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At this point in the week, Will Smith’s slap to Chris Rock is already the most important in the history of cinema. The event has gone around the world, and the internet, and has provoked political and sociological comments of all kinds and conditions. The most bizarre, without a doubt, and perhaps the most interesting, is the one that relates it to Francisco de Quevedo, and signed by the Young European tweeter, who recalled that in Madrid there is a plaque with the following inscription: “In this square Francisco de Quevedo mortally wounded a gentleman on Holy Thursday of 1611 in defense of a lady.” In other words: that our Golden Age already had a Will Smith.
The plate in question, installed in December 2014 in the San Martin Square, reproduces an alleged attack by the author of ‘Buscón’ on a man who had just slapped a lady inside a church. Legend has it that the writer took him out of the temple and beat him until he bled, and that he died hours later. Other versions of the incident affirm that Quevedo dealt him a death blow. As a consequence of the crime, always supposed, the man of letters was forced to flee to Italy.
The story has been repeated ad nauseam, and not only by the municipal license plate. In 2014, in a new edition of his satirical and picaresque poems, that news was included again. However, there are many who have denied the authenticity of it: this is how Pablo Jauralde and Luis Astrana did it in the 20th century, or even the manual of Spanish literature by Hurtado and González-Palencia, who in 1977 recognized their mistake and stated that “this legend cannot be admitted” (until then they had disclosed it ).
According to Germán de Patricio, professor at Towson University and author of a study dedicated to this matter (‘Quevedo’s diachronic reception: manipulated manipulator, collective symbol’), the crime in San Martín square was spread by Paul Antony of Tarsia, first biographer of Quevedo, and is part of a good number of feats that have always accompanied the figure of the poet, such as obtaining a doctorate in Theology at the age of 14 or 15, escaping from the conspiracy of Venice disguised as a beggar, marrying in love, go to jail for leaving a poem under the king’s napkin or be buried with golden spurs. All of them, according to De Patricio, have been refuted.
“In general, it can be said that the image that many people have today of Quevedo is essentially a construction of the romantic theater of the 19th century, and it is also true that the Spanish romantics seemed more interested in his life than in his work,” says the researcher.
According to Professor María Aflérez Sánchez, from the Francisco de Vitoria University, Pablo Antonio de Tarsia’s book “cannot be strictly considered a ‘biography’ as we understand the term today, but as a story full of legends, some invented purpose by the author and others simply due to the absence of reliable data.
Fortunately, there is a video of Will Smith for posterity.
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