The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

de Castro in order to find success in his own land, and the land of Shakespeare was home only to a bunch of hypocritical pirates in search of excuses to prosper and, like so many others, nipping at the heels of the weary, old Spanish lion, who was, nonetheless, still capable of far greater things than they ever were. To quote Lope:
    Forward, Spanish sea-dogs,
In whose veins runs the blood of Goths,
Fill your hands with gold,
With slaves, with treasure,
You’ve earned it, take full measure.
    During that conversation in the garden, we spoke about a little of everything. Captain Contreras brought news of various wars, and Lopito described to Diego Alatriste the current situation in the Mediterranean, where my master had once sailed and done battle. Then, inevitably, talk turned to literature. Luis Alberto de Prado read some of his own verse, which, to his great pleasure, drew praise from Quevedo, and Góngora’s name was mentioned again.
    “Apparently, the man’s dying,” Contreras told them.
    “Good riddance,” said Quevedo tartly, “there’ll be plenty to replace him. Every day, eager for fame, as many overcultivated, turd-mongering poets spring up in Spain as mushrooms in the winter damp.”
    Lope smiled from his Olympian heights, amused and tolerant. He could not bear Góngora either, although, paradoxically, he had also always hoped to draw him into his circle, because, deep down, he admired and feared him, so much so that he even wrote these lines:
    Bright swan of Betis who so
Sweetly and gravely tuned thy bow.
    Góngora—that prebendary-cum-swan—was, however, the kind of man who ate alone and never succumbed to blandishments. At first, he had dreamed of snatching the poetic scepter from Lope, even writing plays, but he failed in that as he did in so many things. For all these reasons, Lope always professed to loathe him, meanwhile mocking his own relative lack of knowledge of the classics—for unlike Góngora and Quevedo, Lope knew no Greek and could barely read Latin—as well as the success of his plays with ordinary people. Of his plays he wrote:
    They are ducks who splash in the waters of Castile
Which flow so easily from that vulgar stream
And sweetly flood the lower slopes;
From plain-born Lope expect no high-flown tropes.
    Lope, however, rarely stepped into the public arena. He did his best to get along well with everyone, and at that point in his life and his success, he was in no mood to become embroiled in disputes and rivalries. He contented himself instead with gentle, veiled attacks and left the really dirty work to his friends, Quevedo among them, for the latter had no qualms about pouring scorn on Góngora’s culturanista excesses or, indeed, on those of his followers. Góngora could no longer hit back at the fearsome Quevedo, who was a past master when it came to tongue-lashings.
    “I read Don Quixote when I was in Sicily,” remarked Captain Contreras. “Not bad at all, I thought.”
    “Indeed,” replied Quevedo. “It’s already famous and will, I’m sure, outlive many other works.”
    Lope raised a disdainful eyebrow, poured himself more wine, and changed the subject. This is further evidence, as I say, that in that Spain of never-ending envy and back-stabbing, where a place on Parnassus was as sought-after as Inca gold, the pen caused more blood to be shed than the sword; besides, enemies in one’s own profession are always the worst kind. The animosity between Lope and Cervantes—the latter, as I said, had, by then, entered the heaven reserved for just men and was doubtless seated at the right hand of God—had gone on for years and was still alive even after poor don Miguel’s death. The initial friendship between those two giants of Spanish literature quickly turned to hatred when the illustrious one-armed Cervantes, whose plays, like Góngora’s, met with utter failure—“I could,” he wrote, “find no one who wanted them”—fired the first shot, by including in