Don Quixote Exhibit - Station 31

Fielding's interest in Cervantes, however, dated at least to 1727, when he was composing his play Don Quixote in England. Although not performed until 1734, this farce/comedy reflects Fielding's early interest in the novel and its potential to relate the knight's madness to the madness of society in general. The play ends with an apostrophe to the audience: "Since your madness is so plain / Each spectator / Of good nature / With applause will entertain / His brother of La Mancha."

Fielding was only one among many authors who read and profited from the presence of Don Quixote in England. References to the novel appear in the works of, among others, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's central character, Arabella, in The Female Quixote (1752) is deceived by her reading of fiction, although the novel as a whole seems more indebted to Fielding's own work. The impact of fiction-reading on one's life was not limited to fictional representation. Dr. Thomas Percy --the same Dr. Percy to whom Reverend Bowle addressed his letters on Don Quixote--wrote to James Boswell as the latter was preparing The Life of Samuel Johnson (1811), to inform him that when Johnson was a boy, "he was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life.... Yet I have heard him attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which prevented him ever fixing in any profession." Whether or not Dr. Johnson's self-diagnosis pointed to Don Quixote's peculiar illness as his own is pure speculation. It is noteworthy, however, that Dr. Johnson commented on the identification between Don Quixote and his readers: "When we pity him, we reflect on our own disappointments; and when we laugh, our hearts inform us that he is not more ridiculous than ourselves, except that he tells what we have only thought." The separation between fiction and reality was not as wide as we sometimes prefer to believe. By the end of the eighteenth century, Cervantes had managed to acquire those readers who understood his novel, who understood that what we perceive as reality is fiction and vice-versa. Don Quixote's ridiculous adventures produced the laughter that Cervantes had intended; they also elicited that more profoundly critical vision of the world and of human nature which defines the modern novel.