Background
Vicente Martinez Espinel was born on December 28, 1551 in Ronda, Spain.
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Vicente Martinez Espinel was born on December 28, 1551 in Ronda, Spain.
He was expelled from the university in 1572, and served as a soldier in Flanders, returning to Spain in 1584 or thereabouts.
A few years of soldiering with the Spanish forces in Italy followed this, and he returned to Spain in 1583.
There he was ordained to the priesthood and published his first volume of poetry, Rimas (1591).
In the composition of Marcos de Obregón, Obregon, Espinel employed picaresque commonplaces only as a means of presentation.
However, as an old man, mainly concerned with contemplating and morally evaluating the rashness and errors of his past, Espinel never succeeded in fusing the two with the synthetic artistry of a Cervantes.
Marcos' life, presented in a series of flashbacks, remains a curious mixture of conventional pattern and life, autobiographical moralizing and picaresque, tragicomic disillusion.
His bust can be found in Ronda, the city of his birth, in the small Plaza de los Gigantes. His head is decorated with a Laurel wreath.
Espinel was a clever musician and added a fifth string to the guitar.
His technical invention of a new ten-line stanza, the espinela, and his reputed addition of a fifth string to the Spanish guitar brought him a certain fame among his contemporaries.
