Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/41

 Rh not at Madrid in 1584 as his biographers and bibliographers all say, and no doubt helped to make his name more widely known, but certainly did not do him much good in any other way.

While it was going through the press, he married Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and apparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which may possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that was all. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages and strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned to it for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty or thirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing of cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses, outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not bad enough to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own upon it. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two of the seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we may assume they are favorable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas. Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional power they may show, they are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was the rising popularity of Lope the cause, as is often said, notwithstanding his own words to the contrary. When Lope began to write for the stage is uncertain, but it was certainly after Cervantes went to Seville.

This, according to Navarrete, was in 1588, but the "Nuevos Documentos" published by Don Jose Asensio y Toledo in 1864 show that it must have been early in 1587. His first employment seems to have been under Diego de Valdivia, a judge of the Audiencia Real, but at the beginning of 1588 he was appointed one of four deputy purveyors under Antonio de Guevara, purveyor-general to that "fleet of the Indies" known to history as the Invincible Armada. It was no doubt an irksome and ill-paid office, for in 1590 he addressed a memorial to the King, setting forth his services and petitioning for