Don Quixote de la mancha

1009 Pages·2008·48.15 MB·English

by  Cervantes Saavedra

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
DON QUIXOTE
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, who was born in 1547 and died in 1616,
a few days after Shakespeare, had lived most of his life before he
published the First Part of Don Quixote in 1605. He had served as a
soldier in Philip IPs forces in the Mediterranean area, and been held
captive for five years in North Africa, After his ransom and return
to Spain, he was a minor government functionary, tax-collector,
and aspiring dramatist. Don Quixote was an immediate success, and
writing the sequel, composing, assembling, and publishing his
other works, notably the Exemplary Novels (1613), kept him busy
for the last decade of his life. His masterpiece combines powerful
character-creation with pioneering narrative techniques. It remains
the work to which the Western novel from the eighteenth to the
twentieth century is most indebted.
The translation by Charles Jar vis, first published in 1742, has
deservedly been one of the most successful and has often been
reprinted.
E. C. RILEY is Emeritus Professor of Hispanic Studies at the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh.
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OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA
Don Quixote de la Mancha
Translated by
CHARLES JARVIS
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
E. C. RILEY
OXPORD
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CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xvii
Select Bibliography xix
A Chronology of Cervantes and his Times xxi
DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA
Part One i
Part Two 463
Explanatory Notes 945
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INTRODUCTION
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES was 57 years old when the First Part of
Don Quixote appeared in January, 1605. A rather marginal figure in
literary circles, he was known at the time as the author of a number
of plays, some occasional poems, and La Galatea, a pastoral
romance. This last had been published twenty years before, was
incomplete, and had only two editions to its name. Don Quixote, his
belated first major success, was the product of most of a lifetime of
experience and wide reading. His career as a young man—soldier,
veteran of the Battle of Lepanto, captive for five years in North
Africa—had been adventurous and even heroic. The next twenty-
five years, spent mostly as a minor government functionary and tax
collector, were humdrum and unrewarding. His work took him trav-
elling widely about Spain, however, and thus at least helped to lay
some of the groundwork for Don Quixote.
It is not certain when he began to write the book, but he was
busy with it by 1602. A remark in the first prologue suggests that
he conceived the idea of it in prison (probably in Seville in 1597),
although we cannot be altogether sure of this. In the summer of
1604 he negotiated the sale of the rights with the publisher and
bookseller Francisco de Robles, and it went to the press of Juan de
la Cuesta in Madrid. Success was immediate. There were five or
six editions (two of them unauthorized) by the end of the year. As
early as June 1605, the figure of Don Quixote was well-enough
known to appear in a festival masquerade in Valladolid (where Cer-
vantes was living at the time). In 1607 this happened again in
Cuzco, Peru, in 1613 in Heidelberg, and at least ten times in all by
1621.
Cervantes's new-found fame prompted a surge of writing, revis-
ing, and publishing, which continued for more than a decade until
his death in 1616. Part Two appeared late in 1615—too late to fore-
stall a sequel written by someone who called himself the Licentiate
Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda. It is a crude work by comparison.
The author, despite paying Cervantes the supreme compliment of
imitating him, was hostile and even insulted him in the prologue.
Cervantes, who was obviously offended, replied with acid restraint
viii Introduction
in his own prologue to Part Two, and incorporated his revenge in his
narrative (chapters 59, 70, 72, and passim).
There had been nothing quite like Don Quixote before, although it
had multiple points of contact with existing literature. The Spanish
public took to it at once, for in the realm of prose fiction there was a
ready reception for novelty and experiment. Viewed on a broad time-
scale, Don Quixote, for all its originality, may be regarded as the
culmination of a century of experimenting with prose-fiction forms.
The courtly sentimental romance Car eel de amor (Prison of Love) by
Diego de San Pedro (1492), La Celestina, dialogue fiction of courtly
amours and back-street life, by Fernando de Rojas (1499, 1502),
Antonio de Guevara's pseudo-historical compilation, the Libra dureo
de Marco Aurelio (1528, 1535—known in contemporary England as
The Dial of Princes), the picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Jorge
de Montemayor's pastoral Diana (1559), Gines Perez de Hita's his-
torical Moorish romance, the Guerras civiles de Granada Part I (1595)
and Mateo Aleman's picaresque novel Guzman de Alfarache (1599,
1604) constitute a succession of European bestsellers as remarkable
for innovation as for variety.
The most 'avant-garde' fiction when Cervantes was writing Don
Quixote was the picaresque novel which, following the unparalleled
success of Guzman de Alfarache, was enjoying something like a
boom. Cervantes had contributed to this new wave with his story
'Rinconete y Cortadillo', written by 1604, later revised and pub-
lished as one of the Exemplary Novels (1613). Anti-heroic, material-
istic, plebeian, the picaresque was in effect, if not in intention, a
reaction against heroic, idealistic, aristocratic romance, particularly
the romance of chivalry which, numerically at least, had dominated
the field in the sixteenth century. Now the romance of chivalry was
in deep decline, although in its pastoral and other forms romance
was still flourishing. The last new book of chivalry in Spain was
published in 1602. Like the picaresque novels, Don Quixote reacted
against these works, but in a profoundly different and deliberate
manner. The relationship is parodic, though parodic in a very special
way, as we shall see presently.
The literature of chivalry had long outlived the medieval practice
of it. The vogue for romances in this vein had been rekindled in
Renaissance Europe following the great success of Matteo Boiardo's
Orlando innamorato (1486), Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso
Introduction ix
(1532), and Rodriguez de Montalvo's Amadis de Gaula (1508). Cer-
vantes followed the Italians, particularly Ariosto, rather than Mon-
talvo, however, inasmuch as he made fun of chivalric romance in a
way that did not rule out affection for it. His attitude to these books
is ambivalent but perfectly clear. He saw in them frequent faults of
bad construction, inflated style, and impossible subject matter, but
he could still enjoy their soaring imagination and superhuman hero-
ics. He relished them rather as a sophisticated reader today might
enjoy the novels of Ian Fleming. He did not regard them all indis-
criminately as bad either. He evidently thought well of Amadis of
Gaul and Palmerin of England. So it is unwise to take at full face-
value the protestations in the first prologue and elsewhere about the
urgent need to rid the world of the plague of books of chivalry. One
need only read the pro and contra arguments of the Canon of Toledo
in Part One, Chapter 47 to see the two sides of the question set out.
For Cervantes there were good and bad ways of writing romances as
there were for writing plays and poems. The great novelty here was
that nobody had paid them more than passing attention in a critical
context before.
The ideal mode for this state of mind is of course parody. But
rather than write a straight parody, in the manner of Ariosto for
instance, Cervantes displaces it, sets it at one remove. Don Quixote
himself is the parodist, inadvertently. The result is a basically real-
istic novel about a man who tries to turn his life into a romance of
chivalry. Naturally, his material conditions—age, physique, social
and economic circumstances—are thoroughly unsuitable for such a
design—so much so that the idea could only be seriously entertained
by someone whose mind was unbalanced. At the heart of Don
Quixote, therefore, there is a confrontation between romantic litera-
ture and 'real life'. Only it is not really real life, because Cervantes
has made the whole thing up. The confrontation is between two
kinds of fiction, one highly romantic and the other relatively real-
istic. As such, the latter is certainly not authentic biography or his-
tory such as is accepted as recording life. But this is just what Cer-
vantes's fiction pretends to do, and in a fairly elaborate way. There is
talk of historians, annals, and archives.
Yet this pretence aims to take no one in. That would be for
Cervantes to treat his readers as gullible don-quixotes. On the con-
trary, it is a pretence which they are intended to see through; they are
to recognize the illusion created by literary art for what it is. This