Cervantes’s dispute with Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda

Cervantes’s dispute with Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda transformed a delayed continuation into a contest over personal reputation and control of a story. The decisive offense, in the account’s view, was not that another writer continued Don Quixote, but that Avellaneda’s preface used the publication to attack Cervantes; the controversy then helped push Cervantes to complete the Second Part and close the hero’s story permanently.

The continuation appears

Cervantes was still writing the Second Part of Don Quixote when a small octavo volume printed at Tarragona reached him. It called itself the Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha and named the Licentiate Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda of Tordesillas as its author. Cervantes had reached Chapter LIX; given his leisurely pace, the account places this point around October or November 1614.

The publication followed years of delay. Cervantes had left the possibility of a continuation open in the ending of the earlier book and had made no move to resume the story for eight and a half years. The account therefore treats the bare act of writing a sequel as a weak basis for complaint: Avellaneda had taken up a possibility that Cervantes’s own ending had not firmly ruled out.

The personal attack

The injury lay in Avellaneda’s preface. It taunted Cervantes for his age, his lost hand, his imprisonment, poverty, and lack of friends, and accused him of envy toward Lope de Vega, petulance, and querulousness. In this telling, those personal insults—not the unauthorized continuation alone—were the sting of the affair. Avellaneda also accused Cervantes of attacking him and Lope in his criticism of the drama.

Avellaneda’s identity remained uncertain. The account describes him as evidently connected to the dramatists of Lope de Vega’s school, but reports that even extensive critical inquiry had not established who he was. It records a view that Cervantes knew the author’s identity, while the commentator instead reads Cervantes’s anger as the reaction to an assailant whose identity was hidden. Cervantes inferred from linguistic solecisms that Avellaneda was Aragonese; Pellicer supported that inference and further conjectured that Avellaneda was an ecclesiastic, probably a Dominican. These remained conjectures rather than a settled identification.

Cervantes’s response and the ending

The attack found Cervantes in the middle of a work he had allowed to advance slowly. Once the volume came into his hands, he appears to have feared that further Avellanedas might enter the field. He set aside other work and concentrated on finishing the Second Part, answering the threat in the only way he could: by killing Don Quixote. The ending thus served both as the conclusion of the narrative and as protection against another writer extending the hero’s adventures.

The account judges this conclusion hasty and at points clumsy, and finds the repeated scolding of Avellaneda increasingly wearisome. Yet it also stresses the practical force of the result: the book had an ending. Without Avellaneda’s intervention, Cervantes might have finished the volume in hand only to promise a Third Part, possibly taking Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a pastoral life as shepherds. Given his many plans and projects, the work might instead have remained unfinished at his death.

Literary and narrative consequences

The dispute shaped what readers would receive in the completed work. The account argues that, without the pressure to finish, readers might never have encountered the Duke and Duchess or followed Sancho Panza to Barataria. Avellaneda’s intervention therefore had a paradoxical consequence: the continuation that provoked Cervantes also helped bring about the definitive version of Cervantes’s own story.

Cervantes’s response made the dispute part of the Second Part’s structure. The conflict over who could continue Don Quixote became inseparable from the decision to end the character’s adventures rather than leave them available for further appropriation. In the account’s interpretation, Avellaneda’s personal attack hastened a conclusion that Cervantes’s earlier delay had left uncertain.