"Don Quixote" as a Funny Book
P. E. Russell
The Modern Language Review, Vol. 64, No. 2. (Apr., 1969), pp. 312-326.
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Sat Dec 15 15:46:22 2007
'DON QUIXOTE' AS A FUNNY BOOK1
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines 'fun' as 'a cheat or trick; a hoax.
Diversion, sport; also, boisterous gaiety, drollery.' It is from the standpoint of that
definition, and with particular emphasis on the element of boisterous laughter,
that I want to talk about the book Don Quixote in this paper. I daresay that, even
today, readers of the book would admit that such an approach may be permissible,
even if normally eschewed by serious critics. I t can hardly be denied that a great
deal of it is concerned with describing tricks and hoaxes, with making sport of the
protagonist, his squire, and many other characters - all this with the object of
occasioning that boisterous laughter from the spectators which Cervantes so
frequently describes. To produce laughter of this kind was, of course, all part of
the author's intention as set out in the prologue to Part I : reading the tale, he
tells us, the melancholic is to be made to laugh and he whose disposition is naturally
merry is to be made to laugh louder.
For more than one and a half centuries after the book was first published,
readers, not only in Spain but in all Europe, apparently accepted without cavil
that Don Quixote was simply a brilliantly successful funny book. So it was that, as
late as I 742, Henry Fielding sought to attract readers to his novel Joseph Andretws
by explaining that he had written that work in imitation of the manner of
Cervantes, making the sentiments and diction 'not sublime but ridiculous'. Sixty
years later, however, the dawning of European romanticism introduced a drastic
reassessment of the traditional view that Don Quixote was a funny book. Sismondi,
in his very influential study De la Littkrature du Midi de I'Europe (Paris, 1813), takes
the view that it is improper to laugh at the Manchegan knight and that the book
is 'le livre le plus triste qui ait jamais CtC C ~ r i t ' .We
~ know, on the authority of
Napoleon Bonaparte, that from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a short step.
Indeed, until the early nineteenth century, most readers of Don Quixote had taken
the book to be an illustration of just that. Now romantic criticism had arrived to
proclaim the perhaps more dubious proposition, A propos of Cervantes' work,
that a step in the reverse direction is equally easy. Bouterwek, in his History oj'
Spanish Literature ( I 8 I 2), complements Sismondi's view of the mad knight, declaring,
to quote the French translation of that date, that he is 'un paladin, irrtfltchi sans
doute, mais sublime'. And everyone knows what Byron wrote (DonJuan, Canto I 3) :
'Of all tales 'tis the saddest - and more sad I Because it makes us smile . . . ' - a
pronouncement which hardly fits comfortably with Cervantes' own first assertion
of intent to which I have already alluded: 'procurad tambiCn que leyendo vuestra
historia el melanc6lico se mueva a risa, el risueiio la acreciente' (Don Quixote,
I, Pr6logo).
I t is nevertheless, this romantic view which has continued to dominate Quixote
criticism everywhere. I suppose one ought not to be too surprised that Spanish
critics almost invariably follow this line; they have allowed themselves to be
1 This paper was first given a t a meeting of the Sir Robert Taylor Society in Oxford in October
1967 and, in a revised form, at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Hispanists in Liverpool
in April I 968.
2 Maurice Bardon, 'Don Quichotte' en France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe sikcle, 1605-1815, 2 vols (Paris,
1g31), I, iii.
P. E. RUSSELL
3I 3
persuaded that the book somehow synthesises important aspects of the national
character and that, of course, makes it rather difficult to entertain the possibility
that Cervantes simply wanted to give his readers something to laugh at. However,
the same view is generally taken by non-Spanish critics too. Thus in 1954, a distinguished Hispanist who undertook a new translation of Don Quixote into English
explained ,that he had pruned away many chapters of Part 11 because 'the element
of unfeeling horseplay renders them somewhat distasteful to readers of today'.
And the author of a useful study much read by students of Cervantes in this country
begins it by asserting 'every healthy boy delights in the adventures of Don Quixote
with the frank hilarity of youth, but this is not to discover Cervantes'. There are,
perhaps, several debatable points in this assertion, but its main contention is clear
enough, and very widely accepted: it is not adult to laugh at Don Quixote. I want,
in this paper, to have a look at the older, pre-romantic, view of the book's meaning
to see whether it really was quite so off-target as we have come to think.
Before I turn to this task there are one or two points which perhaps need to be
made first. If one wants to consider Don Quixote as a funny book one must, inevitably,
also discuss Don Quijote's madness, for, as far as the knight is concerned, the fun as Cervantes saw it -was inseparable from the madness. Certainly the madness
of Don Quijote, despite Cervantes' continuous insistence on it, is something that
Quixote critics do not seem, in any clinical sense, to be much concerned with.
I note, though, that historians of psychiatry do not share this lack of interest in
the knight's Locura. Thus we find a standard text-book in this field asserting that
Cervantes' grasp of the psychology of mental illness as revealed in Don Quixote is
even more striking than that shown by Shakespeare: the knight's fantasies, it
explains, are regressive in character and regression is a main characteristic of
psychosis. Cervantes also knows, and exploits in artistic terms, the principle that
the mentality of the psychotic includes the essential qualities of normal thinking.l
Michel Foucault in his Folie e t Dkaison, directing himself to a much wider audience
than students of psychiatry, tells us that the way Cervantes presents the madness of
Don Quijote makes the knight a key figure at a crucial moment in the changing
history of European feelings about the significance of insanity as a force in human
~ o c i e t y .I~am not now concerned with the acceptability of these views of the
knight's insanity, only with suggesting that they give grounds for supposing that
literary critics ought, perhaps, to pay a great deal more attention to this theme
than they usually do.
I also want to make the general point that, in electing to consider Don Quixote as a
funny book, I do not think that I a m denying it either profundity as a work ofart, or
its own kind of seriousness. I t is quite wrong to suppose that, as a matter of general
principle, Renaissance critical theory assigned to the comic a very inferior place on
the scale of literary values. It is true that Robortello had said that, if asked to say
which gave the greater satisfaction, tragedy or comedy, he would plump for t r a g e d ~ . ~
But the matter was regarded as debatable and was, indeed, frequently debated.
Sometimes the argument inclined in favour of the comic. Dr Johnson, in his Preface
Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick, The History of Psychiatry (1967), pp. 101-2.
See the English translation of Folie et Dkaison by Richard Howard, Madness and Civilization, a
History of Insanity in the Age o f Reason (1967)~
pp. 31-2.
3 Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago, 1961),
I> 397.
1
2
314
'Don Quixote' as a Funny Book
to Shakespeare, clearly does not think he is diminishing Shakespeare's genius in the
slightest when he rates his comic scenes as superior to his tragic ones. I t is, Johnson
explains, over the rock of Shakespeare's comic scenes that the stream of time,
continually washing away the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, breaks without
doing any injury. The problem which confronted Cervantes - and I think it
was one which bothered him considerably - was that neo-Aristotelian criticism
always thought of the comic in terms of poetry and the drama and had failed to
develop any theory of high comedy capable of embracing the sort of comic book he
had written in Don Quixote. But that was a problem of sub-division within the comic
genre. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers did not assume - as I think
we are often inclined to do - that comic writing was necessarily blemished by
some kind of genetic inferiority compared with overtly serious writing.
There is one final introductory observation I want to make. I know quite well
that, by electing to talk about Don Quixote as a funny book, I am probably
condemned in advance to fail to give satisfaction. One remembers the pertinent
warning given by Louis Cazamian in 1929 at the start of a course of lectures on
English humour in English literature. Cazamian then said 'subjects have their
fates, and it would be vain to ignore the heavy doom that besets all disquisitions
upon humour'. He went on to explain why this is so: 'to treat of it [humour]
seriously is the unpardonable sin against artistic fitness and to treat of it in a manner
that suits the argument is to baffle the ains of serious enquiry.'l This dilemma has
always bedevilled the discussion of comic literature. Quintilian and Cicero reached
the conclusion that laughter and the ridiculous seemed to be beyond the reach of
adequate comment. Today, if we look at the writings of the captains of the
various schools of critical theory who now compete for our allegiance, we shall
find that they have at least one thing in common: from Marxists to New Humanists
and at all points in between, there is a noticeable avoidance of the theoretical
problems presented by comic literature. I t seems, as W. K. Wimsatt points out in
his book HateJiul C ~ n t r a r i e sthat
, ~ laughter has always been one of the chief stumblingblocks for the theorist and produces embarrassments, not riches, for the critic.
R. S. Crane, too, has noted that the insights of psychologists and others into the
nature of laughter have yet to be translated into a language appropriate to literary
criticism. Maybe some ofthe unwillingness of Quixote critics to talk about the book
in terms of its humour derives, then, not so much from a failure to accept that it is
funny as from an awareness that the critical tools that would make it possible to
discuss it in satisfactory terms from that point of view are missing. I would
certainly be sailing under false colours if I suggested that I have hit on a solution
to this problem. What I now hope to do is to find a rough track round it by
recourse to the early history of Quixole criticism in Spain and abroad.
Quixote criticism in England starts, albeit in the form of deeds not words, in
1605 itself, when an English bookseller whom Sir Thomas Bodley had sent to
Spain to buy books for him included the First Part among his purchases. I t was
put on the shelves of the Bodleian Library that same year. This act, of course,
does not prove that either the English buyer or Bodley himself thought the book
funny; it does show that they thought it important. In 1614 the prolific Richard
Brathwaite (?1588-1673) listed the book among what he described as 'many
1
2
Louis Cazamian, The Develofiment of English Humour (New Yorl;, ~gcjo),p.
(Lexington, Kentucky, 1965), pp. go and 101-2. I, 3I5
P. E. RUSSELL
other fruitless inventions, moulded only for delight without profit'. This comment
was a bit much, coming as it did from the author of titles like The English Gentlewoman
drawne out to the full Body and Art Asleep Husband? A Boulster Lecture. Perhaps,
however, Brathwaite's dislike of Don Quixote is accounted for by the title of another
book he wrote: A History of Moderation. His objections reveal both that Cervantes'
work was by now well-known to the English reading-public, at least by repute,
and that he judged it a work intended to give pleasure, not guidance. Robert
Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) recommends the victim of black bile to
indulge in a certain amount of therapeutic reading, but to be careful not to
overdo his consumption of chivalric romance since those who do that 'many times
prove in the end as mad as Don Quijote3.1Burton, who was, of course, something
of a seventeenth-century expert on mental disease, as well as on laughter, evidently
did not doubt that the knight was mad or that, as Cervantes supposes, an imprudent devotion to a particular type of literature could lead to insanity. An
English writer who made a close study of the book was Edmund Gayton, whose
Pleasant or Festiz1iou.s Notes upon Don Quixofe (1654) has been studied by Professor
E. M. W i l ~ o nHe
. ~ finds Gavton's Notes to be 'a work of entertainment that took
the form of a commentary on what he must have regarded as a burlesque novel'.
Wilson was led by his study of the comments of Gayton and some other seventeenthcentury English critics of Don Quixote to suggest 'we are wrong when we underrate
- as I think many modern readers do - the humorous side of the misadventures
of Quixote and his Squire'. Gayton, it seems to me, belonged to the not inconsiderable number of seventeenth-century readers of the book who, so far from feeling
any sympathy for Don Quijote and Sancho, felt a positive dislike for them, though
that, of course, did not make them unfunny. Another such was Edward Ward,
whose Don Quixote 'merrily turned into Hudibrastic verse' (1711) is SO coarse in
parts as to be unquotable. It is a company which also includes, in Spain, Lope de
Vega, Quevedo, and, most obviously, Avellaneda.
Another English writer of that age who was interested in the book, but who also
failed to like the protagonist or his squire, was Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras
(1663). This work, which was inspired by Cervantes as well as by Scarron, clearly
- as Professor Wilson points out - shows Butler to be among those readers who
believed Don Quixote to be a funny book. Butler's dislike of the knight is reflected in
his decision to make the Quijote-figure in his own work - that is Hudibras himself
- into a Presbvterian. However I think it is not to Hudibras so much as to Butler's
Note-Books that we should turn if we want a real insight into how the character of
Don Quijote may have appeared to seventeenth-century readers. In one of his
articles Butler is concerned with sketching the characteristics of a type he calls 'A
Humorist' - that is a person whose humours, in a seventeenth-century medical
sense, had got the better of him. He writes that such a man
-
is a peculiar Fantastic, that has a wonderful Affection to some particular Kind of Folly, to
which he applies himself, and in Time becomes eminent. 'Tis commonly some out-lying
Whimsie of Bedlam, that being tame and unhurtful is suffered to go a t Liberty. T h e more
serious he is, the more ridiculous he becomes, and a t the same time pleases himself in Earnest,
vols (London, 1936) 11, 92-3.
'Cervantes and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century', Bulletin hispanique, 50 (1948)'
27-52.
1 3
2
316
'Don Quixote' as a Funny Book
and others in Jest. He knows no mean; for that is inconsistent with all Humor, which is
never found but in some Extreme or other.1
Butler knew Don Quixote well and his statement that the victim of this type of
madness is all the more laughable when he is serious and in earnest deserves our
attention. Is it possible that the knight's seemingly right-minded discourses on all
kinds of topics were not, in fact, taken seriously by seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury readers simply because they knew they came from the mouth of someone
who was mad? Certainly men of that age did not think that, because Don Quijote
had 'lucid intervals', he was any the less mad on that account. As Butler wrote
elsewhere
A Mad man Seldom forfets a1 his wits
Without some Intervals Between their Fits
and, in his essay on Wit and Folly he declares:
Although a Mad man in his intervals, is much wiser than a Natural1 fool yet a Fool (if he
be not very stupid) has (a1things considerd) much the Advantage of him. For Nature never
made anything so bad as the Deviations from her have render'd it . . . And therefor the
Author of Don Quixot, makes Sancho (though a Natural Fool) much inore wise and
Politique than his Master with all his Study'd and acquired Abilities.2
Modern criticism may well, by its over-literal understanding of allusions to the
knight's lucid intervals, miss a disturbing seam of ambivalence which Cervantes
exploited comically: that madness speaks at times with a voice which is indistinguishable from the voice of sanity. For Tobias Smollett, who published a new
translation of the book in 1755, this exploitation of the fact that a madman has
intervals of lucidity was an important facet of Cervantes' genius; in a note attached
to his translation, after pointing out that his own aim had been 'to maintain that
ludicrous solemnity and self-importance' of Don Quijote, he remarked that the
Spanish author had on the one hand avoided 'raising him to the insipid rank of a
dry philosopher' and, on the other, had not debased him to 'the melancholy
circumstances and unentertaining caprice of an ordinary madman'. He has, in
fact, found a way of depicting madness in literature that is artistically acceptable
and yet verisimilitudinous.
There were some half-dozen different and excellent translations of Don Quixote
published in England between I 612 and the end of the eighteenth century. I have
not noticed anything about them which hints that their authors regarded this
book as anything except a brilliantly funny book. I t is salutary, for example, to
compare how modern translators of Don Quixote translate the famous epithet 'El
Caballero de la Triste Figura' with the way their seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury predecessors did so. Thus J. M. Cohen gives us 'Knight of the Sad
Countenance' and Salvador de Madariaga 'Sir Knight of the Sorrowful Figure'
-versions which conjure up, as they are doubtless intended to do, images of
superior suffering. But Shelton ( I 6 I 2) translates the epithet quite simply as 'the
knight of the ill-favoured face'. Phillips, in 1687, also uses this version and glosses
the Spanish to make sure his readers get it right by making Sancho say, to account
for his choice of the new title he has bestowed on his master, 'in my conscience I
1
Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, edited b y A. R.
1908),PP. 138-9
2 Waller edition, pp. 414 and 327-8.
Waller (Cambridge,
P. E. RUSSELL
3I7
never beheld such a swine's countenance in my life'. For Gayton he is simply the
'Knight of the Ill-Face'; for Smollett the 'Knight of the Rueful Countenance'
because, as Sancho says, he is 'the most dismal figure I have ever seen'. Even
Charles Jarvis, the first of the English translators ( I 742) to declare that, for people
of good judgement, there were 'nicer beauties' in Don Quixote than the ordinary
run of reader supposed, makes it clear that, in translating the epithet as 'the knight
of the sorrowful countenance', he, too, is alluding to the ludicrous appearance of
Don Quijote. This, after all, must be what Cervantes meant: the knight has just
had his teeth knocked out (I, xix) by stones from the slings of the shepherds guarding
the flocks of sheep he had tried to attack. As Rodriguez hlarin reminds us, in the
Spanish of Cervantes' time 'triste figura' was an expression used to describe a
person of dirty, unprepossessing and ridiculous appearance.= It all seems rather
far away from Entwistle's 'sadly heroic figure'.
I do not want to spend much time discussing French views of Don Quixote at
this time, despite the popularity of the work in France; French attitudes then have
been very thoroughly studied by Maurice Bardon. Bardon's verdict on the fortune of
the work in France up to about 1625 is categorical: 'tous se gaudissent de cet
Cpouvantail armt, beaucoup en font usage; nu1 ne l'estime' (I, 69). The same view
continued to be taken by French readers, writers, and critics throughout the
seventeenth century though there is evidence that one or two Frenchmen, like
Charles Jarvis in England a good deal later, detected 'nicer beauties' in the work.
saint-~vremondwas the most important and the most penetrating of French
seventeenth-century Quixote critics. He was the first Frenchman to perceive, or at
least to state that he perceived, the full extent of Cervantes' subtle and pervasive
irony. He was also the first to point out that Cervantes had contrived, through the
mouth of his madman, to find a means of offering his own commentary on things.
Don Qzlixote, he wrote, is the best of stories because
I1 n'y en a point, mon avis, qui puisse contribuer davantage a nous former un bon goQtsur
toutes choses. J'admire comme, dans la bouche du plus grand fou de la terre, Cervantes a
trouvC le moyen de se faire connoitre l'homme le plus entendu, et le plus grand connoisseur
qui se puisse imaginer. (Bardon, I, 298)
I t is curious to think that this distinguished libertin critic of letters found a kindred
spirit in Cervantes and, according to contemporaries, constantly read and reread
Don Quixote. There is even an absurd story of his attempting to play the part of the
mad knight once when driving through Suffolk in Lord Arlington's carriage. But
everything saint-~vremondsays about the book makes it plain that he thought
of it as a funny book and Don Quijote himself as a beguiling comic portrait of a
madman. Thus he writes to the exiled comte d'olonne, in 1674, that the latter
should read Don Quixote because it is a book which makes one laugh, dissipates
grief, and leads those who are unhappy back into a cheerful humour: 'quelque
affliction que vous ayez, la finesse de son ridicule vous conduira imperceptiblement
B la joye' (I, 300).
What of Spain ? One remembers the comment of Tom6 Pinheiro da Vega in his socalled Memorias de Valladolid the very year Part I first appeared: the knight is a figure
of fun because of his extraordinary appearance, his ridiculous performance as a lover,
1 This meaning is still associated in modern Spanish with the word jigura, 'la persona ridicula,
fea y de mala traza'.
318
'Don Quixote' as a Funy Book
and his unawareness of how nonsensical a figure he cuts -the latter point reminds
us of a characteristic feature of Samuel Butler's Humorist. Most students of Spanish
literature, I suppose, also know of Philip 111's contribution to Quixote criticism as
reported by Baltasar Porrefio in his Dichosy hechos del Sr. D. Felipe III (?1626) : according to this biographer, the King, hearing a student laughing excessively loudly,
commented to his entourage 'aquel estudiante, o estA fuera de si, o lee la historia
de Don Quijote'.l I suppose we cannot be certain that this rather ambiguous
royal comment was intended to be praise for Cervantes' book, but it does at least
show that the king thought Don Quixote to be a work which made its readers laugh
uproariously. And this was the general view. Thus Quevedo's burlesque poem is
little more than a catalogue of all the beatings-up the knight received and
obviously, in Quevedo's view, deserved. GraciAn, in a piece about vainglory,
alludes to Don Quijote and his 'ridiculas proezas'. NicolAs Antonio, the seventeenth-century literary historian, categorizes the book as 'a most amusing creation
whose hero is a new Amadis of Gaule fashioned out of ridicule'. Lope de Vega
belonged to the category of those who found the knight objectionable, dismissing
him as an extravagante and the book as worthless. Lope doubtless took this line
because he liked the romances of chivalry and perhaps thought - in my view
with considerable good sense - that those who laughed at them did so because
they missed their real point.
More interesting than these comments from other men-of-letters in seventeenthcentury Spain is the speed with which both knight and squire evidently became
established as traditional figures of fun in the popular mind and, as such, regularly
made their appearance in masquerades and public festivals. Thus, in Francisco de
~ v i l a ' sentreme's, according to Alberto Navarro GonzAlez, the stage directions
required Don Quijote to make his appearance 'vestido a lo picaro lo mAs ridiculo
que ser pudiera'. Some ofi the other popular manifestations in which the knight
figures are decidedly odd. For example, in 1617, the University of Seville swore to
defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception against all-comers. T o mark
this chivalrous enterprise a procession was organized through the city's streets.
Prominent in it was a grotesque figure on horseback representing Don Quijote on
Rocinante. One might think this, in the circumstances, somewhat contra@roducente,
but Spaniards, in those days, could never resist a pun, however inappropriate;
the knight carried a placard which read
Soy Don Quijote el manchego
que, aunque nacido en La Mancha,
hoy defiendo a la Sin Mancha.
I t would be interesting to speculate, if one had time, about the reasons which
caused Don Quijote and Sancho to be so rapidly assimilated, as figures of ridicule,
into popular mythology. Was it perhaps partly because Cervantes, in that
aristocratically-dominated society, had presented the people with a convenient
means of giving expression to their dislike of the pretensicns of their betters?
The most detailed commentary on Don Quixote by any Spanish contemporary of
Cervantes is, of course, provided, albeit obliquely, by Avellaneda's spurious Second
Part. Avellaneda certainly saw Cervantes' two principal characters in strictly
1 Quoted in Alberto Navarro Gonzilez, 'El ingenioso Don Quijote en la Espa5a del siglo XVII',
Anales Ceruantinos, 6 (1g57), p. 6.
P. E. RUSSELL
3I9
burlesque terms and, even more than their creator, keeps drawing the reader's
attention to the uproarious laughter their antics produce. When the knight ends
up in a madhouse he is intended, of course, to seem a funnier object than ever,
s;ffering as he now does at the hands of his peers, the other comic madmen detained
there. There is, if we are to credit its author's own asides, almost a laugh a page in
Avellaneda's work. It is worthwhile noting, too, that earlier centuries did not
entirely share that contempt for Avellaneda's work which is, today, a necessary
qualification for acceptance as a serious critic of Don Quixote. There were several
translations of ~vellanedain eighteenth-century England and no less a person than
Dr Joseph Warton, in his Essay on Pope ( I 772 edition, 2 vols, I, 144) says of it 'the
book is not so contemptible as some authors insinuate; it was well received in
France and abounds i n k a n y streaks of humour and character worthy of Cervantes
himself.'
Alberto Navarro Gonzklez, who made a determined effort to discover evidence
that someone in seventeenth-century Spain saw Don Quixote as something more
than a funny book, thought he had found what he was looking for in Guilltn de
Castro's play Don Quijote de L a Mancha. Guilltn de Castro, he says, managed to
perceive 'notas esenciales del alma quijotesca' - the reference here is, of course,
to the Quixotic soul that modern readers descry. I can find nothing in Guilltn de
Castro's play to support such a conclusion. Don Quijote and Sancho in fact only
have a secondary role in it and Guilltn de Castro seems to me to see Don Quijote
exactly as all his contemporaries did. He introduces, for example, an episode of his
own where the knight, believing he is Leander on the shores of the Hellespont,
strips on the stage and is seen by the audience flat on the boards making swimming
motions.
It is, perhaps, a pity that Calder6n's play about Don Quijote has been lost. It
was staged in Madrid in 1637 Its title, as Professor Shergold has revealed, was
Los disparates de Don Quijote; this does not authorize us to suppose that Calder6n's
view of the knight differed from everyone else's.
I conclude that it is beyond dispute that, for some two centuries after 1605,
Don Quixote seemed to its readers to be a funny book in the sense I defined it at the
beginning of this paper. That, in itself, is surely a fact which merits consideration.
But what of Cervantes? Did his contemporaries all fail to get his point, or was his
intention what they took it to be? There is certainly no evidence in those chapters
in Part 11 where the success of Part I is discussed to suggest that Cervantes thought
his readers had misunderstood him. What he does do instead (Don Quixote, 11, iii)
is to make a claim that to write humorously requires great genius. I think, if we are
to understand how it came about that Cervantes was satisfied to have created. as
he thought, a work whose aim was to cause laughter, it is necessary to have some
understanding of the views of his time about laughter, folly, and madness, for those
views differed in many ways from our own.
The men of the ~enaissancewere much troubled by the fact that the Ancients
had failed to write satisfactorily about laughter and the comic. They tried hard to
fill this gap - a fact which itself points to the great importance they attached to
the subject. Spaniards made important contributions to this attempt to evolve a
satisfactory theory of laughter. The work of Juan Luis Vives in this direction is well
known, as are the not very satisfactory, if original, suggestions of Huarte de San
Juan. Less well known these days is a once famous text-book on laughter by a
'Don Qlixote' as a Funny Book
Spaniard, the Commentarorium de sale libri quinque of Bernardo G6mez de Miedes, a
medically-minded canon of Valencia whose treatise is much quoted by Robert
Burt0n.l We do not always remember, either, that Spaniards in Cervantes' time
had earned themselves the reputation, justifiably it seems, of being more advanced
than other Europeans in the theory of mental disease, as well as in its treatment.2
Cervantes' own interest in insanity - quite apart from Don Quijote's madness has often been remarked on. Though modern views of Golden-Age Spain perhaps
tend to stress Spanish seriousness it should be remembered, too, that in Renaissance
Europe Spaniards had a special reputation as comics, excelling particularly in
droll or witty sayings and behaviour. This characteristic was noted by I1 Pontano at
the beginning of the sixteenth century and on more than one occasion by
Castiglione in I1 Cortegiano3. Castiglione, of course, thought it a thoroughly
desirable, even necessary, ability. It was not, therefore, so surprising as has
sometimes been suggested that Spain should be the country which gave birth to
Don Quixote.
Those who write about laughter in the Renaissance do so in terms of the medical
theory of the humours and stress its immense therapeutic value for the maintenance
of normal health and for the cure of mental disease. 'Mirth . . . purgeth the blood,
confirms health, causeth a fresh, pleasing colour, prorogues life, whets the wit,
makes the body young, lively and fit for any manner of employment', writes
Burton, glossing a passage in Vives. Nothing is better, he adds, as a cure for the
disease of melancholy, which can be expelled by hilarity. Cervantes certainly had
this curative function of laughter in mind. When Don Antonio Moreno praises
Don Quijote and Sancho because they are able, as he says, to 'volver a alegrar a
la misma melancolia' (Don Quixote, 11, lxv), it is not passing sadness he is alluding
to but to Covarrubias's 'enfermedad conocida' which that lexicographer carefully
distinguishes from mere 'tristeza'. The age's high esteem for laughter-making as
an end in itself is doubtless what leads Cervantes continuously to point out in the
form of 'author's comment' that the antics and speech of Don Quijote and Sancho
caused the bystanders to erupt into loud laughter.
Cervantes and his contemporaries had views about what was funny which
differed in various respects from ours. They believed that laughter and the
ridiculous were provoked by some form or ugliness, of turpitudo, symbolized by the
distorting mask worn by the players in ancient comedy. A deviation from the natural
order of things lay at the root of the ridiculous. The deviation had to be of a kind
that could not easily be eliminated though also, if it was to be laughable, it must
I only know what appears to be a second edition - Valencia, 1579.
The works of Juan Luis Vives (De anima, 1538) and Crist6bal de Vega (De arte medendi, 1564) are
often referred to by seventeenth-century students of insanity as well as by modern historians of
psychiatry. The curative experiments carried out in some Spanish asylums for the insane, like that
at Valencia, have caused experts in the field to describe Spain as 'the cradle of psychiatry' (Alexander
and Selesnick, pp. I 16-1 7).
3 '1, facezie e i motti sono piu presto dono e grazia di natura che d'arte; ma bene in questo si
trovano alcune nazioni pronte pib l'una che l'altra come i Toscani, che in vero sono acutissimi.
Pare ancor che ai Svaanoli sia assai aroorio il motteagiare' (I1Libro del Corte.piano,edited by Vittorino
see idkm. note 2,
Ciana (Firenze., 10d7<
.,.,,,D. 201. For i l ~bntano'sob&&atioA (in De sermone.-Lib.'~~~)
'etsi ~ i ' s ~ acum
n i primis sunt facetiarum studiosi'. Both writ&, however, criticized Spanish humour
Castiglione because Spaniards' jokes often failed to pay proper attention to social categories, I1
Pontano because they were more concerned with derision aud mockery than 'in risus voluptatem e
iucunditate conceptam'.
1
2
-
P. E. RUSSELL
321
be incapable of causing serious harm.l I t was on this basis that that age justified its
view that insanity, provided it was not too violent, was funny.
All the Renaissance treatises insist, too, that the comic, at least in its highest
forms, requires the presence of an element of admiratio - of surprise and wonderment.2 There are a number of scattered comments in the text of Don Quixote
which show that Cervantes, in whose general aesthetic admiratio was very important,
as Professor Riley has shown, accepted the view that it was also an essential causal
element of the kind of fun he purveyed. Thus, when the priest describes Don
Quijote's madness to Don Fernando and his friends in Part I, xxxvii, we are told
'no poco le admiraron y rieron por parecerles lo que a todos parecia: ser el m8s
extrafio gtnero de locura que podia caber en pensamiento disparatado'.
Avellaneda, too, frequently stresses the connexion between wonderment or surprise
and the laughter his Don Quijote and Sancho provoke. I think a failure to understand this close relationship between laughter and the element of wonderment or
surprise in Cervantes' day is one of the reasons why, for example, the propriety
of the chapters in Part 11 devoted to events at the palace of the Duke and Duchess
has baffled post-romantic critics of Don Quixote.
The Renaissance treatises on laughter supply many details to show how far
away from our own their ideas about what was innately comic were. Bernardo
Gdmez, for example, offers us the cuckoo and the ape as prototypes of the
laughable. Can anything, he asks, be funnier than a bird which puts its eggs in
another bird's nest or than the sight of an ape - 'ridicula hominis imitatio?'
One feels that, in the post-Darwinian age, this last example of the comic has,
perhaps, turned rather sour. Gian Giorgio Trissino's list of mirth-provoking
subjects is perhaps more immediately relevant to Quixote criticism; it includes an
ugly or distorted face, an inept physical action, a silly word (one remembers that
constant stress on Sancho's malapropisms which modern readers find so tiresome),
and, more surprisingly, a rough hand, a wine of unpleasant taste, or a rose with
an unpleasant ~ d o u r . ~
I see no reason to suppose that Cervantes' notions of the comic differed from those
of his contemporaries. I n particular he seems to have accepted entirely the view
that madness was, or could be, comic. When the apparently cured madman in the
asylum at Seville gives himself away and is revealed as still insane, Cervantes tells
us, as the most natural thing in the world, that the warden of the asylum and the
bystanders laughed at him. More important, perhaps, is the problem of Don
Quijote's 'lucid intervals' which modern criticism has seized upon to justify
treating the knight as a character who is sane except where the romances of
chivalry are involved. I t is quite certain, it seems to me, that Cervantes did not
see the matter in those simple terms. The warden of the Seville asylum, an expert
on the subject, knows that a display ofintelligence and normality is not incompatible
with continuing insanity. H e assures those who want him to release his patient,
before the latter has given himself away, that 'aun estaba loco, y con lkidos
1 See, for example, Alonso Ldpez Pinciano, Philosophia antigua poitica, edited by Alfredo Carballo
Picazo, 3 vols (Madrid, 1953), 111, 34, 68.
2 Bernardo Gdmez de Miedes, IV, 405-6, 422. See also Antonius Laurentinus, Dialoguspulcherrimus
et utilissimus de risu (Marburg, 1606), pp. 94 ff., and Vicenzo Maggi, De ridiculis (1550): 'R~SUS
turpitudine citra dolorem cum admiratione dependet' -the latter quoted in Weinberg, I, 417.
3 Bernardo Gdmez de Miedes, pp. 435 ff. For Trissino's list see Marvin T. Herrick, 'Comic Theory
in the Sixteenth Century', Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 34 (1950), p. 41.
322
'Don Quixote' as a Funy Book
intervalos' (Don Quixote, 11, i). Since the whole point of the story of this madman is
that he is like Don Quijote the assertion is of some importance. Diego de Miranda's
son, given by his father the task of elucidating whether Don Quijote is, or is not,
mad, concludes that he is and that he will never be cured - '61 es un entreverado
loco, lleno de lucidos intervalos'. The same point is really made so often that it can
hardly be misunderstood. Cervantes' readers were intended to be amused,
astonished, and, no doubt, perplexed by the fact that the mad knight often spoke
with the voice of the sane. They did not think, when he did that, that he was sane.
One must remember, too, that, according to the psychiatric theories of that age,
madness could produce a display of intellectual brilliance in a person who had
previously shown no signs of it. Cervantes made use of that belief when he wrote
his story of another madman - the Licenciado Vidriera. He, when his reason is
restored, is merely a bore. Don Quijote, too, in the few pages when we see him
restored to sanity just before his death, has become, in terms of his new, sane,
identity, an uninteresting and conventional figure. It is because Don Antonio
Moreno knew that this would happen that he complains about Sans611 Carrasco's
determination to make the knight recover his senses :
!Dios os perdone el agravio que habtis hecho a todo el mundo en querer volver cuerdo a1
m8s gracioso loco que hay en Cl! ;No veis, sefior, que no podr6 llegar el provecho que cause
la cordura de don Quijote a lo que llega el gusto que da con sus desvarios? (11, lxv)
There is one other point to be noted about Don Quijote's madness as Cervantes
understood it. The knight cannot, without doing violence to his author's intentions,
be held responsible, as has sometimes been suggested, for himself or for the
consequences of his acts. It is, I suppose, marginally arguable that he was responsible
for bringing on his illness by reading too many romances but, once the boundary
between sanity and insanity has been crossed, any notion of responsibility has
necessarily been lost. The point is made by the innkeeper (I, iii) when lie warns
the muleteers not to try to revenge themselves for the wounds inflicted on them by
the knight 'porque ya les habia dicho como era loco, y que por loco se libraria,
aunque 10s matase a todos'. For the same reason, when the constabulary are sure
he is mad, they leave him alone.
A complete study of my theme would, of course, had one the space, require a
careful study of the role of Sancho Panza as well as that of Don Quijote. Sancho,
is certainly also in need of some reappraisal in the light of what we know about the
part of the fool in Renaissance literary and social hist0ry.l There is, however, one
point about him which I want to make here: Cervantes' age regarded madness
and folly as two very closely associated phenomena. As Burton puts it, citing a
wealth of authorities, in the introductory section of the Anatomy of Melancholy,
' 'twas an old Stoical paradox, omnes stultos insanire, all fools are mad, though some
are madder than others' (I, 29). Cervantes clearly shared this view. 'CQuiCn no
habia de reir con 10s disparates de 10s dos, amo y mozo?' he writes (Don Quixote,
I, xxv). It seems, therefore, that some of the headier dualities which modern
criticism has read into the association and relationship of these two characters
would greatly have surprised their creator, who probably thought of them as
simply representing the twin faces of comic folly.
1
See, for example, Enid Welford, The Fool, His Social and Literary History (1935).
P. E. RUSSELL
323
The other aspect of my theme which deserves far closer attention than I have
space to give it concerns the question of the book Don Quixote and the romances of
chivalry. It is, I suppose, a commonplace of Quixote criticism that Cervantes
expected his readers to be thoroughly familiar with these romances, and that his
burlesque depended on that. Since modern readers are not in such a position, it
necessarily follows that the burlesque element is, for them, considerably muted.
Modern criticism is liable to register this fact and then to forget its implications,
partly, no doubt, because of the lack of any serious critical appraisal of the literary
or social significance of the romances themselves in Renaissance Europe generally;
criticism of them usually does not get beyond an anachronistic rnisclassification of
the romances as 'novels', followed by a smug but largely irrelevant demonstration
of their shortcomings in that category. It would not be true to suppose that the
romantic reappraisal of Don Quixote had to await the disappearance of the romances
of chivalry from the literary scene. These romances were, in fact, still rather
popular reading at the beginning of the romantic age in Europe. Nevertheless an
acute awareness and appreciation of the burlesque aspects of the book is a
characteristic of pre-romantic Quixote criticism. Joseph Addison, for example, at
once thought of it when, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, he wanted to
define one possible form of literary burlesque. Cervantes' treatment of Don Quijote,
he writes, exemplifies that kind of burlesque that consists of 'the presentation of
mean persons in the accoutrements of heroes'.l If Addison's classification of the
knight as a 'mean person' seems rather shocking today it is worthwhile remembering
that Cervantes caused the Sobrina to make exactly the same point to Don Quijote
himself
se dt a entender que es valiente, siendo viejo, que tiene fuerzas, estando enfermo, y
que endereza tuertos, estando por la vida agobiado, y, sobre todo, que es caballero, no lo
siendo . . . (DonQuixote, 11, vi)
The Sobrina's remarks also remind us that, as far as Don Quijote's acts at least are
concerned, Cervantes, through them, never comes to grips at all with the problems
posed by chivalric literature. Roland, in Orlando Furioso, at least went mad inside
the structure, conventions, and ideological assumptions of romance itself. The
situation of Cervantes' protagonist, in this respect, keeps the comment on a strictly
burlesque level.
If one seeks to discover the cause of the change which came over readers' attitudes
to Don Quixote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which subsists today,
this, I suggest, will be found in the modern reader's ability (and desire) to identify
with the knight and, perhaps, with Sancho Panza too. It seems plain to me, in the
light of what has been discussed earlier in this paper, that earlier readers of the
book cannot have thought of identifying themselves con amore with Don Quijote or
with Sancho; their clear-cut notions about insanity and folly, about the nature of
laughter and the causes of the ridiculous, ruled out any such thing. The point is
made very clearly by Alonso Lopez Pinciano, writing towards the end of the
sixteenth century. In tragedy, he explains, the audience participates emotionally
in the events depicted on the stage, feeling commiseration and pity towards the
characters. A distinguishing feature of comedy is that no such process of identification occurs; the audience laughs but is emotionally indifferent: 'aunque en 10s
1
Quoted by Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, 1962),p. 107.
324
'Don Quixote' as a Funry Book
actores aya turbaciones y quexas, no passan, como he dicho, en 10s oyentes, sino
que de la perturbaci6n del actor se fina el oyente de risa'.l There seem to me to
be implications in this ruling that are perhaps of concern to the criticism of other
forms of Spanish literature besides Don Quixote.
Closely connected with this attitude of non-involvement postulated by L6pez
Pinciano is, also, the question of the modern reader's sympathy for Don Quijote
as a would-be, though very unsuccessful, do-gooder. That kind of sympathy, as I
think Sir Isaiah Berlin once pointed out, also stems fkom attitudes developed by
European romanticism. People in earlier ages judged men rather by the results of
their actions than by the respectability of their intentions and, even if we leave
aside the crucial question of Don Quijote's madness, they can hardly have shared
the romantics' sympathy with the knight simply because he wanted to put the
world to rights, though he made such a hash of it.
A careful scrutiny of the text of both parts of Don Quixote seems to me to provide,
then, no grounds for suggesting that Cervantes himself thought of his book except, of course, for those sections in which the knight and his squire are
temporarily put on one side - as anything other than a funny book. I t is true that
there are a few, very few, passages which, taken in isolation, might seem to suggest
that Cervantes conceived, at least momentarily, that it might be possible for his
readers, or some of them, to see the knight as something other than a merely
laughable f i g ~ r e But,
. ~ in all these passages, the drift of Cervantes' meaning is
always ambiguous and, in any case, if taken in the sense to which I have just alluded,
contradicted by his overall attitudes. Cervantes, right up to the end of Part 11,
seems to go out of his way to insist on the ridiculous figure Don Quijote cuts. This
insistence is carried beyond Don Quijote's death into the cruel epitaph placed on
his grave by his friend, Sans6n Carrasco:
FuC el espantajo y el coco
Del mundo, en tal coyuntura,
Que acredit6 su ventura,
Morir cuerdo y vivir loco.
or, as Shelton put it in seventeenth-century England,
For as a Scar-crow i n mens eyes, Hee liv'd, and was their Bug-bear too; And had the luck with much adoe T o live a Foole, and yet die wise. Cervantes' choice of descriptive terms for Don Quijote here could hardly be more
derisive. Coco belonged to the language of children and was used to describe
something that frightened them. Estantajo, beside its meaning of scarecrow, was
used of persons in a figurative sense. As Covarrubias explains (161I ) it described
Alonso L6pez Pinciano, Philosophia antigua joitica, 111, 24 and 26.
See, for example, the celebrated passage in Part 11, xliv where Cervantes tells the reader that the
affairs of Don Quijote are to be celebrated 'o . con admiraci6n o con risa' (discussed by E. C.
Riley, Cervantes's Theory of the Novel (Oxford, 1962), pp. 92-3). In the same passage it is suggested
that, if the reader does not laugh at what is to come, he will at least spread his lips in a 'risa de
jimia'. As Diego Clemencin points out, however (El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Manchu,
8 vols (Madrid, 1894), VII, I 10, n. 14), the logic of this passage is very unclear and, in any case, in
view of Cervantes' other statements that he regarded wonder as an essential element of the ridiculous
we cannot conclude that the particles 'o . o' have here a true disjunctive function rather than, as
sometimes occurs, a copulative one.
1
2
. .
. .
P. E. RUSSELL
325
someone who, at first sight, seemed to merit respect but turned out to be undeserving
of it because he lacked real substance.
I have been concerned in this paper only to make, in general terms, a point
which seems to me of some interest. I have not tried to illustrate the many-sided
facets of Cervantes as a comic writer of genius in Don Quixote. That has been done,
in strictly literary terms, by Erich Auerbach in his excellent article in Mimesis
which seeks to show how Cervantes set about creating what Auerbach calls 'a
merry play on many levels'. Nor would I wish to be taken as asserting that old
books must necessarily remain for ever tied to their author's intentions - what
has been described by some modern writers on the theory of literature as 'the
intentionalist fallacy'. One must surely concede, at least in principle, that works
of literature may have an independent life which their authors could not foretell
and that writers of all the ages have sometimes spoken as prophets and seers - for
the future rather than only in the voices of their own times. But, in practice, the
trouble about many of the reinterpretations of Don Quixote which have been put
forward since Sismondi called it 'the saddest book ever written' is that they require
us to avert our look from large portions of the text which Cervantes actually penned.
Is that really acceptable as criticism? I t seems to me that one can only make
critical sense of the whole book, from whatever critical angle one chooses to
approach it, by going back to Cervantes' declared intentions and to the assumptions
of his age which went with them. Or, if that is now too much to ask, at least we
can require the critics to declare frankly, as Auerbach in fact does, that some of the
meanings the book has for him are ones about which Cervantes himself could have
had no inkling.
I hope I have at least succeeded in suggesting that Cervantes did not share that
instinctive feeling of modern criticism that literature whose primary concern is to
make us laugh is necessarily an inferior kind of writing - an attitude neatly
summed up by Emerson's observation 'reason does not joke and men of reason do
not'. I suspect that Cervantes was in some difficulty because, though the world
applauded Don Quixote, he could not find, in the doctrines of neo-Aristotelian
literary criticism, any warrant for granting high value and respect to the particular
kind of comic book he had written; as Professor Riley has pointed out, despite
Cervantes' addiction to talking about literary theory in general in Don Quixote,
he seems to avoid much discussion of the comic. Nevertheless, at the end of his life,
he was ready enough to stake his reputation on his comic writing. There is already
a hint of this in the self-portrait attached to the h"ove1as Ejemplares, where he paints
himself for posterity as a man with a merry look in his eye. I n the prologue to his
last work - the far from comic Persiles y Segismunda - he frankly categorizes
himself, though not without a characteristic undertone of irony, as a comic writer:
'i Si, si; Cste es el manco sano, el famoso todo, el escritor alegre, y, finalmente, el
regocijo de las Musas!'. And it is not without interest that, in the same work, he
takes his dying farewell of his friends in the form of a black joke at their expense
in the highest traditions of clowning: 'iAdios, gracias; adios, regocijados
amigos; que me voy muriendo, y deseando veros presto contentos en la otra vida!'.
But, of course, Cervantes' most unambiguous assertion of the value of comic
writing in general and of his own literary skill as a comic writer in particular is to
be found in the discussion on the craft of the author in Part 11, Chapter iii, where
- again with characteristic irony - it is left to Don Quijote to assert that it requires
'Don Quixote' as a Funny Book
great genius to be witty and to write humorously. He follows this up by the famous
aphorism 'la mAs discreta figura de la comedia es la del bobo' or, as Shelton
translated it, 'the cunningest part in a Play is the Fools; because hee must not bee
a Fool that would well counterfeit to seem so'. I conclude from this that, contrary
to what modern criticism has sometimes suggested, Cervantes would not have
thought it in the least unadult to take Don Quixote to be a funny book. Perhaps,
since a comic intention is to be detected in quite a number of other famous and less
famous Spanish literary works of the Golden Age - and before - there is a more
general lesson to be learnt here.
P. E. RUSSELL
OXFORD