Don Quixote Exhibit - Station 27

There was perhaps at least one exception to the commonly-held view of Don Quixote as pure farce during this period. Samuel Butler seemed to perceive the novel as a satiric paradigm as early as 1663 in his poem Hudibras whose title character was described as "the Don Quixot of this nation." For Butler, Don Quixote was a wicked madman as well as a hero-satirist whose quest represented the futility of transforming reality (windmills) into fiction (giants). On his quest Butler's character Hudibras was not interested in restoring a glorious past but rather in revealing the base motivation of Presbyterianism as a true religion. Butler's indebtedess to Cervantes may be evident in his portrayal of the two central characters and the unstructured pattern of their wanderings together.