Unlike Shakespeare, Cervantes was an heroic man. Almost certainly a disciple of Erasmus, from a family who had been forced by the Inquisition to abandon their Judaism, he fought and shone at the battle of Lepanto, even though he was sick, survived long years of Moorish captivity and then in Spanish jails, where Don Quixote may have been begun. The book appeared at more or less the same time as King Lear and can claim to be as utterly original and as unprecedented.
