Don Quixote 101

Lesson 1

Cervantes: soldier, captive, and writer

Before he was a writer, Miguel de Cervantes was a soldier, and his life reads like one of his own adventures. Born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares in Spain, the son of a poor surgeon, he left home young and joined the Spanish infantry in Italy. In 1571 he fought at the Battle of Lepanto, the great sea battle against the Ottoman fleet. He was shot three times, and though he recovered, he lost the use of his left hand for the rest of his life. He was proud of that wound all his days, and he signed himself, with grim humor, the cripple of Lepanto.

Worse was coming. In 1575, sailing home to Spain, his ship was captured by Barbary pirates, and Cervantes was carried to Algiers as a slave. For five long years he plotted escapes, four times nearly winning freedom and four times being betrayed or caught. Each time he took the blame on himself to shield his companions, and each time his captors, impressed or baffled by his courage, spared his life. In 1580 his family and a religious order finally raised his ransom, and he came home at thirty three with nothing but stories.

The Spain he returned to had little use for an aging soldier with a ruined hand. He worked as a tax collector and purchasing agent, jobs that twice landed him in prison over accounts he could not balance, and he wrote plays and poems that brought him modest notice and almost no money. It was reportedly in a prison cell that the idea of Don Quixote first came to him. He published Part One in 1605, when he was fifty seven. It made him famous across Europe and kept him, mostly, poor. He died in 1616, the same spring as Shakespeare, having given the world a book far bigger than the life that produced it.

Lesson 2

A man who read too many books

The hero begins as nobody special: a lean country gentleman of about fifty, living quietly in a village in La Mancha on a small income, with a housekeeper, a niece, and a library. His name shifts a little in the telling, Quesada or Quixada, but his passion is fixed. He is obsessed with romances of chivalry, the bestselling adventure books of his day, full of knights, giants, enchanters, and damsels in towers. He sells farmland to buy more books, reads through the night, and sleeps so little that, as Cervantes dryly tells it, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.

His madness takes a particular and wonderful form. He does not merely admire the old knights; he decides the world needs one again, and that the knight will be him. He polishes a suit of rusty armor inherited from his great grandfathers, fashions a helmet out of a basin and cardboard, and gives himself a grand new name: Don Quixote de la Mancha. His bony old horse becomes Rocinante, a name meant to sound noble. Every knight needs a lady to serve, so he settles on a sturdy farm girl he once fancied from afar and renames her, in his mind, Dulcinea del Toboso, a princess she never asked to be.

Notice what Cervantes is doing. This is a parody of the chivalry romances, written by a man who clearly loved them even as he mocked them, and it is also something warmer: a portrait of a reader so changed by books that he walks into the story himself. An honest warning for modern readers: the Ormsby translation keeps the flavor of old Spain, with its thees and thous in formal speech, and the early chapters move at a leisurely pace. Read slowly, enjoy the narrator arguing with his own sources, and let the comedy build. The book rewards patience like few others.

Lesson 3

The windmills

On his second sally out, with Sancho Panza now beside him, Don Quixote sees thirty or forty windmills standing on the plain of Montiel, and the most famous misunderstanding in literature begins. He announces that fortune is arranging matters better than they could have wished, because here are thirty or more monstrous giants to fight, whose spoils will make their fortunes. Sancho, staring at the same plain, asks the only sensible question: "What giants?" His master points to the long arms. Sancho answers with the plain truth, verified in the text: "what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go."

It makes no difference. Don Quixote explains that Sancho is simply not used to adventures, commends himself to his lady Dulcinea, and charges at the nearest mill at a full gallop. Just as his lance strikes the sail, a gust of wind whirls it around, shattering the lance and rolling horse and rider across the plain in a sorry heap. Sancho trots up on his donkey and delivers the gentle verdict of every friend who has ever watched us ignore good advice: did I not tell your worship they were only windmills? The knight, unshaken, blames the whole affair on an enchanter who transformed giants into mills at the last moment to rob him of glory.

Why has this one scene lived for four hundred years, long enough to give English the phrase tilting at windmills? Because everyone recognizes both men. There is a Don Quixote in each of us, charging at the world as we wish it were, and a Sancho in each of us, holding the reins and pointing at the obvious. Cervantes never tells us simply that the knight is wrong. The mills are real, and so is the courage. The comedy and the sadness of the whole enormous book are folded into this single charge.

Lesson 4

Sancho Panza: the best sidekick ever written

Sancho Panza is a poor farmer from the same village, a short, round man with a donkey, a wife, and a healthy appetite, who agrees to squire for Don Quixote for one reason: his master has promised him the governorship of an island. He cannot read, he speaks in a tumble of proverbs, and he believes roughly half of what his master says, which turns out to be exactly the right proportion. Earlier knights in literature had squires who were mostly furniture. Sancho talks back, bargains, complains, jokes, and steals every scene he is in without ever ceasing to love the madman he follows.

The friendship is the engine of the book. Don Quixote is all ideals and no sense; Sancho is all sense and, slowly, a surprising share of ideals. They argue constantly, about food, money, enchantments, and whether a barber basin is a magic helmet, and each argument changes them a little. Critics have long noticed the exchange: Sancho grows more quixotic, dreaming bigger than his station, while the knight grows more sanchified, learning to listen, to doubt, and to laugh at himself. Neither man alone would make a great book. Together they make the greatest comic partnership in fiction, the tall thin dreamer and the short round realist, talking their way across Spain.

Sancho is also funnier than his master, and Cervantes knew it. His proverbs arrive in floods, sometimes wise, sometimes gloriously beside the point. He judges every adventure first by what there is to eat. Yet when his master is beaten, mocked, or locked in a cage by well meaning friends, it is Sancho who stays loyal, Sancho who weeps, and Sancho who, in the end, begs him to live. The best sidekick ever written is not a servant in the story. He is its second hero, and by the final chapters, arguably its first.

Lesson 5

The inns, the shepherds, and the stories within stories

Part One is built like a journey along the roads of Spain, and its great meeting places are the inns, which Don Quixote insists are castles. At Juan Palomeque inn, the book opens outward. Travelers gather, stories are told, a manuscript is found in a forgotten trunk and read aloud to the company: the tale of the man who, insanely jealous, tested his wife faithfulness with the help of his best friend, and destroyed all three lives. Meanwhile the knight, dreaming he is battling a giant, slashes the innkeeper wineskins in his sleep and drenches the room in red wine. Tragedy, farce, and storytelling sit down at the same table and refuse to be separated.

In the hills, the travelers meet shepherds and hear the story of Marcela, a wealthy young woman who chose the free life of a shepherdess, and of the lovesick student who died blaming her beauty. At the funeral, Marcela herself appears and answers the charge in one of the great speeches of the book. She did not ask to be loved, she argues, and her beauty no more obliges her to return a passion than a fire obliges her to warm everyone who sees it. Don Quixote, to his credit, defends her right to refuse them all, and forbids anyone to follow her. The madman, for a moment, is the most reasonable person on the mountain.

A word of honesty about reading Part One: it contains knockabout violence played for laughs, beatings, blanket tossings, and brawls, in the rough comic style of its century, and some episodes will strike modern readers as cruel. Read them as the book asks, watching who suffers and who learns. The interruptions, the found manuscripts, the debates about which stories are true: this untidy abundance is not a flaw in the book. It is the book inventing, before our eyes, what a novel can hold.

Lesson 6

Part Two: the knight finds out he is famous

Ten years passed between the two parts, and Cervantes returned with a stroke of genius. In Part Two, published in 1615, the whole world inside the book has read Part One. Don Quixote and Sancho meet readers wherever they go. A student, Samson Carrasco, greets them with news that their history is printed, translated, and everywhere, and that people argue about its details, even complaining that the author forgot what became of Sancho stolen donkey. The knight and his squire must now ride out into a world that knows them as characters, expects them to perform, and sometimes stages adventures for them as cruel entertainment.

The great test of Part Two is the ducal palace, where a duke and duchess who have read the book receive the pair with mock solemnity and elaborate pranks: enchanted boats, flying wooden horses, processions of fake demons. The jokes are splendid and increasingly uncomfortable, because the hosts have money, leisure, and no mercy, while their guests have only dignity. Many readers find Part Two sadder and deeper than Part One, and they are right. Fame has not freed Don Quixote. It has turned his madness into other people theater, and both he and Sancho begin, slowly, to see it.

Cervantes had a practical reason for this darker turn. In 1614, another writer had published a false sequel under a pen name, sending Don Quixote on adventures Cervantes never wrote. Stung, the real author hurried his own Part Two into print, had his characters denounce the forgery on the page, and finally killed his hero to keep him out of other hands forever. It is the first time in literature a character defends his own story against a sequel, and it still feels startlingly modern, like watching an author wrestle the internet inside a book from 1615.

Lesson 7

Sancho governs an island

At last the joke promise comes true. As part of their sport, the duke and duchess appoint Sancho governor of a town they call the Island of Barataria, and the farmer who cannot read takes his seat in robes of office with a staff, a title, and a table of officials waiting to watch him fail. Everyone expects a fool show. The courtiers present him with impossible lawsuits: a man accused over money hidden in his staff, two old men disputing a loan, a woman demanding damages from a tailor. Sancho listens, asks plain questions, and delivers judgments so shrewd and fair that the witnesses conclude some learned judge must be whispering through him.

His secret is not education. It is honesty plus horse sense. Raised poor, he knows how ordinary people cheat and how they suffer, and he rules as he would wish to be ruled. He then turns lawmaker, issuing commonsense ordinances about honest weights, fair prices, and clean food, the worries of a man who has been hungry and cheated himself. But the palace has one more torment prepared: a physician who snatches every dish from the governor table as unhealthy, course by course, while Sancho starves in silk. The comedy has a bite. Power, he discovers, means being displayed, managed, and kept from dinner.

After a staged enemy attack in the night, in which the terrified governor is strapped between boards and trodden on, Sancho resigns. His farewell is one of the noblest speeches in the book: naked he was born and naked he finds himself, he says in effect, and he would rather eat onions in freedom with his donkey than feast as a governor with a doctor at his elbow. He walks out poorer than he came and greater than anyone at that court. The promised island was a prank. The governorship was real, and the peasant was the best ruler in the novel.

Lesson 8

The return home and what it means

Every quest in this book ends at home, but the final return is different. In Barcelona, Don Quixote is defeated in formal combat by the Knight of the White Moon, who is really his friend Samson Carrasco in disguise, come to cure him by the rules of chivalry itself. The condition of defeat: the knight must go home and lay aside arms for two years. Don Quixote accepts, honorably, because the code he lives by demands it. On the road back he plans a new life as a shepherd in a pastoral romance, one last story to live inside, but this time the story is fading and he knows it.

At home he falls ill, sleeps, and wakes sane. It is the most quietly devastating scene in the book. He announces that he is no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha but Alonso Quixano the Good, abhors the romances that ruined him, makes a proper will, and asks forgiveness of everyone, above all Sancho. Sancho, weeping, begs him not to die: get up, dress as a shepherd, and ride out once more, for the greatest folly a man can commit is to let himself die of melancholy. The sidekick now carries the dream, and the knight, smiling, lets it go. He dies sane, confessed, and surrounded by the people who loved him through the madness.

So what does it mean? Readers have argued for four centuries, and the argument is the tribute. Is sanity the cure or the tragedy? Did the world lose a knight or regain a neighbor? Cervantes refuses to close the question, and perhaps that is the point of the first modern novel: it trusts you to hold both truths. We need our windmills, some vision worth charging for, and we need our Sanchos, some love that tells us the truth and stays. Finish the book, and you will find, as generations have, that you are oddly reluctant to leave these two on the road.

Sources

The Book Behind This Course

This course is taught from one great book, free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg, in the classic English translation by John Ormsby.

• Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by John Ormsby (1885), Project Gutenberg

Graduation

You finished the first modern novel

You set out with a mad knight and a wise fool, charged the windmills, sat up all night in the inns, watched Sancho govern, and came home at last to a quiet village in La Mancha. You now hold the key that unlocks four centuries of novels, because nearly every storyteller since has been answering Cervantes. Congratulations, and may you always keep one good dream worth riding out for.

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