It would not be difficult to suggest how this might have come about if Cervantes were only a mask or agent for the real author. Fitzmaurice-Kelly as well as Lope de Vega has no high opinion of Cervantes as a poet. So far as concerns the poetic gifts his endowment was scant, to the last day of his life he was all too ready a sonneteer. And yet Don Quixote was hailed as a masterpiece in Spain and later in Europe outside Spain. A fifth edition was published in Valencia in July 1605 and a second part was published in 1615 shortly before Cervantes' death in 1616, and yet he died in poverty.
Nothing seems to fit.
In view of these strange circumstances the suggestion has been made and received considerable support that the book owes its origin to some other hand than that of Cervantes. The remarkable character of Shelton's so called translation, the mystery of its production and the failure to identify Shelton have led to the view that here in some way we have the origin of Don Quixote, and in Shelton a mask behind which stands the real author. A summary of the grounds on which this theory has been based may be found in a chapter of Mr. Edward Johnson's recent enlarged issue of his book, The Shaksper Illusion. The search continues. When it was seen that the Author's Preface to the Reader was printed in italics in the 1890 reprint, it was thought that this might be a vehicle for embodying information by the bi-literal cipher, and provide material for an independent test of the genuineness of Mrs. Gallup's decipherment, and so photographs of the Preface were taken from the original in the British Museum.