Chapter 4 resituates Cervantes’ poetics within the erotic philosophy of the sixteenth century, particularly in Judah Abravanel’s Dialoghi d’Amore ([Leone Ebreo], Rome, 1535). By 1569, Cervantes was serving in the court of the young Neapolitan nobleman Giulio Acquaviva in Rome, where Vicenzo Orsini’s gardens at Bomarzo were one of many private pastoral courts cultivated by various Italian noblemen throughout the region. Within pastoral poetics, the beloved, as embodiment of beauty, was often conceived of as the summa belleza or summum bonum in the natural world. In light of Abravanel’s influence on early modern poetics, this chapter studies Cervantes’ octavas for the Sicilian poet and fellow captive Antonio Veneziano that Cervantes wrote from Algiers and sent to Veneziano in 1579 in response to Veneziano’s own songbook, the Celia. They survive in Veneziano’s autograph manuscript (Biblioteca Centrale Regione Siciliana, Palermo) along with Veneziano’s sonnet response. This chapter concludes with Cervantes’ earliest dramaturgical work, the Trato de Argel (likely composed in Algiers or shortly upon his return to Madrid, ca. 1575–1582), in which he developed the concept of “love as faith” as transposing the religious within the confluence of Islamic and Christian beliefs. The Trato evidences figurations of intersubjectivity and female desire necessary for character formation in Cervantes’ subsequent fiction.

Chapter 2 treats the early Italianate-poetry that Cervantes wrote for Isabel de Valois (1567, 1568) when he was around twenty years old as serious works composed within the particular cultural and poetic practices of the Habsburg court. In his first sonnet, Cervantes’ speaker develops a conceptual play between the speaking ingenio and the lofty lady through the use of an exalted apostrophe, a key feature of Pastoral Petrarchism that would inflect the subsequent decades of the author’s literary career. The only known copy of this sonnet was preserved in an early seventeenth-century manuscript collection of pastoral and erotic lyric and narrative poetry pertaining to the Habsburg court, now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Richelieu. This chapter examines and draws upon the manuscript in order to reconstruct the literary environment in which Cervantes wrote, as it was understood by the early modern compiler (a primary source on readership, reception, and genre). Ms. Espagnole 373 also recontextualizes the poetry that Cervantes composed the following year for the untimely death of Isabel on October 3, 1568. This chapter considers Cervantes’ relationship to Giulio Acquaviva while the papal legate was present in the Habsburg court, his journey to Rome, and the Sigura affair.

Chapter 1 recovers the pastoral precedents for the culture that directly precipitated Cervantes’ first poems within the court of Isabel de Valois (Queen of Spain, 1560–1568), in which literary art forms and forms of cultural practice became intertwined in complex mimetic processes. From Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Sannazaro to Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, the retreat of the pastoral was understood to be a device employed to encode and allegorize the private life and lived experience of the court which made poiesis possible. Drawing on archival records (relaciones) of life in the court, the diary kept by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and histories of Isabel’s reign, Chapter 1 explores the frequent and often improvisational imitation of various literary genres, including the romance of chivalry, by members of the court caught up in erotic entanglements which became the content of pastoral fiction. At the confluence of literary allegory and contemporary history, through the exchange of motes in the terrero, the palace became pastoral.

Chapter 3 explores how an exemplary amorous biography, a type of vita poetica or literary hagiography, was attributed to el divino Francesco Petrarch over the course of the sixteenth century. Imitatio applied not only to the figures and tropes of the Trionfi and Canzoniere, but also to the figura of the poet as a model or exemplar for the life of an author. After roughly two centuries (1374–1575), Petrarch’s lasting fame became literary immortality like that of ancient authors (Homer and Vergil). From the 1535 alleged rediscovery of Laura’s grave and Alessandro Piccolomini’s 1540 pilgrimage to Petrarch’s tomb, to the various sixteenth-century translations of Petrarch’s poetry, and commentaries made by lyric poets in the front matter to publications, in manuscript poems, and in pastoral fiction, the literary afterlife of the figura of the poet took shape. This chapter reconstructs the figura of the poet as it was imagined, articulated, imitated, and reinvented by sixteenth-century poets writing in Castilian. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Castilianized ingenio (ingenium) had come to define the figura of the poet. This chapter fills in a lacuna (Garcilaso to Góngora) of roughly sixty years which is crucial to Cervantes’ work and studies of early modern poetics.

Chapter 6 examines the force of lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment in the Galatea. At the confluence of verse and prose, allegory and history, mimesis and poiesis, this chapter treats the Galatea and contemporary works, beginning with the 1582 transition from verse to prose in Pedro de Padilla’s Églogas pastoriles (Seville). While the Galatea has often been dismissed in scholarship as a partially formed and immature work, or reinterpreted through standard approaches to the DQ, this chapter studies the chronotopic dynamism of Cervantes’ first prose fiction through the narrative emplotment of Lauso’s lyric interior. It is attuned to the sophisticated narrative architecture of an unprecedented capacity to juggle multiple lyric temporalities within a single narrative landscape. The Galatea lent novelistic immediacy to the timeless retreat of the pastoral through the use of lyric subjectivity. As a meditation on the nature of love and lyric subjectivity inherent in Pastoral Petrarchism, in the Galatea the figura of the poet as literary character was fully developed in Lauso. As a novel in key, the Galatea not only pertained to the fábulas of Cervantes’ literary milieu, it also wove a tapestry of narrativized lyric intersubjectivity necessary to the conception of the first modern novel.

Chapter 5 reconstructs the site of production for Cervantes’ prosimetric pastoral, the Galatea (1585), and investigates the way in which he disguised himself and members of his own literary milieu as shepherd-poets under pastoral pseudonyms. It employs paratextual sources to reconstruct this milieu. Drawing on early manuscript annotations (ms.2.856, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) that identify Cervantes as the “Lauso” of the Galatea and earlier scholarship on the Galatea as roman à clef, this chapter proposes an additional decoding of the work through attention to the use of biographical names (and pseudonyms) for poets associated with the river Tajo in the “Canto de Calíope” (Book VI of the Galatea). With the decline of literary circles in the courts, poetic life migrated from the Alcázar to the barrio de las letras. The established poets of Isabel’s reign – Figueroa, Laínez, Gálvez de Montalvo, Gómez de Tapia, and Cervantes – were joined by younger poets – López Maldonado, Pedro de Padilla, Vargas Manrique, Liñán de Riaza, Juan Rufo Gutiérrez, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora – to form a milieu of “urban pastoralists.” The encomiastic poetry that Cervantes wrote indicates a network of authors contemporary to the Galatea, in which the figura of the poet became a literary character.