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Cervantes’s last great prose romance, Persiles y Sigismunda, has rightly attracted considerable critical attention since Alban K. Forcione’s two seminal studies of the 1970s. The Persiles is an infinitely fascinating and challenging work, vast and sprawling in terms of its scope and construction, and oddly telescoped in its fourth and final book. An explanation for what feels like a rushed conclusion may be sought in the material circumstances of the work’s composition: although the Persiles appears to have been in progress when Don Quijote was published in 1605, Cervantes may well have been working on it until a few days before his death.

At the end of DQ I.47, the Canon of Toledo gives a lengthy appreciation of a type of fiction that gives full rein to the imagination and could for all the world be a description of the Persiles itself. But the book evidently took Cervantes a good deal longer to complete. It is advertised in the Prologue to the Novelas ejemplares (1613), and the material of Books 3 and 4 belongs more obviously to the world of the novela than that of romance. More fundamentally, Cervantes’sdedication of the Persiles to the Conde de Lemos is dated 19 April 1616, only four days before he died,4 and the book appeared posthumously in Madrid in 1617.

Cervantes turned his awareness of the ultimate deadline into a characteristically playful yet rather spooky prologue. As I will suggest later, Cervantes’s prologues demonstrate a progressive approach to the topos of self-deprecation. In the prologue to the Persiles, Cervantes portrays himself as both modestly famous and terminally ill. He is travelling with two friends from Esquivias5 to Madrid, and a dishevelled student riding a donkey catches up with them on the road. One of the companions mentions Cervantes’s name and the student rushes up to him and grabs his left hand:

The reference to his wounded hand, and to his celebrity as a writer, establishes a direct link with the prologue of the Novelas ejemplares of three years earlier, while the way in which the student verifies Cervantes’s identity recalls Thomas’s gesture in John 20: 27.