. It blends together the gravest and gayest things in the world . . . It is a story that a child may enjoy, a tragic comedy that only the wisest can understand . . . It has entered into the lives of the people of every civilized land; it has become part of our human civilization.’ Don Quixote, ‘the most cosmopolitan, the most universal of books,’ has six hundred sixty-seven other personages in addition to the two famous characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Not one of them is a villain. It is a coincidence that Shakespeare’s King Lear appeared the same year as Cervantes’ Don Quixote-and that both these authors died on the same day in 1615. This third Madrid edition, printed in 1609 by Juan de la Cuesta, is known as the first “Academic” edition since the Madrid Academy considered it of great textual importance. Printing was at a low ebb at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Margaret Stillwell, commenting on this fact, adds, ‘If Cervantes had been born when the Spanish states were in ascendency, who knows what stunning format some sixteenth century printer might have produced for Don Quixote!’”
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