Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (mobile ebook reader .txt) 📖

was dedicated. The Zuñiga family, of which the Duke was the head, claimed descent from the royal line of Navarre. ↩

“Le donne, i cavalieri, l’arme, gli amori” —⁠Orlando Furioso, i 1. This is one of many proofs that the Orlando of Ariosto was one of the sources from which Cervantes borrowed. ↩

“Figures,” i.e. picture cards. The allusion to vain emblems on the shield is a sly hit at Lope de Vega, whose portrait in the Arcadia, and again in the Rimas (1602), has underneath it a shield bearing nine castles surrounded by an orle with ten more. ↩

This refers to the querulous and egotistic tone in which dedications were often written. Álvaro de Luna was the Constable of Castile and favorite of John II, beheaded at Valladolid in 1450. Francis I of France was kept a prisoner at Madrid by Charles V for a year after the battle of Pavia. The last four lines of the stanza are almost verbatim from verses by Fray Domingo de Guzman written as a gloss upon some lines carved by the poet Fray Luis de Leon on the wall of his cell in Valladolid, where he was imprisoned by the Inquisition. ↩

Juan Latino, a self-educated negro slave in the household of the Duke of Sesa, who gave him his freedom. He was for sixty years Professor of Rhetoric and Latin at Granada, where he died in 1573. ↩

In allusion to Don Quixote’s penance in the Sierra Morena. ↩

V. note 35. ↩

Oriana, the heroine of Amadís of Gaul. Her castle Miraflores was within two leagues of London. Shelton in his translation puts it at Greenwich. ↩

“Rustic kiss and cuff”⁠—buzcorona⁠—a boorish practical joke the point of which lay in inducing some simpleton to kiss the joker’s hand, which as he stoops gives him a cuff on the cheek. The application here is not very obvious, for it is the person who does homage who receives the buzcorona. It is not clear who is meant by the Spanish Ovid; some say Cervantes himself; others, as Hartzenbusch, Lope de Vega. ↩

“Motley poet”⁠—Poeta entreverado. Entreverado is properly “mixed fat and lean,” as bacon should be. Commentators have been at some pains to extract a meaning from these lines. The truth is they have none, and were not meant to have any. If it were not profanity to apply the word to anything coming from Cervantes, they might be called mere pieces of buffoonery, mere idle freaks of the author’s pen. The verse in which they are written is worthy of the matter. It is of the sort called in Spanish de pies cortados, its peculiarity being that each line ends with a word the last syllable of which has been lopped off. The invention has been attributed to Cervantes, but the honor is one which no admirer of his will be solicitous to claim for him, and in fact there are half a dozen specimens in the Picara Justina, a book published if anything earlier than Don Quixote. I have here imitated the tour de force as well as I could, an experiment never before attempted and certainly not worth repeating. The “Urganda” verses are written in the same fashion, but I did not feel bound to try the reader’s patience⁠—or my own⁠—by a more extended reproduction of the puerility. ↩

Celestina, or Tragicomedy of Calisto and Meliboea (1499), the first act of which is generally attributed to Rodrigo Cota, the remaining nineteen being by Fernando Rojas. There is no mention in it of “Villadiego the Silent;” the name only appears in the proverbial saying about “taking the breeches of Villadiego,” i.e. beating a hasty retreat. ↩

Babieca, the famous charger of the Cid. ↩

An allusion to the charming little novel of Lazarillo de Tormes, and the trick by which the hero secured a share of his master’s wine. ↩

The play upon the word “Peer” is justified by Orlando’s rank as one of the Twelve Peers. This sonnet is pronounced “truly unintelligble and bad” by Clemencín, and it is, it must be confessed, very feeble and obscure. I have adopted a suggestion of Hartzenbusch’s which makes somewhat better sense of the concluding lines, but no emendation can do much. Nor are the remaining sonnets much better; there is some drollery in the dialogue between Babieca and Rocinante, but the sonnets of the Knight of Phoebus and Solisdan are weak. There was no particular call for Cervantes to be funny, but if he thought otherwise it would have been just as well not to leave the fun out. ↩

The Knights of Phoebus or of the Sun⁠—Caballero del Febo, Espejo de Principes y Caballeros⁠—a ponderous romance by Diego Ortuñez de Calahorra and Marcos Martinez, in four parts, the first printed at Saragossa in 1562, the others at Alcalá de Henares in 1580. ↩

Solisdan is apparently a name invented by Cervantes, for no such personage figures in any known book of chivalry. ↩

See here. ↩

The national dish, the olla, of which the puchero of Central and Northern Spain is a poor relation, is a stew with beef, bacon, sausage, chickpeas, and cabbage for its prime constituents, and for ingredients any other meat or vegetable that may be available. There is nothing exceptional in Don Quixote’s olla being more a beef than a mutton one, for mutton is scarce in Spain except in the mountain districts. Salpicon (salad) is meat minced