Don Quixote by Cervantes
Don Quixote
Author: Miguel de Cervantes
Culture: Spanish
Date: early 17th c.
Genre: satirical novel
Names/terms to know: Don
Quixote, Sancho Panza,
Dulcinea, Sansón Carrasco,
Marcela, Grisóstomo,
chivalry & pastoralism
Cervantes Background
 Son of a poor doctor, did not
have a humanist education
 Cervantes’ adventurous life:
 Fought in religious wars
 Captured by pirates
 Spent 5 years as a slave
 Held government jobs.
 1604: Don Quixote Part 1
published
 1615: published DQ II.
Don Quixote
 Cervantes combines several
genres into one.
 His initial purpose: to satirize
the romances of chivalry, to
create a parody of a literary
type characterized by
supernatural deeds of valor,
implausible & complicated
adventures, duels, and
enchantments.
 The novel was popular
immediately.
Medieval Chivalry & Pastoral
 The literature that had expressed the medieval spirit
of chivalry and romance had degenerated by
Cervantes’ time.
 His method of showing the inherent silliness of
chivalric romances: ‘to show what extraordinary
consequences they would lead a man insanely
infatuated with them, once this man set out to live
‘now’ according to their patterns of action and belief.’
 In addition to chivalric romances, Cervantes parodies
the pastoral novel, with the section about Marcela,
the shepherdess who is unmoved by her shepherd
admirers.
Don Quixote’s Mask
 Our hero, Don Quixote, dons the mask of a chivalric
knight to make his life more interesting and bearable.
 We can see the influence of Greek comedy on this
novel: a crazy idea is proposed, and the rest of the
work concerns its working out in the real world.
 The humor lies in the contrast between Don
Quixote’s ideals and the real world around him.
 French Jesuit Francois de la Noue - Warned against
the dangerous influence of chivalric books on the
young - claimed they were as harmful to the young as
Machiavelli was to the old. [Think also Socrates]
Reality
 Don Quixote is not a knight but an impoverished
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country landowner.
His ideals: love as ‘service,’ adventurousness,
loyalty to valor and generosity. Tries to seek out
wrongs and right them, to help those in need, to
be full of valor in honor of his Lady (courtly love).
Like Greek heroes, he wants his great deeds to
be sung.
Don Quixote: a wandering hero
His insanity: caused by reading too many books
about chivalry (literature corrupts)
First Nine Chapters
 Some scholars think these chapters
represent the kernel of a story originally
meant to be just a novella.
 The story breaks off soon after DQ has taken
off again with Sancho Panza as his squire,
fresh from their windmill encounter.