Biography

Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas was the most popular Spanish author of his century. Before 1634, his work had already appeared in 78 editions – more than twice the number of any other author. Quevedo was also a man of vehement opinions. As one prominent quevedista has remarked, he attacked Cicero, Tacitus, the Genovese, Protestants, Jews, Moriscos, women, and homosexuals while defending Homer, Epicurus, the Stoics, Spain, its patron saint Santiago de Compostela, and his own patron the Duke of Osuna. As a result of his violent loyalties, there has been much critical discussion of the “two Quevedos”: one lyrical, long-suffering, and devout and the other nasty, cynical, and abusive. Without entering into inconclusive posthumous psychoanalysis, it is nonetheless possible to see his massive corpus of works as including writings relevant to both ends of this spectrum.

Clubfooted and shortsighted, Quevedo was born in 1580 to a family of minor nobility; his parents were secretary and lady-in-waiting to Princess María. When his father died 6 years later, he became the pupil of Agustín de Villanueva, a noble government official. As a young man, he studied with the Jesuits at the Colegio Imperial in Madrid, where he was able to escape from his mother whom he hated. He later went on to study classical and modern languages and philosophy at the University of Alcalá (1596–1599) and theology at the University of Valladolid (1601–1605). It was during his time in Valladolid that he began both his enmity with the poet Luis de Góngora and his Latin correspondence with Justus Lipsius. It was also during this time that his first poems appeared in print. From 1605 to 1609, he participated in various poetic academies at court, such as that of Count Saldaña, and wrote several of his satirical prose works, including the picaresque novel the Buscón. In 1610, he was denied the permission to print his Sueño del juicio final; the censor, Father Antolín Montojo, called its style “imprudent.” In 1613, he seems to have suffered a personal crisis in which he resolved to write more “prudent” works based on the Bible or the classics, a decision which resulted in such endeavors as Lágrimas de Hieremías castellanas and Heráclito cristiano.

From 1613 to 1618, Quevedo’s so-called Italian period, he served in various government functions – particularly under the Viceroy of Naples, the Duke of Osuna – in Palermo, Sicily, Rome, and Naples. His Italian period had a profound impact on his humanistic ambitions. We know from Lope de Vega’s detailed description of the literary atmosphere at court in 1608–1609 that Quevedo had been making no secret of his project of imitating Statius and other Silver Age authors. His stay in Italy strengthened this preference in his reading and the tendency in his writing to imitate these classical figures. During this time, he participated in the activities of the Accademia degli Oziosi in Naples, and since the Silver Age poet Statius himself had been a Neapolitan, Quevedo undoubtedly enjoyed the opportunity to continue working on his own silvas in this setting.

Upon his return to Spain, Quevedo became a knight of the Order of Santiago, but following quickly upon the heels of this honor were several tokens of political disgrace. His fortunes fell with those of his mentor, the Duke of Osuna; after trying to defend the Duke in 1618 before the Council of State against the charge of having participated in the Conspiracy of Venice, Quevedo was banished to his country estate, the Torre de Juan Abad. He was imprisoned for some time in Uclés but then allowed to return to his country home under house arrest. When he became ill, he was allowed to go to a monastery in Villanueva de los Infantes. In 1623, he was back at court, trying to salvage his political career by writing overtly political works in favor of the king’s new minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. In 1626 and 1627, to his great distress, three of his most popular works – the Política de Dios, the Buscón, and the Sueños – were pirated by the booksellers Roberto Duport and Alonso Pérez, in Zaragoza and Madrid, respectively. In 1628, he was banished again, perhaps because of his active involvement, through the publication of pamphlets, in the controversy over which saint – Teresa or Santiago, with Quevedo favoring the latter – would be the patron of Spain.

Refusing to learn his lesson about engaging in pamphlet wars, in 1631, he published two satirical pamphlets denouncing the deliberately obscure style and irrelevant classical allusions of his foremost literary rival, Luis de Góngora. These two pamphlets, La culta latiniparla and Aguja de navegar cultos, argue against the elaborate, obfuscating culterano style in favor of conceptismo, a more direct humanistic attempt to imitate the classics in terms of concepts or matter as well as manner. Quevedo’s use of his pen to participate in the political as well as literary controversies of his day (in all, he wrote 19 overtly political works) did not escape the attention of the authorities. In 1632, he was appointed to the nominal post of secretary to the king, but in the same year, his pre-1631 works, in both authorized and unauthorized editions, appeared on the Index of Prohibited Books “until such time as their true author recognizes them as his own, corrects them accordingly, and republishes them” (the 1640 Index would later continue the ban on his festive and satirical works, with only one exception). In 1634, the Duke of Medinaceli persuaded him to marry an older noble widow, Esperanza de Mendoza, who wished to escape scandal; this unhappy marriage, which was more of a political alliance, would be dissolved a short 2 years later. In 1635, he was attacked viciously by his literary and political enemies in the anonymous Tribunal de la justa venganza, the title page of which called him “Maestro de Errores, Doctor en Desverguenças, Licenciado en Bufonerias, Bachiller en Suciedades, Cathedratico de Vizios, y Proto-Diablo entre los Hombres.”

Quevedo continued to be persecuted by his literary and political enemies throughout the rest of his life. Finally, at 11 o’clock on the night of 7 December 1639, he was arrested in the house of the Duke of Medinaceli with a letter from Olivares to the king accusing him of being “unfaithful and an enemy of the government and a slanderer of it and ultimately a confidante of France and a correspondent of the French.” He was seized with such abruptness that he did not even have time to get dressed. Quevedo was imprisoned in the convent of San Marcos in León for 4 years, during which time he suffered repeated bouts of ill health; the prison conditions were so wretched that he even had to cauterize his open sores with his own hands. Nonetheless, he continued to write such religious works as Vida de San Pablo. After his erstwhile enemy Olivares fell from power in 1643, he was released and allowed to return home. His health destroyed, his spirit permanently wounded, he spent a year in Madrid revising some of his manuscripts for publication. Increasingly ill, he retired to his country home for the last time. He died in a cell of the convent of Santo Domingo in Villanueva de los Infantes in 1645.

Heritage and Rupture with Tradition

Quevedo imitated the Latin classics in terms of style as well as content, sometimes engaging in serious mimesis and other times using the classical texts as points for parodic departure. He knew and valued the Latin Golden Age authors: Ovid’s mannerism appealed to his stylistic taste, and the elegists such as Tibullus and Propertius provided material for his love poetry. Even the sober Horace makes an occasional intertextual appearance in Quevedo’s works. For example, his “Sermón estoico de censura moral” is composed on the model of Horace’s satirical sermones, while his “Epístola satírica y censoria,” written in tercets, is likewise written after the fashion of the Horatian Epistulae. Virgil, too, is represented in his humanistic imitatio, as the Dido story reappears in Quevedo’s “Imitación de Virgilio.” But while he seems to have admired Virgil’s poetry as a source for linguistic purity, mythological material, and the Stoic thought he believed was there, he also parodied this most serious of poets.

Ideologically and stylistically, Quevedo showed a strong preference for Silver Age authors such as Tacitus, Petronius, and especially Seneca, the classical Spaniard whom he patriotically chose to see as a literary and philosophical role model. He crafted his style in the Marco Bruto after the Latin prose style of Seneca, Tacitus, and Lucan, with its hyperbaton, repetition, and opposition of terms. At least 70 of his shorter poems are elaborations of quotations or epigrams from Martial, Persius, or Juvenal. The satura form of these latter two authors was also influential for Quevedo when he wrote his longer satirical works. Quevedo’s Sueños fall within the tradition of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis but also bear some resemblance to Lucian’s Dialogues. Some themes from Seneca’s tragedies and Lucan’s Pharsalia are also evident in Quevedo’s amorous poetry. Quevedo’s translation of the Letters to Lucilius and his epitome De los remedios de cualquier fortuna (1638) show the depth of his direct knowledge of Seneca (or, in the latter case, pseudo-Seneca), but he also learned about Stoicism from Epictetus, whose Enchiridion he adapted and published in 1635.

By modeling many of his writings closely on the works of classical authors, Quevedo opted for the traditional philological approach to literary creation. In his Sueño del infierno, Quevedo shows himself well enough informed about the practices of contemporary scholarly method to condemn Julius Caesar Scaliger and other contemporaneous humanists to hell for sins that were fundamentally philological. Quevedo himself, however, was guilty (by modern standards) of one egregious philological “sin”: he tried so hard to reconcile pagan and Christian philosophy that he insisted, in his Doctrina estoica, on tracing a direct influence of the Old Testament book of Job upon the Stoic thinkers Epictetus and Seneca. Quevedo cites these two Stoics as well as Juvenal and Persius as being compatible with Christianity. Lucan, like the other Silver Age authors whom Quevedo favored, lived after the birth of Christ and therefore had the opportunity to come into contact with Christian truth. But not all the Silver Age authors were as sympathetic to Christianity as Quevedo felt they should have been. Martial, for example, uttered many commendable sentiments “con profana boca” (“with a profane mouth”), while Tacitus is severely criticized by Quevedo for being anti-Christian at a time when he could – and in Quevedo’s eyes, should – have been sympathetic to the new religion. Quevedo stopped short in most instances of asserting that pagan writers actually converted to Christianity. But his synthesis of classical with Christian philosophy was typical of the Christian Humanism of his day.

Innovative and Original Aspects

Much has been written about Quevedo’s Neostoicism. One of the most influential factors in shaping Quevedo’s synthesis of Christianity with classical Stoic philosophy had been his youthful exchange of letters in Latin with the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius. Quevedo’s correspondence with Lipsius had begun early, in 1604, but the effects of their relationship lasted for several decades. Quevedo’s interest in Stoic themes was probably reinforced by his banishment as well as his successive political and social disasters. As a result of his personal misfortunes, along with the Inquisitorial suspicion cast upon him by his ongoing placement on the Index, Quevedo wrote almost exclusively serious works beginning in the mid-1630s. In rapid succession came his translation of the Introduction à la vie dévote, his Neostoic work La cuna y la sepultura, his adaptation of a work attributed to Seneca, De los remedios de cualquier fortuna (completed in 1633; published in 1638), and his Providencia de Dios... (1641–1642). His Neostoic manifesto was published in 1635 as Nombre, origen, intento, recomendación y descendencia de la doctrina estoica, but other moralistic works of his, such as Virtud militante, La constancia y paciencia del santo Job, and Doctrina moral del conocimiento propio y del desengaño de las cosas ajenas, bear strong Neostoic overtones. From the mid-1630s on, he seems to have wanted to change his image from that of a brilliant but heretical satirical writer to that of a sage and erudite humanist.

Impact and Legacy

Quevedo’s writings in almost every conceivable genre make him one of the foremost Spanish intellectuals of all time. But few of his more than 875 poems, including sonnets, Pindaric odes, silvas, jácaras, and letrillas, were published during his life, although many were later collected for publication by his nephew and his editor, Pedro de Aldrete Quevedo and Jusepe Antonio González de Salas. His humanistic accomplishments included translations of classical authors as well as imitations of their style and subject matter in both Spanish and Latin. An early example of his ability to imitate Seneca’s Latin is an epitaph for his friend and fellow poet, Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor. Typical of the early praise for Quevedo’s accomplishments is that of his editor González de Salas, who wrote in 1648 that “Hasta hoy no conozco poeta alguno versado más, en los que viven, de hebreos, griegos, latinos y franceses; de cuyas lenguas... tuvo buena noticia” (“Until today I do not know any poet alive who is more well-versed in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French; of which languages... he possessed a good knowledge”). On the basis of his translation of such authors and works as the Greek anthology, pseudo-Phocylides, Anacreon, and Plutarch’s life of Marcus Brutus, Quevedo’s contemporaries regularly praised his Greek in particular, although a discordant voice was raised by his enemy Luis de Góngora. Modern scholars have tended to agree with the latter’s assessment of Quevedo’s Greek abilities, but his scholarly procedure in other areas met or exceeded the standards of his day.

Recent work on Quevedo and philosophy has emphasized his politico-moral stance as anti-Machiavellian. There have also been efforts to qualify his Neostoic doctrine as having been influenced to some degree by the Sophists. His Stoic Doctrine appears in English translation in the Moral Philosophy volume of the Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, and he is likewise highlighted in the “Moral Philosophy” chapter of The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. By any measure, Quevedo is a major figure within the pantheon of Renaissance philosophers and also one of the clearest examples of the intersection of philosophy with literature. His Christian Humanism represents a unique synthesis of pagan philosophy with religious belief.