Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T10:21:41.946Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The Personalities of Don Quixote and Sancho: Their Genesis, Interrelationship and Evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2023

Get access

Summary

Basic Patterns and Themes of the Dialogue

In the intervals between adventures the knight and his squire talk, and their conversations make up a significant proportion of the novel, representing a radical shift in the development of narrative fiction from incident to dialogue and from action to character. Cervantes's motive in giving the conversations such prominence is clearly attested by those who overhear them and comment on them (e.g. II, 2; p. 641, and II, 7; p. 684): he comes to see the two central figures as extraordinary characters, whose delusions and mannerisms, including their changing attitude towards each other and the world around, constitute the main focus of interest of his story. In Part II, this conception of them supersedes, without totally supplanting, the original motive for pairing Sancho with his master: parody of the knight/squire relationship in chivalry books.

A related, if implicit, motive for the introduction of Sancho in Chapter 7 is the need to complement the solitary, self-absorbed protagonist of the first sally, solemnly engrossed in imitative role-play, with a comic foil of a quite different kind, and the rustic nitwit (bobo) of sixteenth-century comedy provided a convenient model. Sancho embodies the stock traits of this type: foolishness, forgetfulness, talkativeness, greed, cowardice, sloth, proneness to solecisms. His arrival in the story logically causes the exchanges with Don Quixote to slot into the standard patterns of master/servant dialogue in sixteenth-century comedy, a high/low antiphonal in which the nobleman's lyrical effusions and posturings of love and honour are met by the commoner's quips, complaints, objections, and concern for skin and creature comforts. In Fernando de Rojas's comedy-in-prose La Celestina and its continuations, and in the plays of Lope de Rueda, Juan de Timoneda and the early Lope de Vega, one finds fragments of dialogue that closely prefigure the attitudes of Cervantes's famous pair (Close, 1981). Another early model, though outside the theatre, is the relation of young Lazarillo to his third master, the snobbish, down-at-heels squire, in the third tratado or chapter of the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554).

Such are the basic models of Cervantes's conception of his pair of heroes, though in the course of the story they are augmented by a host of others.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×