Cervantes and Shakespeare

Salman Rushdie in New Statesman, on two late, great writers: "Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the closer you look … the more echoes you hear. The first, and to my mind the most valuable shared idea is the belief that a work of literature doesn't have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time. … What we who come after inherit from the Bard: the knowledge that a work can be everything at once. The French tradition, more severe, separates tragedy (Racine) and comedy (Molière). Shakespeare mashes them up together, and so, thanks to him, can we."