GD+IV+--+2nd+Quarter

[|The Sacking of Rome]
 * GD IV--2nd quarter **

[|The Dark Ages, 2]

[|Christianity in Europe in the Dark Ages]

[|Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxons]

[|Beowulf]

[|"The Seafarer"]

//**Sir Gawain and the Green Knight **//

Sir Gawain. (Liza Voronin/The Epoch Times)

by daedalusknight





A view of 'Lud's Church', Staffordshire (possible inspiration for the 'Green Chapel'in //Sir Gawain and the Green Knight//). Photo: Dr Richard Dance
 * The above are examples of illustrations found on the website below: **

[|illustrations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]

**Essential questions: How does one's moral duty differ from his duty as prescribed by the law? What is man's obligation to intervene in unjust situations (tyranny, exploitation)? Why does man idealize the past?**

__ The Inquisitions: Spain, France, Italy, The Americas __ = Joan of Arc: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151137/ = = Galileo and the Church : http://video.pbs.org/video/2036276385 =

The Reformation: Martin Luther: http://www.hulu.com/watch/44148/empires-driven-to-defiance#s-p1-st-i4

//**Sir Gawain and the Green Knight**//

**Mario Vargas Llosa and Fuentes--essays on Cervantes**

A Novel for the Twenty-First Century, Mario Vargas Llosa
= =

Don Quixote de La Mancha, Cervantes' immortal novel, is first and foremost an image: a fifty-something gentleman in anachronistic armor and as bony as his horse, accompanied by a coarse and chubby peasant riding a donkey, a sometime squire, frozen in winter, burning in summer, crossing the plains of La Mancha in search of adventures. He is driven by a mad plan: to revive a long-eclipsed era (one, in fact, that never existed) of knights-errant, who traveled the world helping the weak, righting wrongs, and dispensing justice to those who would otherwise never know it-a plan which seizes him after reading chivalric romances to which he attributes the veracity of history.

This ideal is impossible to reach because everything in Don Quixote's reality refutes it. There are no knights-errant, no one professes the ideas or respects the values that once moved them, and war no longer consists of ritualistic duels between knights. Now, as Don Quixote laments in his discourse on arms and letters, war is no longer settled by swords and lances, that is,by the courage and dexterity of individuals, but rather by the thunder of artillery which, in the roar of death, has erased the codes of honor and heroic deeds that forged the mythic figures of an Amadis of Gaul, a Tirant lo Blanc and a Tristan de Leonis.

Does this mean that Don Quixote de La Mancha is a book focused on the past, that Alonso Quijano's madness comes from a desperate nostalgia for a world that is gone, from a profound rejection of modernity and progress? This would be true if the world for which Don Quixote yearns and which he is intent on reviving had ever had a place inhistory.In truth, it only ever existed in the imagination ,in legends and utopias created by men to escape the insecurity and barbarism of their lives-societies of order, honor, principles, fair and redeeming citizens, which compensated them for the violence and suffering of life in the Middle Ages.

The books of chivalry that incite Don Quixote's madness are not realistic, and the delirious feats of their paladins do not reflect reality. Yet they are an authentic and imaginative response, filled with dreams and wishes and, above all, denial, to a very real world-a dream of ceremony and elegance, of justice triumphant and evil punished, so different from the real world in which those who avidly read the chivalric romances (or listened to them in taverns and plazas) lived. Thus, the dream that transforms Alonso Quijano into Don Quixote de La Mancha does not constitute a reenactment of the past, but rather something much more ambitious: the realization of a myth, the transformation of fiction into living history.

This fantasy, which seems insane to those around Alonso Quijano, especially to his friends and acquaintances in his village-the priest, the barber Nicolas, the __house keeper__ and her niece, the bachelor Sanson Carrasco-gradually infiltrates reality, thanks to the fanatical conviction with which the Knight of the Sad Countenance imposes it on his surroundings, fearless of the thrashings and blows he receives and the misfortunes that befall him everywhere as a result. In his splendid interpretation of the novel, Para Leer a Cervantes (El Acantilado, 2003), Martin de Riquer insists that throughout his long adventure Don Quixote does not change, that he never loses his certainty that it is the enchanters who distort reality so that he appears mistaken when he attacks windmills, wineskins, sheep, or pilgrims, believing them to be giants or enemies. Undoubtedly, this is true. Yet, although Don Quixote does not change, imprisoned as he is in his rigid chivalric vision of the world, what does change are his surroundings, the people around him, and the very reality, which, as if infected by his powerful madness, becomes less and less real until as in a Borges storyit becomes pure fiction. This is one of the most subtle and most modern aspects of the great Cervantine novel.

Fiction and Life

The central theme of Don Quixote de La Mancha is fiction, its raison d'etre, and the way it infiltrates life, forming and transforming it. Thus, what would seem to many modern readers the Borgesian theme par excellence (from "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") is actually a Cervantine subject, which, centuries later, was revived by Borges, giving it his own personal twist.

Fiction is the main issue of the novel because the gentleman from La Mancha has been "unhinged"- his madness is also an allegory or symbol, ahead of a clinical diagnosis-by the fantasies of chivalric romance. Believ- ing the world to be as it is described in the novels of Amadises and Palmerines, Don Quixote rushes at it in search of adventures in which he will participate parodically, provoking and enduring minor catastrophes. He will not learn the lesson of realism from these unfortunate experiences. With the unmoving belief of a fanatic, Don Quixote blames on the evil enchanters the fact that his feats are transformed into farces. In fact, in the end, Don Quixote triumphs; fiction infects true life and reality gives way to his fantasies. Sancho Panza, who has been introduced as a materialist and pragmatist, at last succumbs to the delights of the imaginary and, as governor of Barataria, accommodates himself to the world of falsity and illusion. His language, which at the beginning of the story is earthy, direct and populist, becomes refined and occasionally as pretentious as that of his master.

The stratagem by which Basilio prevents the beautiful Quiteria from marrying the wealthy Camacho so as to marry her himself-isn't that fiction? Basilio "commits suicide" amid preparations for the wedding, stabbing himself with a sword and bathing in blood. In agony as he dies, he asks Quiteria for her hand in marriage or he will die without confession. As soon as Quiteria agrees,Basilio returns to life, revealing that his suicide was pure theater and that the blood he shed came from a hidden pipe. The Hction, nonetheless, is effective and, with Don Quixote's help, becomes reality as Basilio and Quiteria unite in marriage.

The friends from Don Quixote's town-so opposed to the passion for reading novels that they bum Don Quixote's library on the pretext of curing Alonso Quijano's madness-also appeal to fiction by scheming to return the Knight of the Sad Countenance to his sanity and the real world. They actually achieve the opposite, however. The bachelor Sanson Carrasco dresses up twice as a knight-errant, first as the Knight of the Mirrors and later in Barcelona as the Knight of the White Moon. The first time the deception turns out to be counterproductive and Don Quixote has his own way. But the second time it achieves its aim, forcing Don Quixote to renounce his arms for a year and return to his village, bringing the story to its denouement.

The ending is a rather staged and depressing anti-climax and consequently, perhaps, Cervantes completed his work in a few more pages. There is something abnormal and even unreal in Alonso Quijano's decision to return to reality, when reality has become to a great extent fiction, as a weepy Sancho Panza indicates when he proclaims to his master from his deathbed that they should "be off to the country dressed as shepherds" to act out the pastoral fiction that is the last of Don Quixote's fantasies.

The fictionalization of reality reaches its peak with the appearance of the mysterious duke and duchess, who increase the pace and number of theatrical and fabulous changes. The duke and duchess have read the first part of the story, as have many other characters, and when they meet Don Quixote and Sancho Panza they are as seduced by the novel as Don Quixote is by the romances of chivalry. In their castle they arrange for life to become fiction and for the unreality in which Don Quixote lives to be reproduced in real life. The duke and duchess do this with the intention of laughing at the crazy gentleman and hissquire-or so they believe. But the game begins to corrupt them,for late, when Don Quixote and Sancho leave for Zaragoza, the duke and duchess round up their servants and soldiers to find the two and bring them back to the castle, where the fabulous funeral ceremony and supposed resurrection of Altisidora has been organized. In the world of the duke and duchess, Don Quixote is no longer an eccentric; he is right at home in these fictional surroundings, from the island of Barataria, where Sancho real izes his dream of being governor, to the flight aboard Clavilefi.o, the artificial quadruped on which the great Manchegan gallops through the clouds of illusion.

Another wealthy and influential man, Don Antonio Moreno, who lodges, wines, and dines Don Quixote in Barcelona, also stages some spectacles which break down reality. For example, in his house he has an enchanted bronze head, which answers questions posed to it, appearing to know the future and past of the other characters. The narrator explains that this is an "artifice," and that the supposed fortuneteller is in fact a hollow machine with a student who sits inside and responds to questions.Isn't this yet another manifestation of living fiction ,creating theater from life, as Don Quixote does, but with less ingenuity and greater malice?

During his __stay in Barcelona__, when his host Don Antonio Moreno is walking Don Quixote through the city, a Castilian emerges who calls out to the Ingenious Gentleman: "You are mad ... (and] you have the quality of turning into madmen and fools those who meet and speak with you." The Castilian is right: Don Quixote's madness, his thirst for unrea lity, is contagious and has fostered in others the appetite for fiction that possesses him.

This explains the flowering of stories, the forest of tales and novels, which is Don Quixote de La Mancha. Not only the elusive Cide Hamete Benengeli, the other narrator of the novel, who boasts of being merely its transcriber and translator (although he is really its editor, annotator, and commentator as well), reveals this passion for the imaginary life of literature, incorporating occasional tales-"The Man Who was Recklessly Curi- ous" and the tale of Cardenio and Dorotea, for example-into the main story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Characters like the beautiful Moorish woman, the Knight of the Green Coat, or the Princess Micomicona, also share this propensity or narrative vice, which leads them to tell tales, real or in vented, creating in the course of the novel a landscape of words and imagination which comes before, even at times abolishes, the other natural but not very realistic one of cliches and conventional rhetoric. Don Quixote de La Mancha is a novel about fiction in which imaginary life is everywhere, in the vicissitudes, the words, even the very air that the characters breathe.

A Novel of __Free__ Men

In addition to being a novel about fiction, Don Quixote is also a song to freedom. Let us pause for a moment to reflect on these very famous words of Don Quixote to Sancho Panza: "Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious of heaven's gifts. It cannot be compared to the treasures of the land or sea. For freedom, as for honor, one can and should risk one's life, while captivity is the worst evil which can come to men."

Behind these words, and the fictitious character who utters them, is the figure of Miguel de Cervantes, who knew well of what he spoke. The five years during which he was held captive by Moors in Algiers and the three times he was imprisoned in Spain for debt and mismanagement of his position in the purchasing bureaucracy of the Armada in Andalusia-these experiences must have whetted his appetite for freedom and spurred his horror of captivity, filling Don Quixote's words with authenticity and force and giving a libertarian slant to the story of our Ingenious Gentleman.

What, then, is Don Quixote's concept of freedom? Is it that of so-called European liberals from the eighteenth century onward: the sovereignty of the individual tochoose his life,without pressures or limitations, according to his intelligence and his will? This is what, several centuries later, Isaiah Berlin would define as"negative freedom,"freedom from interference and coercion to think, express oneself, and act. At the heart of this idea of freedom is a profound distrust of authority and of the crimes that those in power might commit.

Let us remember that Don Quixote pronounces this exalted praise of freedom as he leaves the domain of the anonymous duke and duchess, where he has been treated like royalty by the man of the castle, the very incarnation of power. Yet, even amidst this flattery and pampering, the Ingenious Gentleman perceives an invisible corset which threatens and diminishes his freedom-"because I did not enjoy it with the liberty that I would have if [the gifts and abundance heaped on me] were mine." The assumption is that the basis of liberty is private pwperty and that pleasure is only complete when one's capacity for initiative, one's freedom of thought and action, is not constrained. "Fortunate is he to whom the heavens have given bread without obliging him to thank anyone but the heavens themselves!"

It cannot be made clearer: freedom is individual and requires a mini- mum level of prosperity. He who is poor and depends upon charity to survive is never entirely free. It is true that there existed a time many years ago, as Don Quixote reminds the stunned goatherds in his speech on the Golden Age, when "virtue and goodness reigned in the world" and, in this heavenly era before private property, "those who lived did not even know the words yours and mine" and "all thingswerecommon property." But time passed and "our detestable centuries" arrived, wherein, so that there might be security and justice, "the order of knights-errant was instituted to defend maidens, to protect widows and to help orphans and the needy."

Don Quixote does not believe that justice, order, and progress are the responsibility of authority, but rather that of individuals who, like the knights-errant and himself, take it upon themselves to rid the world of injustice and bring freedom and prosperity. This is the knight-errant: one who, inspired by his calling, hurls himself out into the world to look for remediesfor all that ails it. Authority, when it appears, instead of easing the task, generally makes it more difficult.

Where is authority in the Spain that Don Quixote crosses in his three journeys? We must leave the novel to know that the king alluded to on several occasions is Philip III, because, in the fiction, except for a few fleeting appearances, such as that of the governor of Barcelona during Don Quixote's visit to that city's port, the authorities are notably absent. The institutions that embody them, such as the Saintly Brotherhood or rural Spain's judicial corps, which are mentioned during Don Quixote and Sancho's trips, are likewise viewed as something far away, dark, and dangerous.

Don Quixote does not hesitate to confront authority and challenge the law when it deviates from his own conception of justice. In his first sally he confronts the wealthy Juan Haldudo, a neighbor from Quintanar, who is beating one of his servants because he has lost some sheep-wh ich, according to the barbarous customs of the era, he has every right to do. But for our Manchega n th is is intolerable and he rescues the servant, righting what he sees as a wrong. (As soon as he departs, Haldudo flogs the servant to death, despite his promises not to mistreat him.) The novel is filled with episodes like this, in which the individualist vision of justice leads the bold gentleman to disrespect a uthority, law, and custom in the name of what is for him a superior moral imperative.

The adventure in which Don Quixote takes this libertarian spirit to a nearly suicid al extreme-suggesting that h.is idea of freedom also antici- pates in some respects the a narchist thinkers of two centuries later-is one of the most celebrated in the novel: the libera tion of the twelve delinquents, among them the sinister Gines de Pasamonte, the future Master Pedro who forces the Ingenious Gentleman, despite being perfectly aware that they are dealing with ruffians condemned for their misdeeds, to row the galleys of the king. The reason for his open challenge to au thority-"it is not right that honorable men are the hangmen of others"- hardly conceals Don Quixote's love of liberty, which, if he had to choose, he would place ahead of justice, or his profound mistrust of authority, which for him is no guarantee of what he ambiguously refers to as "distributive justice," an expression that implies an egalitarian counterweight to his libertarian ideals.

In this episode, in order to reiter(lte how insubordinate and free his thought is, Don Quixote praises the "trade of the procurer," as "very necessary in an orderly republic," and indignantly suggests that an elderly man who was sentenced to the galleys for the practice of procuring should instead have been "made general of them." He who dared to rebel so blatantly against political correctness and prevailing morals was a true madman who-not only when he spoke of the romances of chivalry-said and did things that questioned the roots of the society in which he lived.

Don Quixote's Homelands

What is the image of Spain that emerges from the pages of Cervantes' novel? It is one that is vast and diverse, without geographical borders, consisting of an archipelago of communities,villages,and towns, which the characters refer to as "homelands." It is an image similar to that of the empires or kingdoms of chivalric romance, the genre supposedly ridiculed in Don Quixote de La Mancha. Yet Cervantes pays it great homage and one of his literary feats is to modernize the romance of chivalry, recovering from it, through play and humor,all that could survive, and adjusting it to the social and artistic values of the seventeenth century, an era very different from that in which it had originated.

In the course of his three adventures, Don Quixote travels through La Mancha and part of Arag6n and Catalonia, but the origin of many of the characters and the many references to places and things make Spain appear a much vaster, geographically diverse space with imprecise borders, de- fined not in terms of territories and administrative demarcations, but in terms of religion. Spain ends in those vague coastal areas where the dominion of the Moot, the religious enemy, begins.

At the same time, Spain is the context and the horizon of the relatively limited geography that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza traverse, and what is displayed with color and affection is the "homeland," the concrete and human space that memory can span-a landscape, people, customs, which men and women save in their memories as a personal heritage and which constitute their credentials. The characters in the novel travel the world over, one might say, carrying their towns and villages with them. They identify themselves by referring to these details, their "homeland," and remember the small communities where they have left lovers, friends, families, homes, and animals with irrepressible nostalgia. When, at the end of the third trip after many adventures, Sancho Panza sees his village in the distance, he falls on his knees and exclaims: "Open your eyes, beloved homeland, and see that Sancho Panza, your son, has returned ..."

Since, in the course of time, this idea of homeland would begin to dematerialize, gradually approaching theidea of nation (whichonly emerges in the nineteenth century) until it becomes one with it, it should be noted that the homelands of Don Quixote have nothing to do with this abstract concept of nationhood, which is general, schematic, and essentially politi- cal, and is at the root of all nationalisms. This collectivist ideology, which claims to define individuals according to membership in a human con- glomerate distinguished by certain traits (race, language, religion) which impose on it a specific personality, is radically different from the exalted individualism that Don Quixote and others display. Theirs is a world in which "patriotism" is a generous and positive sentiment, a love of one's native land and peopie, of shared memories and a familiar past, and not a means of separating oneself or establishing borders against others. Don Quixote's Spain has no borders: it is a multicolored, pluralistic world of many homelands, open to the outside world and indistinguishable from it. It opens its doors to those who arrive from other parts, somehow avoiding the obstacle (insurmountable for the Counter-Reformation mentality of the time) of religion, that is, conversion to Catholicism.

A Modern Book

Don Quixote's modernity lies in its rebellious and avenging spirit, which permits the protagonist to assume that changing the world for the better is his responsibility, even when, while trying to put this into practice, he meets insurmountable obstacles, is throttled, ill-treated, and transformed into an object of derision. But it is also very much a novel of today, since Cervantes, in order to tell the exploits of Don Quixote, revolutionized the narrative forms of his time and created the basis of the modern novel. Although they may not know it, the contemporary novelists who play with form, distort time, shuffle and twist perspectives, and experiment with language, are all in debt to Cervantes.

This formal revolution which is Don Quixote has been studied and analyzed from all possible points of view and, yet, as with all paradigmatic masterpieces, it never runs dry, because, as with Hamlet or The Divine Comedy or The Iliad and The Odyssey,the work changes with the passage of time, recreating itself in terms of the aesthetics and values of each culture, revealing that it is a true Ali Baba cave whose treasures never end.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Don Quixote's narrative form is the way Cervantes approaches the problem of the narrator, the basic problem that should resolve everything a novel encompasses.Whois going to tell the story? Cervantes' answer introduces a subtlety and complexity in the genre that continues to enrich modern novelists today and was for its era what Joyce's Ulysses, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or, in Latin American literature, Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude or Cortazar's Hopscotch was for ours.

Who tells the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Two narrators: the mysterious Cide Hamete Benengeli,whom we never read direct}y as his manuscript is in Arabic, as well as an anonymous author who sometimes speaks in the first person, but most often from the last of three omniscient narrators who supposedly translate into Spanish and at the same time adapt, edit, and comment on the manuscript. This is a Chinese box struc- ture: the story that we read is contained within another earlier and broader one at which we can only guess. The existence of these two narrators introduces ambiguity into the novel and an element of uncertainty about the "other" story, that of Cide Hamete Benengeli. Their presence fills the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza with a subtle relativism, an aura of subjectivity, and contributes autonomy, sovereignty, and original personality.

But these other narrators, and their delicate dialectic, are not the only ones who matter in this novel of story writers and compulsive tellers of tales. Many characters substitute for them, as we have seen, referring to their own mishaps or those of others in episodes which constitute other, smaller Chinese boxes contained within the vast universe filled with private fictions that is Don Quixote de La Mancha.Making the most of the romances of chivalry (many of which were supposedly manuscripts found in exotic and outlandish places), Cervantes created Cide Hamete Benengeli as a device to introduce ambiguity and the game as central characteristics of the narrative structure. He also made transcendental innovations in another matter of capital importance to the novel's form: the narrative time.

Don Quixote's Time

In all novels, time, like the narrator, is an artifice, an intention, something created according to the needs of anecdote, and never merely a reproduc- tion or reflection of real time. In Don Quixote there are various times which, masterfully mixed, add to the novel that air of an independent world, that touch of self-sufficiency, that is crucial in giving it persuasive power. There is, on the one hand, the time in which the characters of the novel move, which covers a little more that half a year, since Don Quixote's three trips last, respectively, three days, a few months, and about four months. To this period we must add two intervals between trips (the second lasting a month), which Don Quixote spends in his village, and the last two days, until his death- altogether, then, around seven or eight months.

However, there are episodes in the novel, which by their nature increase the narrative time considerably, both toward the past and toward the future. Many of the events we learn about in the course of the novel have happened before it begins; we hear of them through the testimonies of witnesses or protagonists and we see many of them conclude in what would be the present of the novel.

But the most notable and surprising aspect of the narrative time is that many characters in the second part of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the duke and duchess, for example, have read the first part. Thus we learn that other realities, other times, different from those in fiction, exist, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exist as characters in a book whose readers are either inside or outside the story, which is our situation, we contemporary readers. This small stratagem, in which one must see something far more daring than a simple game of literary illusionism, has important conse- quences for the structure of the novel. The time of the fiction expands and multiplies. The fiction remains enclosed within a greater universe,in which Don Quixote, Sancho, and the other characters have already lived and been converted into the heroes of the book and appeared in the hearts and memories of the readers of this other reality, which is not exactly the reality we are reading and yet contains it. This is just like a Chinese box, where the largest box contains a smaller one, and then a smaller and a smaller one,in a series that could, in theory, be infinite.

This is a game, which is both amusing and disturbing, and at the same time enriches the story with episodes like those with the duke and duchess (who are aware of Don Quixote's manias and obsessions from the book that they have read).It also has the virtue of graphically and pleasantly illustrating the complex relations between fiction and life-the way life produces fictions and these fictions, then, revert to life, brightening it, changing it, giving it color, adventure, emotion, laughter, passion, and surprises. The relation between fiction and life, a recurrent theme of classical and modern literature, is seen in Cervantes' novel in a way that anticipates the great adventures of the twentieth century in which the explorations of narrative form-language, time, characters, points of view, and the func- tion of the narrator tempt the very best novelists.

For these and many other reasons, the immortality of Don Quixote is due to the elegance and power of its style, in which the Spanish language reached oneof its highest peaks.One should speak perhaps not of one but of various styles in which the novel is written. There are two that can be clearly distinguished, and that, as novelistic material, correspond to the two sides or faces of reality through which the story unfolds: the real and the fictitious.

In the tales interspersed throughout the novel, the language is more rhetorical than in the central story in which Don Quixote,Sancho, the priest, the barber, and other villagers speak in a simpler and more natural way. In the added tales the narrator uses a more affected-more literary-laguage with which he achieves a distancing, almost fantastic effect. These differences are also to be seen in the words that come from the characters' mouths, according to their social position, level of education, and profession. Indeed, among the characters from the popular sector, the differences are evident: a humble villager would speak most transparently, while a slave, a city ruffian who defends himself in slang, would speak an argot at times totally incomprehensible to Don Quixote.

Don Quixote, in fact, does not have one single way of expressing himself. According to the narrator, he only exaggerates on chivalric themes, and speaks precisely and objectively when treating other issues. When focusing on the themes of chivalry, Don Quixote's speech becomes a grab bag of scholarly topics, erudite affectations, literary references, and fantastic ravings. No less variable is the language of Sancho Panza, whose manner of speaking changes over the course of the story, from a salty language, bursting with life and filled with refrains and sayings that express a wealth of popular knowledge, to a convoluted and ornamented mode of expression at the end which he has acquired from his master and which is like a smiling parody of the parody that is, in itself, the language of Don Quixote.Cervantes then, instead of Sanson Carrasco, should be called the Knight of the Mirrors, as Don Quixote de La Mancha is a veritable labyrinth of mirrors, where everything-the characters, the artistic forms, the anec dotes, the styles-unfold and multiply in images which express human life in all its infinite subtlety and variety.

For all of these reasons, then, this pair is immortal, and four centuries after entering the world through Cervantes' pen, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza continue to ride without interruption or despondency. In La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia, Europe, America, the world.They are stili here, through rain, roaring thunder, burning sun or shining stars, in the great silence of the polar night, or in the desert, or in the tangled jungles, arguing, seeing, and understanding different things in all that they find and hear. Yet, despite their constant disputes, they need each other more and more, they are indissolubly joined in that strange union, which is the union of sleep.

= Cervantes, or The Critique of Reading =

by Carlos Fuentes

I When I was a young student in Latin American schools, we were constantly being asked to define the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Modem Age. I always remembered a grotesquely famous Spanish play in which a knight in armour unsheaths his sword and exclaims to his astonished family: "I'm off to the Thirty Years' War!"

Did the modem age begin with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the discovery of the New World in 1492, or 'the publication by Copernicus of his Revolutions of the Spheres in 1543? To give only one answer is akin to exclaiming that we are off to the Thirty Years' War. At least since Vico, we know that the past is present in us because we are the bearers of the culture we ourselves have made.

Nevertheless, given a choice in the matter, I have always an- swered that, for me, the modem world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world, and discovers that the world does not resemblwhat he has read about it.

Many things are changing in the world; many others are sur- viving. Don Quixote tells us just this: this is why he is so modem, but also so ancient, eternal. He illustrates the rupture of a world based on analogy and thrust into differentiation. He makes evident a challenge that we consider peculiarly ours: how to accept the diversity and mutation of the world, while retaining the mind's power for analogy and unity, so that this changing world shall not become meaningles

Don Quixote tells us that being modern is not a question ofsacrificing the past in favor of the new, but of maintaining, com- paring, and remembering values we have created, making them modern so as not to lose the value of the modern.

This is our challenge as contemporary individuals and, indeed, as present-day writers. For if Don Quixote, by its very nature, does not define the modern world but only an aspect of it, it does, I believe, at least define the central problems of the modern novel. I remember discussing the matter over luncheon one cold day in 1975 with Andre Malraux: he chose Madame de Lafayette's La

Princesse de Cleves as the first modern novel because, he said, it was the first psychological, interior novel, constructed around the reasons of the heart. Anglo-Saxon criticism would perhaps prefer, along with Ian Watt, to establish "the rise of the novel" in con- nection with the appearance of a middle class of affluent readers in England, politically emancipated and psychologically demand- ing of novelty in theme and characterization: Richardson, Fielding, Smollett.

Yet I shall not travel the road of Quixote's modernity alone. After all, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, "All prose fiction is a variation of the theme of Don Quixote: . . . the problem of appearance and reality." This all-encompassing fictitiousness in Cervantes is not at odds with Harry Levin's vision of its modernity: Don Quixote is seen by Levin as "the prototype of all realistic novels" ... for it deals with "the literary technique of systematic disillusionment." And its universality is not in contradiction to Alejo Carpentier's discovery in Cervantes of the imaginary dimen- sion within the individual: Cervantes invents a new I, says the Cuban novelist, much as Malraux said of Mme de Lafayette.

Wayne Booth's self-conscious narrator in Don Quixote; Marthe Robert's conception of Don Quixote as a novel in search of itself; Robert Coover's vision of Don Quixote in a world divided between reality and illusion, sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludi- crous, the visionary and the eschatological; all of these highly articulate and penetrating discussions on the modernity and rel- evance of Cervantes accompany me in my own search for Don Quixote. But it is, perhaps, Michel Foucault who has best described the displacement that occurs in the dynamic world of Cervantes: Don Quixote, writes Foucault in The Order of Things, is the sign of a modern divorce between words and things. Don Quixote is desperately searching for a new coincidence, for a new similitude in a world where nothing seems to resemble what it once resembled.

This same dynamic displacement, this sense of search and pil- grimage, is what Claudio Guillen calls the "active dialogue" in Don Quixote. A dialogue of genres, in the first place: the pica- resque, the pastoral, the chivalric, the byzantine, all the estab- lished genres stake their presence and have their say in Don Quixote. But the past and the present are also actively fused and the novel becomes a critical project as it shifts from the spoken tale to the written narrative, from verse to prose and from the tavern to the printing shop.

Don Quixote, it is true, bears all the marks of what it leavesbehind. If it is the first modern novel, its debt to tradition is enormous, since its very inception, as we all know, is the satire of the epic of chivalry. But if it is the last medieval romance, then it also celebrates its own death: it becomes its own requiem. If it is a work of the Renaissance, it also maintains a lively medieval carnival of games, puns, and references not far from Bakhtin's definition of festive humor in the novel, breaking down the frontiers between actors and audience. And finally, if it opens for all the adventure of modern reading, it remains a book deeply immersed in the society and the history of Spain.

Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 and died in 1616. He published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, and the second part in 1615. So that everything I have said up till now happens historically within a contradiction. Cervantes's work is one of the great examples of Renaissance liberation. But his life occurs within the supreme example of the negation of that same liberation: the Spanish Counter-Reformation. We must judge Cervantes and Don Quixote against this background if we are to understand his achievement fully Caught between the flood tide of the Renaissance and the ebb tide of the Counter-Reformation, Cervantes clings to the one plank that can keep him afloat: Erasmus of Rotterdam. The vast influence of Erasmus in Spain is hardly fortuitous. He was correctly seen to be the Renaissance man struggling to conciliate the verities of faith and reason, and the reasons of the old and the new. Spanish Erasmism is the subject of Marcel Bataillon's monumental work Erasme et l'Espagne. The origins, influence, and eventual perse- cution of Erasmism in Spain are too important and lengthy a subject for this essay. Suffice it to remember that, as far as the formal education of Cervantes went, it was totally steeped in Erasmus, through the agency of his Spanish disciple, Juan Lopez de Hoyos, the early and ascertained tutor of the author of Don Quixote.

The influence of Erasmian thought on Cervantes can be clearly perceived in three themes common to the philosopher and the novelist: the duality of truth, the illusion of appearances, and the praise of folly. Erasmus reflects the Renaissance dualism: under- standing may be different from believing. But reason must be wary of judging from external appearances: "All things human have two aspects, much as the Silenes of Alcibiades, who had two utterly opposed faces; and thus, what at first sight looked like death was, when closely observed, life" (In Praise of Folly). And he goes on to say: "The reality of things . . . depends solely on opinion. Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be assured of any truth."

Erasmus promptly gives his reasoning a comic inflection, when he smilingly points out that Jupiter must disguise himself as a "poor little man" in order to procreate little Jupiters. Comic debunking thus serves the unorthodox vision of double truth, and it is evident that Cervantes opts for this Aesopian short- cut in creating the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, for the former speaks the language of universals, and the latter that of particulars; the knight believes, the esquire doubts; and each man's appearance is diversified, obscured, and opposed by the other's reality: if Sancho is the real man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Don Quixote's world of pure illusion; but if Don Quixote is the illusory man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Sancho's world of pure reality.

It is one of the most brilliant paradoxes in the history of thought that Erasmus, in an age enamored of divine reason, should write, of all things, a praise of folly. There was, however, method in this madness. It is as though Erasmus had received an urgent warning from reason itself: Let me not become another absolute, such as faith was in the past, for I will then lose the reason of my reason. The Erasmian folly is a doubly ironical operation: it detaches the fool, simultaneously, from the false absolutes and the imposed verities of the medieval order; yet it casts an immense doubt on reason itself. Pascal would one day write: "Les hommes sont si necessairement fous que ce serait etre fou par un autre tour de folie de n'etre pas fou."

This Pascalian turn of the screw of reason is precisely what Erasmus is driving at: if reason is to be reasonable, it must see itself through the eyes of an ironical madness, not its opposite but its critical complement; if the individual is to assert himself, then he must do so with an ironical conscience of his own ego, or he will flounder in solipsism and pride. The Erasmian folly, set at the crossroads of two cultures, relativizes the absolutes of both: this is a madness critically set in the very heart of Faith, but also in the very heart of Reason. The madness of Erasmus is a ques- tioning of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, and no longer by God, sin, or the Devil. Thus relativized by critical and ironical folly, Man is no longer subjected to Fate or Faith; but neither is he the absolute master of Reason.

How do the spiritual realities reflected on by Erasmus translate into the realm of literature? Perhaps Hamlet is the first character to stop in his tracks and mutter three minuscule and infinite words that suddenly open a void between the certain truths of the Middle Ages and the uncertain reasoning of the brave new world of mo- dernity. These words are simply that: "Words, words, words . . ." and they both shake and spear us because they are the words of a fictional character reflecting on the very substance of his being. Hamlet knows he is written, represented, and represented on a stage, whereas old Polonius comes and goes in agitation, intrigues, counsels, and deports himself as if the world of the theater truly were the real world. Words become acts, the verb becomes a sword, and Polonius is pierced by Hamlet's sword: the sword of literature. Words, words, words, mutters Hamlet, and he does not say it pejoratively: he is simply indicating, without too many illusions, the existence of a thing called literature: a new literature that has ceased to be a transparent reading of the divine Verb or the es- tablished social order, but has been unable to become a sign reflecting a new human order as coherent or indubitable as the religious and social orders of the past.

Perhaps it is not fortuitous that Don Quixote, King Lear, and Macbeth should all bear the same date of birth, 1605: two old fools and a young assassin appear simultaneously on the stage of the world to dramatize this transition of two ages of the world. Macbeth, as G. Wilson Knight has observed, is a drama written with question marks, from the moment the Witches ask themselves, "When shall we three meet again?" to the moment when Macbeth prepares to die, "Why should I ... die on mine own sword?", passing through the central questions of the play, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" and "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood I

Clean from my hand?" And Lear is a drama of magnificent met- aphors derived from a tumultuous universe, where stars and eclipses, planetary influences and the government of our state by the heav- enly bodies mix with the images of the dislocated terrestrial ele- ments: drama of rain and fire, of fog and thunder. And in the center of this tempest of heaven and earth, accompanied only by a Fool, struts an abandoned old man, incapable of learning more than he knows already, assimilated to a sorrowful and solitary world of nature.

All the world's a stage, and the words spoken from it are, indeed, full of sound and fury; the state of the world is undone and the actor who struts his hour upon the stage speaks wandering, or- phaned words: we have lost our father, but we have not found ourselves. Words become the vehicle of ambiguity and paradox. "All is possible," says Marsilio Ficino. "All is in doubt," says John Donne. Between these two sentences, pronounced more than a century apart, the new literature appears as an opaque circle where Hamlet can represent his methodic madness, Robinson Cru- soe his optimistic rationalism, Don Juan of Seville his secular sexuality, and St. John of the Cross his celestial eroticism: in literature, all things become possible. In the medieval cosmos each reality manifested another reality, in accordance with symbols that were homologated in an unequivocal manner. But in the highly unstable and equivocal world that Copernicus leaves in his wake, these central criteria are forever lost.

All is possible, but all is in doubt. All things have lost their concert. In the very dawn of his humanist affirmation, the indi- vidual is assailed by the very doubts, the very criticisms, the very questioning with which Copernicus and Galileo have set free the dormant forces of the universe, expanding it to a degree such that the dwarfed individual, in response, must gigantically display his unleashed passions, his unbridled pride, the cruel uses of his political power, the utopian dream of a new city of the sun, the hunger for a new human space with which to confront the new, mute space of the universe: the spatial appetite that is evident both in the discovery of the New World and in the frescoes of Piero della Francesca.

Nothing should be refused, writes Ficino; human nature contains all and every one of the levels of creation, from the horrendous forms of the powers of the deep to the hierarchies of divine intel- ligence described by the mystics; nothing is incredible, nothing is impossible; the possibilities we deny are but the possibilities we ignore. The libertine and the ascetic, Don Juan and Savonarola, Cesare Borgia and Heman Cortes, the tyrant and the adventurer, Marlowe's Faust and Ford's incestuous lovers, Machiavelli's Prince and Thomas More's Utopian traveller, rebellious intelligence and rebellious flesh, a chronophagic and omni-inclusive imagination: human faults no longer reestablish an ancestral order. They con- sume themselves in the self-sufficient fires of pride, passion, rea- son, pleasure, and power. But, even as they are won, these new realities are doubted by the critical spirit, since the critical spirit founded them.

All is possible. All is in doubt. Only an old hidalgo from the barren plain of La Mancha in the central plateau of Castile continues to adhere to the codes of certainty. For him, nothing is in doubt and all is possible. In the new world of criticism, Don Quixote is a knight of the faith. This faith comes from his reading, and his reading is a madness. (The Spanish words for reading and madness convey this association much more strongly: reading is lectura; madness is locura.)

Like Philip II, the necrophiliac monarch secluded at El Escorial, Don Quixote both pawns and pledges his life to the restoration of the world of unified certainty. He pawns and pledges himself, both physically and symbolically, to the univocal reading of the texts and attempts to translate this reading into a reality that has become multiple, equivocal, ambiguous. But because he possesses his readings, Don Quixote possesses his identity: that of the knight- errant, that of the ancient epic hero.

So, at the immediate level of reading, Don Quixote is the master of the previous readings that withered his brain. But at a second level of reading, he becomes the master of the words contained in the verbal universe of the book titled Don Quixote. He ceases to be a reader of the novels of chivalry and becomes the actor of his own epic adventures. As there was no rupture between his reading of the books and his faith in what they said, so now there is no divorce between the acts and the words of his adventures. Because, assimilated to Don Quixote, we read it but do not see it, we shall never know what it is that the goodly gentleman puts on his head: the fabled helm of Mambrino, or a vulgar barber's basin. The first doubt assails us: is Quixote right, has he discovered the legendary helmet where everyone else, blind and ignorant, sees only the basin?

Within this verbal #|sphere, Don Quixote is at first invincible. Sancho's empiricism, from this verbal point of view, is useless, because Don Quixote, each time he fails, immediately reestablishes his literary discourse, undiscouraged, the words always identical to the reality, the reality but a prolongation of the words he has read before and now enacts. He explains away his disasters with the words of his previous, epic readings, and resumes his career within the world of the words that belong to him.

Harry Levin compares the famous "play within the play" scene in Hamlet with the chapter on the puppet theater of Master Pedro in Don Quixote. In Shakespeare's drama, King Claudius interrupts the mummery because imagination starts to resemble reality too dangerously. In Cervantes's novel, Don Quixote assaults Master Pedro's "Moorish puppetry" because representation starts to re semble imagination too closely. Claudius desires that reality were a lie: the killing of Hamlet's father, the King. Don Quixote desires that fantasy were a truth: the imprisonment of the Princess Meli- sendra by the Moors.

The identification of the imaginary with the real remits Hamlet to reality, and from reality, naturally, it yields him to death:Hamlet is the envoy of death, he comes from death and goes toward death. But the identification of the imaginary with the imaginary remits Don Quixote to his books. Don Quixote comes from his readings and goes toward them: Don Quixote is the ambassador of readings. In his mind, it is not reality at all that interposes itself between his enterprises and reality: it is the magicians he knows through his readings.

We know this is not so; we know that only reality confronts the mad readings of Don Quixote. But he does not know it, and this ignorance (or this faith) establishes a third level of reading in the novel. "Look your mercy," Sancho constantly says, "Look you that what we see there are not giants, but only windmills." But Don Quixote does not see: Don Quixote reads and his reading says that those are giants.

Don Quixote wants to introduce the whole world within his readings, along as these are the readings of a unique and consecrated code: the code that, since the action at Roncesvalles, identifies the exemplary act of history with the exemplary act of books. Roland's sacrifice defended the heroic ideal of chivalry and the political integrity of Christendom. His gest shall become ideal norm and ideal form of all the heroes of the fictions of chivalry. Don Quixote counts himself among their number. He, too, believes that between the exemplary gestures of history and exemplary gestures of books there can be no cracks, for above them all stands the consecrated code that rules both, and above the code rises the univocal vision of a world structured by God. Issued from these readings, Don Quixote, each time he fails, finds refuge in his readings. And sheltered by his books, he will go on seeing armies where there are only sheep, without losing the reason of his read- ings: he will be faithful unto them, because he does not conceive any other licit way of reading. The synonymity of reading, madness, truth, and life in Don Quixote becomes strikingly apparent whenhe demands of the merchants he meets on the road that they confess the beauty of Dulcinea without ever having seen her, for "the important thing is that without having seen her you should believe, confess, swear, and defend it." This it is an act of faith. Don Quixote's fabulous adventures are ignited by an overwhelming pur- pose: what is read and what is lived must coincide anew, without the doubts and oscillations between faith and reason introduced by the Renaissance.

But the very next level of reading in the novel Don Quixote starts to undermine this illusion. In his third outing, Don Quixote finds out, through news that the Bachelor Sanson Carrasco has trans- mitted to Sancho, that there exists a book called The Most Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. "They mention me," Sancho says in marvelment, "along with our lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and many other things that happened to us alone, so that I crossed myself in fright trying to imagine how the historian who wrote them came to know them." Things that happened to us alone. Before, only God could know them; only God was the final knower and judge of what went on in the recesses of our conscience. Now, any reader who can pay the cover price for a copy of Don Quixote can also find out: the reader thus becomes akin to God. Now the Dukes can prepare their cruel farces because they have read the first part of the novel Don Quixote. Now Don Quixote, the reader, is read.

On entering the second part of the novel, Don Quixote also finds out that he has been the subject of an apocryphal novel written by one Avellaneda to cash in on the popularity of Cervantes's book. The signs of Don Quixote's singular identity suddenly seem to multiply. Don Quixote criticizes Avellaneda's version. But the existence of another book about himself makes him change his route and go to Barcelona so as to "bring out into the public light the lies of this modern historian so that people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he says I am."

This is surely the first time in literature that a character knows that he is being written about at the same time that he lives his fictional adventures. This new level of reading is crucial to deter- mine those which follow. Don Quixote ceases to support himself on previous epics and starts to support himself on his own epic. But his epic is no epic, and it is at this point that Cervantes invents the modern novel. Don Quixote, the reader, knows he is read, something that Achilles surely never knew. And he knows that the destiny of Don Quixote the man has become inseparable from the destiny of Don Quixote the book, something that Ulysses never knew in relation to the Odyssey. His integrity as a hero of old, safely niched in a previous, univocal and denotative epic reading, is shattered, not by the galley slaves or the scullery maids who laugh at him, not by the sticks and stones he must weather in the inns he takes to be castles or the grazing fields he takes to be battlegrounds. His faith in his epical readings enables him to bear all the batterings of reality. But now his integrity is annulled by the readings he is submitted to.

It is these readings that transform Don Quixote, the caricature of the ancient hero, into the first modern hero, observed from multiple angles, scrutinized by multiple eyes that do not share his faith in the codes of chivalry, assimilated to the very readers who read him, and, like them, forced to re-create "Don Quixote" in his own imagination. A double victim of the act of reading, Don Quixote loses his senses twice. First, when he reads. Then, when he is read. Because now, instead of having to prove the existence of the heroes of old, he is up to a much, much tougher challenge: he must prove his own existence.

And this #|leads us to a further level of reading. A voracious, insomniac reader of epics he obsessively wants to carry over to reality, Don Quixote fails miserably in this, his original purpose. But as soon as he becomes an object of reading, he begins to vanquish reality, to contaminate it with his mad reading: not the reading of the novels of chivalry, but the actual reading of the new novel, Don Quixote. And this new reading transforms the world, for the world, more and more, begins to resemble the world con- tained in the pages of the novel Don Quixote.

In order to mock Don Quixote, the world disguises itself with the masks of Don Quixote's obsessions. Yet, can anyone disguise himself as something worse than his own self? Do not our disguises reveal our reality with greater truth than our everyday appearance? The disguised world of those who have read Don Quixote within the pages of Don Quixote reveals the undisguised reality of the world: its cruelty, its ignorance, its injustice, its st upidity. So Cervantes need not write a political manifesto to denounce the evils of his age and of all ages; he need not recur to Aesopian language; he need not radically break with the strictures of the traditional epic in order to surpass it: he dialectically merges the epic thesis and the realistic antithesis to achieve, within the very life and logic and necessity of his own book, the novelistic synthesis. No one had conceived this polyvalent creation within a book before him; not Tasso's mock heroics, not the picaresque's stark docu- mentary, not Rabelais's gargantuan, insatiable, terrifying affirmation of the surfeit energy of the world pitted against the vacuum of heaven.

Don Quixote, the knight of the faith, meets a faithless world: both no longer know where the truth really lies. Is Don Quixote really mocked by Dorotea when she disguises herself as the Prin- cess Micomicona, or by the Bachelor Carrasco when he defies Don Quixote disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors? Is Don Quixote really fooled by the Dukes when they stage the farces of the wooden horse Clavileiio, the Sorrowful Lady with her twelve bearded duen- nas or the government of Sancho in the Island Barataria? Or is it really Don Quixote who has mocked them all, forcing them to enter, disguised as themselves, the immense universe of the read- ing of Don Quixote? Perhaps this is disputable matter for psycho- analysis. What is indisputable is that Don Quixote, the bewitched, ends by bewitching the world. While he read, he imitated the epic hero. When he is read, the world imitates him.

But the price he must pay is the loss of his own enchantment. Prodigal writer that he is, Cervantes now leads us to a further level of reading. As the world comes to resemble him more and more, Don Quixote, more and more, loses the illusion of his own being. He has been the cipher of the act of reading: a black ink question mark, much as Picasso was to draw him. But by the time he reaches the castle of the Dukes, Don Quixote sees that the castle is actually a castle, whereas, before, he could imagine he saw a castle in the humblest inn of the Castilian wayside.

The incarnation of his dreams in reality robs Don Quixote of his imagination. In the world of the Dukes, it will no longer be nec- essary for him to imagine an unreal world: the Dukes offer him what he has imagined in all its reality. What, then, is the sense of reading? What is the sense of books? What is their use? From then on, all is sadness and disillusionment. Paradoxically, Don Quixote is bereft of his faith at the very moment when the world of his readings is offered to him in the world of reality. His crucial passage through the castle of the Dukes permits Cervantes to in- troduce a triple wedge in his critique of reading. One, he is stating, is Don Quixote's idea of an epic coincidence between his readings and his life. It is a faith born from books and totally defined by the way Don Quixote has read those books. As long as this mental coincidence is supreme, Don Quixote has no trouble coexisting with what is outside his own universe: the very fact that reality does not coincide with his readings permits him, again and again, to impose the vision of his readings on reality. But when what only pertains to his univocal readings finds an equivalent in reality, the illusion is shattered. The coherence of epic reading is defeated by the incoherence of historical facts. Don Quixote must live through this historical reality before he reaches the third and definitive level proposed by Cervantes: the level of the novel itself, the synthesis between the past Don Quixote loses and the present that annuls him.

Thrust into history, Don Quixote is deprived of all opportunity for his imaginative action. He meets one Roque Guinart, an au- thentic robber, alive in the time of Cervantes. This Guinart, totally inscribed in history, was thief and contrabandist of the silver car- goes from the Indies and a secret agent of the French Huguenots at the time of the St. Bartholomew's night massacre. Next to him and his tangible historicity, as when he sees (but does not partake in) a naval battle off Barcelona, Don Quixote has become a simple witness to real events and real characters. Cervantes gives these chapters a strange aura of sadness and disillusionment. The old hidalgo, forever deprived of his epic reading of the world, must face his final option: to be in the sadness of reality or to be in the reality of literature: this literature, the one Cervantes has invented, not the old literature of univocal coincidence that Don Quixote sprang from.

Dostoevsky calls Cervantes's novel "the saddest book of them all"; in it, the Russian novelist found the inspiration for the figure of the "good man," the idiot prince, Myshkin. As the novel ends, the knight of the faith has truly earned his sorrowful countenance. For, as Dostoevsky adds, Don Quixote suffers from a disease, "the nostalgia of realism."

This phrase must give us pause. What realism are we talking about? The realism of impossible adventures with magicians, chiv- alrous knight-errants, and frightful giants? Exactly so. Before, everything that was written was true ... even if it was a fantasy. There were no cracks between what was said and what was done in the epic. "For Aristotle and the Middle Ages," explains Ortega y Gasset, "all things are possible that do not contain an inner contradiction. For Aristotle, the centaur is a possibility; not so for us, since biology will not tolerate it."

And this is what Don Quixote feels such intense nostalgia for: this realism without inner contradictions. The new science, the new doubts, all the skepticisms that anachronize the faith of the knight of the unique reading, of the ambassador of the licit reading, cross Don Quixote's path and undermine his illusions. But above all, what shatters the monolith of the old realism Don Quixote yearns for are the plural readings, the illicit readings to which he is subjected.

Don Quixote recovers his reason. And this, for a man of his ilk, is the supreme folly: it is suicide. When he accepts conventional "reality," Don Quixote, like Hamlet, is condemned to death. But Don Quixote, thanks to the critical reading invented by Cervantes in the act of founding the modem novel, shall go on living another life: he is left with no resource but to prove his own existence, not in the univocal reading that gave him his original being, but in the multiple readings that deprived him of it. Don Quixote loses the life of his nostalgic, coincidental reality but goes on living, forever, in his book and only in his book.

This is why Don Quixote is the most Spanish of all novels. Its very essence is defined by loss, impossibility, a burning quest for identity, a sad conscience of all that could have been and never was, and, in reaction to this deprivation, an assertion of total existence in a realm of the imagination, where all that cannot be in reality finds, precisely because of this factual negation, the most intense level of truth. Because the history of Spain has been what it has been, its art has been what history has denied Spain. This is equally true of the mystic poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, the baroque poetry of Luis de GOngora, Velazquez's Meninas, Goya's Caprichos, and the films of Luis Buiiuel. Art gives life to _;!hat history killed. Art ives voice to what history- denied silenced or persecute. Art rings truth to the lies of history. This is what Dostoevsky meant when he called Don Quixote a novel where truth is saved by a lie. The Russian author's profound observation goes well beyond the relationship of a nation's art to its history. Dostoevsky is speaking of the broader relationship be- tween reality and imagination. There is a fascinating moment in Don Quixote when the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance arrives in Barcelona and forever breaks the bindings of the illusion of reality. He does what Achilles, Aeneas, or Sir Lancelot could never do: he visits a printing shop, he enters the very place where his adventures become an object, a legible product. Don Quixote is thus sent by Cervantes to his only reality: the reality of fiction.

#|The act of reading, in this manner, is both the starting point and the last stop on Don Quixote's route. Neither the reality of what he read nor the reality of what he lived were such, but merely paper ghosts. Only freed from his readings but captured by the readings that multiply the levels of the novel on an infinite scale; only alone in the very center of his authentic, fictional reality, Don Quixote can exclaim: Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the Empress of La Mancha, the unrivaled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me! Reality may laugh or weep on hearing such words. But reality is invaded by them, loses its own defined frontiers, feels itself displaced, transfigured by another reality made of words and paper. Where are the limits between Dunsinane Castle and Bimham Wood? Where the frontiers that might bind the moor where Lear and his Fool live the cold night of madness? Where, in fact, does Don Quixote's fantastic Cave of Montesinos end and reality begin?

Never again shall we be able to know, because there will never again be a unique reading of reality. Cervantes has vanquished the epic on which he fed. He has established the dialogue between the epic hero, Achilles, Lancelot, Amadis, and the picaro, the rogue, the blind man's guide, Lazarillo. And in doing so, he has dissolved the severe normativity of scholastic thought and its uni- vocal reading of the world. Of course, Cervantes is not alone in this task of demolition; he is, legitimately, a Renaissance man in this and many other aspects.

But he is also a Spaniard caught between the flux of renewal and the stagnant waters of reaction. Where others can go perilously forward to instate reason, hedonism, capitalism, the unbounded optimism of faith in unlimited progress inscribed in lineal time and a future-oriented history, Cervantes must wrestle between the old and the new with far greater intensity than, say, Descartes. And he certainly cannot face the world with the pragmatic assur- ance of Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self- made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, tech- nology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

Don Quixote is the polar opposite of Robinson. His failure in practical matters is the most gloriously ludicrous in recorded history (perhaps it is only paralleled by the great clowns of the silent screen: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy . . . }. Robinson and Quixote are the antithetical symbols of the Anglo-Saxon and His- panic worlds. Americo Castro, the greatest modern interpreter of Spanish history, has defined it as "the story of an insecurity." France, he goes on to say, has assimilated its past, at the price of maximal sac- rifices, through the categories of rationalism and clarity; England, through those of empiricism and pragmatism. The past is not a problem for the Frenchman or the Englishman. For the Spaniard, it is nothing but a problem; the latent strains of its multiple heritages- Christian, Muslim, and Jewish-throb unresolved in the heart and mind of Spain. The Spanish ethos oscillates violently between exaltation and passivity, but always in relation to a trans- cendental mission which divorces and opposes the absolute values of life or death, the temporal or the eternal, honor or dishonor. Spain has been unable to participate in modern European values, defined by a rational articulation between the objective world and the subjective being. Her capacities for political and economic efficiency have been nil; her scientific and technical prowess, scarce; but her capacity for art has been absolute.

It is no wonder, then, that the greatest works of Spanish genius have coincided with the periods of crisis and decadence of Spanish society. The Arcipreste de Hita's Libro de Buen Amor saves and translates into Spanish the literary influences of the Caliphate of Cordoba after the brilliant world of the Omeya dynasty in Al Andalus has been destroyed by the Almoravide and ·Almohad inva- sions. Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina is the masterpiece of Jewish Spain: it coincides with the expulsion and persecution of the Spanish Hebrews nd of the conversos. The whole Golden Age of Spanish literature--Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Gon- gora, Calderon-flowers as the power of Spain withers. Velazquez is the painter of the crepuscular court of Philip IV, and Goya the contemporary of the blind and venal Bourbons, Charles IV and Fernando VII, who lose their crown to Joseph Bonaparte and their American empire to the rebellious creoles. And only when Spain lost the remnants of empire in the Spanish-American War did the dearth of her nineteenth-century culture give way to an extraor dinary assertion of thought, science, and art: Unamuno, Valle Inclan, Ramon y Cajal, Ortega y Gasset, Buiiuel, Miro, and the poetic generation of Garcia Lorca. The absolute value of art has always shone in Spain at its brightest when its political, economic, and technical fortunes have been at their lowest.

So Cervantes is no exception to a general rule. But what are the particular values he instates in the heart of reality, he, the orphan child of both the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation; he who cannot proceed to the rational clarity and self-contention of a Madame de Lafayette or the pragmatic efficiency of a Defoe? I have recalled the influence of Erasmus on Cervantes. Don Quixote, a Spanish extension of the Praise of Folly identical to the praise of Utopia, contains an ethic of Love and Justice. A moral reality occupies the center of Cervantes's imagination, since it cannot occupy the center of the society he lives in.

Love and Justice. Don Quixote, the madman, is mad not only because he has believed all he has read. He is also mad because he believes, as a knight-errant, that justice is his duty and that justice is possible. Again and again, he proclaims his credo: "I am the valiant Don Quixote de la Mancha, undoer of wrongs and torts": "The duty of my office is to correct injustices and fly to help the needy." We know the sort of gratitude Don Quixote re- ceives from those he succors: he is beaten and mocked by them. Cervantes's social irony reaches a high pitch indeed in these scenes. The poor and miserable and wronged ones Don Quixote aids do not want to be saved by him. Perhaps they want to save themselves. This is an open question. In any case, there is not a shred of a Polyanna in Cervantes: he sees the common people capable of being every bit as cruel as their oppressors. But then, does this not pose the implicit commentary that an unjust society perverts all of its members, the mighty and the weak, the high and the lowly?Don Quixote, in spite of his recurrent disasters as a do-gooder,never fails in his faith in the ideal of justice. He is a Spanish hero: the transcendent idea cannot be wounded by the accidents of ordinary reality. And what is the ideology that sustains Don Quixote's search for Justice? It is the utopia of the Golden Age:

A happy age, and happy centuries, those that the ancients called golden, and not because gold, so esteemed in our iron age, was to be found without any hardship in that felicitous age, but because those who then lived knew not these two words yours and mine. All things, in that holy age, were common ... The clear fountain and the flowing rivers offered men, in magnificent abundance, their tasty and transparent waters ... All was peace then, all friendship, all concord. . . Then were the loving concepts of the soul dressed in simplicity, as the loving soul conceived them ... Fraud and mendacity were unknown, malice did not then parade as truth and sincerity. Justice was faithful to its name, and men of favor and interest did not dare perturb what today they so discredit, disturb and persecute. . . None of this, Don Quixote ends by saying, is true "in our de- testable times," and so he has become a knight-errant in order to "defend young women, protect widows, and bring help to the or- phaned and the needy." Don Quixote's concept of Justice is thus a Concept of Love. And through Love, Don Quixote's abstract Justice achieves its full realization.

The power of Don Quixote's image as a madman who constantly confuses reality with imagination has made many a reader and commentator forget what I consider an essential passage of the book. In Chapter XXV of the first part of the novel, Don Quixote decides to do penance, dressed only in his nightshirt, in the craggy cliffs of the Sierra Morena. He asks Sancho to go off to the village of El Toboso and inform the knight's lady Dulcinea of the great deeds and sufferings with which he honors her. Since Sancho knows of no highly placed lady called Dulcinea in the miserable hamletof El Toboso, he inquires further. Don Quixote, at this extraor- dinary moment, reveals that he knows the truth: Dulcinea, he says, is none other than the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo; it is she Sancho must look for. This provokes gales of laughter in the roguish squire: he knows Aldonza well: she is common, strong as a bull, dirty, can bellow to the peasants from the church tower and be heard a league away; she's a good one at exchanging pleasantries and, in fact, is a bit of a whore.Don Quixote's response is one of the most moving declarations of love ever written. He knows who and what Dulcinea really is; yet he loves her, and because he loves her, she is worth as much as "the most noble princess in all the world." He admits that his imagination has transformed the peasant girl Aldonza into the noble lady Dulcinea: but is not this the essence of love, to transform the loved one into something incomparable, unique, set above all con- siderations of wealth or poverty, distinction or commonness? "Thus, it is enough that I think and believe that Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and honest; the question of class is of no consequence. . . I paint her in my imagination as I desire her . . . And let the world think what it wants."The social, ethical, and political content of Don Quixote is obvious in this reunion of Love and Justice. The myth of the Golden Age is its ideological core: a utopia of brotherhood, equality, and pleasure. Utopia is to be achieved not in a nihilistic sweeping away of the past and starting from scratch to build a brave new world, but in a fusion of the values that come to us from the past and those we are capable of creating in the present. Justice, Don Quixote insists, is absent from the present times; only Love can give Justice actuality, and the Love Don Quixote speaks of is a democratic act, an act surpassing class distinctions, a truth to be found in the lowliest of peasant girls. But to this love must be brought the constant, aristocratic values of chivalry, personal risk in the quest for justice, integrity, and heroism. In Don Quixote, the values of the age of chivalry acquire, through Love, a demo- cratic resonance; and the values of the democratic life acquire the resonance of nobility. Don Quixote refuses both the cruel power of the mighty and the herd instinct of the lowly: his vision of humanity is based not on the lowest common denominator but onthe highest achievement possible. His conception of Love and Justice saves both the oppressors and the oppressed from an oppres- sion that perverts both.It is through this ethical stance that Cervantes struggles to bridge the old and new worlds. If his critique of reading is a negation of the rigid and oppressive features of the Middle Ages, it is also an affirmation of ancient values that must not be lost in the transition to the modem world. But if Don Quixote is also an affirmation of the modem values of the pluralistic point of view, Cervantes does not surrender to modernity either. It is at this juncture that his moral and literary vision fuses into a whole. For if reality has become plurivocal, literature will reflect it only in the measure to which it forces reality to submit itself to plural readings and in multiple visions from variable perspectives. Precisely in the name of the polyvalence of the real, literature creates reality, adds to reality, ceases to be a verbal correspondence to verities unmovable, or anterior to reality. Literature, this new printed reality, speaks of the things of the world; but literature, in itself, is a new thing in the world.As if he foresaw all the dirty tricks of servile literary naturalism, Cervantes destroys the illusion of literature as a mere copy of reality and creates a literary reality far more powerful and difficult to grapple with: the reality of a novel is its existence at all levels of the critique of reading. The moral message of Don Quixote, instead of being imposed from above by the author, thus passes through the sieve of the multiple readings of multiple readers who are reading a work that is criticizing its own artistic and moral prop- ositions. By rooting the critique of creation in the creation itself, Cervantes lays claim to being one of the founders of the modem imagination. Poetry, painting, and music will later demand an equal right to be themselves and not docile imitators of a reality that they ill serve by reproducing it. Art will not reflect more reality unless it creates another reality.' Through his paper character Don Quixote, who integrates the values of the past with those of the present, Cervantes translates the great themes of the centerless universe and of individualism triumphant, yet awed and orphaned, to the plane of literature as the axis of a new reality. There will be no more tragedy and no more epic, because there is no longer a restorable ancestral order or a universe univocal in its normativity. There will be multiple levels of reading, capable of testing the multiple layers of reality.

IT so happens that this rogue, convicted galley slave, and false puppeteer, Gines de Pasamonte, alias Ginesillo de Parapilla, alias Master Pedro, is writing a book about his own life. "Is the book finished?" asks Don Quixote. And Gines answers him: "How can it be, if my life isn't over yet?"This is Cervantes's last question: Who writes books and who reads them? Who is the author of Don Quixote? A certain Cer- vantes, more versed in grief than in verse, whose Galatea has been read by the priest who scrutinizes Don Quixote's library, burns the books he dislikes in an immediate auto-da-fe, and then seals off the hidalgo's library with brick and mortar, making him believe it is the work of magicians? A certain de Saavedra, mentioned by the Captive with admiration because of the acts he accomplished, "and all of them for the purpose of achieving freedom"?

Cervantes, like the character Don Quixote, is read by other characters of the novel Don Quixote, a book without an original author and, almost, a book without a destiny, a book that agonizes in the act of being born, reanimated by the papers of the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, which are then translated into Spanish by an anonymous Moorish translator and which will be the object of the abject apocryphal version of Avellaneda ...The endless circle of reading and writings winds itself anew: Cervantes, author of Borges; Borges, author of Pierre Menard; Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote; Don Quixote, author of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be read and the author knows himself to be written and it is said that he dies on the same date, though not on the same day, as William Shakespeare. It is further stated that perhaps both were the same man. Cervantes's debts and battles and prisons were fictions that permitted him to disguise himself as Shakespeare and write his plays in England, while the comedian Will Shaksper, the man with a thousand faces, the Elizabethan Lon Chaney, wrote Don Quixote in Spain. This disparity between the real days and the fictitious date of a common death spared world enough and time for Cervantes's ghost to fly to London in time to die once more in Shakespeare's body. But perhaps they are not really the same person, since the calendars in England and Spain have never been the same, in 1616 or in 1987.

But then again, if not the same person, maybe they are the same writer, the same author of all the books, a wandering polyglot polygraphist named, according to the whims of the times, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Cide Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Defoe, Goethe, Poe, Dickens, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka, Borges, Pierre Menard, James Joyce ... He is the author of the same open book which, like the autobiography of Gines de Pasamonte, is not yet finished because our lives are not yet over. With other words, Mallarme will one day say the same thought as the rogue of Parapilla: "A book neither begins nor ends; at the most, it feigns to . . ."

Cervantes wrote the first open novel as if he had read Mallarme. He proposes, through the critique of reading that seems to start with the hidalgo's reading of the epics of chivalry and seems to end with the reader's realization that all reality is multi-leveled, the critique of creation within creation. Don Quixote's intemporal and, at the same time, immediate quality derives from the nature of its internal poetics: it is a split poem that converts its own genesis into an act of fiction: it is the poetry of poetry (or the fiction of fiction), singing the birth of the poem, narrating the origin of the very fiction we are reading.

Gaston Bachelard has written that all great writers know that the world wants literature to be everything and to be something else: philosophy, politics, science, ethics. Why this demand, asks the French thinker. Because literature is always in direct com- munication with the origins of the spoken being, at that very core of speech where philosophy, politics, ethics, and science them- selves become possible.

But when science, ethics, politics, and philosophy discover their own limitations they appeal to the grace and disgrace of literature to go beyond their insufficiencies. Yet they only discover, along with literature itself, the permanent divorce between words andthings: the separation between the representative uses of language and the experience of the being of language.

Literature is the utopian operation that would like to reduce that distance. When it simply disguises the divorce, it is called epic. When it reveals it, it is called novel or poetry. Such is the novel and the poem of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance in his struggle to make words and things coincide. Don Quixote finds out, as we all do in our lives, that things do not belong to all; but words do. Words are like air: they belong to all or to no one. Language is the first and most natural instance of common property. If this is so, then Miguel de Cervantes is only the owner of his words in the same measure that he is not Miguel de Cervantes but all men: like Joyce's Dedalus, he is the poet, singing the uncreated conscience of his race, mankind. The poet is born after his act, the poem. The poem creates its author, much as it creates its readers. The final description of Cervantes's critique of reading is this simple, lapidary statement: Don Quixote, written by everybody, read by everybody.

**Cervantes,** ** //Don Quixote// **  -- Don Quixote and Sancho Panza-Don Quixote statuetilting at windmills Don Quixote again

cartoon Don Quixote---More Don Quixote and Sancho THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE Idle reader: thou mayest believe me without any oath that I would this book, as it is the child of my brain, were the fairest, gayest, and cleverest that could be imagined. But I could not counteract Nature's law that everything shall //**beget**// its like; and what, then, could this sterile, illtilled wit of mine beget but the story of a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any other imagination--just what might be begotten in a prison, where every misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes its dwelling? Tranquillity, a cheerful retreat, pleasant fields, bright skies, murmuring brooks, peace of mind, these are the things that go far to make even the most barren //**muses**// fertile, and bring into the world births that fill it with wonder and delight. Sometimes when a father has an ugly, loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit and grace.

I, however--for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to "Don Quixote"--have no desire to go with the current of custom, or to i//**mplore**// thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this child of mine. Thou art neither its kinsman nor its friend, thy soul is thine own and thy will as free as any man's, whate'er he be, thou art in thine own house and master of it as much as the king of his taxes and thou knowest the common saying, "Under my cloak I kill the king;" all which exempts and frees thee from every consideration and obligation, and thou canst say what thou wilt of the story without fear of being abused for any ill or rewarded for any good thou mayest say of it. My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned, without any //**embellishment**// of preface or uncountable muster of customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the beginning of books.

For I can tell thee, though composing it cost me some labour, I found none greater than the making of this Preface thou art now reading. Many times did I take up my pen to write it, and many did I lay it down again, not knowing what to write. One of these times, as I was pondering with the paper before me, a pen in my ear, my elbow on the desk, and my cheek in my hand, thinking of what I should say, there came in unexpectedly a certain lively, clever friend of mine, who, seeing me so deep in thought, asked the reason; to which I, making no mystery of it, answered that I was thinking of the Preface I had to make for the story of "Don Quixote," which so troubled me that I had a mind not to make any at all, nor even publish the achievements of so noble a knight. "For, how could you expect me not to feel uneasy about what that ancient lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after slumbering so many years in the silence of //**oblivion**//, coming out now with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush, devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all fables and profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle, and Plato, and the whole herd of philosophers, that they fill the readers with amazement and convince them that the authors are men of learning, erudition, and eloquence.

And then, when they quote the Holy Scriptures!--anyone would say they are St. Thomases or other doctors of the Church, observing as they do a decorum so //**ingenious**// that in one sentence they describe a distracted lover and in the next deliver a devout little sermon that it is a pleasure and a treat to hear and read. Of all this there will be nothing in my book, for I have nothing to quote in the margin or to note at the end, and still less do I know what authors I follow in it, to place them at the beginning, as all do, under the letters A, B, C, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. Also my book must do without sonnets at the beginning, at least sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or famous poets. Though if I were to ask two or three obliging friends, I know they would give me them, and such as the productions of those that have the highest reputation in our Spain could not equal.

"In short, my friend," I continued, "I am determined that Senor Don Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha until Heaven provide some one to garnish him with all those things he stands in need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without them. Hence the //**cogitation**// and abstraction you found me in, and reason enough, what you have heard from me." Hearing this, my friend, giving himself a slap on the forehead and breaking into a hearty laugh, exclaimed, "Before God, Brother, now am I disabused of an error in which I have been living all this long time I have known you, all through which I have taken you to be shrewd and sensible in all you do; but now I see you are as far from that as the heaven is from the earth. It is possible that things of so little moment and so easy to set right can occupy and perplex a ripe wit like yours, fit to break through and crush far greater obstacles? By my faith, this comes, not of any want of ability, but of too much //**indolence**// and too little knowledge of life. Do you want to know if I am telling the truth? Well, then, attend to me, and you will see how, in the opening and shutting of an eye, I sweep away all your difficulties, and supply all those deficiencies which you say check and discourage you from bringing before the world the story of your famous Don Quixote, the light and mirror of all knight-errantry."

"Say on," said I, listening to his talk; "how do you propose to make up for my //**diffidence**//, and reduce to order this chaos of //**perplexity**// I am in?"

To which he made answer, "Your first difficulty about the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with.

"As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you take the //**aphorisms**// and sayings you put into your story, it is only contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to insert _//Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro;//_ and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it; or, if you allude to the power of death, to come in with-- _//Pallida mors Aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas, Regumque turres.//_ "If it be friendship and the love God bids us bear to our enemy, go at once to the Holy Scriptures, which you can do with a very small amount of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: //Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros//. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: //De corde exeunt cogitationes malae//. If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his distich: _//Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos, Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris//._ "With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and profit. "With regard to adding annotations at the end of the book, you may safely do it in this way. If you mention any giant in your book contrive that it shall be the giant Goliath, and with this alone, which will cost you almost nothing, you have a grand note, for you can put--The giant Golias or Goliath was a Philistine whom the shepherd David slew by a mighty stone-cast in the Terebinth valley, as is related in the Book of Kings--in the chapter where you find it written. "Next, to prove yourself a man of //**erudition**// in polite literature and cosmography, manage that the river Tagus shall be named in your story, and there you are at once with another famous annotation, setting forth--The river Tagus was so called after a King of Spain: it has its source in such and such a place and falls into the ocean, kissing the walls of the famous city of Lisbon, and it is a common belief that it has golden sands, etc.

If you should have anything to do with robbers, I will give you the story of Cacus, for I have it by heart; if with loose women, there is the Bishop of Mondonedo, who will give you the loan of Lamia, Laida, and Flora, any reference to whom will bring you great credit; if with hard-hearted ones, Ovid will furnish you with Medea; if with witches or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso, and Virgil Circe; if with valiant captains, Julius Caesar himself will lend you himself in his own 'Commentaries,' and Plutarch will give you a thousand Alexanders. If you should deal with love, with two ounces you may know of Tuscan you can go to Leon the Hebrew, who will supply you to your heart's content; or if you should not care to go to foreign countries, you have at home Fonseca's 'Of the Love of God,' in which is condensed all that you or the most imaginative mind can want on the subject. In short, all you have to do is to manage to quote these names, or refer to these stories I have mentioned, and leave it to me to insert the annotations and quotations, and I swear by all that's good to fill your margins and use up four sheets at the end of the book. "Now let us come to those references to authors which other books have, and you want for yours. The remedy for this is very simple: You have only to look out for some book that quotes them all, from A to Z as you say yourself, and then insert the very same alphabet in your book, and though the imposition may be plain to see, because you have so little need to borrow from them, that is no matter; there will probably be some simple enough to believe that you have made use of them all in this plain, artless story of yours.

At any rate, if it answers no other purpose, this long catalogue of authors will serve to give a surprising look of authority to your book. Besides, no one will trouble himself to //**verify**// whether you have followed them or whether you have not, being no way concerned in it; especially as, if I mistake not, this book of yours has no need of any one of those things you say it wants, for it is, from beginning to end, an attack upon the books of chivalry, of which Aristotle never dreamt, nor St. Basil said a word, nor Cicero had any knowledge; nor do the niceties of truth nor the observations of astrology come within the range of its fanciful vagaries; nor have geometrical measurements or //**refutations**// of the arguments used in //**rhetoric**// anything to do with it; nor does it mean to preach to anybody, mixing up things human and divine, a sort of motley in which no Christian understanding should dress itself. It has only to avail itself of truth to nature in its composition, and the more perfect the imitation, the better the work will be. And as this piece of yours aims at nothing more than to destroy the authority and influence which books of chivalry have in the world and with the public, there is no need for you to go a-begging for aphorisms from philosophers, //**precepts**// from Holy Scripture, fables from poets, speeches from orators, or miracles from saints; but merely to take care that your style and diction run musically, pleasantly, and plainly, with clear, proper, and well-placed words, setting forth your purpose to the best of your power, and putting your ideas //**intelligibly**//, without confusion or obscurity. Strive, too, that in reading your story the //**melancholy**// may be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still; that the simple shall not be wearied, that the judicious shall admire the invention, that the //**grave**// shall not despise it, nor the wise fail to praise it. Finally, keep your aim fixed on the destruction of that ill-founded edifice of the books of chivalry, hated by some and praised by many more; for if you succeed in this you will have achieved no small success."

In profound silence I listened to what my friend said, and his observations made such an impression on me that, without attempting to question them, I admitted their soundness, and out of them I determined to make this Preface; wherein, gentle reader, thou wilt perceive my friend's good sense, my good fortune in finding such an adviser in such a time of need, and what thou hast gained in receiving, without addition or alteration, the story of the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, who is held by all the inhabitants of the district of the Campo de Montiel to have been the chastest lover and the bravest knight that has for many years been seen in that neighbourhood. I have no desire to magnify the service I render thee in making thee acquainted with so renowned and honoured a knight, but I do desire thy thanks for the acquaintance thou wilt make with the famous Sancho Panza, his squire, in whom, to my thinking, I have given thee condensed all the squirely drolleries that are scattered through the swarm of the vain books of chivalry.

And so--may God give thee health, and not forget me. Vale. DEDICATION OF VOLUME I TO THE DUKE OF BEJAR, MARQUIS OF GIBRALEON, COUNT OF BENALCAZAR AND BANARES, VICECOUNT OF THE PUEBLA DE ALCOCER, MASTER OF THE TOWNS OF CAPILLA, CURIEL AND BURGUILLOS In belief of the good reception and honours that Your Excellency bestows on all sort of books, as prince so inclined to favor good arts, chiefly those who by their nobleness do not submit to the service and bribery of the vulgar, I have determined bringing to light The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha, in shelter of Your Excellency's glamorous name, to whom, with the //**obeisance**// I owe to such grandeur, I pray to receive it agreeably under his protection, so that in this shadow, though deprived of that precious ornament of elegance and erudition that clothe the works composed in the houses of those who know, it dares appear with assurance in the judgment of some who, trespassing the bounds of their own ignorance, use to condemn with more rigour and less justice the writings of others. It is my earnest hope that Your Excellency's good counsel in regard to my honourable purpose, will not disdain the littleness of so humble a service. Miguel de Cervantes

VOLUME I. CHAPTER I. WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA

DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA. CHAPTER I. _ The quality and way of living of Don Quixote._

In a certain village in La Mancha, in the kingdom of Arragon, of which I cannot remember the name, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen, who are never without a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound. His diet consisted more of beef than mutton; and, with minced meat on most nights, lentiles on Fridays, and a pigeon extraordinary on Sundays, he consumed three quarters of his revenue; the rest was laid out in a plush coat, velvet breeches, with slippers of the same, for holydays; and a suit of the very best homespun cloth, which he bestowed on himself for working-days. His whole family was a housekeeper something turned of forty, a niece not twenty, and a man that served him in the house and in the field, and could saddle a horse, and handle the pruning-hook. The master himself was nigh fifty years of age, of a hale and strong complexion, lean-bodied and thin-faced, an early riser, and a lover of hunting. Some say his sirname was Quixada, or Quesada (for authors differ in this particular); however, we may reasonably conjecture, he was called Quixada (_i.e._ lantern-jaws), though this concerns us but little, provided we keep strictly to the truth in every point of this history.

Be it known, then, that when our gentleman had nothing to do (which was almost all the year round), he passed his time in reading books of //**knight-errantry**//, which he did with that application and delight, that at last he in a manner wholly left off his country sports, and even the care of his estate; nay, he grew so strangely enamoured of these amusements, that he sold many acres of land to purchase books of that kind, by which means he collected as many of them as he could; but none pleased him like the works of the famous Feliciano de Sylva; for the brilliancy of his prose, and those intricate expressions with which it is interlaced seemed to him so many pearls of eloquence, especially when he came to read the love-addresses and challenges; many of them in this extraordinary style. "The reason of your unreasonable usage of my reason, does so enfeeble my reason, that I have reason to expostulate with your beauty." And this, "The sublime heavens, which with your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, and fix you the deserver of the desert that is deserved by your grandeur." These, and such-like rhapsodies, strangely puzzled the poor gentleman's understanding, while he was racking his brain to unravel their meaning, which Aristotle himself could never have found, though he should have been raised from the dead for that very purpose.

He did not so well like those dreadful wounds which Don Belianis gave and received; for he considered that all the art of surgery could never secure his face and body from being strangely disfigured with scars. However, he highly commended the author for concluding his book with a promise to finish that unfinishable adventure; and many times he had a desire to put pen to paper, and faithfully and literally finish it himself; which he had certainly done, and doubtless with good success, had not his thoughts been wholly engrossed in much more important designs.

He would often dispute with the curate of the parish, a man of learning, that had taken his degrees at Giguenza, as to which was the better knight, Palmerin of England, or Amadis de Gaul; but Master Nicholas, the barber of the same town, would say, that none of them could compare with the Knight of the Sun; and that if any one came near him, it was certainly Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis de Gaul; for he was a man of a most commodious temper, neither was he so finical, nor such a whining lover, as his brother; and as for courage, he was not a jot behind him.

In fine, he gave himself up so wholly to the reading of romances, that at night he would pore on until it was day, and would read on all day until it was night; and thus a world of extraordinary notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination; now his head was full of nothing but enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, complaints, love-passages, torments, and abundance of absurd impossibilities; insomuch that all the fables and fantastical tales which he read seemed to him now as true as the most authentic histories. He would say, that the Cid Ruydiaz was a very brave knight, but not worthy to stand in competition with the Knight of the Burning Sword, who, with a single back-stroke had cut in sunder two fierce and mighty giants. He liked yet better Bernardo del Carpio, who, at Roncesvalles, deprived of life the enchanted Orlando, having lifted him from the ground, and choked him in the air, as Hercules did Antæus, the son of the Earth.

As for the giant Morgante, he always spoke very civil things of him; for among that monstrous brood, who were ever intolerably proud and insolent, he alone behaved himself like a civil and well-bred person.

But of all men in the world he admired Rinaldo of Montalban, and particularly his carrying away the idol of Mahomet, which was all massy gold, as the history says; while he so hated that traitor Galalon, that for the pleasure of kicking him handsomely, he would have given up his housekeeper, nay and his niece into the bargain.

Having thus confused his understanding, he unluckily stumbled upon the oddest fancy that ever entered into a madman's brain; for now he thought it convenient and necessary, as well for the increase of his own honour, as the service of the public, to turn knight-errant, and roam through the whole world, armed cap-a-pie, and mounted on his steed, in quest of adventures; that thus imitating those knight-errants of whom he had read, and following their course of life, redressing all manner of grievances, and exposing himself to danger on all occasions, at last, after a happy conclusion of his enterprises, he might purchase everlasting honour and renown.

The first thing he did was to scour a suit of armour that had belonged to his great grandfather, and had lain time out of mind carelessly rusting in a corner; but when he had cleaned and repaired it as well as he could, he perceived there was a material piece wanting; for, instead of a complete helmet, there was only a single head-piece. However, his industry supplied that defect; for with some pasteboard he made a kind of half-beaver, or vizor, which, being fitted to the head-piece, made it look like an entire helmet. Then, to know whether it were cutlass-proof, he drew his sword, and tried its edge upon the pasteboard vizor; but with the very first stroke he unluckily undid in a moment what he had been a whole week in doing. He did not like its being broke with so much ease, and therefore, to secure it from the like accident, he made it a-new, and fenced it with thin plates of iron, which he fixed on the inside of it so artificially, that at last he had reason to be satisfied with the solidity of the work; and so, without any farther experiment, he resolved it should pass to all intents and purposes for a full and sufficient helmet.

The next moment he went to view his horse, whose bones stuck out like the corners of a Spanish real, being a worse jade than Gonela's, _qui tantum pellis etossa fuit_; however, his master thought that neither Alexander's Bucephalus nor the Cid's Babieca could be compared with him. He was four days considering what name to give him; for, as he argued with himself, there was no reason that a horse bestrid by so famous a knight, and withal so excellent in himself, should not be distinguished by a particular name; so, after many names which he devised, rejected, changed, liked, disliked, and pitched upon again, he concluded to call him Rozinante.

Having thus given his horse a name, he thought of choosing one for himself; and having seriously pondered on the matter eight whole days more, at last he determined to call himself Don Quixote. Whence the author of this history draws this inference, that his right name was Quixada, and not Quesada, as others obstinately pretend. And observing, that the valiant Amadis, not satisfied with the bare appellation of Amadis, added to it the name of his country, that it might grow more famous by his exploits, and so styled himself Amadis de Gaul; so he, like a true lover of his native soil, resolved to call himself Don Quixote de la Mancha; which addition, to his thinking, denoted very plainly his parentage and country, and consequently would fix a lasting honour on that part of the world.

And now, his armour being scoured, his head-piece improved to a helmet, his horse and himself new-named, he perceived he wanted nothing but a lady, on whom he might bestow the empire of his heart; for he was sensible that a knight-errant without a mistress was a tree without either fruit or leaves, and a body without a soul. "Should I," said he to himself, "by good or ill fortune, chance to encounter some giant, as it is common in knight-errantry, and happen to lay him prostrate on the ground, transfixed with my lance, or cleft in two, or, in short, overcome him, and have him at my mercy, would it not be proper to have some lady to whom I may send him as a trophy of my valour? Then when he comes into her presence, throwing himself at her feet, he may thus make his humble submission: 'Lady, I am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island of Malindrania, vanquished in single combat by that never-deservedly-enough-extolled knight-errant Don Quixote de la Mancha, who has commanded me to cast myself most humbly at your feet, that it may please your honour to dispose of me according to your will.'" Near the place where he lived dwelt a good-looking country girl, for whom he had formerly had a sort of an inclination, though, it is believed, she never heard of it, nor regarded it in the least. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and this was she whom he thought he might entitle to the sovereignty of his heart; upon which he studied to find her out a new name, that might have some affinity with her old one, and yet at the same time sound somewhat like that of a princess, or lady of quality; so at last he resolved to call her Dulcinea, with the addition of del Toboso, from the place where she was born; a name, in his opinion, sweet, harmonious, and dignified, like the others which he had devised. CHAPTER II. _Which treats of Don Quixote's first sally._

These preparations being made, he found his designs ripe for action, and thought it now a crime to deny himself any longer to the injured world that wanted such a deliverer; the more when he considered what grievances he was to redress, what wrongs and injuries to remove, what abuses to correct, and what duties to discharge. So one morning before day, in the greatest heat of July, without acquainting any one with his design, with all the secrecy imaginable, he armed himself cap-a-pie, laced on his ill-contrived helmet, braced on his target, grasped his lance, mounted Rozinante, and at the private door of his back-yard sallied out into the fields, wonderfully pleased to see with how much ease he had succeeded in the beginning of his enterprise. But he had not gone far ere a terrible thought alarmed him; a thought that had like to have made him renounce his great undertaking; for now it came into his mind, that the honour of knighthood had not yet been conferred upon him, and therefore, according to the laws of chivalry, he neither could nor ought to appear in arms against any professed knight; nay, he also considered, that though he were already knighted, it would become him to wear white armour, and not to adorn his shield with any device, until he had deserved one by some extraordinary demonstration of his valour.

These thoughts staggered his resolution; but his frenzy prevailing more than reason, he resolved to be dubbed a knight by the first he should meet, after the example of several others, who, as the romances informed him, had formerly done the like. As for the other difficulty about wearing white armour, he proposed to overcome it, by scouring his own at leisure until it should look whiter than ermine. And having thus dismissed these scruples, he rode calmly on, leaving it to his horse to go which way he pleased; firmly believing, that in this consisted the very essence of adventures. And as he thus went on, "no doubt," said he to himself, "that when the history of my famous achievements shall be given to the world, the learned author will begin it in this very manner, when he comes to give an account of this my setting out: 'Scarce had the ruddy Phoebus begun to spread the golden tresses of his lovely hair over the vast surface of the earthly globe, and scarce had those feathered poets of the grove, the pretty painted birds, tuned their little pipes, to sing their early welcomes in soft melodious strains to the beautiful Aurora, displaying her rosy graces to mortal eyes from the gates and balconies of the Manchegan horizon,--when the renowned knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, disdaining soft repose, forsook the voluptuous down, and mounting his famous steed Rozinante, entered the ancient and celebrated plains of Montiel.'" This was indeed the very road he took; and then proceeding, "O happy age! O fortunate times!" cried he, "decreed to usher into the world my famous achievements; achievements worthy to be engraven on brass, carved on marble, and delineated in some masterpiece of painting, as monuments of my glory, and examples for posterity! And thou, venerable sage, wise enchanter, whatever be thy name; thou whom fate has ordained to be the compiler of this rare history, forget not, I beseech thee, my trusty Rozinante, the eternal companion of all my adventures." After this, as if he had been really in love; "O Princess Dulcinea," cried he, "lady of this captive heart, much sorrow and woe you have doomed me to in banishing me thus, and imposing on me your rigorous commands, never to appear before your beauteous face! Remember, lady, that loyal heart your slave, who for your love submits to so many miseries." To these extravagant conceits, he added a world of others, all in imitation, and in the very style of those which the reading of romances had furnished him with; and all this while he rode so softly, and the sun's heat increased so fast, and was so violent, that it would have been sufficient to have melted his brains, had he had any left.

He travelled almost all that day without meeting any adventure worth the trouble of relating, which put him into a kind of despair; for he desired nothing more than to encounter immediately some person on whom he might try the vigour of his arm.

Towards the evening, he and his horse being heartily tired and almost famished, Don Quixote looked about him, in hopes to discover some castle, or at least some shepherd's cottage, there to repose and refresh himself; and at last near the road which he kept, he espied an inn, a most welcome sight to his longing eyes. Hastening towards it with all the speed he could, he got thither just at the close of the evening. There stood by chance at the inn-door two young female adventurers, who were going to Seville with some carriers that happened to take up their lodging there that very evening; and as whatever our knight-errant saw, thought, or imagined, was all of a romantic cast, and appeared to him altogether after the manner of his favourite books, he no sooner saw the inn but he fancied it to be a castle fenced with four towers, and lofty pinnacles glittering with silver, together with a deep moat, drawbridge, and all those other appurtenances peculiar to such kind of places.

When he came near it, he stopped a while at a distance from the gate, expecting that some dwarf would appear on the battlements, and sound his trumpet to give notice of the arrival of a knight; but finding that nobody came, and that Rozinante was for making the best of his way to the stable, he advanced to the door, at which the innkeeper immediately appeared. He was a man whose burden of fat inclined him to peace and quietness, yet when he observed such a strange disguise of human shape in his old armour and equipage, he could hardly forbear laughter; but having the fear of such a warlike appearance before his eyes, he resolved to give him good words, and therefore accosted him civilly: "Sir Knight," said he, "if your worship be disposed to alight, you will fail of nothing here but of a bed; as for all other accommodations, you may be supplied to your mind." Don Quixote observing the humility of the governor of the castle (for such the innkeeper and inn seemed to him), "Senior Castellano," said he, "the least thing in the world suffices me; for arms are the only things I value, and combat is my bed of repose." "At this rate, Sir Knight, you may safely alight, and I dare assure you, you can hardly miss being kept awake all the year long in this house, much less one single night." With that he went and held Don Quixote's stirrup, who having ate nothing all that day, dismounted with no small trouble and difficulty. He immediately desired the governor (that is, the innkeeper) to have special care of his steed, assuring him that there was not a better in the universe; upon which the innkeeper viewed him narrowly, but could not think him to be half so good as Don Quixote said. However, having set him up in the stable, he came back to the knight to see what he wanted, and whether he would eat anything. "That I will, with all my heart," cried Don Quixote, "whatever it be; for I am of opinion nothing can come to me more seasonably." Now, it happened to be Friday, and there was nothing to be had at the inn but some pieces of fish, which they call _truchuela_; so they asked him whether he could eat any of that truchuela, because they had no other fish to give him. Don Quixote imagining they meant small trout, told them, that provided there were more than one, it was the same thing to him, they would serve him as well as a great one; "for," continued he, "it is all one to me whether I am paid a piece of eight in one single piece, or in eight small reals, which are worth as much. Besides, it is probable these small trouts may be like veal, which is finer meat than beef; or like the kid, which is better than the goat. In short, let it be what it will, so it comes quickly; for the weight of armour and the fatigue of travel are not to be supported without recruiting food." Thereupon they laid the cloth at the inn-door for the benefit of the fresh air, and the landlord brought him a piece of the salt fish, but ill-watered and as ill-dressed; and as for the bread, it was as mouldy and brown as the knight's armour.

While he was at supper, a pig-driver happened to sound his cane-trumpet, or whistle of reeds, four or five times as he came near the inn, which made Don Quixote the more positive that he was in a famous castle, where he was entertained with music at supper, that the country girls were great ladies, and the innkeeper the governor of the castle, which made him applaud himself for his resolution, and his setting out on such an account. The only thing that vexed him was, that he was not yet dubbed a knight; for he fancied he could not lawfully undertake any adventure till he had received the order of knighthood.

CHAPTER III. _An account of the pleasant method taken by Don Quixote to be dubbed a knight._ Don Quixote's mind being disturbed with that thought, he abridged even his short supper; and as soon as he had done, he called his host, then shut him and himself up in the stable, and falling at his feet, "I will never rise from this place," cried he, "most valorous knight, till you have graciously vouchsafed to grant me a boon, which I will now beg of you, and which will redound to your honour and the good of mankind." The innkeeper, strangely at a loss to find his guest at his feet, and talking at this rate, endeavoured to make him rise; but all in vain, till he had promised to grant him what he asked. "I expected no less from your great magnificence, noble sir," replied Don Quixote; "and therefore I make bold to tell you, that the boon which I beg, and you generously condescend to grant me, is, that to-morrow you will be pleased to bestow the honour of knighthood upon me. This night I will watch my armour in the chapel of your castle, and then in the morning you shall gratify me, that I may be duly qualified to seek out adventures in every corner of the universe, to relieve the distressed, according to the laws of chivalry and the inclinations of knights-errant like myself." The innkeeper, who, as I said, was a sharp fellow, and had already a shrewd suspicion of his guest's disorder, was fully convinced of it when he heard him talk in this manner; and, to make sport he resolved to humour him, telling him he was much to be commended for his choice of such an employment, which was altogether worthy a knight of the first order, such as his gallant deportment discovered him to be: that he himself had in his youth followed that profession, ranging through many parts of the world in search of adventures, till at length he retired to this castle, where he lived on his own estate and those of others, entertaining all knights-errant of what quality or condition soever, purely for the great affection he bore them, and to partake of what they might share with him in return. He added, that his castle at present had no chapel where the knight might keep the vigil of his arms, it being pulled down in order to be new built; but that he knew they might lawfully be watched in any other place in a case of necessity, and therefore he might do it that night in the court-yard of the castle; and in the morning all the necessary ceremonies should be performed, so that he might assure himself he should be dubbed a knight, nay as much a knight as any one in the world could be. He then asked Don Quixote whether he had any money? "Not a cross," replied the knight, "for I never read in any history of chivalry that any knight-errant ever carried money about him." "You are mistaken," cried the innkeeper; "for admit the histories are silent in this matter, the authors thinking it needless to mention things so evidently necessary as money and clean shirts, yet there is no reason to believe the knights went without either; and you may rest assured, that all the knights-errant, of whom so many histories are full, had their purses well lined to supply themselves with necessaries, and carried also with them some shirts, and a small box of salves to heal their wounds; for they had not the conveniency of surgeons to cure them every time they fought in fields and deserts, unless they were so happy as to have some sage or magician for their friend to give them present assistance, sending them some damsel or dwarf through the air in a cloud, with a small bottle of water of so great a virtue, that they no sooner tasted a drop of it, but their wounds were as perfectly cured as if they had never received any. But when they wanted such a friend in former ages, the knights thought themselves obliged to take care that their squires should be provided with money and other necessaries; and if those knights ever happened to have no squires, which was but very seldom, then they carried those things behind them in a little bag. I must therefore advise you," continued he, "never from this time forwards to ride without money, nor without the other necessaries of which I spoke to you, which you will find very beneficial when you least expect it." Don Quixote promised to perform all his injunctions; and so they disposed every thing in order to his watching his arms in the great yard. To which purpose the knight, having got them all together, laid them in a horse-trough close by a well; then bracing his target, and grasping his lance, just as it grew dark, he began to walk about by the horse-trough with a graceful deportment. In the mean while, the innkeeper acquainted all those that were in the house with the extravagancies of his guest, his watching his arms, and his hopes of being made a knight. They all marvelled very much at so strange a kind of folly, and went on to observe him at a distance; where, they saw him sometimes walk about with a great deal of gravity, and sometimes lean on his lance, with his eyes all the while fixed upon his arms. It was now undoubted night, but yet the moon did shine with such a brightness, as might almost have vied with that of the luminary which lent it her; so that the knight was wholly exposed to the spectators' view. While he was thus employed, one of the carriers who lodged in the inn came out to water his mules, which he could not do without removing the arms out of the trough. With that, Don Quixote, who saw him make towards them, cried out to him aloud, "O thou, whoever thou art, rash knight, that prepares to lay thy hands on the arms of the most valorous knight-errant that ever wore a sword, take heed; do not audaciously attempt to profane them with a touch, lest instant death be the too sure reward of thy temerity." But the carrier regarded not these threats; and laying hold of the armour without any more ado, threw it a good way from him; though it had been better for him to have let it alone; for Don Quixote no sooner saw this, but lifting up his eyes to heaven, and thus addressing his thoughts, as it seemed, to his lady Dulcinea; "Assist me, lady," cried he, "in the first opportunity that offers itself to your faithful slave; nor let your favour and protection be denied me in this first trial of my valour!" Repeating such-like ejaculations, he let slip his target, and lifting up his lance with both his hands, he gave the carrier such a terrible knock on his inconsiderate head with his lance, that he laid him at his feet in a woful condition; and had he backed that blow with another, the fellow would certainly have had no need of a surgeon. This done, Don Quixote took up his armour, laid it again in the horse-trough, and then walked on backwards and forwards with as great unconcern as he did at first.

Soon after another carrier, not knowing what had happened, came also to water his mules, while the first yet lay on the ground in a trance; but as he offered to clear the trough of the armour, Don Quixote, without speaking a word, or imploring any one's assistance, once more dropped his target, lifted up his lance, and then let it fall so heavily on the fellow's pate, that without damaging his lance, he broke the carrier's head in three or four places. His outcry soon alarmed and brought thither all the people in the inn, and the landlord among the rest; which Don Quixote perceiving, "Thou Queen of Beauty," cried he, bracing on his shield, and drawing his sword, "thou courage and vigour of my weakened heart, now is the time when thou must enliven thy adventurous slave with the beams of thy greatness, while this moment he is engaging in so terrible an adventure!" With this, in his opinion, he found himself supplied with such an addition of courage, that had all the carriers in the world at once attacked him, he would undoubtedly have faced them all. On the other side, the carriers, enraged to see their comrades thus used, though they were afraid to come near, gave the knight such a volley of stones, that he was forced to shelter himself as well as he could under the covert of his target, without daring to go far from the horse-trough, lest he should seem to abandon his arms.

The innkeeper called to the carriers as loud as he could to let him alone; that he had told them already he was mad, and consequently the law would acquit him, though he should kill them. Don Quixote also made yet more noise, calling them false and treacherous villains, and the lord of the castle base and unhospitable, and a discourteous knight, for suffering a knight-errant to be so abused. "I would make thee know," cried he, "what a perfidious wretch thou art, had I but received the order of knighthood; but for you, base, ignominious rabble, fling on, do your worst; come on, draw nearer if you dare, and receive the reward of your indiscretion and insolence." This he spoke with so much spirit and undauntedness, that he struck a terror into all his assailants; so that, partly through fear, and partly through the innkeeper's persuasions, they gave over flinging stones at him; and he, on his side, permitted the enemy to carry off their wounded, and then returned to the guard of his arms as calm and composed as before. The innkeeper, who began somewhat to disrelish these mad tricks of his guest, resolved to despatch him forthwith, and bestow on him that unlucky knighthood, to prevent farther mischief: so coming to him, he excused himself for the insolence of those base scoundrels, as being done without his privity or consent; but their audaciousness, he said, was sufficiently punished. He added, that he had already told him there was no chapel in his castle; and that indeed there was no need of one to finish the rest of the ceremony of knighthood, which consisted only in the application of the sword to the neck and shoulders, as he had read in the register of the ceremonies of the order; and that this might be performed as well in a field as anywhere else: that he had already fulfilled the obligation of watching his arms, which required no more than two hours watch, whereas he had been four hours upon the guard. Don Quixote, who easily believed him, told him he was ready to obey him, and desired him to make an end of the business as soon as possible; for if he were but knighted, and should see himself once attacked, he believed he should not leave a man alive in the castle, except those whom he should desire him to spare for his sake.

Upon this, the innkeeper, lest the knight should proceed to such extremities, fetched the book in which he used to set down the carriers' accounts for straw and barley; and having brought with him the two kind females already mentioned, and a boy that held a piece of lighted candle in his hand, he ordered Don Quixote to kneel: then reading in his manual, as if he had been repeating some pious oration, in the midst of his devotion he lifted up his hand, and gave him a good blow on the neck, and then a gentle slap on the back with the flat of his sword, still mumbling some words between his teeth in the tone of a prayer. After this he ordered one of the ladies to gird the sword about the knight's waist: which she did with much solemnity, and, I may add, discretion, considering how hard a thing it was to forbear laughing at every circumstance of the ceremony: it is true, the thoughts of the knight's late prowess did not a little contribute to the suppression of her mirth. As she girded on his sword, "Heaven," cried the kind lady, "make your worship a lucky knight, and prosper you wherever you go." Don Quixote desired to know her name, that he might understand to whom he was indebted for the favour she had bestowed upon him, and also make her partaker of the honour he was to acquire by the strength of his arm. To which the lady answered with all humility, that her name was Tolosa, a cobbler's daughter, that kept a stall among the little shops of Sanchobinaya at Toledo; and that whenever he pleased to command her, she would be his humble servant. Don Quixote begged of her to do him the favour to add hereafter the title of lady to her name, and for his sake to be called from that time the Lady Toloso; which she promised to do. Her companion having buckled on his spurs, occasioned a like conference between them; and when he had asked her name, she told him she went by the name of Molivera, being the daughter of an honest miller of Antequera. Our new knight entreated her also to style herself the Lady Molivera, making her new offers of service. These extraordinary ceremonies (the like never seen before) being thus hurried over in a kind of post-haste, Don Quixote could not rest till he had taken the field in quest of adventures; therefore having immediately saddled his Rozinante, and being mounted, he embraced the innkeeper, and returned him so many thanks at so extravagant a rate, for the obligation he had laid upon him in dubbing him a knight, that it is impossible to give a true relation of them all; to which the innkeeper, in haste to get rid of him, returned as rhetorical though shorter answers; and without stopping his horse for the reckoning, was glad with all his heart to see him go.

CHAPTER IV. _What befel the Knight after he had left the inn._

Aurora began to usher in the morn, when Don Quixote sallied out of the inn, so overjoyed to find himself knighted, that he infused the same satisfaction into his horse, who seemed ready to burst his girths for joy. But calling to mind the admonitions which the innkeeper had given him, concerning the provision of necessary accommodation in his travels, particularly money and clean shirts, he resolved to return home to furnish himself with them, and likewise get him a squire, designing to entertain as such a labouring man, his neighbour, who was poor and had a number of children, but yet very fit for the office. With this resolution he took the road which led to his own village. The knight had not travelled far, when he fancied he heard an effeminate voice complaining in a thicket on his right hand. "I thank Heaven," said he, when he heard the cries, "for favouring me so soon with an opportunity to perform the duty of my profession, and reap the fruits of my desire; for these complaints are certainly the moans of some distressed creature who wants my present help." Then turning to that side with all the speed which Rozinante could make, he no sooner came into the wood but he found a mare tied to an oak, and to another a young lad about fifteen years of age, naked from the waist upwards. This was he who made such a lamentable outcry; and not without cause, for a lusty country-fellow was strapping him soundly with a girdle, at every stripe putting him in mind of a proverb, _Keep your mouth shut, and your eyes open_. "Good master," cried the boy, "I'll do so no more: indeed, master, hereafter I'll take more care of your goods." Don Quixote seeing this, cried in an angry tone, "Discourteous knight, 'tis an unworthy act to strike a person who is not able to defend himself: come, bestride thy steed, and take thy lance, then I'll make thee know thou hast acted the part of a coward." The country-fellow, who gave himself for lost at the sight of an apparition in armour brandishing his lance at his face, answered him in mild and submissive words: "Sir knight," cried he, "this boy, whom I am chastising, is my servant; and because I correct him for his carelessness or his knavery, he says I do it out of covetousness, to defraud him of his wages; but, upon my life and soul, he belies me." "Sayest thou this in my presence, vile rustic," cried Don Quixote; "for thy insolent speech, I have a good mind to run thee through the body with my lance. Pay the boy this instant, without any more words, or I will immediately despatch and annihilate thee: unbind him, I say, this moment." The countryman hung down his head, and without any further reply unbound the boy; who being asked by Don Quixote what his master owed him, told him it was nine months' wages, at seven reals a month. The knight having cast it up, found it came to sixty-three reals in all; which he ordered the farmer to pay the fellow immediately, unless he intended to lose his life that very moment. "The worst is, sir knight," cried the farmer, "that I have no money about me; but let Andres go home with me, and I'll pay him every piece out of hand." "What, I go home with him!" cried the youngster; "I know better things: for he'd no sooner have me by himself, but he'd flay me alive, like another St. Bartholomew." "He will not dare," replied Don Quixote; "I command him, and that's sufficient: therefore, provided he will swear by the order of knighthood which has been conferred upon him, that he will duly observe this regulation, I will freely let him go, and then thou art secure of thy money." "Good sir, take heed what you say," cried the boy; "for my master is no knight, nor ever was of any order in his life: he's John Haldudo, the rich farmer of Quintinar." "This signifies little," answered Don Quixote, "for there may be knights among the Haldudos; besides, the brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works." "That's true, sir," quoth Andres; "but of what works can this master of mine be the son, who denies me my wages, which I have earned with the sweat of my brows?" "I do not deny to pay thee thy wages, honest Andres," cried the master; "do but go along with me, and by all the orders of knighthood in the world, I promise to pay thee every piece, as I said." "Be sure," said Don Quixote, "you perform your promise; for if you fail, I will assuredly return and find you out, and punish you moreover, though you should hide yourself as close as a lizard. And if you will be informed who it is that lays these injunctions on you, that you may understand how highly it concerns you to observe them, know, I am Don Quixote de la Mancha, the righter of wrongs, the revenger and redresser of grievances; and so farewell: but remember what you have promised and sworn, as you will answer for it at your peril." This said, he clapped spurs to Rozinante, and quickly left them behind.

The countryman, who followed him with both his eyes, no sooner perceived that he was passed the woods, and quite out of sight, than he went back to his boy Andres. "Come, child," said he, "I will pay thee what I owe thee, as that righter of wrongs and redresser of grievances has ordered me." "Ay," quoth Andres, "on my word, you will do well to fulfil the commands of that good knight, whom Heaven grant long to live; for he is so brave a man, and so just a judge, that if you don't pay me, he will come back and make his words good." "I dare swear as much," answered the master; "and to shew thee how much I love thee, I am willing to increase the debt, that I may enlarge the payment." With that he caught the youngster by the arm, and tied him again to the tree; where he handled him so unmercifully, that scarce any signs of life were left in him. "Now call your righter of wrongs, Mr. Andres," cried the farmer, "and you shall see he will never be able to undo what I have done; though I think it is but a part of what I ought to do, for I have a good mind to flay you alive, as you said I would, you rascal." However, he untied him at last, and gave him leave to go and seek out his judge, in order to have his decree put in execution. Andres went his ways, not very well pleased, you may be sure, yet fully resolved to find out the valorous Don Quixote, and give him an exact account of the whole transaction, that he might pay the abuse with sevenfold usury: in short, he crept off sobbing and weeping, while his master stayed behind laughing. And in this manner was this wrong redressed by the valorous Don Quixote de la Mancha.

In the mean time the knight, being highly pleased with himself and what had happened, imagining he had given a most fortunate and noble beginning to his feats of arms, went on towards his village, and soon found himself at a place where four roads met; and this made him presently bethink of those cross-ways which often used to put knights-errant to a stand, to consult with themselves which way they should take. That he might follow their example, he stopped a while, and after he had seriously reflected on the matter, gave Rozinante the reins, subjecting his own will to that of his horse, who, pursuing his first intent, took the way that led to his own stable.

Don Quixote had not gone above two miles, when he discovered a company of people riding towards him, who proved to be merchants of Toledo, going to buy silks in Murcia. They were six in all, every one screened with an umbrella, besides four servants on horseback, and three muleteers on foot. The knight no sooner perceived them but he imagined this to be some new adventure; so, fixing himself in his stirrups, couching his lance, and covering his breast with his target, he posted himself in the middle of the road, expecting the coming up of the supposed knights-errant. As soon as they came within hearing, with a loud voice and haughty tone, "Hold," cried he; "let no man hope to pass further, unless he acknowledge and confess that there is not in the universe a more beautiful damsel than the empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso." At those words the merchants made a halt, to view the unaccountable figure of their opponent; and conjecturing, both by his expression and disguise, that the poor gentleman had lost his senses, they were willing to understand the meaning of that strange confession which he would force from them; and therefore one of the company, who loved raillery, and had discretion to manage it, undertook to talk to him. "Sigñor cavalier," cried he, "we do not know this worthy lady you talk of; but be pleased to let us see her, and then if we find her possessed of those matchless charms, of which you assert her to be the mistress, we will freely, and without the least compulsion, own the truth which you would extort from us." "Had I once shewn you that beauty," replied Don Quixote, "what wonder would it be to acknowledge so notorious a truth? the importance of the thing lies in obliging you to believe it, confess it, affirm it, swear it, and maintain it, without seeing her; and therefore make this acknowledgment this very moment, or know that with me you must join in battle, ye proud and unreasonable mortals! Come one by one, as the laws of chivalry require, or all at once, according to the dishonourable practice of men of your stamp; here I expect you all my single self, and will stand the encounter, confiding in the justice of my cause." "Sir knight," replied the merchant, "I beseech you, that for the discharge of our consciences, which will not permit us to affirm a thing we never heard or saw, and which, besides, tends so much to the dishonour of the empresses and queens of Alcaria and Estremadura, your worship will vouchsafe to let us see some portraiture of that lady, though it were no bigger than a grain of wheat; for by a small sample we may judge of the whole piece, and by that means rest secure and satisfied, and you contented and appeased. Nay, I verily believe, that we all find ourselves already so inclinable to comply with you, that though her picture should represent her to be blind of one eye, and distilling vermilion and brimstone at the other, yet to oblige you, we shall be ready to say in her favour whatever your worship desires." "Distil, ye infamous scoundrels," replied Don Quixote in a burning rage, "distil, say you? know, that nothing distils from her but amber and civet; neither is she defective in her make or shape, but more straight than a Guadaramian spindle. But you shall all severely pay for the blasphemy which thou hast uttered against the transcendent beauty of my incomparable lady." Saying this, with his lance couched, he ran so furiously at the merchant who thus provoked him, that had not good fortune so ordered it that Rozinante should stumble and fall in the midst of his career, the audacious trifler had paid dear for his raillery: but as Rozinante fell, he threw down his master, who rolled and tumbled a good way on the ground without being able to get upon his legs, though he used all his skill and strength to effect it, so encumbered he was with his lance, target, spurs, helmet, and the weight of his rusty armour. However, in this helpless condition he played the hero with his tongue; "Stay," cried he; "cowards, rascals, do not fly! it is not through my fault that I lie here, but through that of my horse, ye poltroons!"

One of the muleteers, who was none of the best-natured creatures, hearing the overthrown knight thus insolently treat his master, could not bear it without returning him an answer on his ribs; and therefore coming up to him as he lay wallowing, he snatched his lance, and having broke it to pieces, so belaboured Don Quixote's sides with one of them, that, in spite of his arms, he thrashed him like a wheatsheaf. His master indeed called to him not to lay on him so vigorously, and to let him alone; but the fellow, whose hand was in, would not give over till he had tired out his passion and himself; and therefore running to the other pieces of the broken lance, he fell to it again without ceasing, till he had splintered them all on the knight's iron enclosure. At last the mule-driver was tired, and the merchants pursued their journey, sufficiently furnished with matter of discourse at the poor knight's expense. When he found himself alone, he tried once more to get on his feet; but if he could not do it when he had the use of his limbs, how should he do it now, bruised and battered as he was? But yet for all this, he esteemed himself a happy man, being still persuaded that his misfortune was one of those accidents common in knight-errantry, and such a one as he could wholly attribute to the falling of his horse.

CHAPTER V. _A further account of our Knight's misfortunes._

Don Quixote perceiving that he was not able to stir, resolved to have recourse to his usual remedy, which was to bethink himself what passage in his books might afford him some comfort: and presently his frenzy brought to his remembrance the story of Baldwin and the Marquis of Mantua, when Charlot left the former wounded on the mountain; a story learned and known by little children, not unknown to young men and women, celebrated, and even believed, by the old, and yet not a jot more authentic than the miracles of Mahomet. This seemed to him as if made on purpose for his present circumstances, and therefore he fell a rolling and tumbling up and down, expressing the greatest pain and resentment, and breathing out, with a languishing voice, the same complaints which the wounded Knight of the Wood is said to have made! "Alas! where are you, lady dear, That for my woe you do not moan? You little know what ails me here, Or are to me disloyal grown." Thus he went on with the lamentations in that romance, till he came to these verses:-- "O thou, my uncle and my prince, Marquis of Mantua, noble lord!"-- When kind fortune so ordered it that a ploughman, who lived in the same village, and near his house, happened to pass by, as he came from the mill with a sack of wheat. The fellow seeing a man lie at his full length on the ground, asked him who he was, and why he made such a sad complaint. Don Quixote, whose distempered brain presently represented to him the countryman as the Marquis of Mantua, his imaginary uncle, made him no answer, but went on with the romance. The fellow stared, much amazed to hear a man talk such unaccountable stuff; and taking off the vizor of his helmet, broken all to pieces with blows bestowed upon it by the mule-driver, he wiped off the dust that covered his face, and presently knew the gentleman. "Master Quixada!" cried he (for so he was properly called when he had the right use of his senses, and had not yet from a sober gentleman transformed himself into a wandering knight); "how came you in this condition?" But the other continued his romance, and made no answers to all the questions the countryman put to him, but what followed in course in the book: which the good man perceiving, he took off the battered adventurer's armour as well as he could, and fell a searching for his wounds; but finding no sign of blood, or any other hurt, he endeavoured to set him upon his legs; and at last with a great deal of trouble, he heaved him upon his own ass, as being the more easy and gentle carriage: he also got all the knight's arms together, not leaving behind so much as the splinters of his lance; and having tied them up, and laid them on Rozinante, which he took by the bridle, and his ass by the halter, he led them all towards the village, and trudged on foot himself, while he reflected on the extravagances which he heard Don Quixote utter. Nor was the Don himself less melancholy; for he felt himself so bruised and battered that he could hardly sit on the ass; and now and then he breathed such grievous sighs, as seemed to pierce the very skies, which moved his compassionate neighbour once more to entreat him to declare to him the cause of his grief: so he bethought himself of the Moor Abindaraez, whom Rodrigo de Narvaez, Alcade of Antequera, took and carried prisoner to his castle; so that when the husbandman asked him how he did and what ailed him, he answered word for word as the prisoner Abindaraez replied to Rodrigo de Narvaez, in the Diana of George di Montemayor, where that adventure is related; applying it so properly to his purpose, that the countryman wished himself any where than within the hearing of such strange nonsense; and being now fully convinced that his neighbour's brains were turned, he made all the haste he could to the village, to be rid of him. Don Quixote in the mean time thus went on: "You must know, Don Rodrigo de Narvaez, that this beautiful Xerifa, of whom I gave you an account, is at present the most lovely Dulcinea del Toboso, for whose sake I have done, still do, and will achieve the most famous deeds of chivalry that ever were, are, or ever shall be seen in the universe." "Good sir," replied the husbandman, "I am not Don Rodrigo de Narvaez, nor the Marquis of Mantua, but Pedro Alonzo by name, your worship's neighbour; nor are you Baldwin, nor Abindaraez, but only that worthy gentleman Senior Quixada." "I know very well who I am," answered Don Quixote; "and what's more, I know, that I may not only be the persons I have named, but also the twelve peers of France, nay and the nine worthies all in one; since my achievements will out-rival not only the famous exploits which made any of them singly illustrious, but all their mighty deeds accumulated together."

Thus discoursing, they at last got near their village about sunset; but the countryman stayed at some distance till it was dark, that the distressed gentleman might not be seen so scurvily mounted, and then he led him home to his own house, which he found in great confusion. The curate and the barber of the village, both of them Don Quixote's intimate acquaintances, happened to be there at that juncture, as also the housekeeper, who was arguing with them: "What do you think, pray, good Doctor Perez," said she, (for this was the curate's name) "what do you think of my master's mischance? neither he, nor his horse, nor his target, lance, nor armour, have been seen these six days. What shall I do, wretch that I am? I dare lay my life, and it is as sure as I am a living creature, that those cursed books of errantry, which he used to be always poring upon, have set him beside his senses; for now I remember I have heard him often mutter to himself that he had a mind to turn knight-errant, and ramble up and down the world to find out adventures." His niece added, addressing herself to the barber; "You must know, Mr. Nicholas, that many times my uncle would read you those unconscionable books of disventures for eight-and-forty hours together; then away he would throw his book, and drawing his sword, he would fall a fencing against the walls; and when he had tired himself with cutting and slashing, he would cry he had killed four giants as big as any steeples; and the sweat which he put himself into, he would say was the blood of the wounds he had received in the fight: then would he swallow a huge jug of cold water, and presently he would be as quiet and as well as ever he was in his life; and he said that this same water was a sort of precious drink brought him by the sage Esquife, a great magician and his special friend. Now, it is I who am the cause of all this mischief, for not giving you timely notice of my uncle's raving, that you might have put a stop to it, ere it was too late, and have burnt all these excommunicated books; for there are I do not know how many of them that deserve as much to be burnt as those of the rankest heretics." "I am of your mind," said the curate; "and verily to-morrow shall not pass over before I have fairly brought them to a trial, and condemned them to the flames, that they may not minister occasion to such as would read them, to be perverted after the example of my good friend."

The countryman, who, with Don Quixote, stood without, listening to all this discourse, now perfectly understood the cause of his neighbour's disorder; and, without any more ado, he called out, "Open the gates there, for the Lord Baldwin, and the Lord Marquis of Mantua, who is coming sadly wounded; and for the Moorish Lord Abindaraez, whom the valorous Don Rodrigo de Narvaez, Alcade of Antequera, brings prisoner." At which words they all got out of doors; and the one finding it to be her uncle, and the other to be her master, and the rest their friend, who had not yet alighted from the ass, because indeed he was not able, they all ran to embrace him; to whom Don Quixote: "Forbear," said he, "for I am sorely hurt, by reason that my horse failed me; carry me to bed, and, if it be possible, let the enchantress Urganda be sent for to cure my wounds." "Now," quoth the housekeeper, "see whether I did not guess right, on which foot my master halted!--Come, get to bed, I beseech you; and, my life for yours, we will take care to cure you without sending for that same Urganda. A hearty curse, I say, light upon those books of chivalry that have put you in this pickle!" Whereupon they carried him to his bed, and searched for his wounds, but could find none; and then he told them he was only bruised, having had a dreadful fall from his horse Rozinante while he was fighting ten giants, the most outrageous and audacious upon the face of the earth. "Ho, ho!" cried the curate, "are there giants too in the dance? nay, then, we will have them all burnt by to-morrow night." Then they asked the Don a thousand questions, but to every one he made no other answer, but that they should give him something to eat, and then leave him to his repose. They complied with his desires; and then the curate informed himself at large in what condition the countryman had found him; and having had a full account of every particular, as also of the knight's extravagant talk, both when the fellow found him, and as he brought him home, this increased the curate's desire of effecting what he had resolved to do next morning: at which time he called upon his friend, Mr. Nicholas the barber, and went with him to Don Quixote's house.

**//Macbeth//**

**Machiavelli //--// portions from //The Prince//**


 * //The Tragedy of Macbeth// **

Check out this blog about the theater where many of Shakespeare's plays were performed:

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 24px;">[|Globe Theatre blog]

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 24px;">The Globe Theatre Interior



<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica;"> ** //This reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, based on what is known of its design, shows several features of the theater that influenced the plays written to be performed within it. The upper stage was the setting for the balcony scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and the recessed "discovery space" at the back was used in such plays as his The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.// ** (Folger Shakespeare Library)

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<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 24px;">The Bard himself


 * [[image:http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/images/BILLS.gif caption="Droeshout Engraving GIF Image"]] ||
 * Droeshout Engraving GIF Image ||

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 24px;">A link to a short biography of Shakespeare:

[|Short Shakespeare Biography]


 * <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 64px;">//The Tragedy of Macbeth// **

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 24px;">The Three Witches and Another pic of the Witches with Macbeth and Banquo



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<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 24px;">Macbeth Himself



This is a poster for a [|c.] 1884 American production of //Macbeth//, starring Thomas W. Keene. Depicted, counter clockwise from top-left, are: Macbeth and Banquo meet the [|witches]; just after the murder of [|Duncan]; Banquo's ghost; Macbeth duels Macduff; and Macbeth.

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<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 24px;">Lady Macbeth with Duncan


 * [[image:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Lady_Macbeth_Cattermole.jpg caption="File:Lady Macbeth Cattermole.jpg" link="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Lady_Macbeth_Cattermole.jpg"]] ||
 * File:Lady Macbeth Cattermole.jpg ||



[|Beowulf]