Francisco de Quevedo was a 17th century Spanish writer . He served Felipe III and Felipe IV on secret missions, was protected by the Duke of Osuna and suffered the rigors of the favorite of the second of the monarchs, the Count-Duke of Olivares. His life was very close to the absolutist court of the Habsburgs and reflects the splendor and the incipient imperial decline that accelerated in the second half of the seventeenth century. A contemporary of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Covarrubias, Tirso de Molina, Saint Juan de la Cruz, Góngora and Gracián, his poetic work is the greatest, daring and innovative verbal monument of the Spanish language .
Childhood
Quevedo was born in 1580, the same year that Spain annexed Portugal, in the court of Felipe II, the most powerful king on earth . His father, Pedro Gómez de Quevedo, was secretary to Princess María, daughter of Carlos V and sister, therefore, of the reigning Felipe II, and his mother, María de Santibáñez, was a lady-in-waiting to the queen. At the age of six, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas would lose his father, who at that time served the fourth wife of the king, Ana de Austria, while the widow remained under the orders of the infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia. Q>
Education
Quevedo was part of the very heart of the empire, its ideals and its miseries, none of the illustrious geniuses of the Golden Age knew and served power and lords of it with such fervor. In 1598, on the death of Philip II, the eighteen-year-old studied with the Jesuits and has spent two years at the University of Alcalá de Henares . Little is known about his official studies, but his fruitful relations with the Flemish humanist Justo Lipsio are well known. He entrusted himself to him, from Valladolid, when he suffered the first of the two serious illnesses that would accompany him during his life:an uncomfortable cold and chronic sinusitis: «I lead the pale herd of diseases» .
First works
In 1600 he had begun to write the Dreams, which he would dedicate in 1606 to the Count of Lemos . In this same year he also finished his brilliant and peculiar contribution to the genre of the picaresque novel inaugurated by Lazarillo de Tormes:the first edition of this example of wanderers and a mirror of stingy would come out in Zaragoza in 1626.
At the age of twenty-six, he is described in great detail by his contemporaries:he is a myopic young man, of «medium height, somewhat frizzy black hair, a large forehead and very bright eyes, but so shortsighted that he constantly wore glasses; the nose and other limbs, proportionate, and from the middle of the neck up was well done, although I am crippled in both feet, which had them twisted inward» . If he, in his poetry, did not stop talking about these defects, his everlasting enemies Góngora and Ruiz de Alarcón were not far behind. And, with all the cruelty imaginable, Góngora added to these charges those of drunkard, pimp and sodomite. But, despite the limp and myopia, Quevedo was a first-class swordsman, daring, daring and curious. All this, in addition to his perfect command of Italian, will be very useful to him when, at the age of thirty-three, he undertakes his political adventure in Italy at the service of the empire.
Vassal of the king, spy of the duke
Quevedo arrives in Sicily, summoned by Pedro Téllez de Girón, Duke of Osuna. He has already written numerous poems, he is known and his verses run, like those of Lope and Góngora, through the court and on the street . It is the moment of glory of Castilian poetry, the moment in which the highest poetry that a language could give is assimilated by the common people in all its splendor and complexity. For these or other reasons, Quevedo never bothered to collect and order them; the dominant and systematic passion of his life was politics. He put at the disposal of the empire both his fidelity and his almost medieval narrow vision of the world, and he stopped at nothing . The fate of his protectors befell him:thus, after serving several embassies in Nice and Genoa from 1613 to 1616, returning to Madrid and ending up in Naples, the Duke of Osuna used him to put an end to the Duke of Lerma's clique and manage to become viceroy. from Naples. He himself was chosen as a delegate ambassador of the Sicilian parliament to Felipe III and after the triumph of Osuna, upon arriving in Madrid in 1617, he received the habit of knight of the Order of Santiago, which was greeted with hostile and sarcastic verses by his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora.
Banishment of Francisco de Quevedo
But the fall of the Duke of Lerma was soon followed by the trial against the Duke of Osuna, protector of Quevedo. In 1619 the poet retired to his possession of the Tower of Juan Abad, whose lawsuit to recover it had begun in 1609 and whose definitive sanction would only come in 1631. Exiled in the same Tower, with a ban on approaching Madrid, Quevedo write and contemplate from afar the change in the favors of Philip III . Once the Duke of Osuna had fallen definitively, the unstoppable rise of the Count-Duke of Olivares began, a staunch enemy of the poet and private of Felipe IV.
Before his exile, the affairs of Quevedo with a famous comedian named Ledesma were already known in Madrid. In 1623, after getting rid of the king's favorite and the monarch himself in public praise, Quevedo was pardoned, managed to return to court and joined Philip IV's retinue on a trip through Andalusia, during which he learned of the death in prison of his former protector, that of Osuna . Comforted by the royal pardon, he then published Cartas del Caballero de la Tenaza and La Politica de Dios (1626), both political writings, in which, as in later works (El Chitón de las Taravillas, 1630, and España defended from the times de agora, 1630), advocates a policy that opposes the threat of the French, that nips the relaxation of customs and the decadent life of the court in the bud.
But there was something in Quevedo that drove him, once pardoned, to put his safety at risk . The first biographers mention his bad character, his irritable spirit. Be that as it may, driven by these impulses he writes in 1628 the Memorial for the Patronage of Santiago, in which he attacks the Carmelites who defended the Teresian tradition and opposes Saint Teresa of Ávila being named patron saint of Spain. The king's wrath fell unrelentingly on him and another banishment order brought him back to the Tower . There he would reach him, in December of that same year, the pardon of the monarch.
ephemeral marriage
At the age of fifty he continues to write poetry tirelessly. It owes to him the greatest variety, in themes, in verbal audacity, in brilliance and depth, that Castilian has ever given:the metaphysical and love sonnets, the satirical and burlesque letrillas and romances reach perfection in him. dazzling . Translator of the Greek Anacreonte and of Latin masters such as Marcial, he was also, although to a limited extent, a playwright:entremeses and dances are preserved (Entermeses of the gentleman with the pincers, La ropavejera, The old jealous man) and satirical prose works, which although they do not reach the mastery of the Buscón, they are relevant for the sarcasm and the incredible collection of verbal games. But this fifty-year-old never bothered to collect his work in his verse, which appeared published for the first time in 1648, three years after his death, with the title of El Parnaso español. The continuation would see the light in 1670 with the title of The three last Castilian muses. Second part of the Spanish Parnassus.
In 1634 Quevedo made it easier for his literary and political enemies to make fun of him more than ever:the ferocious misogynist, a scourge of adulterous owners and cuckolded husbands, married, at the age of fifty-four, a widow named Doña Esperanza of Mendoza and of the Goat, lady of Cetina . The reasons for that marriage are unknown; Within a few days the spouses were living apart and Quevedo resumed his bachelor habits.
Long imprisonment and death of Francisco de Quevedo
Four years later, in 1639, when he had already published the second part of The Politics of God, the royal guard looked for him in the palace of one of his protectors, the Duke of Medinaceli and, for unknown reasons, imprisoned him in prison. of the convent of San Marcos, where he remained, shackled, frozen and physically at the edge of his strength, until the very fall of the worthy Olivares, in 1643. In 1972 a letter from him to King Felipe IV was discovered that sheds light on the possible causes of the prison without process of Quevedo :«Well, as Your Majesty knows, for Don Francisco de Quevedo's business it was necessary for the Duke of Infantado, being an intimate of Don Francisco de Quevedo (as he told Your Majesty and me), it was necessary for him to accuse himself of being an infidel and an enemy of the government and a gossip about it, and lately as a confidant of France and a correspondent of the French» .
Thus, reasons of state that needed a scapegoat shortened the life of the great poet. Released, when he arrived first in Cogolludo, then in Toledo and finally in the Torre de Juan Abad in November 1644, he is, in his own words, "with more signs of being dead than alive" . On August 8, 1645 he moved to Villanueva de los Infantes looking for a doctor, where he died on September 8 of the same year . It is said that when he heard those around him prepare his funeral, talk about his shrouds and the choir that was to sing at his funeral, he had the strength for the last joke and said:«The music, pay for it whoever hears it » .