INTRODUCTION
Don Quixote has been called "the founding story of printed literature" (The invention of the printing press made possible the creation of many copies of long books and their distribution over most of the known world. In England some felt that if reading matter were available to the poor they might "become aware and enlightened of their circumstances" and that this might lead to unrest and revolt.)

There had been nothing remotely like the novel before. It appeals to a wide audience; on one level some of it can be enjoyed by children, on another it provokes philosophical discussions among adults of all classes. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion learned Spanish so he could read it in the original; he thought it a prerequisite to becoming an effective statesman.

Although Spain was one of the most literate populations in Europe at the time, most people still became acquainted with literature by being read to. One reason plays were so popular was because they tell a story which islistened to and Don Quixote was probably written with the realization that most people would learn to know it through their ears rather than their eyes. (In one episode, a priest reads a story to a group of travelers at an inn.) While there is the common thread of the adventures of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, the novel is actually a compilation of many stories, short enough to be read on their own and finished in one evening.

Don Quixote is one of the most widely-read books after the Bible, it is also one of the most written about with a plethora of interpretations and commentaries. Of course opinions vary; what followed is a compilation of some of the most common.

CONCEPTION AND WRITING
In the prologue Cervantes writes: "You may suppose it was the child of disturbance, engendered in some dismal prison, where wretchedness keeps its residence, and every dismal sound its habitation". This has led to the supposition that Don Quixote was written during one of the prison terms of Cervantes, most probably in Seville. (Several cities other than Seville, including Argasamilla, have been claimed as the site of this prison.) Wherever it was, even if he first got the idea there, it is unlikely he did much actual writing; the conditions would have been too difficult, and the planning and execution was the work of years, not months. Any writing was most probably of a short story rather than of the later long novel.

Note that in Man of La Mancha the manuscript had already been written when Cervantes arrived at the jail in Seville, but this is highly unlikely.

It took some time for Cervantes to find a publisher, and he seems never to have read what came from the printers; there were many errors and inconsistencies in the first edition of Part I which others enjoyed pointing out and for which he apologized in his Part II. Nevertheless The book was an immediate success, and many later editions were printed. However, all of the early editions were done cheaply as though the publishers did not deem them worthy of special treatment. It wasn't until the eighteenth century that deluxe editions began to appear.

Don Quixote was written as a "history" rather than a novel, thus implying that everything in it was factual rather than fictional. Cervantes pretended that he was not the actual author but merely the editor of an existing work. For more on this see below.

PURPOSE
In his Prologue to Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote about his dissatisfaction with his finished book and almost resolved not to publish it. Then a friend convinced him that his fears were senseless and persuaded him to go ahead with it saying: "... from beginning to end it is an invective against romances of chivalry ... . Always have as your aim the demolition of the ill-founded fabric of those books of chivalry, despised by so many and praised by many more; and if this is what you achieve it will be no mean achievement". Cervantes agreed to go ahead. When he comes to the end of Part II, the last sentence reads: "My only desire has been to make men hate those false absurd histories in books of chivalry, which thanks to the exploits of my real Don Quixote are even now tottering and without any doubt will soon tumble to the ground".

It is important to note that Cervantes was mocking not the chivalry and knight errantry of history. Except for reenactments on festive occasions, these were long gone by his time. His target was the spate of romantic novels on the subject which were so popular and which made publishers so wealthy. It was not only the common people who enjoyed them; Emperor Charles V read them as did St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Teresa of Avila. Indeed, in his youth Cervantes had read and reread Amadís of Gaul and, as evidenced by countless references, was very familiar with many others.

By the time of Cervantes, such books were already falling out of favor. Moralists and clergy had been attacking them for years. (This is reflected in the novel by an argument between the innkeepter and the Canon of Toledo about the merits of such works.) Don Quixote merely spelled their death knoll.

So his purpose is clear, but he does not accomplish it by using invective against these books; he does it by parody, relating a supposedly true "history" with apparent seriousness but about comic situations.

STRUCTURE
The complete Don Quixote consists of two parts which appeared ten years apart (1605 and 1615). While Cervantes is clearly the author of entire book, he uses the literary device of merely editing the work of someone else. He implies that the story of the quixotic knight was well known from other sources, but that his version is the only "true history", and all other versions were written by imposters.

As the original author he names Cide Hamete Benengeli, a Morisco scholar who would not be inclined to favor the Spanish and therefore could be could be counted upon to give an accurate account. Moreover, while Cide Hamete as a historian had to give only accurate "facts", Cervantes was free to make comments.

However, this dichotomy does not appear immediately. During the first section of Part I the reader has no reason to believe that Cervantes himself is not the original author. At the beginning of the second section he tells how he met a boy on the streets of Toledo carrying notebooks and papers written in Arabic. He could see that they concerned Don Quixote and found a local Morisco to translate them into Castilian for him. Cervantes then edited the translation. It is Cide Hamete, not Cervantes who says in the final pages: "For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was for him to act, for me to write; we two together make one".

At the end of Part I Alonso Quijana did not recover his sanity seeming to promise a sequel. However, before Cervantes could finish his own Part II, a spurious version appeared, "conceived in Tordesillas and born in Tarragona". The author used the pseudonym Avellanada and has never been identified. Poorly written and dull, the characters are buffoons and Don Quixote dies in an insane asylum. It was not a success but, without it, the slow-working Cervantes may never had finished his Part II. In his prologue to Part II, Cervantes inveighed against "Avellanada's" version and berated the author for not revealing his identity. He is particularly upset by the reference to his (Cervantes's) age and maimed hand. He ends by saying he will tell of Quijana's death so no one else can pretend to tell another story,

Part II is much more philosophical than Part I, but the major difference is in the roles of the knight and the other characters. In Part I Don Quixote has lost his sense of reality and sees giants in windmills and a castle in a run-down inn. The others try to get him to see that he is wrong. There are characters in Part II who have read Part I as well as new characters and the illusions are created by them to fool the knight; he sees the reality in most cases. For example, in Part II Carrasco disguises himself as the Knight of the Mirrors*, but Don Quixote defeats and exposes him. He sometimes even joins in to fool the others.

* In Man cf La Mancha Don Quixote is defeated here. In the book he wins this conflict but is defeated in Barcelona near the end of the book.

CHARACTERS
Don Quixote: Not much is told about Don Quixote's real life as Alonso Quijana other than that he is a hidalgo who has sold most of his property to buy books. The rest we can infer from what we know about his alter ego. He is obviously well educated and he demonstrates his knowledge of history and ancient languages. He speaks in a noble and correct, if romantic and florid, language which reflects his reading of chivalric literature. He is always a gentleman and never common or vulgar.

He has been called insane but he is not. He is not suffering from dementia; his madness is single-minded. In most things he is completely rational: when discussing other literature, in conversing with others, in his courtesy, in giving Sancho advice on governing his island, et cetera. He only seems insane when encountering things which he takes for giants, enchanters and evildoers. In fact, some commentators have suggested he is acting his role and is always sane when alone.

Don Quixote sees as his quest not only to right wrongs, but to revive the Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table and other such groups. As a knight errant he sees himself as great troubadour and lover. But he tries to rectify the wrongs of his world by using the tools of a bygone time. He finds prototypes in books for transforming his mundane surroundings (e.g. a castle for an inn). He explains his defeats, and anything else that does not fit his illustion, as the work of enchanters. Otherwise he does not see himself as being under a spell.

Sancho Panza is as important as Don Quixote and is his foil. Cervantes says he is "a compendium of all the squirely fun scattered throughout the whole troop of vain books of chivalry". Unlike Don Quixote he sees things as they really are but goes along with his master because he has no choice. Since he is not being paid, he must stay with the knight if he is to gain his promised island to govern. Eventually he comes to love him, and their relationship is often like father and son. Sancho struggles between his love for and belief in his master and what he knows is reality. Gradually he becomes almost convinced and starts to believe in their quest; at Alonso Quijana's deathbed he begs him to take up knight-errantry again

A typical Spanish peasant, very proud of his purity of blood, and often pictured as fat (in Spanish, panza means belly or paunch), simple-minded, and always complaining and fearful. Sometimes portrayed as a comic bumpkin, he is actually quite intelligent as illustrated by his skill in governing his "island" and in his conversations with Don Quixote, his wife, and others. In fact, he is so intelligent that the "translator" thinks these conversations are apocryphal.

Dulcinea (with dulce as its root) means something like "sweetness". The word has come to represent anything which is the object of helpless devotion and love, the ideal. She is purely a figment of Don Quixote's imagination and thus never appears. Her prototype, Aldonza Lorenzo, is a young village girl who is mentioned several times in the novel, but we do not meet her. Instead, in Part II, Sancho produces a very crude, foul-mouthed country girl and tries to convince Don Quixote she is Dulcinea. The knight sees her for what she is, but Sancho finally convinces him she is only under an enchantment which makes her ugly and repulsive. In Man of La Mancha, the Priest's song tells how, even though she doesn't exist, the idea of Dulcinea keeps Don Quixote alive and on his quest.

RECEPTION
Don Quixote was published in same year as Shakespeare's King Lear (1605). It was a huge success from the first, appearing in over 700 editions since then. By 1610 it had gone through ten editions with a total of about 30,000* copies in Spain and had already been translated into most European languages. Since Don Quixote was only licensed in Castile and Portugal, pirated copies soon appeared, not only in Spain, but all over Europe. Early editions often retold the tales without caring about the ideas behind them and some were quite racy. For example, the nephew of the poet John Milton made one which is coarse and vulgar and a travesty of the work of Cervantes. Many were cheaply done, on poor paper and with careless errors. The story was popular not only with the educated but with the masses to whom it was read by others; illiterates knew it well. Soon Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Dulcinea became stock figures in pageants and masquerades, even for such occasions as the beatification of St. Teresa of Avila (1614).

Until that time history was written in prose (and therefore was to believed as true), and fiction was in poetry. Thus the Church thought the use of prose for Don Quixote undermined the moral fiber of society by making people believe it was all true. However, Don Quixote did not include anything that could actually offend Catholics, so it was not banned. It also was unpopular with lovers of chivalric romances.

*By modern standards this is a ridiculously small number but for the time it was huge.

INFLUENCE AND DERIVATIVES
It was not long before Don Quixote started to attract imitators and parodies. In England, Beaumont and Fletcher created the 1613 The Knight of the Burning Pestle about a grocer who dreams of fighting giants. Also a satire on chivalric romances, it may have originally be written for performance for one of the children's companies of the time. Fletcher also collaborated with Shakespeare on a 1613 play Cardenio which was inspired by one of the inserted stories in Don Quixote. It is now lost.

Don Quixote has influenced all of the arts.
There have been many ballets which tell some of the story. The first appeared about in 1740 in Vienna. Like Man of La Mancha, a 1965 Balanchine ballet took the form of a play-within-a-play. In it, an aged Don Quixote dreams of his youth.

There have been about twenty-one operas, some based on only one or two of the stories within the novel. One of the earliest was in Hamburg in 1690. One still frequently performed today is Massenet's 1910 Don Quichotte which has a tilt with a windmill and features Dulcinea as a flirtatious beauty; Don Quichotte retrieves a stolen necklace for her. There have also been many other musical compositions including a song cycle by Maurice Ravel and a tone poem by Richard Strauss.

The stories have inspired many painters including, most famously, Salvador Dali, Gustave Doré, Honore Daumier and Pablo Picasso. A few of their works have been used in these articles, and complete collections can be found on the Internet.

It is perhaps in literature that we find the most imitators. Don Quixote has influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Jane Austin among many, many others. Just a few examples:

Dickens's The Pickwick Papers: The characters of Pickwick and Sam Weller are like Don Quixote
    and Sancho Panza (although their physiques are exchanged).
Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, claiming to imitate Cervantes, wrote Joseph Andrews,
    with a Quixote-type hero.
Jane Austin's Northanger Abbey is a parody of Don Quixote. A naïve young girl loves to read
    gothic* (rather than chivalric) novels. When she is invited to stay at country house converted
    from a medieval abbey, her imagination recreates some of the horrors in the books.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Finn and Jim have all sorts of adventures
    with references to Don Quixote.
In one of the popular Asterix comics, Asterix in Spain, Asterix and Obelisk meet Don Quixote
    and Sancho Panza. (This is an anachronism. Since Asterix lives in Gaul during the Roman
   invasion, almost 1600 years separate the characters.)
The original Star Wars had character named Don-Wan Kihotay, the alias of a librarian turned
    pseudo-Jedi Knight who was acquainted with Han Solo.
Mister Rogers Neighborhood had a puppet named Donkey Hodie, a Sicilian donkey.

* Gothic literature was a late 18th and early 19th century form which featured the supernatural, villains, madmen, magicians, romantic heroes and persecuted women. One of the best known examples is The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

TRANSLATING
Don Quixote has been translated into more than sixty languages and there are always new versions. The first English version (by Shelton 1608-1612) translated it into the the language of Shakepeare who probably knew it. Translating Don Quixote is difficult. The style is between prose and poetry and the language is never vulgar. Don Quixote himself speaks in a romantic but aristocratic style and few can capture the flavor of the original Spanish. Some have made close, literal translations but missed the gentle fun apparent in the Spanish.

For example: In one incident, Don Quixote is stoned by some shepherds, loses teeth and receives many facial wounds. His face is really sad to look at, and Sancho, thinking him the sorriest sight he has ever seen, calls him El Caballero de las Triste Figura, literally Knight of the Sorry or Ill-favored face. This has been translated as Sorrowful Figure or Sad Countenance (or woeful or doleful*). However, these translations imply the sobriquet indicates his internal feelings rather than the sorry physical appearance of the original.

* As in Man of La Mancha

CONCLUSION
It is said that Don Quixote captured the soul of sixteenth century Spain. Nothing like it had been written before, and it changed the face of literature in Europe. With its collision of illusion with reality, it stands in a unique position between early romances (stories with little exploration of inner characters) and the modern novel (in depth psychological studies of characters). While at first it was thought of as mostly comic, a series of ridiculous adventures such as the tilting at the windmill, later its depth and attention to detail was recognized. It is a satire yet its humor is sympathetic, not nasty.

In addition to being a new form of novel, Don Quixote made many contributions to the languages of the world including "tilting at windmills" and, most importantly, the word quixotic. Quizotism is characteristic of visionary action, for example, acts of reform. Quixotic visionaries such St. Teresa, Joan of Arc and Martin Luther were often held up to ridicule during their life times but changed history. Often unaccepted in a world with absolute values, they sought

and justice and ignored outward appearances. Did this make them mad?

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Revised September 2007
Please credit Lyric Opera San Diego when using this material.