4 Arcadia was a region of the Peloponnesus where classical and Renaissance authors frequently located their pastoral novels; two important works of this extremely popular genre, by Sannazaro and Lope de Vega, were entitled La Arcadia, and Cervantes himself published a pastoral novel called La Galatea.
1 Penitents in Spain, for example those still seen today in Holy Week processions, and those brought before the tribunals of the Inquisition, wore sheets and hoods that bear an unfortunate resemblance to the outfits of the Ku Klux Klan.
2 Only seventeen days had passed since Don Quixote’s second sally.
3 As indicated in an earlier note in chapter VII, there is a good amount of variation in the name of Sancho’s wife.
4 These are the horses of Orlando and Reinaldos de Montalbán. It should be noted that this sonnet, the kind called caudato in Italian, has an extra tercet.
5 The line, from Orlando furioso, should read, Forse altri canterà con miglior plettro (“Perhaps another will sing in a better style”), and is cited by Cervantes in the first chapter of the second part of the novel.
1 Don Pedro Fernández Ruiz de Castro (1576–1622), seventh count of Lemos, was the viceroy of Naples from 1610 to 1616. He was patron to several writers, including Cervantes, who dedicated to him the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) in 1613, the Comedias y entremeses (Plays and Interludes) in 1615, the second part of Don Quixote, also in 1615, and Persiles y Sigismunda (a “Byzantine” novel) in 1616, five days before Cervantes’s death.
2 In 1614, what is generally known as the “false Quixote” appeared in Tarragona. Its title was The Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha; its author has never been identified, though the book was published under the name of “Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, a native of the town of Tordesillas.” Cervantes apparently learned of its publication as he was writing chapter LIX of the authentic second part.
1 Despite his disclaimer, in his prologue Cervantes obviously is responding to the prologue of the “false Quixote.” The “greatest event” to which Cervantes refers is the battle of Lepanto, where he was wounded.
2 An allusion to Lope de Vega; according to Avellaneda’s prologue, Lope was unjustly attacked by Cervantes in the first part of Don Quixote; the protestations that follow here are pointedly disingenuous, for despite his being a priest, Lope de Vega’s dissolute private life was common knowledge.
3 There seems to be no information about this work, which has probably been lost; there is speculation that an interlude called La Perendeca, published in 1663 by Agustín Moreto, may be an adaptation of the one Cervantes had in mind.
4 The Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Cervantes’s protector.
5 A satirical work in verse written during the reign of Enrique IV (1454–1474), it was widely circulated and immensely popular.
6 This was never published, and if Cervantes in fact wrote it, the work has been lost.
1 Famous legislators of ancient Sparta and Athens, respectively.
2 The reference is to a well-known popular tale.
3 The second line, in Italian, closes part I of Don Quixote.
4 The first poet is Luis Barahona de Soto, who wrote Las lágrimas de Angélica (The Tears of Angelica); the second is Lope de Vega, who wrote La hermosura de Angélica (The Beauty of Angelica).
5 Subsequent to the publication of part II, both Góngora and Quevedo wrote satires of the epic of Charlemagne, including the love of Roland and Angelica, which had been so popular in the early Renaissance.
1 The honorific don or doña was supposed to be used only with specific ranks of nobility, though many people added the title to their names without having any right to it.
2 See note 6, chapter IX, part I, for a discussion of the Moorish “author’s” name.
1 Sansón is the Spanish equivalent of Samson.
2 The ordinary clothing of the clergy and of scholars; the term is used here mockingly, as if it were the habit of one of the great military orders, such as the order of Santiago (St. James).
3 Part I had been printed three times in Madrid (twice in 1605, once in 1608), twice in Lisbon (1605), twice in Valencia (1605), twice in Brussels (1607, 1611), and once in Milan (1610) when Cervantes probably wrote these lines. It did not appear in Barcelona until 1617 (when the first and second parts were printed together for the first time) or in Antwerp until 1673 (it is assumed that Cervantes wrote Antwerp instead of Brussels). All of these editions are in Spanish; the first translation of the book (into English, by Thomas Shelton) appeared in London in 1612.
4 Alonso de Madrigal, bishop of Avila, an immensely prolific writer of the fifteenth century.
5 A line from Horace’s Ars poetica: “From time to time even Homer nods.”
6 “The number of fools is infinite.”
1 This incident appears in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.
2 The medieval battle cry of Spanish Christians engaged in combat with Muslims.
3 In Cervantes’s day, the redondilla was a five-line stanza, and the décima was composed of two redondillas.
1 The original, by Cide Hamete Benengeli, is in Arabic. In part I, a translator was hired in the market in Toledo; his translation is the history of Don Quixote described by the bachelor in part II.
2 Teresa has the proverb backward. It should be “Where kings go laws follow.”
3 The allusion is to a ballad about Doña Urraca’s desire to go wandering.
4 Sancho confuses almohada, the Spanish for “pillow” or “cushion,” and Almohade, the name of the Islamic dynasty that ruled North Africa and Spain in the twelfth century.
1 “Apportioning the sun” (partir el sol) was the arrangement of combatants in a tourney so that the sun would not shine in anyone’s eyes; “slashing to bits” is Cervantine wordplay.
2 The stigmatizing hood and robe that those accused by the Inquisition were obliged to wear.
3 A kind of black stone that once was used to test the purity of gold or silver by rubbing the stone with the metal and analyzing the streak left behind.
4 Garcilaso de la Vega (1503–1536), the great Renaissance poet, perfected the Petrarchan style in Spanish.
1 The housekeeper’s statement is based on her confusing aventura (“adventure”) with ventura (“happiness,” “luck,” and “fortune” are the relevant meanings). I’ve translated ventura as “venture” in order to establish the connection with “adventure,” though a better word would probably be “fortune.”
2 This was a prayer to cure toothache.
3 A secondary meaning for bachiller (the holder of a bachelor’s degree) is “a person who babbles or chatters.” Cervantes plays with the two meanings of the word.
4 With this sentence, Don Quixote again uses a more distant form of address with Sancho in order to indicate his displeasure; he does not return to less formal address until he speaks to Sancho again, following Sansón Carrasco’s arrival on the scene.
5 The Latin phrase translates roughly as “Then well and good” or “That’s fine with me.”
6 The housekeeper, mentioned a few sentences down, clearly comes in now, too, but because of an oversight or an error, by Cervantes or his printer, she is not alluded to here.
1 Garcilaso de la Vega, in his third eclogue.
2 The temple, also called the Pantheon, was in fact visited by Charles, who would walk through Rome in disguise; the anecdote told here does not appear in any other text, however, and may be an invention of Cervantes.
3 In this example of Sancho’s linguistic and historical confusions, the wordplay is based on the fact that in Spanish julio is the month of July, while Julio is the equivalent of Julius; agosto is the month of August, while Agosto is the equivalent of Augustus.
1 The line is from an old ballad, “El conde Claros” (“Count Claros”).
2 This statement is one of the best known in the novel, for it has been interpreted as meaning that Don Quixote and Sancho have “run into” the church in the sense of co
ming into dangerous conflict with the institution. The sentence is sometimes cited using another verb to underscore that meaning: topar (the verb used by Sancho just a few lines down) rather than dar. According to Martín de Riquer, this is overinterpretation, and the sentence means only what it says: the building is a church, not Dulcinea’s palace.
3 Sancho quotes a different version of the ballad of Roncesvalles.
1. Highborn ladies would receive visitors in a special room of the house that had lounging pillows.
2 Sancho misquotes the proverb.
3 The lines are from a ballad about Bernardo del Carpio.
4 It was the custom in universities to write on the walls, in red paint, the names of those who had been awarded professorships.
5 In the weaving and embroidering of the raised design on brocade, fabric with three levels of handiwork was considered very valuable. Carried away by his fantasy, Sancho exaggerates.
6 Municipalities had community grazing lands for the use of residents.
1 This is a way to say, “Let’s behave sensibly and realistically.”
2 This may be a reference to a religious play of the same title (Las cortes de la muerte) by Lope de Vega; there was, in fact, a theatrical impresario named Angulo el Malo.
1 As Martín de Riquer points out, this kind of comparison was common in Spain, and a frequent subject for sermons, so it is not surprising that Sancho repeats it. Whenever Sancho shows signs of erudition—citing Latin words and phrases, for example—his knowledge, by dint of repetition, has its origin in the Church and consequently does not affect the believability of the character.
2 Two friendships celebrated in classical mythology, the first Roman, the second Greek.
3 The first citation is from a ballad; the second is a proverb that probably appeared in a song or ballad, as the verb “sung” suggests.
4 Pliny claimed that the ibis could administer an enema to itself by filling its neck with water and using its long beak as a nozzle.
5 A dog returning to its own vomit was cited as a symbol of a backsliding Christian who abandons a vice and then returns to it.
6 Cranes were supposed to post sentinels at night, when the rest of the flock was sleeping, and during the day, when they were feeding. All of these concepts regarding animals were fairly commonplace.
7 This was an early form of the guitar.
1 The reference is to the weathervane at the top of the tower called La Giralda.
2 Ancient Iberian stone sculptures of bulls discovered outside Guisando, in the province of Ávila.
3 There is a deep chasm close to Cabra, in the province of Córdoba.
4 These are paraphrased lines from Alonso de Ercilla’s epic poem La Araucana.
5 In religious brotherhoods, fines were paid in specific quantities of long wax candles.
1 The phrase means “in order to earn one’s bread.”
2 The phrase, “God is in us,” is by Ovid.
3 The reference is to the Satires of Horace.
4 Augustus exiled Ovid to these islands in the Black Sea.
5 The allusion is to the laurel.
1 As indicated in note 7, chapter XLIX of part I, Don Manuel de León (León is a province of Spain as well as the word that means “lion”) retrieved a glove from a lion’s cage at the request of a lady and then slapped her for needlessly endangering the life of a knight.
2 Certain fine swords had the image of a dog engraved on the blade.
1 These are verses from one of Garcilaso’s sonnets.
2 A creature who, like an amphibian, spent as much time in the water as on land. As early as the twelfth century, he was alluded to in troubadour poetry and identified with St. Nicolas of Bari.
3 Probably Pedro Liñán de Riaza (1558?–1607), a poet praised by Cervantes.
4 The meter of Spanish poetry is essentially determined by the number of syllables in a line; the short line (arte menor) has eight syllables or less; the long line (arte mayor) has nine or more syllables. Here the long line is the hendecasyllable—the eleven-syllable line, perfected by Petrarch, which influenced all of European poetry in the Renaissance and is generally associated with the sonnet. Garcilaso de la Vega naturalized this meter in Spanish early in the sixteenth century.
1 University students and clerics wore the same kind of clothing.
2 People from Sayago (in the modern province of Zamora) spoke with a rustic accent that was often used in the theater for comic effect; natives of Toledo were thought to speak an extremely correct and pure Spanish.
3 A village near Madrid.
4 The dispute between the bachelor and the licentiate is based on the latter’s adherence to the elaborately theoretical handbooks on the art and science of fencing that were extremely popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
1 A figure who appears in traditional ballads.
2 As indicated earlier, an arroba is a dry weight of twenty-five pounds and a variable liquid measure of 2.6 to 3.6 gallons.
3 Money bags were made of cat skin; Roman cats had a black-and-gray-striped fur.
4 A phrase used to indicate which contender the speaker favored in a cockfight or in any other kind of contest.
1 When they married, peasant women usually wore a medallion with religious images on it.
2 Sancho exaggerates to indicate the luxuriousness of the cloth: the warp of velvet normally was two-and-a-half pile.
3 Martín de Riquer explains the reference as follows: Sancho’s wordplay alludes to at least three different meanings for the phrase. The first refers to shifting sand banks, making the phrase equivalent to “passing safely between Scylla and Charybdis.” The second alludes to the great Flemish banking houses. The third suggests the banks, or benches, made of a wood called Flanders pine, which the poor used as beds in central and southern Spain. Sancho, then, is saying that Quiteria is beautiful enough to pass through any danger, that she is going to marry a very wealthy man, and that she will soon come to her nuptial bed.
1 A proverb that extols the joys of liberty.
2 The reference is to the expert swordsman whom they met on the road at the beginning of chapter XIX and who obviously accompanied them throughout the episode of Camacho’s wedding.
9. Pietro Gonnella, the jester at the court of Ferrara, had a horse famous for being skinny. The Latin translates as “was nothing but skin and bones.”
10. Rocín means “nag”; antemeans “before,” both temporally and spatially.
11. Quixote means the section of armor that covers the thigh.
12. La Mancha was not one of the noble medieval kingdoms associated with knighthood.
13. Aldonza, considered to be a common, rustic name, had comic connotations.
14. Her name is based on the word dulce (“sweet”).
1. The wordplay is based on the word blanco, which can mean both “blank” and “white.”
2. These lines are from a well-known ballad; the first part of the innkeeper’s response quotes the next two lines.
3. In Cervantes’s time, this was known as a gathering place for criminals.
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