Once upon a time, 400 years ago, a writer named Cervantes...

The 23rd of April of 1616 was the date where both Shakespeare and Cervantes died. They were two of the greatest writers of all time and whose works are been read until today and will probably continue to be read and studied in the future.
It is such a coincidence that they both have the same death date that the 23rd of April has become nowadays the International Day of the Book.
The truth is that they did die in the same date but not in the same day, that ´s because while on England they used the Julian calendar in Spain they were using the Gregorian one.


On the one hand, Cervantes was born the 9th October 1547 in Alcalá, being the fourth out of seven siblings. He studied at the Jesuit college and learned to read and write at a very young age. He and his family moved to Seville trying to improve their economy ,since Seville was third biggest city of those times and could give them more opportunities.
Cervantes was sentenced to lose his arm and be arrested because he was in a fight with an important person and he had to leave the city and go to a part of Italy which was owned by Spain in order to scape. And there he became as a soldier in Diego de Urbina´s company.

He fought in Lepanto Battle (1571) and he received three injuries, one of them disabled his left arm forever so he received the nickname "the one-armed man of Lepanto".

However, he went into battle again in 1573 with his younger brother in Corfú. After that he received two letters of recommendation which aim was to give him a better position but  in 1575, coming back to Spain he was captured by Turkish pirates and he was a prisoner for 5 years in Argel.

He tried to scape 4 times unsuccesfully,  he was sold to the Hassán king and in 1580 he was finally freed.
Now in Spain he decided to write. He created his most famous work in 1605, El Quijote, which was a parody of the popular genre of cavalry novels.


On the other hand, Shakespeare had a complete different life. He was born in a wealthy family of Stratford-upon-Avon. We do not have much information about the childhood and adolescence of the author,  but we know that with the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway with whom he had 3 children.
He started writing when he moved to London and his first work was Venus y Adonis, a poem. He became known thanks to his theatre; he wrote 14 comedies, 10 tragedies and 10 historical dramas.
Furthermore, Shakespeare has added to the English dictionary a total of 1700 words and sometimes english language is referred as "Shakespeare language".


In conclusion, those two authors have had a very different life as I said and they had never met in person but they have both left an great legacy in their respective language, literature and even culture.