Don Quixote
Don Quixote: The Hero Enchanted by Books
With its preposterous inns full of belated characters from Italian storybooks and its preposterous mountains teeming with lovelorn poetasters disguised as Arcadian shepherds, the picture Cervantes paints of the country is about as true and typical of seventeenth-century Spain as Santa Claus is true and typical of the twentieth-century North Pole. Indeed, Cervantes seems to know Spain as little as Gogol did central Russia . . . throughout these adventures there is a mass of monstrous inaccuracies at every step. The author avoids descriptions that would be particular and might be verified. It is quite impossible to follow these rambles in central Spain across four of six provinces, in the course of which until we reach Barcelona in the northeast one does not meet with a single known town or cross a single river. Cervantes’s ignorance of places is wholesale and absolute, even in respect of Argamasilla in the La Mancha district, which some consider the more or less definite starting point.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote
Few works in Western literature present a greater problem of disproportion than Don Quixote. Nabokov begins with the geography. The book is now inseparable from Spain, yet the country through which its hero travels cannot be followed reliably on a map. Its inns, roads, mountains, shepherds, and castles belong less to documentary Spain than to a literary country assembled from romances, pastoral conventions, and comic necessity. This does not make the novel less Spanish. It establishes at the outset that the world of Don Quixote cannot be reduced to the author’s reported knowledge of actual places.
The disproportion extends to the Cervantine canon. Cervantes wrote extensively, yet nothing else attributed to him approaches the literary stature or historical influence of the work upon which his reputation overwhelmingly rests. La Galatea, the Exemplary Novels, Journey to Parnassus, and the posthumous Persiles and Sigismunda survive principally because their author was Cervantes; Don Quixote belongs to world literature. The disparity does not demonstrate that Cervantes did not write the novel. Literary genius need not distribute itself evenly across a career. It is nevertheless sufficiently remarkable to justify comparison, particularly because Don Quixote repeatedly complicates the question of who wrote it.
The Novel That Disputes Its Own Authorship
In the prologue to the First Part, Cervantes describes himself as one who “in show” appears to be the father of Don Quixote but is in truth only his “step-father.” Within the narrative the complication becomes more elaborate. The history is repeatedly attributed to the otherwise unknown Arabian historian Cid Hamet Benengeli, whose manuscript the narrator encounters by chance and causes to be translated into Spanish. Authorship, translation, discovery, attribution, and literary mediation are woven into the fiction itself.
Cervantes returned to uncertain attribution in the preface to his Exemplary Novels, where he called himself
the author of Galatea, Don Quixote de la Mancha, The Journey to Parnassus, which he wrote in imitation of Cesare Caporali Perusino, and other works which are current among the public, and perhaps without the author’s name.
The remark need not be interpreted as a confession of pseudonymous authorship. It does make anonymity and uncertain attribution legitimate subjects of inquiry rather than ideas imposed upon Cervantes entirely from outside.
In Attributing Authorship, Harold Love summarizes the principles of Saint Jerome, as discussed by Michel Foucault, for determining scriptural canonicity. Among them is the principle that “if among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be withdrawn from the list of the author’s works.” Considered solely from the standpoint of literary distinction, Don Quixote presents something resembling the inverse problem: one work towers over the remainder of the attributed corpus. Again, this is not evidence of alternative authorship. It is an anomaly that makes comparative investigation reasonable.
The possibility of Bacon’s involvement in Don Quixote was argued most extensively by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, barrister and Member of Parliament, whose substantial collection is now held by the University of London. Durning-Lawrence went considerably further than the argument proposed here. He believed that Thomas Shelton’s English Don Quixote, published in 1612, represented the original work and that the Spanish Quixote of 1605 derived from an English antecedent.
That extraordinary proposition must be distinguished from the narrower question considered in this chapter. No claim that Bacon wrote Don Quixote is necessary to recognize that the novel contains a considerable number of correspondences with Bacon and with the Shakespearean works. Some are proverbial or verbal. Others concern ideas sufficiently specific to warrant closer examination. A number of the latter appear not to have been previously remarked.
Chronology is indispensable. Where a parallel occurs only in Shelton’s English translation, it may tell us something about Shelton or the English literary environment without necessarily telling us anything about the Spanish text of 1605. Where the underlying thought or expression can also be established in the Spanish, the problem is different. The parallels that follow should therefore not all be assigned the same evidentiary weight.
The novel itself supplies a model of this difficulty. Its history passes through successive hands: an original actor, an Arabian historian, a chance discoverer, a translator, an editor, and finally the ostensible author who places the result before the reader. Don Quixote does not merely tell a story. It dramatizes the instability of literary transmission.
The Book Found in a Corner
In Chapter IX the narrator encounters old papers in the market at Toledo:
Being one day walking in the exchange of Toledo, a certain boy by chance would have sold divers old quires and scrolls of books to a squire that walked up and down in that place, and I, being addicted to read such scrolls, though I found them torn in the streets, borne away by this my natural inclination, took one of the quires in my hand, and perceived it to be written in Arabical characters, and seeing that although I knew the letters, yet could I not read the substance, I looked about to view whether I could perceive any Moor turned Spaniard thereabouts that could read them.
The narrator hires a translator, takes him home, and has the manuscript rendered into Castilian:
He demanded fifty pounds of raisins and three bushels of wheat, and promised to translate them speedily, well, and faithfully. But I, to hasten the matter more, lest I should lose such an unexpected and welcome treasure, brought him to my house, where he translated all the work in less than a month and a half, even in the manner that it is here recounted.
This device allows the narrator simultaneously to transmit the story and to displace responsibility for it. The history is not simply written. It is found, recovered, translated, and mediated.
Thomas Shelton’s 1612 English edition adds another layer. Shelton claims in his dedication that he translated Don Quixote five or six years earlier, completing the work “in the space of forty days” at the insistence of a friend, after which he discarded it:
Having translated some five or six years ago, the History of Don Quixote, out of the Spanish tongue into English, in the space of forty days, being thereunto more than half enforced through the importunity of a very dear friend that was desirous to understand the subject, after I had given him once a view thereof, I cast it aside, where it lay long time neglected in a corner, and so little regarded by me, as I never once set hand to review or correct the same. Since when, at the entreaty of others my friends, I was content to let it come to light, conditionally that someone or other would peruse and amend the errors escaped, my many affairs hindering me from undergoing that labour.
The resemblance to the prefatory account of François de La Noue’s Discours politiques et militaires is unusually close in conception. The French Discours appeared in 1587. Edward Aggas’s English translation bears the same year on its title page, although its colophon is dated 1588. The near-simultaneous translation is striking. La Noue’s work crossed from French into English almost immediately after its first appearance.
The prefatory epistle was written by La Noue’s friend Philippe Canaye, sieur du Fresne. He describes discovering a neglected body of writing:
I chanced to lay my hand upon a heap of papers thrown aside in a corner, as things not regarded, and finding that they deserved to be more diligently gathered together, I began very gladly to read them over; but he would not suffer me, saying they were but scribblings whereon he had employed the most tedious hours of his leisure during his long and straight imprisonment; likewise that among them there was nothing worth the sight, because his continual exercise in warfare wherein he had employed himself had denied him all opportunity to endite well, as also that in these discourses especially, as never meaning other than to pass away the time, he had taken no pains with the polishing or filing of them, and that he was determined never to take them in hand again.
Canaye nevertheless becomes determined to recover the writings:
The taste that I had then gotten did so set me on edge that all his denial and despising of them did the more confirm me in my desire, neither did I ever ease until by sundry means I had gotten sometime one and sometime another, so long till at length I had gathered all this book.
Having gathered the scattered material, Canaye decides that it is too valuable to remain hidden:
Afterward having more carefully considered of the value of my booty, accounting it more precious and profitable than to be kept in the bottom of a hutch, I did what I might to persuade the author thereof to publish it; but in the end seeing that he made so small account of the same, that there was no means to obtain his consent, I adventured unawares to him to go through with my enterprise.
He even anticipates that La Noue may resent both the publication and the attachment of his name to the book.
Found manuscripts, reluctant authors, and books recovered by friends possess a long literary ancestry. The details should not be treated as proof of common authorship. Their concentration remains notable: discarded papers; a corner; recovery by another person; an intermediary who values what the supposed author does not; rapid or imperfect preparation; publication caused by the insistence of friends; uncertainty about the author’s willingness to be named; and imprisonment forming part of the history of composition.
The last feature deserves emphasis. La Noue’s Discours was represented as the product of his captivity at Limburg. Cervantes, in the prologue to Don Quixote, describes his book as having been “engendered in a prison.” The works share an association between literary production and captivity as well as a history of neglected and recovered papers.
The chronology divides the evidence into two layers. Before 1605, La Noue supplies a possible antecedent for a prison-born book, recovered papers, uncertain authorization, and an attack on chivalric reading. In 1612 Shelton adds a specifically English echo to Aggas’s paratext: his translation lies neglected “in a corner” before friends bring it to light. This later resemblance concerns the English presentation of Don Quixote. It should not be projected backward into the Spanish text without further evidence.
La Noue and the Reader Who Acts His Books
La Noue matters for a reason deeper than the circumstances of publication. His sixth discourse is entitled “That the reading of the books of Amadis de Gaul, and such like, is no less hurtful to youth, than the works of Machiavel to age.” It joins two forms of literary miseducation that appear, at first sight, to have little in common.
La Noue begins by confessing that he once delighted in Machiavelli:
I have heretofore greatly delighted in reading Machiavel’s Discourses and his Prince, because in the same he entreats of high and goodly politic and martial affairs, which many gentlemen are desirous to learn, as matters meet for their professions. And I must needs confess that so long as I was content slightly to run them over, I was blinded with the gloss of his reasons. But after I did with more ripe judgment thoroughly examine them, I found under that fair show many hidden errors, leading those that walk in them into the paths of dishonour and damage.
He recommends an anonymous work:
If any man doubt of my sayings, I would wish him to read a book entitled Antimachiavellus, the author whereof I know not, and there shall he see that I am not altogether deceived.
This is the Anti-Machiavel, the subject of a later chapter in this book. He then turns directly to Amadis:
Neither do I think greatly to deceive myself though I also affirm the books of Amadis to be very fit instruments for the corruption of manners, which I am determined to prove in few words, to the end to dissuade innocent youth from entangling themselves in these invisible snares which are so subtly laid for them.
Machiavelli and Amadis represent two different forms of enchantment. Machiavelli’s arguments possess a persuasive “gloss” concealing “hidden errors.” The chivalric romances conceal “invisible snares” beneath rhetorical pleasure. One supplies a political doctrine; the other supplies attractive models of love, honour, combat, and conduct. Both can reorganize judgment before the reader recognizes what has happened.
La Noue calls the supposed author of the Amadis books a “courtly magician.” He charges the romances with mixing marvels and pleasing representations so cunningly that their poison will be received with delight. Enchantment, voluptuousness, private combat, and the displacement of ordinary duties become parts of a single moral criticism. Knights obey the artificial rules of adventure even when sovereign, father, or mother commands otherwise. The new laws of chivalry threaten to erase duties that nature and society have engraved upon the mind.
Near the end of the discourse La Noue describes the effect upon an indiscreet reader:
For although the wiser sort do account such knightly prowesses and giantlike strength, wherewith the reader is so importuned, to be but fables, yet the more indiscreet, under so sweet a charm of words cannot forbear, but remember some such draughts as are most conformable to their affections, to the end afterward as occasion may serve to try them, thinking thereby to be more active than others. True it is that sometime by the scoffs that they incur, they are reclaimed from these errors. But we are not to permit them to proceed to these experiences, but rather to propound unto them true documents, and to hide from them the false, so to keep them from failing. When a man hath bestowed all his time in reading the books of Amadis, yet will it not all make him a good soldier or warrior. For to attain to be the one or the other, he shall need nothing that therein is contained.
This is more than a general denunciation of improbable books. La Noue describes a reader who retains chivalric exploits in his memory, attempts to reproduce them when an occasion presents itself, becomes an object of ridicule, and may finally be reclaimed from error by the scoffs he suffers. It is an extraordinary anticipation of the governing action of Don Quixote.
Don Quixote’s reading produces an imagined identity. That identity governs conduct. Ordinary objects and encounters are interpreted as chivalric adventures. The inevitable collision with the world produces laughter, humiliation, injury, and eventual disillusionment. La Noue supplies the sequence before Cervantes turns it into fiction: seductive books, internalized models, attempted imitation, collision with experience, and correction through ridicule.
Modern scholarship has not entirely overlooked La Noue’s importance. Marc Fumaroli placed his criticism of Amadis within the history of the polemic against chivalric romance and the emergence of the modern novel. Grace E. Coolidge cites him as a witness to the changing reception of Amadis. Hervé Drévillon states briefly that La Noue was imitated by Cervantes. What appears not to have received academic treatment is the full concentration of paratextual and narrative correspondences: the prison, the neglected papers, the intermediary, publication without consent, Shelton’s corner, and the passage predicting that the reader of Amadis will attempt his books and be corrected by mockery.
No direct borrowing need be asserted. No Castilian translation of the Discours before 1605, or documentary evidence that Cervantes possessed the French edition, has yet been located. The English edition demonstrates the speed of La Noue’s international circulation, not Cervantes’s access to it. The safer conclusion is also the more substantial one: La Noue formulated, before Don Quixote, the intellectual problem, the social danger, and even the comic corrective that Cervantes made into the structure of his novel.
The question is larger than whether giants are really windmills. What happens when representations acquire greater authority over the mind than reality itself?
Bacon and the False Imagination of Honour
Bacon addressed the same problem in a different setting. In 1614 he published The Charge Touching Duels, delivered in the Star Chamber against William Priest and Richard Wright. The immediate subject was private combat. The larger subject was the power of an imagined code to displace religion, law, moral virtue, and public authority.
Bacon begins with the removal of revenge from the magistrate:
When revenge is once extorted out of the magistrate’s hand, contrary to God’s ordinance, Mihi vindicta, ego retribuam, and every man shall bear the sword not to defend but to assail, and private men begin once to presume to give law to themselves and to right their own wrongs, no man can foresee the dangers and inconveniences that may arise and multiply thereupon. It may cause sudden storms in court, to the disturbance of his Majesty and unsafety of his person. It may grow from quarrels to banding, and from banding to trooping, and so to tumult and commotion; from particular persons to dissension of families and alliances, yea, to national quarrels, according to the infinite variety of accidents which fall not under foresight; so that the state by this means shall be like to a distempered and imperfect body, continually subject to inflammations and convulsions.
The duel does not merely violate a particular statute. It establishes a competing jurisdiction:
This offence expressly gives the law an affront, as if there were two laws, one a kind of gown-law and the other a law of reputation, as they term it; so that Paul’s and Westminster, the pulpit and the courts of justice, must give place to the law of ordinary tables and such reverent assemblies; the year-books and statute-books must give place to some French and Italian pamphlets which handle the doctrine of duels; which if they be in the right, transeamus ad illa, let us receive them, and not keep the people in conflict and distraction between two laws.
The reference to “French and Italian pamphlets” is particularly suggestive beside La Noue. Printed doctrines of honour do not remain on the page. They produce rival rules of conduct. Bacon’s duellist inhabits a conflict between statute books and the literature of reputation, much as Don Quixote inhabits a conflict between ordinary law and the ordinances of knight-errantry.
Bacon then identifies the imaginative cause of the practice:
Touching the causes of it, the first motive no doubt is a false and erroneous imagination of honour and credit; and therefore the King, in his last proclamation, doth most aptly and excellently call them bewitching duels. For, if one judge of it truly, it is no better than a sorcery that enchanteth the spirits of young men that bear great minds with a false show, species falsa, and a kind of satanical illusion and apparition of honour; against religion, against law, against moral virtue, and against the precedents and examples of the best times and valiantest nations.
These words belong very naturally beside Don Quixote. Bacon’s young men possess “great minds,” but their magnanimity has been captured by a false appearance. They are not simply cowards or murderers. They mistake an apparition of honour for honour itself. The error is sustained by collective opinion:
The seed of this mischief being such, it is nourished by vain discourses and green and unripe conceits, which nevertheless have so prevailed, as though a man were stayed and sober-minded, and a right believer touching the vanity and unlawfulness of these duels, yet the stream of vulgar opinion is such as it imposeth a necessity upon men of value to conform themselves; or else there is no living or looking upon men’s faces. So that we have not to do in this case so much with particular persons as with unsound and depraved opinions.
The duellist is governed by a social fiction that has become coercive. Even someone who understands the practice to be irrational may feel compelled to participate because reputation is assigned by others. A false system survives through custom, fear, and public expectation. Bacon therefore treats the disease at the level of representation and opinion as well as punishment.
La Noue had described the same deformation of honour in the sixth discourse. The author of Amadis, he says, teaches that “the highest point of knights’ honour consists in cutting one another’s throats for frivolous matters.” Such spectacles can persuade young readers that “they still must be fighting with one or other, to the end to be esteemed of and feared.” La Noue even suggests that these literary impressions may have multiplied the quarrels of France.
The convergence is unusually close. La Noue identifies the chivalric book as a school of false honour. Bacon calls the duel a false imagination and an enchantment. Don Quixote dramatizes a reader whose mind has been reorganized by precisely such books. In each case honour becomes a representation that governs conduct more powerfully than law or experience.
Knight-errantry is consequently more than Don Quixote’s costume. It constitutes a rival jurisdiction. He appoints himself a public officer without public authority. He decides which injuries require correction, which captives deserve release, which strangers must acknowledge Dulcinea, and which ordinary encounters belong to the universal history of chivalry. The books furnish precedents, statutes, offices, ceremonies, and punishments. When ordinary law contradicts this system, ordinary law is judged deficient.
Bacon’s language could almost describe this condition: “private men begin once to presume to give law to themselves, and to right their own wrongs.” Don Quixote’s benevolent intentions do not remove the political danger. His desire to rescue the oppressed repeatedly places other people in danger because his jurisdiction exists only in his imagination.
The liberation of the galley slaves gives the problem its clearest expression. Don Quixote sees men constrained by force and concludes that they must be restored to liberty. He refuses the judgments by which they have been condemned and substitutes his private determination of justice. The act resembles heroic deliverance within the chivalric system. Within the civil world it is an assault upon the administration of law. His books have transformed presumption into duty.
Bacon does not answer false valour with timidity. He distinguishes genuine fortitude from the waste of life upon unworthy causes:
Men have almost lost the true notion and understanding of fortitude and valour. For fortitude distinguisheth of the grounds of quarrels, whether they be just; and not only so, but whether they be worthy; and setteth a better price upon men’s lives than to bestow them idly. Nay, it is weakness and disesteem of a man’s self to put a man’s life upon such ledger performances. A man’s life is not to be trifled away; it is to be offered up and sacrificed to honourable services, public merits, good causes, and noble adventures. It is in expense of blood as it is in expense of money: it is no liberality to make a profusion of money upon every vain occasion, nor no more is it fortitude to make effusion of blood except the cause be of worth.
This distinction returns the discussion to the heroic archetype. Courage is not abolished. It is recalled from theatrical violence and directed toward “honourable services, public merits, good causes, and noble adventures.” The problem lies in the cause, the judgment, and the object of sacrifice.
Don Quixote himself gives a closely related account of valour as a mean between cowardice and rashness:
Valour is a virtue betwixt two vicious extremes, as cowardice and rashness; but it is less dangerous for him that is valiant to rise to a point of rashness than to fall or touch upon the coward. For, as it is more easy for a prodigal man to be liberal than a covetous, so it is easier for a rash man to be truly valiant than a coward to come to true valour . . . for it sounds better in the hearer’s ears, “Such a knight is rash and hardy,” than “Such a knight is fearful and cowardly.”
The doctrine of virtue as a mean between extremes is Aristotelian. The qualification is more distinctive. The two departures from the mean are not equivalent. Rashness retains something of courage; cowardice represents its defect. Bacon makes the same qualification while interpreting Icarus, Scylla, and Charybdis in The Wisdom of the Ancients:
The path of virtue lies straight between excess on the one side, and defect on the other. And no wonder that excess should prove the bane of Icarus, exulting in juvenile strength and vigour; for excess is the natural vice of youth, as defect is that of old age; and if a man must perish by either, Icarus chose the better of the two; for all defects are justly esteemed more depraved than excesses. There is some magnanimity in excess, that, like a bird, claims kindred with the heavens; but defect is a reptile, that basely crawls upon the earth.
This preserves the complexity of Don Quixote’s heroism. His actions are absurd, destructive, and founded upon delusion. His hunger for honour, courage, action, and remembered worth belongs to the ancient heroic tradition that the novel parodies. He is ridiculous without being contemptible. That heroic hunger appears directly when Don Quixote explains fame to Sancho:
I’ll tell you, Sancho, this desire of honour is an itching thing. What dost thou think cast Horatius from the bridge all armed into deep Tiber? What egged Curtius to launch himself into the lake? What made Mutius burn his hand? What forced Caesar against all the soothsayers to pass the Rubicon? And, to give you more modern examples, what was it bored those ships, and left those valorous Spaniards on ground, guided by the most courteous Cortez in the New World? All these and other great and several exploits are, have been, and shall be the works of fame, which mortals desire as a reward and part of the immortality which their famous acts deserve.
Bacon compresses the same psychology in “Of Fame”:
Fame is of that force, as there is scarcely any great action, wherein it hath not a great part.
The desire for fame produces genuine achievement and grotesque imitation. Don Quixote exposes the danger without dismissing the desire itself. Heroic action must be judged by the worth of its cause, the truth of its circumstances, and its relation to public good.
Sancho and the Rebellion of Particulars
Don Quixote begins with books and forces experience to conform to them. His general system precedes his encounters with the world. When a particular contradicts the system, enchantment preserves the system. Inns become castles, windmills become giants, sheep become armies, and ordinary people become figures from romance.
In Bacon’s terms, Don Quixote proceeds by anticipation. Received authorities furnish his axioms before he encounters experience. He does not ascend cautiously from particulars. He descends from a completed imaginative system and assigns every object its predetermined meaning.
This is closely related to Bacon’s idols. The idols are not simply isolated mistakes. They are recurrent structures through which the mind distorts experience: inherited systems, linguistic conventions, personal predispositions, and philosophical constructions that interpose themselves between the understanding and the world. Bacon calls received systems “stage plays” representing worlds of their own creation. Don Quixote inhabits such a theatrical world and attempts to draw everyone he meets onto its stage.
Sancho repeatedly reports the stubborn particulars. The objects are windmills. The building is an inn. The supposed armies are sheep. The enchanted lady is an ordinary country woman. His body, his appetite, his proverbs, and his concern for material consequences continually return the narrative to the world that Don Quixote’s books suppress.
Sancho is not an experimental philosopher in disguise. He is credulous, self-interested, frightened, affectionate, and often confused. His importance lies in his relation to experience. He knows the world through labour, hunger, pain, animals, money, neighbours, and proverbial memory. His understanding is limited, but it is answerable to consequences.
Even Sancho’s resistance can be compromised. Don Quixote promises him an island and a governorship. Political advancement gives Sancho an interest in maintaining the imaginative system he repeatedly doubts. He may know that the castle is an inn, but he also wants the reward available only within his master’s romance.
False philosophy therefore survives through more than intellectual error. It recruits loyalty through promise, patronage, affection, and hope. Sancho’s anticipated island performs a political function. It binds the witness of inconvenient particulars to the system that misinterprets them.
The comedy becomes more subtle as master and servant influence one another. Sancho begins by correcting Don Quixote, then learns to manipulate the chivalric fiction. Don Quixote, meanwhile, sometimes displays greater wisdom in ordinary conversation than the people who laugh at him. Particular and system, folly and wisdom, are not distributed permanently between two characters.
The promised island eventually becomes a real government, and Sancho governs better than anyone expects. His practical judgments reveal the moral capacities concealed beneath his apparent simplicity. Yet the governorship is also another staged world created for amusement. Even when Sancho enters political authority, he does so inside a fiction devised by others.
The relationship between the two men prevents the novel from becoming a simple allegory of reason defeating imagination. Sancho’s particulars correct Don Quixote, but Don Quixote’s imaginative generosity enlarges Sancho. Experience without aspiration can become merely cautious; aspiration without experience becomes destructive. Their companionship gives the book its humanity.
Poetry, History, and the Office of Fiction
The criticism of chivalric romance does not lead Cervantes to reject imaginative literature. Don Quixote answers corrupted fiction by creating a more capacious fiction. The novel repeatedly asks what poetry may do, how it differs from history, and how invention can remain answerable to truth.
Several correspondences with Bacon concern this theory of literature rather than isolated expressions.
Prose and Feigned History
Cervantes writes:
la Epica tambien puede escrebirse en prosa, como en verso
Epics can also be written in prose, as in verse.
Bacon writes in The Advancement of Learning:
Feigned history . . . may be styled as well in prose as in verse.
Both writers refuse to define imaginative or “feigned” literature by verse form. Poetry, in the larger sense, may be written in prose. This proposition is particularly appropriate to the work that helped establish the possibilities of extended prose fiction.
Art and Nature
Don Quixote observes:
Art goes not beyond nature, but only perfects it; so that nature and art mixed together, and art with nature, make an excellent poet.
Bacon writes in De Augmentis Scientiarum:
Poetry is not art, but abuse of art, when instead of perfecting nature it perverts her.
The conception belongs to an older philosophical tradition and cannot by itself establish a direct connection. Its significance increases beside the further correspondences concerning poetry and history. Art operates upon nature. Its legitimate function is to perfect rather than violate it.
The Poet and the Historian
Don Quixote distinguishes the two offices:
It is one thing to write like a poet, and another like an historian: the poet may say or sing things not as they were, but as they ought to have been; and the historian must write things, not as they ought to be, but as they have been, without adding or taking away aught from the truth.
Bacon’s De Augmentis describes narrative poetry as that which
raises the mind and carries it aloft, accommodating the shows of things to the desires of the mind, not, like reason and history, buckling and bowing down the mind to the nature of things.
The correspondence is conceptual rather than lexical. History submits itself to things as they are or were. Poetry possesses another liberty: it can accommodate the represented world to desire or to what ought to have been.
This distinction becomes the central comic mechanism of Don Quixote. The knight behaves as though the poetic world of things as they ought to be possesses authority over the historical world of things as they are. His error is not imagination alone. It is the application of poetic liberty to ordinary perception and public action.
Literature as a Mirror
Hamlet defines the purpose of playing:
Anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.
Don Quixote similarly declares:
Seeing the comedy, as Tully affirms, ought to be a mirror of man’s life, a pattern of manners, and an image of truth.
The mirror metaphor has a long classical and Renaissance history, and Don Quixote invokes Cicero. The importance lies in the judgment attached to it. Dramatic representation should render recognizable life and truth rather than merely produce spectacle.
Love and Hyperbole
Don Quixote describes Dulcinea as
the subject on which the extremity of all commendations may rightly be conferred, how hyperbolical soever it may be.
Bacon writes in “Of Love”:
The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love.
Bacon identifies a rule of rhetorical decorum: continuous exaggeration, normally a defect, becomes appropriate in love. Don Quixote applies that principle to Dulcinea. Hyperbole is not merely his manner of describing her. It is one of the instruments by which he creates her.
Truth, Falsehood, and Pleasure
Don Quixote observes:
An untruth is so much the more pleasing, by how much nearer it resembles the truth.
Bacon writes in “Of Truth”:
A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.
Both passages describe the pleasure produced by an intermixture of truth and falsehood. Bacon asks why human beings should love lies even when they provide neither political advantage nor material pleasure. Don Quixote similarly recognizes that falsehood becomes more attractive as it approaches truth.
The correspondence touches the novel’s central epistemological problem. Don Quixote is constructed from mixtures of history and invention, truthful narration and deliberate fabrication, authentic authors and fictional ones. The reader occupies the unstable territory between truth and fiction that Don Quixote inhabits between experience and romance.
The Storehouse of Lost Knowledge
Don Quixote is told:
If the statutes and ordinances of knight-errantry were lost, they might be found again in your breast, as in their own storehouse and register.
Bacon records in The Advancement of Learning that
certain critics are used to say hyperbolically, that if all sciences were lost, they might be found in Virgil.
The construction is unusually close: if an entire body of knowledge were lost, it could be reconstructed from one exemplary possessor of it. The subject changes from Virgil and the sciences to Don Quixote and knight-errantry, and the effect becomes comic. The knight has internalized his books so completely that he has become their living repository.
The larger paradox can now be stated. Don Quixote condemns false books through an invented history attributed to a fictional historian and recovered in translation. Cervantes does not answer deceptive representation by abandoning fiction. He makes fiction display its own mechanisms of enchantment, pleasure, error, judgment, and correction.
Documentary Parallel Dossier
The following parallels vary considerably in character and significance. Some involve proverbs or proverbial formulations. Some involve turns of phrase also found in Shakespeare. Others concern moral psychology or political conduct. They are preserved because their cumulative extent is historically interesting. No argument should depend upon treating them as equivalent forms of evidence.
Many of the parallels in the first portion of this collection were assembled by Francis Carr in Who Wrote Don Quixote? (2005) and are reproduced here with the permission of Philip Carr. Other correspondences, particularly those discussed separately in this chapter, were found independently.
The chronological history of each expression requires individual study. An expression found in Shakespeare, Bacon’s Promus, and Shelton’s English Don Quixote presents a different problem depending upon whether an earlier Spanish or continental witness can be demonstrated. The list is therefore documentary before it is polemical.
Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the title page of the 1619 “False Folio,” falsely dated 1600:
Post tenebras lux: After darkness, light.
Don Quixote, title page of the first Spanish edition, 1605:
Post tenebras spero lucem: After darkness I hope for light.
The underlying image belongs to a biblical and proverbial tradition associated with Job. The modification deserves attention: Don Quixote transforms the declaration “after darkness, light” into an expression of expectation.
The Merchant of Venice: All that glisters is not gold.
Don Quixote: All is not gold that glisters.
Bacon, Promus: All is not gold that glisters.
Don Quixote: He that gives quickly, gives twice.
Bacon, Promus: He who gives quickly, gives twice.
Don Quixote: Look not a given horse in the mouth.
Bacon, Promus: To look a given horse in the mouth.
Don Quixote: Might overcomes right.
Bacon, Promus: Might overcomes right.
Henry IV, Part II: O God, that right should overcome this might.
Don Quixote: The nearer the church, the further from God.
Bacon, Promus: The nearer the church, the further from God.
Don Quixote: One swallow makes not a summer.
Bacon, Promus: One swallow maketh no summer.
Timon of Athens: The swallow follows not the summer.
These examples become more interesting where Don Quixote and the Promus reproduce substantially the same formulation. The Promus was Bacon’s private collection of expressions, quotations, proverbs, salutations, and verbal materials. A considerable number possess parallels in the Shakespearean works. Related material in Don Quixote creates a three-way textual problem: Bacon, Shakespeare, and the English Quixote.
Fortune, Law, and Conduct
Don Quixote: Everyone is the son of his own works.
Every man is the artificer of his own fortune.
Bacon, “Of Fortune”:
But chiefly the mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.
King Lear:
When we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behavior.
The underlying idea is ancient. The recurrence in the language of manufacture is worth observing: man as artificer, fortune as something moulded by human action.
Don Quixote:
Statutes not kept are the same as if they were not made.
Bacon, note to Queen Elizabeth:
The cessation and abstinence to execute these unnecessary laws do mortify the execution of such as are wholesome.
Measure for Measure:
In time the rod becomes more mocked than feared.
The political principle is related. Law derives practical authority from enforcement. A statute habitually disregarded ceases to function effectively, while neglected enforcement weakens respect even for laws that ought to be obeyed.
Don Quixote:
He who does not rise with the sun does not enjoy the day.
Bacon, Promus:
To rise early is very healthy. Diluculo surgere saluberrimum est.
Twelfth Night:
Diluculo surgere, thou knowest.
Don Quixote:
God’s help is better than early rising.
Bacon, Promus:
It is better to have God’s help than to keep getting up early.
The second expression is particularly worth preserving because Bacon recorded it in Spanish. It belongs to the Anglo-Spanish linguistic territory relevant to this inquiry.
Don Quixote:
He that is warned is half armed.
Bacon, Promus:
Warned and half armed.
Don Quixote:
I know where my shoe wrings me.
Bacon, Promus:
Myself can tell best where my shoe wrings me.
Shakespearean Turns of Phrase
A second group consists of expressions in Shelton’s Don Quixote with close counterparts in Shakespeare. The first question is whether the English wording represents Shelton’s rendering of something already present in the Spanish or an English formulation introduced in translation. Only after that distinction has been made can priority and transmission be considered responsibly.
The Merry Wives of Windsor: As good luck would have it.
Don Quixote:
As Sancho’s ill luck would have it.
Don Quixote: Without a wink of sleep.
Cymbeline:
I have not slept one wink.
Don Quixote:
What put you in this pickle?
The Tempest:
How cam’st thou in this pickle?
Twelfth Night:
If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself into stitches, follow me.
Don Quixote:
Ready to split his sides with laughing.
Don Quixote:
Ill luck seldom comes alone.
Hamlet:
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
Don Quixote:
You are as like the knight I conquered, as one egg is to another.
And elsewhere:
The Devil take me, thought Sancho to himself at this instant, if this master of mine be not a divine; or if not, as like one as one egg is to another.
The Winter’s Tale:
We are almost as like as eggs.
Don Quixote:
Sweet meat must have sour sauce.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 118:
Being full of your ne’er-cloying sweetness
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding.
Don Quixote and Romeo and Juliet:
Time out of mind.
Don Quixote:
I was so free with him as not to mince the matter.
Othello:
Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter.
Don Quixote:
Walls have ears.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
No remedy when walls hear without warning.
Don Quixote:
The weakest go to the walls.
Romeo and Juliet:
The weakest goes to the wall.
Don Quixote:
Murder will out.
Hamlet:
Murder will speak.
1 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI:
God and Saint George!
Don Quixote:
God and Saint George!
Here we should remark that William Shaxpere of Stratford and Miguel Cervantes died within days of each other—both on 23 April 1616, St. George’s Day, but England and Spain were on different calendars, as England had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar. No contemporaries marked their passing; no eulogy, no public effusion of grief, not a word.
Don Quixote:
Comparisons are odious.
Much Ado About Nothing:
Comparisons are odorous: palabras, neighbour Verges.
The Shakespearean joke is curious because palabras is Spanish for “words.” The malapropism “comparisons are odorous” plays upon the proverbial expression while placing a Spanish word immediately beside it.
Don Quixote:
A good name is better than riches.
Othello:
He that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
Don Quixote:
It is such, as is able to make marble relent.
Venus and Adonis:
For stone at rain relenteth.
Don Quixote:
They can expect nothing but their labour for their pains.
Troilus and Cressida: I had my labour for my travail.
The Wise Fool
Don Quixote:
To speak wittily and write conceits belongs only to good wits: the cunningest part in a play is the fool’s, because he must not be a fool that would well counterfeit to seem so.
Twelfth Night:
Fool. Are you not mad indeed? Or do you but counterfeit?
The resemblance belongs to a major Renaissance theatrical paradox. The successful fool must possess sufficient intelligence to perform foolishness deliberately. Apparent deficiency may conceal superior understanding. The paradox has particular force in Don Quixote, where madness and wisdom are continually intermingled. Don Quixote reasons with extraordinary intelligence within one domain and becomes completely governed by delusion within another. Sancho, ostensibly the simpler mind, produces practical wisdom through proverbs. The novel destabilizes the distinction between fool and philosopher.
Hunger as Sauce
Don Quixote:
Hunger is the best sauce in the world.
The Two Noble Kinsmen:
Your hunger needs no sauce.
Macbeth:
My more-having would be as a sauce
To make me hunger more.
Julius Caesar:
Rudeness is a sauce to his good wit,
Which gives men stomach to digest his words
With greater appetite.
The relationship among hunger, sauce, appetite, and desire is proverbial. Shakespeare repeatedly develops it figuratively.
Gallimaufry
Don Quixote:
“I’ll hold a wager,” quoth Sancho, “the dog-bolt hath made a gallimaufry.”
The Merry Wives of Windsor:
He wooes both high and low, both rich and poor,
Both young and old, one with another, Ford;
He loves the gallimaufry.
The Winter’s Tale:
Master, there is three carters, three shepherds, three neat-herds, three swine-herds, that have made themselves all men of hair; they call themselves Saltiers, and they have a dance which the wenches say is a gallimaufry of gambols.
The interest lies primarily in vocabulary. Gallimaufry was not invented by Shakespeare, but its recurrence in these comic contexts deserves retention in the lexical dossier.
Riches and Their Use
Don Quixote:
The rich man not liberal is but a covetous beggar; for he that possesseth riches is not happy in them, but in the spending them; not only in spending, but in well spending them.
Bacon, Apophthegms New and Old:
Mr. Bettenham used to say, that riches were like muck: when it lay upon an heap, it gave a stench and ill odour; but when it was spread upon the ground, then it was the cause of much fruit.
Bacon, “Of Riches”:
Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit.
The correspondence is philosophical rather than merely verbal. Possession is distinguished from use. Accumulated wealth has little genuine value until it is well distributed.
Lucid Intervals and Eclipse
Don Quixote:
He’s a muddled fool, full of lucid intervals.
Bacon, History of Henry VII:
Lucid intervals and happy pauses.
Don Quixote:
Here my exploits suffered a total eclipse.
Bacon, History of Henry VII:
She hath indeed endured strange eclipse.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 107:
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured.
These examples are principally verbal and metaphorical. They are less significant individually than the extended conceptual correspondences, but they remain part of the larger vocabulary shared among the texts.
Jonson and the Poet Against the Lawyer
Another possible anticipation appears in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, first performed in 1601. It concerns the conventional conflict between practical or socially approved learning and the apparently useless attraction of poetry. In Poetaster, Ovid’s father rebukes his son:
Are these the fruits of all my travail and expenses? Is this the scope and aim of thy studies? Are these the hopeful courses wherewith I have so long flattered my expectation from thee? Verses? Poetry? Ovid, whom I thought to see the pleader, become Ovid the play-maker?
A related situation appears in Don Quixote. Don Diego describes his disappointment that his son, after six years at Salamanca, refuses the law and devotes himself to poetry:
I, Sir Don Quixote, have a son, whom if I had not, perhaps you would judge me more happy than I am, not that he is so bad, but because not so good as I would have him. He is about eighteen years of age, six of which he hath spent in Salamanca, learning the tongues, Greek and Latin: and, when I had a purpose that he should fall to other sciences, I found him so besotted with poesy, and that science, if so it may be called, that it is not possible to make him look upon the law, which I would have him study, nor divinity, the queen of all sciences.
What the Parallels Establish
No responsible attribution argument can be constructed by counting parallels. A proverb may circulate for centuries. A classical formulation may descend independently from a common source. A translator may introduce an English expression absent from the original. A philosophical proposition may belong to the common inheritance of educated Europeans. Even an unusual verbal resemblance can occur independently.
The parallels assembled here constitute a problem for investigation rather than a solution announced in advance. Their evidentiary value increases where independent features converge: unusual wording, a distinctive sequence of thought, a shared judgment, or comparable circumstances. Several related correspondences are more consequential than isolated phrases.
The distinction between Cervantes and Shelton remains indispensable. Where a correspondence exists in the Spanish text, the evidence predates Shelton’s translation. Where it exists only in Shelton’s English, it belongs first to the history of the English text and cannot legitimately be attributed to Cervantes without further evidence.
The central argument of the chapter does not depend upon the weakest verbal examples. La Noue formulated the danger of the reader who attempts to live his romances and is corrected by ridicule. He associated chivalric literature with enchantment, false honour, frivolous combat, and the displacement of ordinary duties. Bacon described duelling as a rival law of reputation, a “false and erroneous imagination of honour,” and a sorcery that enchants young men with a false appearance. Don Quixote converts these problems into character and action.
The novel’s hero has internalized an inherited system so completely that it governs perception before experience begins. Contrary particulars are absorbed through further invention. Sancho supplies an intermittent resistance, but even he is drawn into the fiction through affection, promise, and the hope of office. The book thereby expands literary satire into an examination of how false systems preserve authority over the mind.
The discussions of poetry and history, art and nature, virtue and excess, love and hyperbole, truth and pleasurable falsehood, wealth and distribution, lost knowledge, and fame repeatedly place Don Quixote and Bacon within closely related intellectual territory. This fact admits several possible explanations: common sources, shared culture, influence, translation, collaboration, or some more direct relationship. The evidence does not compel a choice among them.
Nor should the evidence be discarded because its ultimate explanation remains uncertain. Its preservation is documentary before it is polemical. The purpose is to place the correspondences before the reader, distinguish the commonplace from the unusual, and permit the pattern to be judged as a whole.
Nabokov began with a Spain that could not be followed upon a geographical map. The intellectual journey is more traceable. Don Quixote travels through a world already described by his books, and every new object must find a place within their system. The comedy arises from the distance between that inherited map and the ground beneath his feet.
The movement also prepares the way for The Labyrinth of the World. Don Quixote sees through books; Comenius’s pilgrim sees through spectacles placed upon him by guides. Both works ask how inherited representations stand between the mind and the world. Both make the correction of vision part of the reader’s journey.
Working Sources
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning; De Augmentis Scientiarum; The Wisdom of the Ancients; The Charge Touching Duels; Essays; Promus of Formularies and Elegancies; History of the Reign of King Henry VII.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Parts I and II; Thomas Shelton’s English translations of 1612 and 1620.
François de La Noue, Discours politiques et militaires (1587); Edward Aggas, trans., The Politicke and Militarie Discourses of the Lord de La Nouue (title-dated 1587; colophon 1588).
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote.
Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bacon Is Shake-Speare and related writings on Don Quixote.
Francis Carr, Who Wrote Don Quixote? (2005).
Marc Fumaroli, “La ‘herencia de Amyot’: La critica de la novela de caballeria y los origenes de la novela moderna.”
Grace E. Coolidge, Chivalry, Reading, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain: From Amadis de Gaula to Don Quixote.
Hervé Drévillon, “Conclusion générale,” in Le récit de guerre comme source d’histoire, de l’Antiquité à nos jours.