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The Forum: Don Quixote: Spanish masterpiece

Cervantes Monument in Madrid, Spain showing Don Quixote riding his horse and Sancho Panza on his donkey

16/12/2021 GMT

Don Quixote: Spanish masterpiece

BBC World Service - The Forum, Don Quixote: Spanish masterpiece

The multi-layered masterpiece by Miguel de Cervantes

Why this centuries-old story of a deluded knight and his squire prefigures the modern novel.

With its multiple narrators, superb and complex characterisation, the influence of Don Quixote de la Mancha has been acknowledged by great writers through the ages as a masterpiece, and hailed as one of the most important novels in the history of literature.

On the surface the novel appears to be a comedy – of situation, of language and of character – but its author Cervantes succeeds in making Don Quixote so much more than a series of slapstick episodes. It was written during a particularly turbulent time in Spanish politics, when both Jews and Muslims were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, and this finds its way into the novel.  

Bridget Kendall explores the tale of the self-styled knight Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza with Cervantes experts Ruth Fine, the Salomon and Victoria Cohen Professor in Iberian and Latin American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Carolyn Nadeau, the Byron S. Tucci Professor of Hispanic Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University; and Edwin Williamson, the King Alfonso XIII Professor Emeritus of Spanish Studies at the University of Oxford.

(Photo: Cervantes Monument in Madrid, Spain showing Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Credit: Sylvain Sonnet via Getty Images)

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