The Adventures of Don Quixote
What few people realize is what a rich, funny, complex novel it is. Actually, it’s two novels: the first part, published in 1605, was immediately popular, first with readers in Spain and later in France and England. In fact, the book was so popular that an unscrupulous rival took the characters and published a sequel, hoping to cash in on Cervantes’s luck.
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Enraged, Cervantes wrote his own sequel, published in 1615, in which Quixote and Panza spend a lot of time bashing the writer of the unauthorized text. In fact, some of the humor in the second part comes from the fact that Quixote and Sancho are fully aware that someone has written a novel about their earlier adventures: they keep running into people who’ve read about them–and who are anxious to see and “admire” the ill-fated duo.
The exploration of reality and illusion in the second book becomes so baroque, and Cervantes’s desire to trip up the reader so mischievous, that some passages must be read two or three times to be understood. It’s very difficult to discover, for example, whether Sancho was really given an island to rule, and whether he was the wise and just ruler his subjects claim he was or totally unsuited to the job, as Sancho himself hints. Such complexity doesn’t work well on the stage–it almost doesn’t work in the novel–and a lot of the second act is incomprehensible unless you’ve read the original.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): The Adventures of Don Quixote theater still-uncredited.
