SOME EXAMPLES OF WRITERS WHO WERE INFLUENCED BY CERVANTES
Cervantes in the English Speaking World
Yamada, Yumiko
“Ben Jonson: A Neoclassical Response to Cervantes”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 3-24.
This essay argues that Ben Jonson (1572?-1637) was influenced by Cervantes through Thomas Shelton’s English translation of Don Quixote. Focusing on Jonson’s quotation from the Curate’s defence of the Aristotelian-Horatian dramatic canon in Part 1, it explores a parallel rivalry in playwriting – Jonson vs. Shakespeare as analogous to Cervantes vs. Lope de Vega. Like Jonson, Cervantes was a frustrated classical playwright, losing to Lope de Vega, the Spanish counterpart of Shakespeare, who preferred commercialism to classicism. It then relates chivalric romances, the main target of satire in Don Quixote, with the commercial theatre of Lope, by examining how the former was adapted on stage, as well as how the Spanish chivalric romance drifted onto the English stage. It concludes that Jonson’s first folio (1616) was an active response to the author of Don Quixote, who appears to struggle under similarly adverse conditions.
Koppenfels, Werner von
“Samuel Butler’s Hudibras: A Quixotic Perspective of Civil War”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 25-42.
The way Samuel Butler’s (1613-1680) Hudibras appropriates its Spanish pre-text in the dual mode of agreement and dissension is both highly original and characteristic of his epoch’s satiric and farcical approach to Don Quixote. Its quixotism, evident in Butler’s transformation of the Cervantine characters, episodes, and narrative voice, can be seen to serve as a broad metaphor for the pseudo-religious and pseudo-heroic madness of the self-styled Puritan saints and fighters of God, and thus constitutes an early Enlightenment critique of altered reason.
Borgmeier, Raimund
“Henry Fielding and his Spanish Model: ‘Our English Cervantes’”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 43-64.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was so deeply influenced by Cervantes that some of his contemporaries called him “our English Cervantes”. The impact the Spanish master and his Don Quixote had is to be traced, above all, in one play and two major novels, and one can observe that Fielding, more and more, artistically transformed the material he found in the Spanish original. In the ballad opera Don Quixote in England (1734) he brings the knight-errant and his squire to English soil, where they show their well-known idiosyncrasies and are confronted with English customs and institutions, which Fielding uses for satiric purposes. Fielding’s first major novel Joseph Andrews (1742) is also in many ways indebted to Cervantes, particularly as far as its narrative concept and comic approach are concerned. The main quixotic personage, however, is no longer the Spanish knight but an English country parson. In the author’s magnum opus, Tom Jones (1749), the Cervantine elements are still recognizable, yet transmuted even further.
Kleber, Felicitas
“Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 65-80.
The article is designed to reveal the influence that Cervantes and his Don Quixote had upon Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) and his Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The influence can be seen on various levels: most obvious are the allusions to Cervantes and Don Quixote as well as the influence on style, especially on narrative methods, on characters and character pairings, and on humour. Sterne paraphrases, echoes, and refers to Cervantes time and again. Different text passages of Sterne’s letters illustrate that he has reflected upon a conceptual Cervantean comedy. Sterne’s adaptation of a Cervantean comedy made – among others – Tristram Shandy itself a magnum opus of unique Sternean humour.
Pardo García, Pedro Javier
“Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker and the Cervantine Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 81-106.
Traditional accounts of Cervantes’ influence on Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) have focused on Launcelot Greaves to the detriment of the rest of his novels, particularly of Humphry Clinker. The author wants to demonstrate that this work is not only the summit of Smollett’s career, but also of his emulation of Cervantes and of the Cervantine tradition in eighteenth-century English fiction. Humphry Clinker provides a group not only of different forms of quixotism explored in previous eighteenth-century novels, but also of different aspects of the quixotic principle, that is, of the theory and practice of fiction implicit in Don Quixote, developed by Fielding and Sterne beyond Cervantes. The paper first deals with the three quixotic figures of the novel (Lismahago, Bramble and Clinker), then moves on to the Cervantine juxtaposition of romance and realism sometimes referred to as comic romance and finally discusses the Cervantine features of the dialogical interplay of consciousnesses.
Ehland, Christoph
“Tobias Smollett’s Quixotic Adventures”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 107-126
Despite the fact that there are writers in eighteenth-century England whose texts show a more detailed adaptation, even imitation of Cervantes’s style of narration, Tobias Smollett represents an author whose career and writing is arguably more closely related and indebted to the quixotic adventures than that of many others. Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote – in all probability plundered and compiled from earlier translations by a group of hack writers under his supervision – is as notorious as it is helpful to draw attention to the thinking of the canny Scotsman. His own novels are carefully balancing between various popular forms of literary expression. With regard to the backbone of his narrative argument, however, the reader finds Smollett’s writing closely related to the tone and outlook of Cervantes’s masterpiece. It is the quixotic rather than the picaresque world-view, which represents for Smollett the strategic cornerstone for an introspection of the anxieties of eighteenth-century Britain on its way to an economically minded civil society.
Gordon, Scott Paul
“Female Quixotism: Charlotte Lennox and Tabitha Tenney”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 127-142.
Critical consensus views female quixotism as a strategy to threaten patriarchal oppression, enabling heroines to act and speak in ways the dominant culture aims to suppress. This claim, however, registers our critical desires more than it attends to the curves of female quixotic narratives themselves. Charlotte Lennox’s (1729/30?-1804) Female Quixote (1752) and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s (1762-1837) Female Quixotism (1801) are profoundly conservative narratives that isolate imaginations that fail to conform to ‘common sense’ as unusual, in need of discipline: each narrative cures the Quixote so she can finally view the world as those around her have always viewed it. While these novels level a critique at the world that surrounds the Quixote, neither portrays quixotism as a creative reformation or escape from that dirty reality; instead, these texts insist that quixotism disables women from understanding either their own nature or the world around them.
Goetsch, Paul
“Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Don Quixote”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 143-158.
As the genesis of The Pickwick Papers (1836/37) indicates, Don Quixote is a less concrete source for the characters and episodes of Dickens’s novel than a general model which Dickens (1812-1870), like other English writers before him, chose to follow. At times, Pickwick is quite unlike Cervantes’ protagonist, he seems to be an inversion of the Don. As quixotic heroes, both of them are admirable characters because of the values they so ridiculously represent. Their servants, Sancho Panza and Sam Weller, are distant cousins. Sam also is Dickens’s surrogate and acts as the protector of the Pickwickian vision of the world. It must be also pointed out that Don Quixote and The Pickwick Papers respond to different historical contexts.
Wonham, Henry B.
“Mark Twain: The American Cervantes”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 159-161.
Don Quixote epitomized for Mark Twain (1835-1910) the power of fiction to expose the “colossal humbugs” that play such an important role in social and political life, and he cultivated an image of himself as “the American Cervantes”. Many of his most celebrated characters, such as Tom Sawyer and Colonel Mulberry Sellers, are direct descendants of Don Quixote, and Twain repeatedly borrowed the basic patterns of Cervantean comedy to narrate their modern American adventures. As his most Cervantean novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), makes clear, however, Twain’s tutelage under his Spanish mentor produced a more complex set of affinities as well, and it is finally in Twain’s ambivalent attitude toward “humbugs”, past and present, that his debt to Cervantes is most clearly felt.
Schenkel, Elmar
“G. K. Chesterton: The Return of Don Quixote”.
In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World.
(Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 162-180.
G. K. Chesterton’s (1874-1936) novel The Return of Don Quixote (1927), like The Flying Inn (1914) or The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), belongs to his so-called “quixotic works” which all conduct a similar experiment by re-introducing the Middle Ages into the twentieth century. In this novel, the role of Don Quixote is given to more than one character just as there is more than one quest. Chesterton’s belief in distributism, a third way between the economic systems, is debated and linked to medieval thought, and industrial capitalism is judged by the modern Don Quixote. The quest for a reconstruction of society is accompanied by the quest for a particular red colour, another link to medieval culture. This paper attempts to show how Chesterton’s novel uses quixotic comedy to throw into relief the blind spots of modernity.
Fernández-Morera, Darío & Michael Hanke
“Roy Campbell: Quixote Redivivus”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 181-190.
Among twentieth-century poets, Roy Campbell (1901-1957) has come closest to personifying the paradoxes and virtues which have made Don Quixote immortal. Admired by those who shared his views, vilified by his opponents, he became one important leader of the South African political establishment when, in the 1920s, he took his stand against racial prejudice. Ten years later he was attacked by the left-wing poets in Britain as a ‘fascist’ when he supported the Spanish Catholics during the Spanish Civil War in Flowering Rifle (1939), and when, more far-sighted than many contemporaries, he denounced Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin alongside Hitler. In the mid-fifties he translated major Spanish verse plays, among them Cervantes’Numantia. He continued to regard Spain as his spiritual home, and Toledo in particular as “this heavenly place which means more than all the world to me”, thus bearing testimony to his conviction that the country of Don Quixote had remained “topical and actual”. The difference between Campbell and Don Quixote was Campbell’s awareness of his precarious position and his willingness to act out a role he had chosen to play.
Ginés, Montserrat
“Walker Percy’s Enraged and Bemused Quixotes”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 191-204.
Walker Percy (1916-1990) casts an ironic eye on the last vestiges of the chivalrous ideal being played out in contemporary America. He depicts an ironic tale of maladjustment between the actions and attitudes of his characters, trapped in a chivalrous-heroic conception of the world, and the prevailing social conventions in which they are immersed. Bewildered, as the protagonist of TheLast Gentleman (1966) or angry as the hero of Lancelot (1977), they bear comparison with Don Quixote. Percy’s ‘Quixotes’ attempt to impose their own idealistic life views on a world imbued with far different values and realities, against which they are constantly banging their heads. Through his ‘Quixotes’, Percy rebukes the southern heroic ideal for its failure to accept the commonplace, but not without nostalgia for the loss of the finer qualities of the old ethics swept away by the process of cultural homogenization experienced by contemporary American society.
Iván Torrijos ©