Don Quixote

Don Quixote A novel whose full title is El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (“The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha”), written by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Part 1 of the novel, which was published in 1604, became an instant success and led to an unauthorized sequel by an author who simply called himself Avellaneda. The sequel caused Cervantes to quickly complete part 2, which was published in 1614, shortly before his death in 1615.

The novel reflects Spain’s divergent worlds in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Renaissance had given rise to a new humanism, but popular writing was still devoted in a large degree to romances about knights in shining armor and a code of chivalry. It is from such sources that Cervantes drew his images of a wandering knight who felt it was his duty to protect the weak, perform good deeds, and most important, idolize women. Part 1 of Don Quixote is in essence a parody of those romances still popular and in circulation during Cervantes’s time. Having read numerous books on chivalrous ideals, the protagonist, named Alonso Quixano, finally loses his mind from lack of food and sleep as a result of all his reading. He decides to set out as a knight-errant, wearing an old suit of armor, and then steals a barber’s basin he believes is the mythic Mambrino’s helmet. At an inn, he has the innkeeper dub him with a new name, “Don Quixote de la Mancha.” He is accompanied on his travels by a common laborer named Sancho Panza, whose reward for his assistance is to become a wealthy governor on a remote island. Quixote is tall and slender, while Sancho is short and dumpy, which produces an impression of humorous contradiction that accompanies them both at the time of writing and in the art and music produced about the two characters over the next four centuries. Quixote names the “lady” for whom he will toil Dulcinea del Toboso, who is in reality a farm girl called Aldonza Lorenzo. Dulcinea is unaware of the knight’s feelings for her and, in fact, does not even appear in the novel itself but rather only in Quixote’s imagination. On his horse, named Rocinante, nothing more than a barn nag, Quixote engages in battles similar to those of other knights and continues to invoke chivalric ideals. The most famous of the battles is that with the windmills in La Mancha, which Quixote believes are in actuality ferocious giants. In the 52 chapters in part 1, there are numerous such stories, including those from individuals who Quixote and Sancho Panza meet on their journey. There is the funeral of a student who dies of unrequited love for a lady who has become a shepherdess. He unknowingly unites two bereaved couples who are torn apart by the treachery of one of the lovers, Ferdinand. When they are all finally reunited at an inn, Don Quixote goes to sleep and dreams that he is once again battling giants. Along the way a young maid falls in love with Don Quixote, but he remains faithful to his ideal woman, Dulcinea. After many such episodes, a beaten and defeated Don Quixote forswears his chivalric ideals and finally dies in a fever, and with his death the knight-errant finally becomes extinct.

The second part of the novel is more philosophical and not nearly so fantastic. Cervantes has his protagonists act out their dreams in a more meaningful way. In 74 chapters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss such literary topics as playwriting, poetry, and fictional literature, and thus place the novel in the literary tradition that was changing at the time. Through their conversation, Cervantes includes social and religious commentary and criticizes the class structure and the outdated concepts of nobility and personal property ownership current in Spain at the time. Cervantes also does not hesitate to discuss the church in his novel, for which he was briefly excommunicated.

Parody is seen particularly in his choice of names for individuals and even animals. The name Quixote is a pun on the Catalan word cuixot, meaning “thigh,” and is used in reference to a horse’s rump. The suffix -ote is a superlative. The name of his horse, Rocinante, is derived from the word rocín, the word for a workhorse, and today used to describe a rough laborer or an unkempt man. It is also possible that the suffix -ante, meaning “before,” was attached to the word rocín, thus indicating that this “used to be” a workhorse but is now nothing but a nag. Even the idolized Dulcinea is an allusion to an illusion of sweetness.

The legacy of Don Quixote has had an enormous influence on other writers, musicians, and artists. Some are brief and subtle, such as the horse Rosinante in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or the characters of Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, where the comedic short/ tall pairing of Quixote and Sancho is reversed. Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is clearly modeled on Don Quixote, and the novel as a whole plays an important role in Michel Foucault’s book The Order of Things. More recently, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh drew inspiration from Cervantes, including the use of names and characters borrowed from the original Don Quixote. Musical treatment includes such well-known composers as Felix Mendelssohn in his Die Hochzeit des Camacho, Richard Strauss in a tone poem entitled simply “Don Quixote” but subtitled “Fantastic Variations for Large Orchestra on a Theme of Knightly Character.” Perhaps the best-known musical work is the Man of La Mancha, with music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion. Premiered in 1965, the one-act Broadway musical combines the novel and the life story of Cervantes. In the field of visual arts, the novel has inspired such well-known artists as Gustave Doré, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Honoré Daumier, who produced 29 paintings and 49 drawings derived from characters and episodes in the book. There are also numerous film adaptations of the novel, the earliest dating from 1933 and continuing into the present. A film version of the musical Man of La Mancha (1972) stars Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote and Miguel de Cervantes, and Sophia Loren as Dulcinea. A British made-for television version, The Adventures of Don Quixote (1973), starred Rex Harrison and Frank Finlay, and a filmed version by the Russian Minkus ballet with Rudolf Nureyev also appeared in 1973. In 2002, a made-for-television version was coproduced by Hallmark and the Turner Network Television, and starred John Lithgow, Vanessa Williams, and Isabella Rosellini.

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