In Our Time - Don Quixote

Episode Date: March 16, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century novel, Don Quixote. Published four hundred years ago in Madrid, the book was an immediate success and recognised as one of the classic texts of Western Literature, revered by writers such as Sterne, Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Melville. Don Quixote tells the story of an unlikely hero - an impoverished country gentleman who goes mad from reading too much and decides to put the world to rights by becoming a knight errant. And so the Knight of La Mancha tilting at windmills with his portly squire astride a donkey is one of the most enduring images in the popular imagination but the simple comedy of the affair belies the fantastically complex, beguiling and sophisticated story on which it is based. As Don Quixote's delusional chivalric ideals bump up against the humdrum of reality and the views of his more earth-bound companion, Sancho Panza.So how has the book endured over the centuries? What was the relationship between Cervantes' work and the world of 17th century Spain in which he lived? In what ways was Don Quixote an interpretation of the age which hitherto had not been articulated? And can it live up to the claim that it was the first European novel?With Barry Ife, Cervantes Professor Emeritus at King's College London; Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Oxford; Jane Whetnall, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the pencil engraving of the errant night of La Mancha tilting at windmills with his portly squire astride a donkey is one of the most enduring images in the popular imagination.

However, the image belies the fantastical, complex and sophisticated story on which, which it's based. Four hundred years ago, Miguel de Savantes, Don Quicksot, was published in Madrid. It was an immediate success, and has been recognised as one of the classic texts of Western literature, revered by writers such as Stern, Gertes, Flober, Dickens, Doskefri, Kafka, and Melville. Don Quixot tells the story of an unlikely hero, an impoverished country gentleman goes mad from reading too much and decides to put the world to rights by becoming a knight-errant. The novel is based on his delusional, chivalric ideas which bump against, against the reality of his more earthbound companion, Sancho Panza.

So, how has the book endured over the centuries? What was the relationship between Cervantes' work and the world of 17th century Spain in which he lived? And can it live up to the claim that it was the first European novel? With me to discuss Don Quixot, as the English have always called it, Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Oxford, Barry Ife, Savantis Professor Emeritus at King's College London, and Jane Wettnell's Senior Lecture in Hispanic Studies

at Queen Mary's University of London. Parraif, the 16th century of Spain was called the Golden Age. This book comes just at the beginning of the 17th century. Was there a sense when Savantes was writing that the power and glory had tilted away from Spain? I think we're at a pivotal point, though there's still some way to go before Spain enters its period of so-called terminal decline. The Golden Age is a term that historians call it.

quite a while after the period that we're talking about. If Spaniards talked about the golden age in the 16th century, they were referring to Horace and Ovid, the classical golden age. The Siglo de Oro, that term tends to be used rather differently, whether you're a political historian or a cultural historian. Political historians of Spain tend to start the golden age, as it were, right back in the 15th century, the last quarter of the 15th century. We joined about a time when Stain had a tremendous.

empire over in the Americas, let's call it, it was a dominating power in Europe, massively powerful, the great protagonist for Christianity, but for a non-following wind and the heroics of the British, it would have taken over the British Isles at the Amada, and so you had much loot and treasure among that people. All of those things, Spain, very, very powerful outside the peninsula, very problematic insight to peninsula, lots of social tension between new Christians and old Christians, the wealth fueling the rise of the new aristocracy, creating another kind of social tension. And all of that beginning to come to the boil towards the end of the 16th century when the mood

perceptively changes. Spain gets a rather bloody nose in 1588 with the failure of the armada. There's a big plague in Castile right at the end of the, of the, of the, of the, century and the mood is is changing and out of that arises a generation of writers I mean essentially six major writers three major dramatists Lopetilson calderon two poets gongra and cabedo and therabantes the major prose writer of the period and they all take they all have in common a kind of problematic attitude towards the relationship between Spanish past and present one of the golden ages we think about in Spain now is a couple of a hundred years earlier, say, with Corderbe and Seville

were the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians, lived alongside each other. We can use alongside, I think, without too much of it. Spaniards, call it convictia. And the Jews, by this, by the time become opposed, the Jews had been expelled, the Moors had been forced to turn Christian

and become Mariscoes, and they were in danger of being pushed out as well. Is this working into, Samantha's obviously knows all about this, is this working into his thoughts? Well, all of those things, different ages tend to read Theravantes in different ways and it's very noticeable that at the beginning of the 21st century

we're picking up on some of the anxieties of our own age particularly relationships between Christendom and Islam and that's inevitably there in the book because it was the Muslims were a major minority group within Spain even third and fourth generation converses

Moriscos still represent a problem to the authorities of the hegemony inside Spain. That's all there. I mean, whether it's foregrounded quite to the extent that we perhaps like to see it today, I rather doubt. It's there in the background, certainly. Edward Nelson, what do we know about Savante's life? Well, we know quite a bit more than we'd know about Shakespeare, for example,

but not that much. I mean, there are gaps, but. his life conventionally is divided, has been divided into two parts. The first part is a life of a man of action. He was a soldier. He was a hero in battle. The second part, roughly, is one of penury and failure. He was born in 1547 in Alcalade Inares, which was a university town some 20 or 30 miles from Madrid.

He was born the son of a barber surgeon, so his father didn't have a very eminent profession, and the family was always strapped for cash and kept moving about. His school education we know very little about, but it's possible that he was educated in Cordoba at a Jesuit school. And then he turns up in his late teens in Madrid at the academy run by Juan Lopeth de Oyos, who was an Erasmian humanist. But shortly after that, in 1569, I think it was, he goes to Rome and enters the service of the Cardinal Aquaviva. About a year or two after that, he goes down to Naples and lists in a Spanish regiment and takes part in a series of military engagements, the greatest of which was the Battle of Lepanto of 1571. Now, this was a great victory for the Christian forces led by Don John of Austria, Philip II's half-brother. and it turned the tide of the Ottoman advance in the Mediterranean.

Savantes was very proud of his action there because he was wounded and lost the use of his left hand. And for the rest of his life, he saw that as a badge of courage, a badge of honour. Then in 1575, he was sailing back to Spain with his brother, Rodrigo, and they were captured by Barbary pirates, Muslim pirates, and taken as slave, sold into slavery in Algiers. He spent five years in Algiers. And even there, his heroism was undimmed.

He organized, became a ringleader, in fact, of at least four escape attempts. Finally, he was ransomed and returned to Spain in 1580. And this is when the second part of his life starts, when he slides into failure, frustration, and important. He tries to become a dramatist and fails. He publishes his first book in 1585, a parcel romance called La Galatea, and that doesn't do too well either. At this stage, he becomes involved in love affairs. We don't know very much about his love life, but in the early 1580s, he becomes involved with a young married woman and has an illegitimate daughter, Isabel.

But shortly after that, very shortly after that, he marries an 18-year-old. old girl, Catalina de Salazar. And they don't have any children. And conventionally, it's thought that it wasn't a very happy marriage because it seemed to spend very little time together. He was making a living as a tax collector and he got nabbed for that, didn't he? Well, that comes a bit later on. In fact, in the 1880s, he's actually a commissary for the Crown, requisitioning provisions for the invincible armada against England.

And in 1590, he tries to, I think he probably got fed up and wanted to give up the of becoming a writer. So he petitions the Council of the Indies for a post in America, and he gets turned down, which is a bitter disappointment to him. And then in the 1590s, he does become a tax collector, which was really a very humble, itinerant sort of profession to follow, and he wanders around And Lucia, obviously staying in roadside inns,

which might have fed into Don Quixit, where the inns play quite an important part. He gets put into jail at least twice for alleged irregularities in his, accounting, he generally is a failure. That's a brilliant, given that you spent years on this subject, brilliant succinct biography. It's wonderfully unlike the biography of almost any writer you ever read about, isn't it? But what were, if he had literary precedence, because then we're coming on to the writing of the great book, what were his literary presence?

What was he reading? I said in the introduction that, I think it was the trail, I can't remember which, he read massively. What was the massively he was reading? Well, he never, as far as we know, he never went to university. He may have acquired some humanistic education at this Academy of Lopis the Orios, but he did spend six years in Italy. And there he was very struck by the Italian classics. And he knew Latin.

He may have read him directly, Aristotle, Plato, Horace in Latin and so on. But he was a great admirer of Ariosto, of Bembo, of Boccaccio. And Jane, Nguyen, can you take that on? What else was that real? Well, he was also very much aware of homegrown models, of which there were numerous. I have the impression that he was a voracious and omnivorous reader. Of course, the book is a glorious celebration of reading.

It's all about reading, about fiction, about readers. And he does have a model, well, I was going to say first of all, apart from incorporating all these other genres into his novel. However, we haven't yet discussed what exactly that is, like the chivalrous romance, the pastoral romance, the picaresque, the epic chronicles and histories, the Italian novella, masses of poetry, the homegrown drama, and of course ballads,

as well as incorporating these wholesale as versions of, well, his versions of these different genres. He also has direct, I think, indebtedness to one particular book, one of the ones that is saved from the fire by the priest who commends it as the best book in the world for style and also for its realism,

a book in which the nights actually eat and sleep and go to bed and die in their beds. They live in the real world. This is Tirant Lo Blanc, a Catalan novel written towards the end of the 15th century in Catalan, but published in Spain, in Spanish, in 1511, Tirant the White by Jean-Jonaut Martorel. Actually, a character who's got a very similar history to Savanti is also something of an adventurer.

Anyway, Chivalin Loblan is the bravest and the strongest night in the world, but he's also accident-prone. And he dies, in his bed, he dies of an illness, he comes to a very pathetic ending. This is, in its way, a different way. It's also a spoof romance of chivalry,

Tiram LeBlanc. Is there evidence that the Cervantes sort of plagiarised that to a certain extent? I wouldn't say plagiarise is a safe word to use at all, but he was obviously aware of it. He mentions it at least twice, I think, in Quixote. And it's very similar in the sense that it's also kind of baggy novel full of different episodes.

It's a kind of compendium of works on chivalry and it contains treatises, love letters, letters of challenge, and lots of action as well. Battle scenes, fighting, tournaments and some very racy sex scenes, which I don't think you get in Quixet. Jane mentioned Baggy,

sort of loose and baggy monster, as it were. And this is what he inherited, this is what he loved to read, and this is what he was taking on board, doesn't it? Can you just put a full stop to that before we move on? Well, as Jane mentioned in passing, there's actually a key episode quite close to the beginning of part one when the priest and the barber go through Don Quicksett's library and expurgate it and throw a lot of the books onto the fire.

And Tehranthus names 31 novels in that chapter alone. some of which survive, some of which don't, but they give really a good idea of the sort of rich background. It's a novel almost as its own bibliography right at the beginning. And the bagginess, I think, comes from two things. One is that it's clear that the Renaissance readers liked variety and they liked a constant changing of topics and subjects. But I think it also comes from the fact that Therbantes had a strong sense of challenge

towards the literary past. Anything they could do, I can do better. And so he absolutely relished the challenge of bringing as much as he could of the 120 years or so of novelistic experiment, which had gone before him, bringing that into the book. And without that, Theravantis couldn't have written Don Quicks. The book couldn't exist without that huge background.

Okay, it's very unfair to ask you to do this a second brilliant encapsulation, but in our time isn't fair in that sense, I mean, at all, I'm not on the scholars, but can you just give us some, can you give listeners who, just to bring them up to speed, just a brief overview of the salient points in the plot and the story, the main characters of the book? I don't know. Well, I think, may I just preface this by saying

that I think we mustn't be too solemn about the remandes of chivalry because in fact they were a very popular genre, which captured the Spanish imagination, and that they did have very clear attractions to a reader, of all classes, really, because you had a tale of adventures, you had a love story, you had what would later be called Gothic horror, you had magic, you had travel in exotic locations. And all these appealed to different people, St. Theresa of Avala,

in her youth, read the romance of chivalry, St. Ignatius of Loyola, read the romance of chivalry, the conquistadors read the romances of chivalry. In fact, the golden state of the USA got its name from a romance of chivalry. When Cortez finished the conquest of Mexico, he sent some ships up to explore the west coast of his new territory, and they came across this land which reminded them of an episode in the exploits of Esplan Dian, this romance of chivalry, where you have a kingdom of warrior women whose queen is called Queen Calafia of California. and that's how California got its name.

So it really did entranced the imagination. It's a bit like, for example, saying that, you know, you have Harry Potter, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and pretty woman all rolled into one when you're reading these stories. So it's no wonder that they were so popular. By the time Cervantes comes to write on Quixot, the Jeanne had run out of steam, but it was still quite, it hadn't gone out of fashion.

You can see that the ordinary people that you encounter in Don Quicksets have read the Romance of Shilbury are aware of the various characters, Amaddis of Gaul and Palm Marina of England and so on. So what Savantis does is he has this very brilliant idea. There had been, as Jane has pointed out, Berlis Romance of Shilbri before. The outstanding one, of course, is Ariosto, Orlando Furioso. But Savantz has an idea which creates a radical break with all in the world of Shilberra. chivalry, the Shibarak romance. The great poetic world of Shavaric Romance, which had enthralled all of Europe for several centuries, shrinks and exists nowhere else but in the head of a madman.

So when you're reading Don Quixit, you're not inside a world, you're not inside a chivalric romance, you're in 17th century Castile. Shivalricer romance exists in Don Quixot's head. So that sets up a very interesting dialectic and interesting class. conflict between Don Quixot's chivalric illusions and everyday reality. And I think that's the starting point of the novel. And so we have Don Quicksett, the Down at Hill gentleman of La Mancha who reads himself into madness and decides to become a knight-errant and sets out an eventious to write the wrongs of the world,

even though it doesn't really find any wrongs to write. And in the book, why did he reinvent himself, Barry, I think. Is it an act of madness or is it an act of, does he really think, well, I suppose if he really thinks he's going to save the world through tilting at when Mills, it is a sort of madness. Well, I think the thing to bear in mind, and this is really quite subtle treatment of the figure, is that the so-called madness is intermittent, it's episodic. I mean, I prefer to think of Don Quixote as being eccentric rather than mad.

And, Sylvantis goes to some links in chapter one. to diagnose the basis of his illness. Basically, he doesn't eat properly. He sits up all night reading. He has no sleep. And in contemporary terms, the balance of his humours is disturbed. A lot of students listening to this will sympathise with him. I wonder if they're on the same track.

Yes, yes. He's a classic single male problem there. And in fact, he is single, and he's very heavily signalled. He has no wife. He lives with a woman who isn't his wife. and there's a girl in the family that isn't his daughter, so he is dysfunctional, socially dysfunctional to that extent. But he has this physiological problem,

which is the basis of this eccentricity. But the eccentricity only really is triggered by chivalry. For large parts of the novel, he is well-read, he utters beautifully crafted statements about the classic gold maze, about arms and letters, and so he shows himself being a very intelligent man, but whenever anybody mentioned chivalry, then he flips.

Jane, Jane Wittnell, we have so far avoid you talking about Sancho Panza, and in the readings I've done for this program, one of you says, or it said somewhere, the masterstroke was after the first six chapters when he came back from unsuccessful jaunts and attempts, he teamed up with Sancho Panza, whom he denoted to be his squire, even though he was much lower class,

and Squire would be and so forth. So can you, and this is thought of as being a new relationship in literature, these two. Can you tell us about why you think it was so important and what happened between these two men? In a word, it is a dynamic relationship and it's a classic, I mean, it becomes a relationship that we look back on and we find there the precursor of all sorts of comedy duo pairings that have existed, then. As far as the novel's concerned, I mean, it simply represents two polar opposites, the fat man, the thin man, the straight guy, the funny guy, the intellectual and the hallucinated one, and the down-to-earth, commonsensical one. And this provides a kind of dynamic,

which allows for all the discussions that punctuate the episodes, or rather, that they become a kind of mortar linking the episodes the banter between the two as they discuss the reality or otherwise Yeah But we've had two men in Western literature before

They've tended to be Almost comparable heroes Or a hero and a shadow hero A hero and an echo This is a difference isn't it This is a Maybe it's happened, you tell me It's happened often enough

In Chevalric literature and so on But in what has become mainstream Western history This is the first appearance to such opposites. That's true. I was, yes, one has to bear in mind

that although the master-servant relationship, the master-servant pairing exists prior to servants, that he's taken it, I mean, it already had a very well-established place role on the Golden Age stage, for example, and that goes back to Roman comedy and plautus and terrorists and people,

where there is always a witty and astute servant attempting to get the better of his master, and that also carries through into the picaresca, well. And there are other pairings like that. Forcible, yeah. I mean, Force Samantha. It's published another one. Probably. But that's the stage, the stage background to it. But in terms of, as it were, straight literature, I suppose you normally get a pairing of two, yeah, more or less equals, the kind of Achilles-Petroclos relationship or Roland and Oliver, where the hero has a friend who is just not quite so brave,

not quite so famous, but who supports him and whose role is to act as usually a restraining force. I mean, in a way, that element also comes in with Sancho constantly trying to deflate Don Quixert in his aspirations, trying to constantly try to needle him and find out the truth. So, yeah, the other thing is there, as it were, emotional. emotional tie, something that grows their relationship throughout the book so that eventually what was once a relationship of self-interest becomes one of mutual dependence and support. I would slightly differ on that because I think another element there is the class difference between master and servant. I mean, John Quixit is an idol. He's a member of the lower gentry, Sanchez and a literary country pumpkin.

But, of course, once Ton Quixit is traveling around with Sancho, Dong Quixit is trying to transform the world from its humdrum reality into the ideal world of chivalry, and he interprets phenomena. Sancho, of course, tries to tell him that things aren't as he says they should be or as he says they are. So you have this constant coming, twing and throwing between the two versions of reality. Now, that's one big theme. But the social difference I think is important because in the course of the development of the narrative,

you find that Sancho becomes more self-confident. He starts out not quite knowing what Don Quixot's about and then gradually he begins to penetrate this strange man's motivation and his temperament and his character. And there comes a point at the beginning of the second part where Sancho learns how to manipulate Don Quixert. So you have the phenomenon, which has been called the rise of Sancho in part two,

And the bond between them is a complex bond. I think it's more than simply an emotional or fraternal bond. It becomes much more complex. So you do get, in the course of the development of that relationship, you do get a sense that these characters are no longer stock types. They are developing along their own, according to their own motivation, according to the particular momentum that their relationship has taken. So I think that's new in narrative.

There's also, in a sense, an economic bond between the two characters because Don Quixote doesn't pay Sancho. He can't pay him. And so Sancho, and what he does is he promises to reward Sancho with the governorship of an island when he's ultimately successful. So he gives Sonshire a stake in his own success. So Sancho is tied in irrevocably to Quixot. And I think that's one of the bases on which he gradually espouses Quixote. its own visions. Jane Wendell, can we dig in a little bit more,

Barry, not dismissive, but slightly put it aside earlier, replaced my use of the word madness with his use of the word eccentricity. Can we dig into the sort of sense of the mind of Don Quicksot and the illusion and the reality thing, the juxtaposition, which is very powerful

and according to Eusey is one of the reasons why the novel is powered through the four centuries. Would you describe Don Quicksot as a madman? Well, actually, I find it difficult do so now and it may be something to do with the way, you know, we have come to a greater understanding of madness, of mental illness, it's obviously not a subject for mockery or mirth anymore. And it's also something that we understand it's kind of commonplace. You know, we're all probably on some sort of spectrum between totally sane and absolutely barking.

But, you know, no, but there are very few on the totally sane point. I think that there is a, Yeah, I have reservations about thinking of him as properly mad and even as completely innocently eccentric either. I'm not in agreement with either, Barry, or Jane on this. I think he is mad and he's mad from start to finish. But he's not mad in the way. This is a literary madness. This is a literary convenience in my view.

This is only a device that Savanta is invents to parody the romance of chivalry. But I think there are two levels, Sidonkicks its madness, I think the primary level is his belief that the Remazer of Chivalry are literally true, that they are true histories. But then there's another level, which is the view that he has been chosen to restore the world of chivalry. Now, he never departs from the view that the Romazzo of Shivalry are literally true until his deathbed.

So for as long as he believes that, he's mad, I think barking. But what does vary and what does change and what does allow for character development is his conviction that he has been chosen by destiny, by God, to restore the world of chivalry. You find that, particularly again in part two, that belief begins to wane, and you have this curious phenomenon of a madman who is succumbing to growing self-doubt. Can we just, can you briskly, Barry, tell us about two or three of the key incidents and keep the theme going of madness.

The tilting windmills that everybody knows about, what that means, the, you know, the the barber's basin which you thought of as a very rare helmet and the sheep is supposed to be now let's get the windmills and the basin onto the table as well that series starts really again in chapter one with the

cardboard helmet his suit of armour is incomplete so he makes the visor of the helmet out of cardboard he then tests it and destroys it makes it again and doesn't test it the next time and that shows shrewdness He knows that it's going to fail, but he wishes it to be a helmet that will withstand battle.

So he starts this process of imposing his will on reality, and the Barber's Basin and the windmills are examples of that. But there's a really, really shrewd logic behind his madness, and that is that now 2,000 years of literature and of moralists have told us that things aren't what they appear to be. You shouldn't judge a book by its cover. And Quicksett applies that principle consistently throughout the book

and says, I know it looks like a windmill. I know it looks like a basin, but it's really membranous helmet. And I am a knight. I have the privileged vision. I can see beyond this false exterior and I can see what it really is. And it's very hard to wrong foot him on that argument.

Would they have, in January, or would people have, have read it in that way in that day in 1605, or would they have just thought, sorry, I'm very sure, finished, you're finished, Barry, and then we'll come to join. Oh, as I say that, I mean, this is pure Platonism, only spoofed in its own way, and there are lots of things that are spoofed in Doncicks

and not just Rouryke, but philosophy as well. Was it seen, are there any evidence that it was seen in the way that Barry Hives been describing it in its day, or was it thought of more as a burlesque, a parody, which he said initially he was setting out to do? The novel itself was obviously seen, as a burlesque, yes, I would have thought so.

I mean, I think we can agree on that. Now, I was thinking more about, to go back to the madness thing, and the sense in which Don Quicksett is in control of his madness, I think as an interesting episode is when they're in the Sierra Morena, and they come face, Sancho and he come face to face with, having seen him gambling in the distance, a genuine madman, a genuine madman in terms of what, what, you know, the clinical definition of madness constituted in those days,

namely, then, you're the character who's first of all introduced as the knight of the ragged mountain or the ragged night of the mountain, and who's doing these capers because he's in distress about his unfortunate love affair. It's, first of all, they see him in the mountain, and then they come across this treasure that has been abandoned, and Sancho seizes on it, and is delighted to find that finally, that there's an adventure that's actually going to produce profit for him. And then they come face to face with the man and Quixot grabs him by the shoulders and holds him in our firm embrace. And there's a moment when they look into each other's eyes

and the madman stares at him and wants, have I seen this guy before? And Quixir is obviously thinking something like the same thing. But it's a kind of epiphany. And what proceeds to happen as a result of that encounter is that Quixot, well aware that this is a genuine case of madness because they've been talking about it to the goat herds earlier, uses him as a rock model and proceeds immediately to start.

doing all the things that Cardena has been doing, like writing letters and capering about with no clothes on and things like that. So it's as though he's probably aware that this is something, he can do this, and this is obviously what he's supposed to do. Edwin Williamson, we're talking about a book that's had several different reputations from the beginning. From the beginning, we had told it was a huge success. It was translated very quickly into English and into other languages.

but people look back in it, people like yourselves and fiction writers and other scholars, as extraordinarily interesting technically, for instance, with the idea of the unreliable narrator. So can you give us a bit of an idea how technically interesting it was? Because it's not often that technical accomplishment at that very high level, or techniques that that go alongside a powerfully popular novel. Well, I think these technical innovations, if you look, like arise from the very parody of the romance of chivalry. As I said earlier, the romance of chivalry tried to pass themselves off as true history,

which is what drove Don Quicks and Mad. So obviously, if you're parodying that, you have to make sure that you present your fiction as fiction. So Slyvantis has great, makes great play of the differences and similarities between fiction and history. For example, in Chapter 9 of Part 1, there's a very curious scene when Don Quix's a about to bash a basque over the head with his sword, and suddenly the action stops. It's almost like a videotape running out. And we are told that the author, who's nameless there, has run out of written sources for the history of John Quixot. So then the second author, that presumably Savantis, saying that this is a great pity,

that we can't find any more sources. And he then, Savantes intrudes himself. into the novel and describes autobiographically how he'd been walking around the marketplace in Toledo and saw a boy with some parchments and he buys these parchments and takes them to Morisco to translate and the Morisco starts laughing

and mentions Dulcined El Toboso and then Cervantes says, ah, this might well be the missing history of Don Quixert. So he gets the Morisco, pays a Morisco, to translate this from the Arabic into Spanish. And it turns out that, indeed, this is another version of the history of Don Quicks that written by an Arab historian called Sidi Hamete Beninhelli. Now, for a Catholic Spaniard of the 17th century,

an Arab historian is supremely unreliable. So we have a sense of this history having come down to us in various forms from different sources, some of which are lost, translated into Arabic, then translated back into, Spanish by a completely unreliable historian whom we find begins to introduce his own voice into the narrative and cast doubt in some of the facts that he's relating. So that is one example of the technical, of the self-consciousness of Don Quix's as a book. And the other important one, I suppose, is the fact that in part two you find that some of the characters... Some years later.

Yes, part two came out in 16, 15, 15, 10 years. part one. And part one had been a great success, as you say, but you find that in part two there are some characters who've read part one, and therefore they can anticipate Don Quixson and Sancho Panther, so Don Quicks and Sancho Panther are vulnerable to manipulation. Can you tell us about Dalsenae, Barry, and what part she plays? Well, going back a few steps and to the invention of Sancho comes in because the innkeeper and the first Sally says, well, you can't be a knight without a squire. Similarly with Dulcinea, she has to come in because she's part of the accoutrements of being a knight.

And it's an image, it's an ideal, and he projects it onto a particular person who he's seen once or twice, who happens to live in nearby village of El de Bozzo. but this becomes a driving fantasy of his whole journey and his whole purpose in life. She never appears. But she never appears, no. In 1,200 pages. Absolutely not, no.

But he's constantly referred to. And I think it's another example of the way in which his will, will to live out this fantasy and to participate in all aspects of it, is imposed on the reality around him. Jane Martin-Lond is one of the reasons why he was translated so swiftly and again and so frequently because of the accessibility of his language. I mean people wanted to read

the story, wanted to read him, but was his language thought to be very accessible at the time? At the time, I don't know, but now it is, which is says an awful lot. I mean, it was 1605 there, 1608 was a copy in the Bodleyn and then there was the translations of the second book soon after

that. I mean, that's getting a move on even by modern standards. Well, by those standards, it had all the ingredients of an international bestseller. I mean, it And the language is certainly one of the things that recommends itself to read us today, because even today you read Savanty Zan, you're not really aware you're reading a book that was written at the beginning of the 17th century. It's much more accessible, much more transparent than Shakespeare.

I mean, nowadays our students are having trouble with Shakespeare, and he's obviously going to get more difficult as time goes on. Savanti seems to have hit, no? I don't know about it. I was just going to be a grump about it, but never mind. Now, pass. No, no, pass, pass, pass. No, let's stick to Svantis.

And so he's using a particular form of a vernacular Spanish of the time, has he chosen to do that? He's used as masses of different registers, but I'm thinking about the frame narrative and the conversations with Sancho. But these are all in a Spanish that is recognizably just classic, really. It's a very eloquent book. Thermentis gives, Don Quicks, a wonderful thing to say, beautifully written, in many

page after page. Well, there's a wonderful passage at the end of the first interpolated novel of Grissost, Marcella, where Quixote is incredibly eloquent. Many other occasions, when he's talking about the ideals of chivalry,

he has wonderfully classical things to say. He has these two big discourses in part one, one on the Golden Age and one on arms and letters. which are compilations of classical wisdom. And so eloquence is really very important because it's a novel in which people talk all the time. We were talking about the narrators earlier,

actually per huge tracks of the novel, the narrator virtually disappears. He delegates the task of telling the story to the characters. Quixote and Sanchez spend page after page after page talking to each other, and all the narrator says he said, he replied. So I think that's part of the root of the sort of limpidity of the book, the transparency and the clarity of it. And that's why I think it is incredibly accessible even today.

Adrian Williamson, I'm sorry, you're about to come in anywhere. And also I think there are different voices too. And I think part of the, it's a very funny book. I think that explains a lot of its popularity. It makes you laugh. And there's comedy of character, comedy of situation, but also comedy of language. And the clashes between this wonderful eloquence of Don Quix,

which he's capable of Sanchez's rustic speech and the rough speech of other characters. I think that's the important part of the comedy. What essentially, we're coming towards the end of the program now, but what essentially was there about this novel which made very, very great writers afterwards until today want to take from it, use it, absorb it, and be part of what he set out?

What would you say, Edwin, to start with? Well, I think that clash between. John Quixot's mad illusions and reality introduces the principle of realism into European literature. From now on, you have a sense in which you're depicting a credible social reality. But more than that, I think the Quixot idea

of a character who has ideals or illusions which he or she has gradually to adjust to a lived experience is perhaps the fundamental drive force of the novel, if you think of any novel. It really is about a man or a woman or men and women who actually have to adjust their own aspirations to reality, to their experience. But in addition to that, you have these quick substantial relationship, and that I think shows, again, for the first time, that the novel will center on relationships between characters, between

individuals, and that becomes a focus of interest in its own right. You get the sense of these characters being individuals, they're not conforming to some conventional type. So there is that dialogue. You've also got the narrator, the voice of the narrator, which is a breezy, ironic comic voice, which is what attracted Henry Fielding so much and Lauren Stern. Talking about Lauren Stern, I think the self-consciousness, literary self-consciousness and the literary play, that also is very appealing to novelists. Do you have anything to add to that, Jane? I was going to say just only one thing.

that was picked up a lot by later novelists was the strain of the dangers of reading often used ironically after a quick set but it appears in all the English 18th century writers, novelists and dramatists

and Sheridan, people like that. I agree with all that but I think we shouldn't underestimate the technical innovation of the work. I mean, it is phenomenally cleverly put together. It feels loose and baggy

but it's extremely well put together. All the episodes are interestingly sewn in. And in part two, he introduces this wonderful switch of making Don Quicks at Famous, whereas in part one he'd been a nobody. And incorporating part one into part two, I think,

is a masterstroke. Well, thank you all very much. Barry Hive, Jane Wettnall and Edwin Williamson. Next week we'll be talking about the origins of the Royal Society again in the 17th century, but here rather than in Spain. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio four.