A somewhat free play with dates has made it possible to twin Cervantes and Shakespeare in death (he died according to the Gregorian calendar on May 3, 1616, and not on April 23; Cervantes died on the 22nd), but such a circumstance is nothing more than a trivial ingenuity in tracing the possible "parallel lives" of two geniuses who reached the highest heights of theater and literature.

Shakespeare achieved fame for his plays (like Lope in Spain), but Cervantes only succeeded with Don Quixote. The two great illusions of the Spaniard (poetry and theater) only brought him frustration and scorn. Theaters did not want Cervantes' comedies. In his Ocho comedias he writes: "a bookseller told me that he would buy them [the comedies] from me if an author of degree scroll had not told him that much could be expected from my prose, but nothing from my verse; and it was true that it gave me grief to hear it". This heaviness festered with the success of Lope's comedies, which the canon of Don Quixote judged to be "mirrors of nonsense, examples of folly and images of lasciviousness...".

In England Shakespeare shines with the same theatrical light that Lope shone in Spain. Ben Jonson paid tribute to the great William: "Shakespeare belongs not to a single epoch but to eternity".

The novelist Nahum Montt imagines in 'Hermanos de tinta' Shakespeare and Cervantes attending a performance of Hamlet at The Globe and staging a play that we sense is full of fantasy, 'El relato de la caravana de los prodigios' (The story of the caravan of wonders). But it is difficult to imagine what Cervantes would have thought of Shakespeare's theater, as full of peripeteias as those comedies that he rejected as excessive, not very plausible and not attentive to classicist norms in the bullrings of Madrid. (That is what Voltaire, so neoclassical himself, accused Shakespeare of).

Would Cervantes have applauded the implausible plots of 'King Lear', the foolishness of 'Othello', the magical inventions of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' or 'The Tempest', the entanglements of 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' or the 'Comedy of Mistakes'? Would he have been amused by the conversations of Falstaff and Sancho Panza? I think he would have.

I believe that Cervantes liked Lope's theater, but a feeling of rivalry impelled him to attack the monster of nature that closed the national stages to him. With Shakespeare there would have been no such rivalry and he would have been able to recognize the admirable greatness of a theater that he repudiated by word of mouth. It is very likely that Cervantes' "theatrical classicism" was more an intellectual conviction than his true inclination. The same one who demanded that comedies should be an image of truth, and who criticized the absurdities of the comedies of saints (Quixote, I, 48) offers stupendous demons (one in the form of a bear, another of a gallant...), souls taken from the purgatory...), souls taken from purgatory, walking skeletons, satyrs and savages, underground flames and flying clouds, with the mouths of serpents in 'El rufián dichoso' and 'La casa de los celos'... Cervantes' last work, 'Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda' is a fantastic novel, of amazing adventures in territories as marvelous as Shakespeare's marvelous world.

If Cervantes did not know the Englishman's theater, he nevertheless knew of the luminous and melancholic Quixote, which gave him the idea for 'Cardenio', performed in the winter of 1612-1613, and mentioned in the repertoire of the bookseller Humpfrey Moseley as 'The History of Cardenio', attributed to Flechter and Shakespeare.

From that story full of subtleties and dangers, and from the adventures of Cardenio, Luscinda, Don Fernando and Dorotea -which can be read in the first part of Don Quixote-, Guillén de Castro made another comedy and it was rewritten by different poets. But the plays inspired by Cervantes due to the two most profound playwrights of the time, Shakespeare and Calderón (whose comedy Don Quixote was also lost) are not known to us.

As happened to Shakespeare, some of Cervantes' creations were also lost. There remained, however, enough of both to justify - so judged another literary genius, Theodore Dostoyevsky - the entire history of mankind.