Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England: The Tapestry Turned (review)

The ongoing quadricentennial of the initial publication of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote (1605–1615) has inspired numerous commemorative projects, including reconsiderations of the English-speaking world’s embrace of Cervantes as a literary forefather whom Hazlitt grandly declared an English author by naturalization. The appearance of Messrs. Randall and Boswell’s encyclopedic inventory of Cervantean references, citations, allusions, and borrowings in English seventeenth-century writings appropriately casts our attention back to the century when it all began. And the way it all began has appeared to later generations a bit of a mystery, for early readers of Cervantes’s great novel seemed blithely unaware that a classic had landed among them.

The Romantic canonization of Don Quixote as one of the western world’s greatest literary expressions of human aspiration and desire has, in fact, obscured and diminished responses to the novel by early readers, who responded primarily to the comic and burlesque aspects of the work. To the early nineteenth-century Romantics, Don Quixote was “the symbol of Imagination, continually struggling and contrasted with Reality” (John Gibson Lockhart). How can it be, wondered A. J. Duffield in 1880, “that a book so pure in spirit and so chaste in words, so lofty in style and yet so full of human sympathy and love as Don Quijote came to be regarded by English men of letters as a book of lowly buffoonery?”

Messrs. Randall and Boswell’s survey assesses more precisely the seventeenth-century reception of Cervantes and his works. The lion’s share of allusions and references are, unsurprisingly, to Don Quixote. The profuse new material, gleaned from a wide range of sources, brings to life a diverse readership “(among hundreds of others) a princess, a painter, a Harvard graduate, a counterfeiter, a duke, a diarist, an astrologer, a philosopher, a midwife, a spy . . . a tapestry-maker, and a missionary to Virginia and Barbados.”

The almost 1200 entries attest to the popularity of Don Quixote with its early readers. That attention also grew markedly during the course of the century: Messrs. Randall and Boswell record only 217 references before 1650; 981 in the second half of the century, of which 697 date from the year 1670 onwards. The two great surges of the 1650s and the 1670s appear to be linked to the reissue of Shelton’s translation in 1652 and 1675, which would have made the book much more widely available to English readers. The growth in the number of publications that appeared annually from the Civil War period onwards also explains these rising figures. Culturally, the compilers point to the Restoration of the monarchy as a turning point: returning from France, Charles II and his entourage were freshly influenced by the French admiration for Cervantes.

Seventeenth-century readers were clearly entertained by Don Quixote. Contemporary readers shared a familiarity with the genre of chivalric romance that Cervantes mocked. By contrast, Joseph Baretti, who attacked John Bowle in the 1780s for exhuming the chivalric romances of Cervantes’s time, regarded an acquaintance with the novelist’s sources as superfluous: “Far from . . . hinting, that, to understand his Don Quixote, we were to read the chivalry and other silly books he had read himself, Cervantes condemned them all to be burnt by means of the Curate.... How could a thick-bearded man like you lose his time in treasuring up all that farrago of silly pieces, as if they had all been Greek fragments of the remotest antiquity?”

Accounting for a cultural phenomenon is a tricky business. The responses to Cervantes during the Restoration, however, show that the process of cultural domestication Hazlitt specified early in the nineteenth century was already well underway. Messrs. Randall and Boswell cite a spate of neologisms inspired by the knight-errant’s name: “the adjectives ‘Quixotti-call’ (1642), ‘Quixot-like’ (1664), ‘Don Quick-sottish’ (1687), and ‘Quixotian’ (1695); the past participle ‘Don quixoted’ (1658); and the nouns ‘Don Quichoterie’ (1659), ‘Quixotry...