Melville House Books

How have you made division of yourself?
An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin
Than these two creatures.

Twelfth Night, Act V, scene1

The consensus seems to be that Miguel de Cervantes was unaware of William Shakespeare, but did Shakespeare read Don Quixote?

Jonathan Bate, in his new biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, while admitting that “these speculations are of course a biographical fantasy,†claims “the recent [1612] acquisition of Cervantes in English†as among “the books that mattered most deeply†to Shakespeare.

And Harold Bloom declaims in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that “You don’t write Hamlet and Falstaff into existence without something like Cervantes’ own reactions to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.â€

In the history we were taught and never thought to doubt, the shared death, commemorated today, of Shakespeare and Cervantes on April 23, 1616, was recorded as literary history’s most remarkable coincidence. The mundane truth is that the two were separated in death by their calendars, Julian and Gregorian, of England and Spain, respectively.  Cervantes died first; Shakespeare ten days later.

Carlos Fuentes, in Myself with Others, writes of Cervantes that “it is said that he dies on the same date, though not on the same day, as William Shakespeare. It is further stated that perhaps both were the same man….This disparity between the real days and the fictitious date of a common death spared world enough and time for Cervantes’s ghost to fly to London in time to die once more in Shakespeare’s body.â€