The Swindler

by Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in the Spanish kingdom of Castile in the early seventeenth century; published in Spanish in 1626 (as La vida del Buscón llam-ado don Pablos), in English in 1657.

SYNOPSIS

From the vantage point of his mature years, Pablos of Segovia tells the story of his life and adventures as a young pícaro, or rogue.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645) was born to aristocratic parents in the Castilian capital of Madrid, where his father was a secretary to the Spanish royal family. Like other young men of his class, Quevedo was educated in classical Greek and Latin literature and in Catholic theology, studying at the universities in Valladolid and Alcalá. He afterward pursued a contentious political career, meanwhile establishing a reputation as one of the most versatile and stylistically gifted writers of his time. His works vary widely in tone, ranging from biting and humorous social satire to lyric love poems, to sophisticated treatises on classical philosophy and theology, but share such features as complex wordplay and ornate, sustained imagery. Quevedo was particularly acknowledged for his mastery of the conceptismo or conceit, an extended metaphor employing elaborate puns and double meanings. He also became known in his time as a proponent of Stoic philosophy. Today Quevedo is remembered both for his doctrinal works and his satirical poems and prose. An example is the Sueños or Visions (1627), five brief satirical prose pieces that attack ignorance and stupidity in a broad range of targets, including bad poets, thieving innkeepers, corrupt constables, and rapacious bankers. Similar satirical elements emerge in The Swindler, a work that introduced new dimensions into the then-fashionable genre of the picaresque novel, which focuses on a picaro, or rogue, as its central character.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The twilight of Spain’s Golden Age

In the sixteenth century the Spanish enjoyed a period of cultural and imperial vitality known as the Golden Age, during which they dominated Europe and much of the world. In addition to Spain’s vast colonies in the Americas and the Pacific, the union of the Spanish royal family with the powerful Habsburg dynasty of central Europe meant that Spanish monarchs also ruled in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, southern Italy, and Sicily, or benefitted from close family ties to rulers in those lands. Using the famous system of routes known as the “Spanish Road,” Spain could send troops deep into central or northern Europe without leaving Habsburg territory. Spanish ships also took the lead in defeating the Turks at the battle of Lepanto (1571) in the Mediterranean Sea, marking the beginning of Turkey’s decline as a threat to Christian Europe. Spanish imperial might forms much of the backdrop of The Swindler, in which famous sixteenth-century campaigns and battles (such as Lepanto) receive frequent mention.

Spain reached the height of its Golden Age strength under its adept and tireless King Philip II (ruled 1555–98). Philip II’s successors, his son Philip III (ruled 1598–1621) and his grandson Philip IV (ruled 1621–65), lacked both the political skill and the energy of their capable and popular predecessor. Whereas Philip II exercised close control in governing his dominions, often working late into the night to ensure that the smallest details received his personal attention, his son and grandson were less inclined to take part directly in making decisions and forming policies. Instead, they preferred recreation and lavish entertainments, delegating responsibility for government to a series of aristocratic court favorites, called privados or validos. Under Philip III the most influential privado was Francisco de Sandoval, the Duke of Lerma, and under Philip IV it was Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares.

Quevedo finished his education and returned to Madrid in 1606 at age 26, hoping to participate in court life. While he had influential friends, including the ambitious Duke of Osuna, Philip III’s Viceroy of Sicily (which was under Spanish rule), the often abrasive Quevedo soon made many enemies at court as well; in fact, in 1611 he was forced to flee briefly to Italy after killing another man in a duel. Scholars believe that The Swindler, though not published until 1626, had already been written by then and had been circulated among Quevedo’s friends at court, most likely around 1608.

By the time Philip III died in 1621, the Duke of Osuna had fallen from grace and Quevedo’s political career was at a low ebb. To ingratiate himself with the new regime, Quevedo wrote poems celebrating the 16-year-old Philip IV’s accession to the throne. Though Quevedo himself had earlier distributed bribes on Osuna’s behalf, his poems on this occasion reflected the feelings of many who were impatient with the bribery and corruption that had dominated court life under Philip III, and to whom the succession seemed like a chance for a fresh start. Philip IV’s court favorite, Olivares, announced his intention to clean up the government and transform the court into a center of arts and literature, and Quevedo dedicated a political tract to him: La Politica de Dios (The Politics of God), published in 1626, the same year as The Swindler. Quevedo and Olivares would be linked throughout their careers in the years after The Swindler’s publication, with Quevedo repeatedly falling in and out of favor before the deaths of both men in 1645.

Historians rate Olivares as far more capable than his predecessor, the genial but inept and bribable Lerma, yet despite Olivares’s undeniable statesmanship, he was ultimately unable to reverse Spain’s decline. To be fair, many of the problems had originated in policies pursued by Philip II. For example, Philip III’s insistence on making even the smallest decisions personally, while highly effective, also led him to discount the advice of others, deterring the development of anything resembling a cabinet of ministers with officially delegated spheres of authority. His methods left the government ill-prepared to function under a monarch of lesser ability. Nor was Philip II ever able to enforce Spanish rule over the rebellious Dutch, despite massive expenditures of lives as well as weapons in attempting to do so. The Dutch Revolt of Philip IPs reign began in 1566 and dragged on for decades, with the Dutch finding willing allies in the English and the French, both of whom were eager to curtail Spanish power. Spilling over into the reign of Philip III, it ended only when Spain recognized the independence of a new Dutch state, the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

NOBLES, CLERICS, AND PEASANTS: THE THREE ESTATES

Spanish society in the Golden Age was divided (in theory at least) into three levels. At the top were the nobles or aristocracy, and the clerics or Church officials. These two classes owned virtually all the land. At the bottom were the peasants who worked the land and paid rent to their landlords; the peasants were the only class that paid taxes. Traditionally, these social classes are known as the “three estates,” Within each estate there were further gradations into upper and lower levels. Quevedo belonged to the hidalgo class, part of the lesser nobility, ranking above peasants on the social scale but below nobles such as counts and dukes. By Quevedo’s time the poor but proud hidalgo, jealously guarding his honor and social rank, had become a stereotypical character in the picaresque novel. In The Swindler, fulfilling the demands of the genre, Pablos meets a hidalgo who takes ludicrous pains to conceal the fact that he is dressed in rags.

in 1609. Spain kept its hold only on the part of the so-called Low Countries that later became Belgium. In the novel, Pablos, the narrator, frequently refers to Spanish campaigns in the Low Countries and elsewhere in Europe, and at one point he meets a soldier who took part in these campaigns. The toothless, scarred old veteran boasts, for example, that he was “in the front at the sacking of Antwerp,” an important Belgian port captured by the Spanish in 1576 (Quevedo, The Swindler, p. 137).

While Olivares inherited serious problems from preceding governments, historians indict him for failing to realize that Spain’s resources, in the end, were unequal to Philip IPs earlier, grandiose ambitions. Striving to maintain the bellicose stance of a former era, Olivares pursued policies that, for example, led to the spread of hostilities in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). The war began with a revolt against Habsburg rule in Bohemia, but Olivares’s aggressiveness soon rekindled conflict in the Low Countries, and Spain and the Habsburgs were ultimately embroiled in disastrous fighting throughout Europe. The Thirty Years’ War resulted in the eclipse of Spanish and Habsburg military preeminence; by the end of the seventeenth century France would replace Spain as Europe’s major power. Thus, the years that fell between The Swindler’s probable composition and its publication—roughly 1608 to 1626—were among the last years of clear Spanish dominance in Europe.

Religion in Spanish society

The Thirty Years’ War marked a time in which religion played a decisive role in the outbreak of a major European war. As a strongly Catholic nation, the Spanish had resisted the Protestant Reformation that began to sweep much of northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century. Dutch Protestantism was a leading factor in the Dutch uprising against Catholic Spain, and the rebellious Bohemian princes whose revolt touched off the Thirty Years’ War were also Protestants resentful of Catholic Habsburg rule. Conversely, the parts of the Low Countries over which the Habsburgs kept control were precisely those parts that had remained largely Catholic. In the future, however, strategic national interests would overshadow shared religious bonds in determining Europe’s alliances and enmities.

Spain’s particular brand of aggressive Catholic militantism sprang from its unique history as the only Western European country to have fallen under Islamic rule. Muslim Arabs and North Africans (or Moors) had conquered Spain in the eighth century, and in the wake of the Muslim conquest came Jewish immigrants who added to the preexisting Jewish population. The resulting culture—called Moorish—blended Muslim, Jewish, and Christian elements under generally tolerant Muslim rulers. Not everyone adapted to the blend. In fact, Christian identity in Spain became closely linked to the idea of reconquering the peninsula from the Muslims, a centuries-long process that was completed when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella captured the last Muslim city, Granada, in 1492.

Driven by the ideal of a unified Catholic society, in that same year Ferdinand and Isabella—known as the “Catholic Monarchs”—offered Spain’s remaining Jews a choice between converting to Christianity or being expelled from

ARBLTRISTAS

By the time Quevedo wrote The Swindler, Spain’s decline had become clear enough for some writers to begin proposing solutions to the nation’s various problems. Called arbitristas or “projectors,” these intellectuals and their sometimes unrealistic arbitrios, or schemes, would become popular targets for satire by Quevedo and others. In The Swindler, Pablos meets an arbitrista who has a plan to help the king’s armies capture the Dutch stronghold of Ostend by using sponges to suck up the sea water that protected the city’s fortress. The novel’s use of the word arbitrista to describe this new phenomenon is perhaps the earliest recorded appearance of the word in Spanish literature.

Spain. In the face of long persecution from Spanish Christians, many Spanish Jews had already converted. Some 700,000 Jews who refused to convert after the Catholic Monarchs’ decree were expelled, and a decade later, in 1502, Ferdinand and Isabella offered Spanish Muslims the same choice between conversion or expulsion. Muslims who converted to Catholicism were called Moriscos; Jews who converted were called Con-versos. Both minority groups suffered hostility from the Catholic establishment, which (often correctly) suspected them of continuing to observe their former religious practices in secret. While some Conversos retained varying degrees of their original Jewish culture, many others assimilated into Spanish society, often into the aristocracy. By contrast, the Moriscos remained a largely segregated underclass in Catholic Spain. Moriscos in Granada revolted in 1569–71, after Philip II ordered them to abandon their customs, and in 1609 the government of Philip III and the Duke of Lerma expelled the Moriscos from Spain altogether.

The Spanish Inquisition

To force the Moriscos and Conversos to conform to Catholic practice, the Catholic Monarchs established the Spanish Inquisition, an arm of the Church that, though under royal control, had broad powers to seek out and punish any deviation from accepted Catholic worship. The Inquisition rapidly became Spain’s most feared institution, for its methods ranged from confiscation of property to torture and execution by fire. Originally intended to monitor the Conversos and Moriscos, the Inquisition expanded during the sixteenth century to target suspected witches and heretics as well, and even to monitor converted Indian peoples in the Spanish colonies of Latin America.

In Spain, tens of thousands died in the Inquisition’s autos-da-fé (literally, “acts of faith”), spectacular public burnings of condemned offenders that were usually attended by large and enthusiastic crowds. The Inquisition appears frequently in The Swindler, illustrating its constant presence in the background—and sometimes the foreground—of Spanish daily life. At one point, for example, Pablos (with a characteristic lack of emotion) hears from his uncle that his mother has been arrested by the Inquisition and accused of witchcraft. She is to be burned at an auto-da-fe, together “with four hundred other people” (The Swindler, p. 121). In another episode Pablos arranges with friends to pretend they are Inquisitors and arrest him, so that he won’t have to pay his bill at an inn.

Poverty and honor

Despite the Latin American gold and silver that flowed into its royal treasury, Spain remained essentially a poor nation throughout the Golden Age. Much of its American treasure was transferred directly to German or Italian bankers in order to finance the Spanish Crown’s expensive foreign wars. By the time of the novel, these bankers were widely resented as a cause of Spain’s growing economic problems. In The Swindler, for example, Pablos meets “a Genoese—you know, one of those bankers who’ve ruined Spain” (The Swindler, p. 140). Historians point to a deeper cause for the failing economy, however, one that had roots in the Spanish tendency to despise industry and business as base and dishonorable. “Conscience in businessmen is a bit like virginity in whores,” Pablos says after meeting the Genoese banker: “they sell it when they haven’t got it anymore. Hardly anyone in business has a conscience” (The Swindler, p. 140). That part of the American treasure that did not go to the Crown found its way into the hands of nobles, who made up the viceroys and other colonial officials upon which the Crown relied but who invested very little of their gains in domestic business. As a result, Spain had little industry, so it needed to import most manufactured products, which further drained cash from the Spanish economy.

In the end, the influx of treasure merely exacerbated the poverty of Spanish peasants by driving up prices, which rose steadily throughout the sixteenth century. The peasants, upon whose backs rested both food production and taxation, grew ever worse off, and rural populations throughout Spain began falling. Between 1596 and 1614, the overall population in Castile, Spain’s leading kingdom and the setting of the novel, fell by an estimated 600,000–700,000 people, a decline of some 10 percent (Lynch, p. 6). Several factors contributed to this depopulation, including outbreaks of plague starting in 1596 and the expulsion of perhaps 90,000 agriculturally productive Castilian Moriscos in 1609.

In addition, many peasants escaped mounting tax debts in their villages by fleeing to the cities. There they often subsisted, like Pablos in the novel, by begging or engaging in petty theft or robbery. Others, as Pablos does at the end of the novel, might seek their fortunes in the Americas, where they could conceal past indiscretions and fabricate a new identity with perhaps a higher social rank. By the time he goes to America, Pablos has already tried and failed to pass himself off as a hidalgo in Spain. His attempts to ascend in social rank reflect what historians have seen as a pervasive obsession in Spanish society with nobility and honor, and an equally widespread desire to avoid the harsh economic burdens of peasant life. His personal experience is based largely on his low-class Converso heritage. Pablos wants to work his way up the social ladder, which does not seem possible in Spain itself, or so the novel seems to say.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

The text is prefaced by a brief letter “To the Reader,” which some modern critics have argued was not written by Quevedo. In it readers are told that the tale about to unfold will teach them “all the tricks of the low life” that people like to read about—and they are warned against themselves trying to trick the bookseller by reading the book without paying for it (The Swindler, p. 83).

In keeping with the demands of the picaresque genre, the novel itself opens with a brief account of the narrator’s lowly origins and early life. His name, he tells us, is Pablos of Segovia. His father is a barber in that city in central Spain, and his mother is a beautiful woman suspected by the townspeople of having “some Jewish or Moorish blood in her” (The Swindler, p. 85). His parents are always in trouble with local authorities, the father for robbing his customers and the mother for practicing witchcraft. His parents argue about which of their careers he should follow, thievery or witchcraft, but Pablos says that even as a boy he thought of himself as a caballero or gentleman, a member of the leisured upper classes, so he did not apply himself to either (The Swindler, p. 86).

LIMPIEZA DE SANGRE

Unfavorable references to Moriscos or Conversos appear frequently in The Swindler, and often in a way that modern readers might find offensive. The references to Conversos typically incorporate anti-Semitic stereotypes (for example, Jews have long noses) and stress historical differences between Judaism and Christianity (like Muslims, for example, Jews do not eat pork, an aversion often maintained in Converso families). “There’s no shortage of those people [Moriscos],” Pablos declares, “or the ones who have long noses and only need them to smell out bacon. Of course, I’m not hinting at any impure blood among the aristocracy, oh no!” (The Swindler, p. 106). The latter part of this quotation reflects the pervasive Spanish social ideal known as limpieza de sangre, literally “purity of blood,’ According to this principle, it was desirable to come from a family with ancient Christian roots and no Moorish or Jewish ancestors. In Quevedo’s day, real or, if necessary, false genealogies could be bought, and Spain’s noble families often went to great trouble to proclaim their Christian “purity” in this way. Actually, however, many noble families descended from Jews who had converted to Christianity decades or even centuries earlier. Fewer noble families had ancestors who married Moriscos. Incidents in The Swindler betray the Converso origins of the narrator, Pablos, among them his family’s contact with the Inquisition, the body authorized to suppress deviation from the Roman Catholic Church.

In school Pablos is befriended by the son of Don Alonso Coronel de Zuniga, a Segovia aristocrat. The boy’s name is Diego; Pablos refers to him with the honorific don (from the Latin dominus, lord), denoting his higher social rank: Don Diego. When Don Diego begins to attend a boarding school in Segovia, Pablos decides to leave home and go with him as his servant and companion. The school is run by the stingy, penny-pinching Dr. Goat (licenciado Cabra), who feeds the boys so little that they are constantly famished. When a boy at the school actually dies of starvation, Don Alonso removes them from Dr. Goat’s academy and sends them both to Alcalá, where Don Diego will finish his education at the university and Pablos will continue to act as his servant.

At the university Pablos is at first mercilessly hazed both by the students and by other servants. On the first night, for example, a group of students surrounds him and spits all over him, so that he is completely coated. Later, while he sleeps, the other servants defecate in his bed so that when he rolls over he covers himself in human excrement. However, Pablos decides to join the mischief and soon fits in with the others, specializing in stealing food from the housekeeper of the boarding house where they live in Alcalá.

Pablos’s stint at the university comes to an end when he receives a letter from his uncle Alonso, Segovia’s hangman, who informs Pablos that his father has been hanged (by the uncle) for theft and his mother has been arrested and condemned to death by the Inquisition for witchcraft. Pablos must return to Segovia and claim his inheritance. On his journey to Segovia, Pablos meets up with a series of characters who represent various social types:

• The arbitrista, a crackpot engineer full of projects (arbitrios) for solving Spain’s problems.

• An inept fencing master, who combines incredible clumsiness with fancy mathematical theories about sword-fighting. (Quevedo’s depiction caricatures his enemy Luis Pacheco de Narváez, who wrote a book on sword-fighting and with whom Quevedo engaged in a long-running literary battle.)

• A priest who recites terrible poetry.

• A scarred old veteran who brags about taking part in campaigns in the Low Countries and elsewhere, though Pablos suspects him of lying.

• A gluttonous monk who loves to gamble and cheats at cards.

• A Genoese banker who talks only about money.

On the way into Segovia, Pablos sees his father’s quartered remains at the city gate (the bodies of executed criminals were often displayed in this way as a warning to others). He finds his uncle leading a procession of five condemned criminals, flogging them as they go, preceded by the town crier, part of whose job is to walk ahead and call out the crimes of the condemned. During a debauched night of drinking with the uncle’s rascally cronies, Pablos suffers his uncle’s grim humor; the uncle serves meat pies for dinner and hints that pieces of Pablos’s father are ground up in the pies. Next the uncle offers to train Pablos as a hangman, but, disgusted, Pablos declines. As soon as he collects the money his parents have left him, he hires a donkey and leaves for Madrid, which he had passed through on his way from Alcala to Segovia.

Along the way, Pablos takes up with a poverty-stricken hidalgo, Don Toribio, a gentleman of the lesser nobility whose trousers are so tattered that his buttocks show through unless he covers them with his cloak. Don Toribio, who lives in Madrid, instructs Pablos in how to get by there by passing oneself off as well-heeled when in reality one is penniless. On arriving in the capital, Pablos joins Don Toribio’s group of friends, essentially a band of high-born con artists and petty thieves that is headed by an aged woman called Old Lebrusca. One day the police catch her selling stolen goods, and after she confesses where to find her gang of “gentleman thieves” (caballeros de rapiña), Pablos and the others are arrested and thrown in jail (The Swindler, p. 170). He spends a few nights in jail, then escapes by bribing and smooth-talking the jailer, leaving his friends behind.

Taking a room at an inn, Pablos pretends to be wealthy in order to impress and seduce the attractive daughter of the innkeepers. His plot backfires when he is exposed and beaten in front of the girl by a lawyer who lives next door. Humiliated, Pablos arranges for two accomplices to come to the inn masquerading as agents of the Inquisition and arrest him, so that he can leave without paying his bill. He then decides that he needs to find a wealthy wife. He chooses a beautiful young girl, Doña Ana, for his attentions, and prepares an expensive picnic in order to impress her and her older relatives.

Again, however, his plot backfires, for he unexpectedly bumps into his old friend and master Don Diego, who turns out to be related to Dona Ana. At first, Pablos tries to carry off the fiction that he is “Don Felipe Tristan,” who just happens to bear a remarkable resemblance to Don Diego’s former servant (The Swindler, p. 187). But Don Diego eventually recognizes Pablos and sets a trap to punish him for his deception. He hires two ruffians to beat a man whom he says will be wearing a cloak he shows them. He then tricks Pablos into swapping cloaks and taking the one he has pointed out to the ruffians. This time Pablos is beaten twice, for some enemies of Don Diego’s (lying in wait to beat him up in an unexplained dispute involving a prostitute) get to Pablos first. Mistaking him for Don Diego, they beat him once, and a few minutes later the two ruffians give him another beating, pounding him with clubs, cutting his face, and covering him with bruises.

After recovering from the beatings, Pablos, now nearly broke, becomes a beggar, employing several child beggars to supplement his takings. Soon he is kidnapping children and waiting till their distraught parents offer a reward, then returning the children and claiming the reward. He decides to leave Madrid for Toledo, and joins a traveling theatrical company that is also going there. By the time they reach Toledo, Pablos is acting in plays, and soon he is writing his own plays for production by the company. The company breaks up, however, and Pablos, who has made some money as a playwright, begins romancing a beautiful nun who saw him act the part of St. John the Apostle in a religious play. He absconds with a valuable needlework she has made, and flees to the port city of Seville, the point of embarkation for Spanish ships sailing to the Americas.

In Seville Pablos joins a group of thugs on a drunken spree in which they hunt policemen. When he kills two officers, he and his companions take refuge in the city’s cathedral, which according to custom provides them with temporary immunity from the law as long as they are inside. Fed by the city’s prostitutes, Pablos escapes with one of them, La Grajales, and embarks for the Americas, hoping things will go better in a new land. “But they went worse,” he concludes his story, “as they always will for anybody who thinks he only has to move his dwelling without changing his life or ways” (The Swindler, p. 214).

Class and conservatism

The arbitrista in The Swindler aspires to rise in social rank, saying that he won’t tell the king about his plan to capture the Belgian port of Ostend “unless the king gives me an estate first” (The Swindler, p. 124). He says he deserves to be given an estate (encomienda)because he has a highly honorable pedigree (una ejecutoria muy honradd), by which he means he has no Moriscos or Conversos among his ancestors. By contrast, Pablos, who also wishes to rise socially, does seem to have “some Jewish or Moorish blood,” at least on his mother’s side (The Swindler, p. 85). In practice, however, Pablos’s mixed ancestry wouldn’t have excluded him from joining the aristocracy. It was common knowledge in Golden Age Spain that many noble families had Converso origins, though the families hid them. Scholars have recently uncovered such origins for a prominent Segovia family named Coronel, for example, which is the name of Don Diego’s family in the novel. The Converso origins of the Coronels seem to have been well known at the time, and these scholars argue that Quevedo meant to suggest to his contemporary readers Converso origins for Don Diego’s family.

“Pure” ancestry was therefore not the sole arbiter of social class. An autobiography from the year 1600 draws a clear distinction between limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, and hidalguia, nobility of birth:

There are two kinds of nobility: the greater is the hidalguia, the lesser the limpieza. Even though the former carries more honour, it is a great disgrace to be denied the latter; in Spain there is more esteem for a pure-bred commoner than for a hidalgo who lacks this purity.

(Defourneaux, p. 40)

Thus, while not a sufficient criterion for nobility on its own, limpieza could enhance nobility immeasurably, and a peasant with limpieza could, despite being a peasant, lord it over a noble of known mixed ancestry.

By Quevedo’s time, however, the traditional value system that promoted such ideals had started to become subject to various social pressures. Some of these pressures are represented by phenomena such as the arbitristas whom Quevedo mocks in The Swindler. While many of the arbitristas’ ideas were in fact impracticable, others amounted to common sense reforms that might have done some good if followed. For example, one suggestion was to reform the antiquated Castilian tax system so that the entire burden did not fall on the peasants but would be shared with the upper classes. Historians in fact see the arbitrista movement as a precursor of the modern science of political economy.

While critics disagree on many aspects of The Swindler’s meaning, they generally agree that Quevedo’s ideology was essentially conservative. Representing this consensus, for example, William Clamurro writes that “Quevedo, throughout most of his writings and especially in the Buscon [i.e., The Swindler] can be seen as a spokesman for the ideology of the reigning status quo” (Clamurro, p. 87). Within this status quo, aristocrats such as Quevedo held a privileged position, but one increasingly under threat as, for example, economic problems drove peasants to the cities, threatening the rural tax base on which society depended. Thus, in his edition of the novel, B. W. Ife suggests that in the character of Pablos, Quevedo has created “a representative example of the kind of villainous social upstart which Quevedo saw as the most dangerous threat to the established fabric of Spanish society” (Ife in Quevedo, La Vida del Buscon llamado Don Pablos, p. 15). In a similar vein, James Iffland focuses on Pablos’s Converso ancestry, arguing that Quevedo shared the anti-Semitism common in Spain, “including resentment at the way many Conversos were still able to attain social and economic prominence at a time when aristocrats of limited means (such as Quevedo) were slowly losing influence and prestige” (Iffland in Quevedo, El Buscón, p. xix). These insights may help explain such disparate elements in The Swindler as Quevedo’s contemptuous depiction of the arbitristas, Pablos’s farcical and brutally punished attempts to break into the nobility, and especially the constantly reiterated preoccupation with limpieza de sangre.

Sources and literary context

The Swindler is the last written of the three canonical works frequently cited as defining the genre of the Spanish picaresque novel. The genre was inaugurated by the highly popular and anonymously written Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times), which served as a model for a spate of lesser works that followed. Not until 1599 did a worthy successor appear in the form of Mateo Aleman’s Guzmán de Alfarache, narrated by the adventurous son of a ruined moneylender. Though lively critical discussion about the genre persists, critics have discerned three major elements that distinguish the picaresque novel:

• The central character’s lowly origins and, from society’s point of view at the time, shameful Converso background

• First-person narration by the central character

• An episodic, autobiographical structure, telling the narrator’s life story in order of events

The Swindler follows Lazarillo de Tormes more closely than it does Guzman, and the two former works share several additional features that distinguish them from the latter. For example, they are brief and concise where it is lengthy and digressive, and their central characters defy conventional morality, with the tale itself imparting no clear moral lesson, where Guzman’s sententious narrator frequently moralizes directly to the reader.

The Swindler was written during a time of immense cultural vitality in Spain, for Golden Age culture continued to flourish long past the onset of Spain’s political and economic decline. Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), whose masterpiece Don Quixote (1605 and 1615; also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times) is regarded as establishing the form of the modern novel, dominated the field of letters. His own contributions to the picaresque genre, Rinconete and Cortadillo and Colloquy of the Dogs were both published in 1613, after The Swindler was written but before it was published. In drama, Lope de Vega wrote his play Fuente Ovejuna (also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times) around the same time. More generally, the prolific Lope de Vega (1562–1635), who wrote some 800 plays altogether, founded the popular comedia tradition, which combines high drama with lively farce, music, and dance.

Quevedo was highly conscious of The Swindler’s rich literary context, and the contemporary literary scene features twice in the novel, first when Pablos meets the priest who recites awful poetry and again when he works briefly as a playwright. In the first instance Pablos reads aloud “A Proclamation Against All Idiot, Useless, and Rubbishy Poets,” a mock legal decree banning poets and playwrights who use clichés and hackneyed plot devices in their works. For example, the decree singles out love poets who, imitating Italian Renaissance romantic verse, “continually worship eyebrows, teeth, ribbons and slippers” (The Swindler, p. 133). The poets mocked in Quevedo’s decree would have been among the growing ranks of professional writers who earned their living in the expanded literary marketplace of the Golden Age.

Publication and reception

From references to specific historical events in the text (for example, the siege of Ostend, which ended in 1604), literary historians have concluded that The Swindler was probably written in the first decade of the seventeenth century, with an early draft completed by perhaps 1603–04 and a revised draft perhaps a decade later. Other scholars, however, have cautioned that such internal references need not necessarily correspond to the time of composition.

More revealing than an exact date of composition is the fact that Quevedo, having written the novel, did not want to publish it. Instead, he distributed handwritten copies to his friends at court and to other literary figures, and may (as B. W. Ife stresses) have read all or part of it aloud at gatherings of his social circle. In keeping with The Swindler’s mock decree banning bad poets, the aristocratic writer would have looked down on the growing ranks of professional authors, opposing as dishonorable the idea of deriving income from his literary efforts. Finally, by not publishing the novel, Quevedo ensured his own safety from the powerful censors of the Spanish Inquisition, whose legal reach extended only to published works. For all these reasons, Quevedo resisted The Swindler’s initial publication in 1626 by the printer Roberto Duport in Zaragoza, and refused to acknowledge authorship thereafter. His refusal mattered little, though, for readers recognized his biting, witty style.

In his introduction to the first edition, Roberto Duport indicates The Swindler’s appeal to contemporary readers. Comparing the novel to Don Quixote in its wit and grace, Duport invokes two classical Latin authors, assuring the reader that the novel lies closer to the careless wickedness of the poet Martial than to the serious moralizing of the playwright Seneca. Despite Quevedo’s disavowal of authorship the novel was highly popular, as evidenced by the many subsequent editions that appeared not only in Spain but also in France, the Low Countries, and England, both in the original Spanish and in translation.

—Colin Wells

For More Information

Chandler, Frank Wadleigh. Romances of Roguery. New York: Lenox Hill, 1974.

Clamurro, William. Language and Ideology in the Prose of Quevedo. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1991.

Defourneaux, Marcel. Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age. Trans. Newton Branch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979.

Domínquez Ortiz, Antonio. The Golden Age of Spain 1516–1659. Trans. James Casey. New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Dunn, Peter. Spanish Picareque Fiction: A New Literary History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Elliott, J. H. Spain and Its World 1500–1700. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Lynch, John. Spain and America: 1598–1700. Vol. 2 of Spain Under the Habsburgs. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965.

Smith, Paul J. Quevedo: El Buscón. London: Grant &Cutler, 1991.

Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco de. El Buscon. Ed.

James Iffland. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1988.

_____.La vida del Buscón llamado don Pablos. Ed. B. W. ife. Oxford: Pergamon, 1977.

_____. The Swindler. In Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler. Trans. Michael Alpert. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.