Study Guide to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
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Study Guide to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Intelligent Education

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Study Guide to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Intelligent Education

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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, one of the most widely read texts from Spanish literature. As a novel of chivalry from Spain in the mid-sixteenth century, Don Quixote is a by-product of Renaissance idealism and the trend to narrate the extraordinary adventures of knights-errant. Moreover, critics have argued about the satirical nature of the book, wondering if its intent was to parody chivalrous novels from the years before. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Cervantes’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645423416
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INTRODUCTION TO MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a university town near Madrid, probably on September 29, the fourth of seven children of Rodrigo de Cervantes, an itinerant apothecary-surgeon of extremely limited means. We know almost nothing of the first twenty years of Cervantes’ life. His father moved the family several times, and it is probable that Miguel studied as a boy with the Jesuits in Seville. In 1568 he is known to have studied in the City School of Madrid, where he was a favored pupil of Juan López de Hoyos, a Spanish disciple of Erasmus. Cervantes’ first poems date from this period.
In 1569, Cervantes traveled to Italy, probably fleeing from the authorities, who had ordered the arrest of one Miguel de Cervantes in Madrid for his involvement in a duel, and condemned him in absentia to have his right hand cut off and to ten years of exile from the court.
In Italy, he served briefly in the entourage of Guilio Acquaviva, named cardinal in 1570, but soon joined the Spanish army in Naples, then under the Spanish crown. He fought in the historic naval battle of Lepanto, in 1571, where the Turkish fleet was defeated, and lost the use of his left hand as a result of one of several wounds. After a brief period of convalescence, he continued his military career, participating in the campaign of 1572-73 on the North Africa coast. The ship on which Miguel and his brother, Rodrigo, were returning to Spain in 1575 was captured by pirates, and the two were taken to Algiers as prisoners and held for ransom. Although Rodrigo was ransomed after two years, the sum demanded for Miguel’s release was not raised until 1580, when, after five years of captivity and several heroic but unsuccessful attempts to escape, he was finally able to return to Spain.
Cervantes married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios in 1584 and published his first novel, La Galatea, in 1585. During the mid-1580s he wrote a number of plays, of which only two, La Numantia and Pictures of Algiers, have survived. For a number of years beginning in 1587 he held the post of commissary of the government, which involved him in the requisitioning of supplies for the armed forces. His tenure in this post was marked by a series of financial and other difficulties with higher authorities, resulting in his being jailed briefly in 1592, and again for three months in 1597, for irregularities in his accounts, owing on the latter occasion to the failure of a banker with whom he had deposited government money.
In 1604, Cervantes moved to Valladolid, and published in 1605 the first part of Don Quixote. Though the work was an immediate success, his own share of the profits did not significantly improve his marginal financial situation. When the Court moved from Valladolid back to Madrid in 1606, Cervantes also returned, and in 1613 his collection of twelve short stories, the Exemplary Novels, was published. In 1614 his verse eulogy of contemporary authors, The Journey to Parnassus, appeared followed in 1615 by the second part of Don Quixote and Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes. Miguel de Cervantes died on April 22, 1616, and his last novel, The Hardships of Persiles and Sigismunda, was published posthumously in 1617.
HISTORICAL AND LITERARY BACKGROUND
Cervantes lived and wrote during what has since come to be called the Siglo de Oro - the Golden Century - a period spanning most of the 16th and 17th centuries, during which Spain achieved tremendous successes - political, military, literary, and artistic. The groundwork was laid for the ascendancy of this first of the modern nations which have successively taken the role of dominant power in Europe by the unification of the Crowns of Aragón and Castile through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469; by their successful completion, in 1492, of the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors, who had been pushed gradually further and further toward the straits of Gibraltar in the centuries since their initial holy war gained them almost the entire Iberian peninsula in 711; and by the discovery of America.
Charles V ascended to the throne in 1517, and, as king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, came to control a vast empire which included most of Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Spain, parts of France, and nearly all of Central and South America.
Spanish Inquisition
But if Cervantes was born at the close of the period of imperial expansion, in a Spain which still looked outward on the world, open to all of the intellectual ferment of Renaissance Europe, his literary production came at a time when Spain had turned in upon herself, having failed to achieve the Catholic unity of Europe which had been her ideal, and beset by foreign enemies from without, and by financial and economic instability from within. In the Spain of Philip II (1556-1598) and his successors, the works of Erasmus, who had been more popular in Spain than anywhere else in Europe, were banned by the Inquisition, and in 1559, Spain, which had founded a College for Spaniards in Bologna two centuries earlier, forbade any foreign study for her youth.
DEFEAT OF THE ARMADA
Cervantes’ own life is intimately bound up with major events on both sides of the watershed of Spain’s imperial destiny. He refers again and again in subsequent years to his participation in the great Spanish victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, which he saw as “the greatest occasion which any age, past, present, or future, ever saw or can ever hope to see” (II, Prologue); yet only seventeen years later, after the long African captivity and his return, impoverished, to Spain, he was reduced to the unpleasant post of government agent, requisitioning supplies for the ill-fated “Invincible” Armada, whose defeat in 1588 marked the beginning of the nation’s long and painful decline.
FROM RENAISSANCE TO BAROQUE PERIOD
This political and historical watershed between Spanish hegemony in Europe and decline and decadence has also its literary parallel, for if Cervantes was born and raised in the period of the full flowering of the Renaissance in Spain, he published his masterpiece in the early years of the Baroque period, in which the dominant elements of Renaissance style are intensified, exaggerated, twisted, parodied, and in general subjected to various kinds of extreme elaboration. If Renaissance literature in Spain is characterized by simplicity, clarity and elegance, as in the poetry of Garcilaso, for example, or the pastoral novels of Montemayor and Gil Polo, the characteristic productions of the Baroque are the brilliantly sensuous images of Góngora and the difficult Latinized syntax of his Soledades (1613), or the sharp and subtle word-play and hyperbolic satire of Quevedo’s Buscón (1626). The two major tendencies of Baroque style, conceptismo and cultismo, exemplified in Quevedo and in Góngora, respectively, share a common ground of complexity, exaggeration, stylization, and consequent unreality, which can be related to a pervasive feeling of doubt, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment, whether reflected in savage satire and parody, or in elegant escapism. The transitoriness of earthly existence, the deceptions of appearances, the inevitability of death - these are all themes common to both of these great Baroque writers, bitter enemies though they were of one another.
Cervantes seems to have absorbed the deepest and most central aspects of both the Renaissance and the Baroque sensibilities: a kind of Renaissance balance and serenity which embraces the full range of troubling Baroque uncertainty. As a learned Oriental critic has written, “Don Quixote was written with the pen of doubt upon the paper of conviction.
DON QUIXOTE AS TRANSITIONAL WORK
As is the case with many literary masterpieces, Don Quixote represents the culmination of what had gone before, as a kind of compendium of all of the main lines of the development of fiction in 16th-century Spain, and provides at the same time the foundation for the subsequent development of the novel. La Celestina (1499-1502), Fernando de Rojas’ novel in dialogue, can in turn be seen as the culmination of the Middle Ages and initiation of the Renaissance. In La Celestina, Rojas combined two central tendencies off Renaissance aesthetics - Neoplatonic idealism and the critical observation of reality. The rarified atmosphere in which the two noble lovers, Calixto and Melibea, live contrasts sharply with the crude reality of the go-between Celestina and the servants. Sixteenth-century fiction developed both of these lines in isolation, and not until their inspired fusion in Don Quixote, in 1605, were they brought together again.
The principal types of prose fiction in Spain during the hundred years before the publication of Don Quixote were the novels of chivalry and the pastoral novels, representing the ideal plane, and the picaresque, drawn from the direct critical observation of the most sordid aspects of contemporary Spanish life.
NOVELS OF CHIVALRY
The most widely read novels of the first half of the 16th century in Spain were the novels of chivalry. The progenitor of this literary vogue was Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadis of Gaul (1508.) It was the exploits of Amadis which led Don Quixote to choose him over Roland as his model. Medieval in inspiration (Montalvo’s Amadis is a reworking of 14th-century material), the novels of chivalry struck a responsive chord in Renaissance idealism. They narrate the extraordinary adventures of knights-errant, who perform fantastic deeds for the glory of their ladies, righting wrongs and protecting the innocent, in interminable peregrination through unknown lands. These novels are of course of central importance for the creation of Don Quixote, as the cause of Don Quixote’s madness and the pattern for his existence as knight-errant.
PASTORAL NOVELS
A second type of poetic, idealizing novel began to flourish in Spain with the publication of La Diana, by Jorge de Montemayor, in 1559, and became as popular in the second half of the century as the novels of chivalry had been in the first, though written for a more limited, aristocratic public. The models for these novels were works of the Italian Renaissance: Petrarch (Carmen Bucolicum), Boccaccio (Ninfale Fiesolano and Ameto), and above all Sannazaro, whose Arcadia (1504) was translated into Spanish in 1547.
A mixture of prose and verse, the pastoral novel places courtiers disguised as shepherds in an idealized bucolic setting of green fields and crystal springs, embroiled in insoluble amorous mismatchings which are the subject of endless Neoplatonic rationalizations and lyrical laments. If the novels of chivalry involve constant action, the pastoral genre substitutes a constant analysis which paralyzes action. It is nevertheless unwise to dismiss out of hand what strikes us today as a totally conventional and artificial genre, for Cervantes, whose first attempt at fiction, La Galatea (1585) was a pastoral novel, noted well the advance in psychological penetration which the genre represented, and important episodes in Part I of Don Quixote have their roots in the pastoral.
PICARESQUE NOVELS
Neither the chivalric nor the pastoral, however, provided Cervantes with the fictional world - contemporary reality - the language - unaffected contemporary Spanish, including slang and proverbs - or the tone - pervasive irony - which he needed for Don Quixote. All of these were to be found in the picaresque, and indigenous Spanish creation which began with the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554, and achieved its greatest public success in Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604), whose second part appeared only months before the first part of Don Quixote. The following are the principal characteristics of the genre:
1) autobiographical narration of the life of a picaro, who usually serves a succession of masters, which leads to
2) satire of different elements of society as seen through the eyes of the picaro, whose movements are restricted to
3) a socially and morally low plane, in a known geographical area. In order to survive in these circumstances, the picaro’s efforts are directed toward
4) the satisfaction of the most elementary necessities of life; the picaro’s antagonist is hunger.
5) Development of his own ingenuity and craftiness becomes essential for survival.
The picaro is an anti-hero, a “half-outsider” who looks at society with a jaundiced eye, the victim of his own weakness and society’s cynicism and hypocrisy. In one of Lazarillo’s masters, the squire, we can see one of the literary antecedents of Don Quixote. The proud but penniless squire, whose sense of his own importance far outstrips his own realistically appraised possibilities, is a pale fore-runner of the Manchegan knight, and Lazarillo pities the ma...

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