Don Quixote

• 1. Introduction

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  Don Quixote, the full title being The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, arrived in the hands of readers on the 16th of January 1605. Most of the first edition's roughly 400 copies were immediately loaded onto ships bound for the New World, with the publisher hoping to fetch a better price in the Americas. A shipwreck near La Havana swallowed most of them. Yet approximately 70 copies reached Lima, and from there they were carried inland to Cuzco, deep in the heart of the defunct Inca Empire. A story about a man who cannot tell fiction from reality was, from its very first days, crossing oceans and continents with a momentum its author could scarcely have foreseen.

  Miguel de Cervantes wrote about a hidalgo from La Mancha named Alonso Quijano, a minor nobleman who reads so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight-errant himself. He gives himself a grander name, names his old horse Rocinante, and designates a slaughterhouse worker named Aldonza Lorenzo as his noble lady love, calling her Dulcinea del Toboso. He recruits a poor farm labourer named Sancho Panza as his squire, and together they ride out into a Spain whose social and political world has little use for either of them.

  What the listener is about to hear is the story of a book that sparked counterfeits before the ink was dry, generated translations across four continents within a single generation, and eventually prompted a Norwegian Nobel Institute study in 2002 in which writers from 55 countries voted it the greatest work of fiction ever written. How did a Spanish satire of medieval romance become the foundation of the modern novel? The answer lies in a cave in Argamasilla de Alba, a printing house in Barcelona, a fake sequel rushed into print in Tarragona, and a pair of characters whose relationship changes in a direction nobody expected.

• 2. A Man Who Prefers Fiction

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  Alonso Quixano is described as a hidalgo nearing 50 years of age, living in a deliberately unspecified region of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. His life is frugal but his head is filled entirely with the codes and imagery of chivalric romance. When his obsession tips into action, he pulls on an old suit of armour and sets out without telling anyone.

  At an inn he mistakes for a castle, he calls the prostitutes he finds there ladies, demands that the innkeeper dub him a knight, and spends the night standing vigil over a horse trough he takes to be a chapel. When muleteers try to move his armour from the trough to water their animals, he fights them. The innkeeper performs a pretend dubbing ceremony to be rid of him, and Quixote rides on, convinced it was genuine.

  His encounters follow a consistent pattern. He finds a servant named Andres tied to a tree and being beaten by his master over disputed wages; he orders the beating stopped and rides off, satisfied. The beating resumes the moment he is out of sight, and is redoubled. He demands that traders from Toledo acknowledge Dulcinea as the most beautiful woman in the world; when one asks for proof, he charges at them and is thrown from his horse. A neighbouring peasant carries him home unconscious.

  The people closest to him respond in their own way. His niece, housekeeper, the parish curate, and the local barber go through his library intending to burn the books wholesale. But filtering through the collection, they find themselves cycling between pity for particularly fine volumes and a renewed determination to destroy everything, then back to pity again. They end up sealing the library room and telling Quixote that a wizard was responsible. It is the first of many deceits performed in the name of protecting him, and it will not be the last.

• 3. Sancho and the Road

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  Sancho Panza joins the adventure after Quixote promises him a petty governorship, and the two of them sneak away from the village at dawn. Their relationship is the engine of the book. Sancho is earthy, practical, and fluent in proverbs drawn from popular Spanish and Italian folklore. Quixote speaks in a register of Old Castilian that makes him incomprehensible to nearly everyone around him.

  The windmills appear early in their journey together. Quixote takes them for ferocious giants and charges; the sails of one windmill catch his lance and throw him. This image, a man in armour broken against the machinery of the ordinary world, gave the English language the phrase "tilting at windmills," meaning the pursuit of imaginary enemies. The word "tilt" here refers specifically to jousting.

  At an inn run by Juan Palomeque, a mix-up involving a servant girl's romantic rendezvous with another guest leads to a brawl. Quixote declares the inn enchanted. He follows the example of fictional knights by leaving without paying, while Sancho is seized by several mischievous guests, wrapped in a blanket, and tossed repeatedly into the air before he can escape.

  The dynamic between the two shifts as Part Two of the novel opens. By then, people they encounter have read Part One and already know who Quixote and Sancho are. Quixote must do less to maintain his image because his image precedes him. When a duke and duchess find them on the road, these nobles have read the earlier part of the story and are fond of books of chivalry. They stage elaborate practical jokes purely for their own amusement, including a prank in which Quixote and Sancho are made to believe that Dulcinea can only be freed from an enchantment if Sancho gives himself three thousand three hundred lashes. Sancho naturally refuses, and his resistance creates genuine friction with his master. Under the duke's patronage, Sancho eventually receives a false governorship, where he proves to be a wise and practical ruler until it all ends in humiliation. Salvador de Madariaga, writing in his 1926 study of the novel, described the dynamic as "the Sanchification of Don Quixote and the Quixotization of Sancho": Sancho's spirit ascends from reality toward illusion while Quixote's declines from illusion toward reality.

• 4. Language as Comedy and Disguise

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  Cervantes wrote in Early Modern Spanish, drawing heavily on Old Castilian, the medieval form of the language. The gap between Old Castilian and the Spanish spoken in the late 16th century was roughly as wide as the gap between Middle English and the English of Shakespeare's day. This meant that when Quixote speaks, he is not merely eccentric but linguistically archaic; his speech is a parody assembled from the very books that drove him to madness, and many times when he talks, nobody around him can understand a word of it.

  Don Quixote is the only character in the novel who speaks Old Castilian. Everyone else uses the contemporary idiom of the late 1500s. Readers of Cervantes's day would have heard this contrast as obvious comedy. For modern readers, even Spanish-speaking ones, the joke is harder to catch because both registers have become equally old. English translators have historically tried to recreate the effect by having Quixote speak in the language of the King James Bible or in a broadly Shakespearean register.

  The names in the book are themselves jokes compressed into single words. Rocinante comes from rocin, meaning a workhorse or nag, and the suffix ante, implying something prior or former. The name suggests the horse used to be even less than it is now. Dulcinea carries an allusion to illusion. The protagonist's own name, Quixote, probably derives from cuixot in Catalan, a word for a horse's rump, and the name quijada (jaw) is another possible source; as a military term, quijote refers to plate armour protecting the thighs. The Spanish suffix -ote is augmentative and carries grotesque overtones: grandote means not just large but extra-large in an absurd way. So Quixote might be heard as "The Great Quijano," an oxymoron perfectly suited to a man consumed by delusions of grandeur.

  The adjective quixotic entered the English language directly from this character. Merriam-Webster defines it as the foolishly impractical pursuit of ideals, typically marked by rash and lofty romanticism. The original pronunciation of the name, in Old Castilian, was kiˈʃote, with a sound like the sh in English; when Spanish phonology shifted, it became kiˈxote, with the velar fricative heard in Scots or German. The traditional English spelling-based pronunciation, ˈkwɪksət, survives specifically in the word quixotic, which is still pronounced kwɪkˈsɒtɪk in English.

• 5. Sources, Caves, and Medical Men

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  Cervantes uses a layered metafictional structure from the very first pages. He claims the opening chapters came from the archives of La Mancha, and that the remainder was translated from an Arabic manuscript by a Moorish historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli. This fictional attribution was not taken seriously at the time, but it allowed Cervantes to treat his own narrative as a found object, something already existing in the world that he was merely relaying.

  The cave of Medrano in Argamasilla de Alba, known since the early 17th century, has a long local tradition as the prison where Cervantes was held and where he first conceived and began writing Don Quixote. The sources he drew on ranged widely. The Castilian novel Amadis de Gaula had been popular throughout the 16th century. Tirant lo Blanch, which the priest character in Chapter VI of the novel calls "the best book in the world," was another clear model, though scholars since the 19th century have called that particular passage "the most difficult passage of Don Quixote" to interpret. Apuleius's The Golden Ass, one of the earliest surviving novels and a picaresque from late classical antiquity, left a visible trace in the wineskins episode in chapter 35 of Part One. Cervantes also made several references to the Italian poem Orlando furioso, including in chapter 10 where Quixote speaks of claiming the magical helmet of Mambrino, an episode drawn from Canto I of that poem.

  Cervantes had deep connections to the medical world. His father Rodrigo de Cervantes and his great-grandfather Juan Díaz de Torreblanca were surgeons; his sister Andrea de Cervantes was a nurse. He knew the medical author Francisco Díaz, an expert in urology, and Antonio Ponce de Santa Cruz, royal doctor to both Philip III and Philip IV of Spain. His personal library held more than 200 volumes, including Examen de Ingenios by Juan Huarte and Practica y teórica de cirugía by Dionisio Daza Chacón. He also visited patients regularly at the Hospital de Inocentes in Sevilla. Researchers have separately uncovered a real-world encounter that may have fed the plot: Cervantes apparently knew the family Villaseñor, who fought against a Francisco de Acuña on the road from El Toboso to Miguel Esteban in 1581, with both sides disguised as medieval knights. They also found a man called Rodrigo Quijada who purchased a title of nobility and created various disputes with the help of a squire.

• 6. The Fake Sequel

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  In about September 1614, an unauthorized second part of the novel appeared in Tarragona under the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda of Tordesillas. The real author was never satisfactorily identified, though he was clearly an Aragonese admirer of Lope de Vega, Cervantes's rival. The prologue of this counterfeit work gratuitously insulted Cervantes by name.

  Cervantes had probably not progressed much further than Chapter LIX of his own genuine Part Two when the fake appeared. He absorbed its existence into his manuscript directly: in his own Chapter 59, Don Quixote encounters Avellaneda's book being discussed in an inn, and in later chapters Quixote visits a printing house in Barcelona where he finds the fake being set in type. Quixote and Sancho eventually meet a character named Don Alvaro Tarfe, who appears in Avellaneda's text, and they compel him to swear that the other Quixote and Sancho are impostors. A fiction refuting a fiction, using characters borrowed from the fiction being refuted.

  The translator Samuel Putnam, in his introduction to The Portable Cervantes, called Avellaneda's version "one of the most disgraceful performances in history." Cervantes completed and published his genuine Part Two in 1615, a year before his own death. The fake sequel almost certainly accelerated his timetable. Some literary critics have argued that the competition sharpened him, and that Part Two is superior to Part One precisely because of its greater psychological depth, the range of its discussions between Quixote and Sancho, and its philosophical weight. The unauthorized English translation of Avellaneda's text by William Augustus Yardley appeared in 1784, long after both men were dead.

• 7. An Ending and a Legacy

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  On the beach in Barcelona, Don Quixote is defeated by the Knight of the White Moon, who is in fact a young man from his own hometown who had earlier disguised himself as the Knight of Mirrors. The terms Quixote agreed to in advance require him to lay down his arms and abandon chivalry for a full year, time enough, his friends hope, for him to regain his senses.

  He does regain them, though not quite in the way they intended. Returning home, he announces a plan to retire to the countryside as a shepherd. Then he falls ill, retreats to his bed, and wakes from a dream as Alonso Quixano once more. Sancho tries to revive his faith in Dulcinea and in their adventures, but Quixano only apologizes for the harm he has caused and renounces all of it. He dictates a will that includes a provision disinheriting his niece should she marry any man who reads books of chivalry. After he dies, Cervantes has his narrator insist that no further adventures exist to relate, and that any future books about Don Quixote would be spurious. The author who spent a career being plagiarized was determined, at the very end, to close the door.

  The novel sold steadily and spread fast. By August 1605, there were already two Madrid editions, two published in Lisbon, and one in Valencia. In 1607 an edition appeared in Brussels; in 1610, a Milan bookseller issued an Italian edition; in 1611, another Brussels edition was called for. Centuries of printing followed. The Cervantes Collection at the State Library of New South Wales now holds over 1,100 editions, assembled by Ben Haneman across thirty years. Mark Twain wrote that the novel had swept admiration for medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence. Pablo Picasso and Richard Strauss both drew on the novel for major works. In science, a deep-sea amphipod species, Dulcibella camanchaca, was named after Dulcinea; two dinosaur genera, Lohuecotitan pandafilandi and Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra, were named after minor characters; and the gastropod family, genus, and species Quijotidae, Quijote, and Quijote cervantesi carry both the novel's name and its author's. Cervantes wrote a book about a man who could not separate real life from the books he had read, and the books have not stopped multiplying since.