Quixote
Page 11
Thomas Shelton, the first translator of El Quijote into English, completed the First Part in 1607. Although it wasn’t published until 1612, it may have circulated first in manuscript form. In any case, when it was finally released, it quickly became a success. Is The Second Maiden’s Tragedy proof that Shakespeare himself read El Quijote? (Hamilton thinks the Shelton translation reached Shakespeare in manuscript form in 1611.) And that he and his collaborator Fletcher were impressed enough to transpose it onto the stage? Or might it be that only Fletcher was acquainted with it, and that the role Shakespeare had in the collaboration was to simply add a few lines here and there or perhaps a scene or two?
The history of the play Cardenio gets even more complicated. In 1727, a British author and editor by the name of Lewis Theobald announced that he had in his possession not one but three manuscripts of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost play about Cardenio. (It was said that Theobald wasn’t able to publish Shakespeare’s original manuscript because in the early part of the eighteenth century, copyright of the Bard’s plays was in the hands of Jacob Tonson, an English publisher and bookseller who obtained it by buying the rights from the publisher of the Fourth Folio.) Theobald staged the play as Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers. The plot is loosely based on the characters of Cervantes’s Ill-Conceived Curiosity, though some names are altered. Skepticism about the authenticity of the material prevails to this day, and the play isn’t particularly inspiring. While Theobald is also known as one of the editors of Shakespeare’s works, this created a tension between him and Alexander Pope, the famous poet of The Dunciad (1728), who also edited the Bard’s plays. They became enemies. Pope ridiculed Theobald as the first avatar of Dulness in The Dunciad.
The Arden Shakespeare, among the most authoritative editions of the Bard’s work, included Double Falsehood in a 2010 edition by Brean Hammond. The insertion of the play into the canon wasn’t greeted with universal enthusiasm. Some Shakespeare scholars believed the effort was premature, with more historical evidence needed to make the case for inclusion. A year later, the Royal Shakespeare Company presented a play called Cardenio: Shakespeare’s “Lost Play” Re-imagined (2011), directed by Gregory Doran. The endeavor sought to synthesize different sources to approximate what the Bard and his collaborator might have had in mind. Of course, the concoction was, in principle, speculative.
In the end, literary historians believe the content of Cardenio is closer to Fletcher than to the Bard, with only a few flashes of his talent sprinkled in. Literary scholar Harold Bloom doesn’t believe Hamilton’s theory about Shakespeare being influenced by El Quijote. Along with other critics, he is skeptical that Shakespeare even read El Quijote, though, if he did, “we can surmise his delight,” he argues, adding, “I doubt [Cervantes] would have valued Falstaff and Hamlet.” Bloom once described Shakespeare as “the inventor of the human.” If this is the case, Cervantes must be “the discoverer of doubt.”
Would anything be different in literary history if these two giants knew of one another? It is unlikely. When Cervantes died, he himself wasn’t aware of the reach of his oeuvre. He couldn’t have imagined that, over the next centuries, he would be turned into a fountainhead. Nor could Shakespeare. Although he appears to have been more aware of the impact his work had in London, at the time of his death few of his plays had been staged abroad (Romeo and Juliet, in a shortened version, was performed in Nördlingen, in Bavaria, Germany, in 1604, but the first translations of the plays weren’t produced in French and German until the second half of the eighteenth century). In other words, Shakespeare then wasn’t the Shakespeare who is now universal.
Of course, neither was Cervantes the Cervantes.
8
THE EBULLIENT BUNCH
As is apparent by now, El Quijote is a mirror: its implications, its lessons always in the eyes of the beholder. To some, the novel is a manifesto for human freedom; to others, it is a treatise on psychiatry. Eternally fluid in its message, it can be seen to advocate individualism or collectivism, to view human nature as resilient or malleable. Therein, perhaps, lies the reason for its continued success.
The El Quijote fan club has, over the centuries, become extraordinarily far-reaching. Its proponents are an ebullient bunch, jovially finding new and intriguing viewpoints on the novel. Members include composers, lithographers, playwrights, opera librettists, painters, filmmakers, and even creators of video games. Many of the fans are inspired, some are even brilliant, and a few, such as Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka, are recognized as geniuses.
To begin tracing the path of such a book club across cultures, it is important to invoke, once again, chapter LXXIII of the Second Part, which is also the novel’s last. In it, the narrator, considering Don Quixote in his deathbed, announces:
For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one.
Cervantes was reacting, in part, to the appropriation of his characters by the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, who beat him to releasing a sequel. But by claiming the knight-errant as his “alone” here, his possession, his avatar, Cervantes seems to be deterring future impostors from taking advantage of his creation.
He had little luck. Almost since his death, world literature has been filled with pseudo-sequels, adaptations, and re-creations, as well as tributes and celebrations. In 2004, Howard Mancing, who teaches at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, published a two-volume Cervantes Encyclopedia, seeking to catalogue these Quixote-inspired creations, at least nominally. Not that it is possible, given the seemingly infinite number of references.
Unquestionably among the most passionate of the ebullient bunch were the Romantics, first in Germany, a country that came rather late to the banquet of El Quijote translations, then in France, Italy, and England. The individual as loner in touch with his own subjectivity and in communion with the cosmos is the mantra of Sturm und Drang, the aesthetic drive that took shape in Europe between 1760 and 1780 but had a lasting influence at least until the early part of the twentieth century, if not up to our own day. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96), about a hero’s journey of self-realization, is seen as its apogee, as is his play Faust (1808). Goethe, a true polyglot, knew Latin, Greek, and Italian, and was interested in Yiddish and learned Hebrew, but he was only superficially acquainted with Spanish. Still, he was a huge fan of Calderón de la Barca’s plays and, to a lesser extent, of El Quijote. Parallels between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Faust and Mephistopheles are supported by the letters in which Goethe wrote that he reread El Quijote. The apocryphal sentence mistakenly attributed to Cervantes’s novel—“Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos,” They are barking, Sancho, proof that we’re still riding forward—actually comes from Goethe’s Kläffer (1808).
The Romantic adoration of El Quijote is best exemplified in France in the form of engravings of printmaker, illustrator, and sculptor Gustave Doré, who illustrated—with woodcuts and steel engravings—Louis Viardot’s 1863 French translation. (Viardot prepared himself for the task of translating by reading the entire oeuvre of Montaigne, believing it shared with Cervantes’s work a questioning way of approaching the world.) With the exception of the minimalist drawing by Pablo Picasso, no illustrations of this most celebrated knight-errant have been more frequently reproduced. Needless to say, these aren’t the only images frequently accompanying El Quijote. Other celebrated artists include the nineteenth-century French caricaturist Honoré Daumier, who produced dozens of images, although he never illustrated the whole book, and the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, who made twenty-eight drawings and ten watercolors in 1945 to illustrate the First Part of El Quijote, published by Random House, and then added to this production twelve lithographs he made for the Parisian edition of Pages choises de Don Quichotte de la Mancha, published by Joseph Foret in 1957. Dalí preferred to draw the knight-errant alone—that is, isolated, as is typical of the surrealist paint
er—rather than accompanied by his squire. (By the way, Dalí believed in the fanciful idea that he was a descendant of Dalí Mami, a Greek corsair to whom Cervantes was assigned as a slave during his imprisonment in Algiers.)
Don Quixote and the Windmills (1945), by Salvador Dalí.
Yet Doré remains the king in the landscape of Quixote-inspired art. He viewed Cervantes’s protagonist as un romantique, an outsider, a genius retreating from society, in touch with his inner energy, in tune with nature, and inspired by supernatural forces. The most popular among all the artists ever to illuminate the novel, Doré published his illustrations several years before he made engravings for the Bible (both the Hebrew and the Christian parts). The Quixote images became a huge success and defined his oeuvre, which would come to include Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1854), Dante’s Divine Comedy (1857, 1866, and 1867), Shakespeare’s Tempest (1860), and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1866). Doré was thirty when, in 1862, he embarked on the Quixote project. He is said to have traveled to Spain, although, if one studies the lithographs closely, there seems to be little indication that the sojourn defined his aesthetic vision. The artist created mythical universes in which every single scene looks as though it was the last image of a sinking, ghostlike universe.
Doré made 113 illustrations for El Quijote: 57 for the First Part and 56 for the Second Part. He included approximately one drawing per chapter, although there are chapters without images and some with five. Some illustrations are more finished than others and more complex too. He signed each one with a short “G Doré” in the lower left corner. The perspective in these pictures is always shifting. When Don Quixote is captured and put in a cage, we are inside with him. When looking at the famous episode of Master Pedro’s puppet show, we are part of the stage while the knight-errant, his squire, and others look on. The knight-errant’s silhouette is near or far, depending on the scene. When a beaten Don Quixote is in bed, his face and ours almost touch. But when he’s dying, toward the end, we see him at some distance; his entourage, made of more than half-a-dozen friends and acquaintances about to begin the process of mourning, take up more physical space than he does.
Sancho Panza (1864), by Gustave Doré.
Don Quixote and Windmills (1864), by Gustave Doré.
Unquestionably one of the most celebrated of Doré’s images presents the knight-errant in the act of fighting against the windmills. It comes in the First Part, chapter XIV, and is strategically placed after Grisóstomo’s song and before the actual narrative continuing the pastoral tale of the peasant Marcela. It shows Don Quixote in midair, being struck by one of the blades, with Rocinante jumping in shock, Sancho and his donkey at a distance, and a row of windmills extending, in decreasing size, from the middle left side into the back. This engraving, whenever I come across it, simultaneously bewilders and disappoints me.
Doré, in my opinion, is not only too blunt but also too realistic. Shouldn’t the windmills at least resemble giants? Shouldn’t we be invited to distort reality along with Don Quixote? Who is doing the looking here? The squire? We, the viewers? The allure of El Quijote is that to its protagonist, reality isn’t what the rest of us make of it. Shouldn’t Doré have tried to convey in graphic terms the conflicting perspectives? There is, on the other hand, enormous energy in the image. The blade itself looks shattered, precarious, a sight that makes us think less of refined technology (that, after all, is what Don Quixote is fighting: progress) than of makeshift advancement. As usual in Doré, the sky is cloudy, threatening even. Meanwhile, Sancho, near his honking donkey, is scandalized.
The other famous Doré illustration—my favorite, reproduced as the frontispiece to this book—depicts Alonso Quijano in his room in the act of becoming Don Quixote. Quijano is dressed as a hidalgo. Balding, he wears a mustache and beard. His oblong face projects an expression of pomposity. He sits on an armchair right at the center of the engraving, his left hand holding a book, the right one raised with a sword. Around him there are books big and small, opened and closed, in piles on the floor and on a table nearby. Also surrounding him, or perhaps emerging from his imagination, are all sorts of knights and other personages riding horses or fighting dragons, giants, and other monsters of various sizes. In the monsters’ midst, on both sides of Quijano, are innocent damsels caught in difficult situations: one is physically dragged from behind, the other is a prisoner begging for her life. There are even mice on the floor, on top of which are mini-knights-errant.
Not surprisingly, Doré’s obsession with myth, reminiscent of the art of another Romantic printmaker, the English poet William Blake, has at times turned him into a target of derision. Even as he became one of France’s most successful engravers, during his lifetime the artistic establishment looked down on him as a mere book illustrator. That ridicule hasn’t ceased. In spite of their unquestionable beauty, his Quixote lithographs are often lampooned in pop culture for their melodramatic nature.
The ebullient bunch also includes an abundance of musicians. Another German admirer and a late Romantic was Richard Strauss, who in 1897 composed Phantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters (Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character), Opus 35. There is also Georg Philipp Telemann’s opera Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Camacho (1761), as well as Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro (1922), a puppet-opera in one act, and the three songs for voice and piano by Maurice Ravel, collectively known as Don Quichotte à Dulcinée (the first one composed in 1932), set to poems by French poet, playwright, and diplomat Paul Morand. In these works, the Romantic composers portrayed the knight as a temperamental spirit uniquely in touch with his emotions, synchronized with the mood of nature as a whole, a genius whose erratic behavior is a model of inspiration and a lesson for humanity on how to appreciate life to its fullest.
In total, there are seven full ballets based on El Quijote, all of them forgettable. The most famous is French choreographer Marius Petipa’s version, first staged by the Bolshoi in Moscow in 1869 to the music of Austrian composer and violin virtuoso Ludwig Minkus. Interestingly, this was one of the only ballets not expurgated from the Bolshoi repertoire after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, probably because the protagonist was perceived by the newly empowered proletarian elite as representing a refutation of bourgeois society. Its structure is rather simplistic: At the beginning, Don Quixote is in his study, dreaming of Dulcinea. As he falls asleep, Sancho shows up. The knight-errant tells him about the adventure he is about to embark on. The action then moves to a Barcelona marketplace, even though Barcelona does not appear in the original story until the end. At one point they are in a gypsy camp. There is an episode with Master Pedro’s puppet show, although modern versions eliminate it. Petipa’s ballet isn’t interested in verisimilitude. The only objective is to place the knight-errant in circumstances in which he refuses to fit into society, opting to be an idealist.
In contrast with ballet, the field of opera has been more fertile. There are around twenty operas based on El Quijote. One is by the nineteenth-century Austrian composer Wilhelm Kienzl. It was completed in 1897 to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Cervantes’s birth, and it premiered a year later in Berlin’s Neues Königliches Opernhaus. Jules Massenet wrote another one, Don Quichotte, which uses a libretto of Henri Caïn. Based on the play Le chevalier de la longue figure, by poet Jacques Le Lorrain, it was first performed in 1904. Made of five acts, this one has a rather loose, disjointed structure. This is aside from the extemporaneous elements it introduces. In truth, the Massenet opera is interested only in the Don Quixote–Dulcinea relationship—and it is sheer melodrama. At one point, the knight-errant watches as four handsome males court her. To gain her favor, he must fight a cadre of giants as well as a bandit named Ténébrun. When Don Quixote finally tells Dulcinea he loves her, she replies with a rather saccharine line: “je souffre votre tristesse,” I suffer your sadness.
Filmmakers have been particularly drawn to El Quijote. In most cases, however,
their efforts have resulted in disaster. I frequently ask myself why. It sometimes looks as if there is a curse, as one moviemaking effort after another falls apart before reaching the big screen, or is released to resounding disappointment. Or it may be plain bad luck. German director Werner Herzog toyed with the idea for a while, but he never completed a movie version. Yet several of his movies are about unrealistic, impractical individuals, or about individuals limited by their environment, and, as such, they are effusively quixotic. Take the case of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), about Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre looking for gold in the Amazon. Or else Fitzcarraldo (1982), which is about a deranged Irish rubber baron who decided to pull a steamship over a hill in Peru. Even Herzog’s documentaries Grizzly Man (2005), about the bear lover Timothy Treadwell, who ended up being devoured by bears in Alaska, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), about the Chauvet Cave in southern France, are dreamy in nature.
Examples of complete adaptations of Cervantes’s novel populate almost every national cinematic tradition. There are Russian versions (e.g., Don Kikhot [1961], directed by Grigori Kozintsev) as well as French ones (e.g., a short by the excellent director Éric Rohmer, called Don Quichotte de Cervantes [1965]), and a handful, either shorts or feature films, from Portugal, Hungary, Italy, Greece, and South Africa, to name a few countries. Peter Yates, in 2000, did an infelicitous TV movie with John Lithgow, Bob Hoskins, and Isabella Rossellini. A children’s animated adaptation, Donkey Xote (2007), directed by José Pozo (who is also responsible for a cartoon version of El Cid), tells the story from the perspective of Rucio, Sancho’s donkey (who wants to be a horse), and presents the argument that the knight-errant isn’t a lunatic but a wise, passionate man.