Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet, is regarded as a literary peer of Shakespeare.
Born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, in 1547, Cervantes came from a good though often poor family.
Little is known of his youth or education except that in 1568 Cervantes was a student of the Madrid humanist Juan Lopez de Hoyos, who edited an elegiac volume on the death of Queen Isabel de Valois, to which Cervantes contributed some verses.
Possibly fleeing arrest, Cervantes went to Naples and then Rome in 1569; there in the service of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva, he studied Italian literature and philosophy, which were later to influence his work.
In 1570 he enlisted in the army and fought in the naval battle of Lepanto (1571), in which he acquitted himself.....
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