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This chapter argues that the sheer inventiveness of Coetzee's exploration of the relationship between an ‘ethics of alterity’ and the situation of South African politics has been misunderstood due to an excessive emphasis on the moral stature of particular characters. It argues instead for the importance of a special form of comic experience in Coetzee's writing that he has referred to, quoting Joyce, as the ‘jocoserious’ – the model for which in Age of Iron is Cervantes' Don Quixote. It shows that Coetzee uses a jocoserious style to explore how, and on what terms, the novelistic tradition of sentiment and sensibility—a tradition that originates in Samuel Richardson's epistolary fiction—might continue to have a claim on the powerful rhetoric of difference that dominated late apartheid‐era politics in South Africa.

This chapter pursues conjectures by earlier scholars that the Jacobean play The History of Cardenio contained a subplot, traces of which survive in Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood, which is anomalously short. It gives reasons for believing that the original play contained more material from Don Quixote, related to the Cardenio story there, and then focuses on two scenes and four characters that seem to be relics of that subplot: the two Gentlemen in 4.2 and Fabian and Lopez in 2.1. It connects these characters to Quixote, Sancho, the Barber, and the Curate. It then uses a variety of stylometric tests to establish that four of the speeches of Fabian and Lopez were written by Shakespeare toward the end of his career, with a fifth apparently by Fletcher, and that the speeches of Henriquez in 2.1 contain large amounts of writing by Theobald.

Based upon evidence that English dramatists were aware of the popularity of Don Quixote as early as 1607 and had some access to it before Shelton’s translation was published in 1612, this chapter proposes that the turn to romance by Shakespeare and his collaborators between 1608 and 1613 was influenced by Cervantes’s work. An English embassy travelled to Spain to sign peace articles in 1605 only four months after Quixote was published there, and early allusions to Quixote appear in plays by Wilkins, Middleton, and Jonson. Cervantes’s novel may have provided some of the metatextual strategies that are evident in Shakespeare’s late plays beginning with Pericles, for each one puts a figure associated with its source on stage or otherwise grants heightened attention to texts in ways analogous to Quixote’s citation of chivalric romances and the creation of its own metatext.

Double Falsehood is a story of love, but also of loss. Theobald’s play alters many details from the assumed source of the original, the Cardenio narrative in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, available to Fletcher and Shakespeare in Shelton’s 1612 translation. This chapter argues that some of these changes are the result of altered understandings of the relationships between friendship, sexuality, and class as represented on the public stage, and particularly the loss of passionately physical expressions of male friendship, common in the earlier period. Those differences are traced across all these interrelated texts, and other relevant plays, in the service of illuminating a shifting politico-erotic territory in which substantial changes occurred in the relationships between homosociality, homoeroticism, and the figure of the ‘friend’.

This chapter focuses on the two known Jacobean performances of Cardenio. It provides new documentary evidence that one performance took place at the Aldermanbury home of Sir John Swinnerton, Mayor of London, attended by one or both of the ambassadors of the Duke of Savoy, and probably by other figures associated with them, including Sir Henry Wotton and Sir Richard Rich. It provides for the first time a full calendar of the movements of King James from 31 October 1612 to 20 May 1613, demonstrating that he probably did not see Cardenio until mid-February. It then connects Cardenio to the death of Prince Henry and to what is known about its early spectators. Finally, it re-examines Double Falsehood in the light of this early theatre history, and conjectures that Theobald’s adaptation was influenced by the reputation of D’Urfey’s Comical History of Don Quixote.

This chapter considers the theatrical challenges of reimagining Double Falsehood/Cardenio for production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where Gregory Doran, the author, is the Chief Associate Director. Having directed a number of Fletcher plays for the company, including The Tamer Tamed, The Island Princess, and the Shakespeare collaboration All is True (Henry VIII), Doran became fascinated by the mysterious Cardenio, developing his adaptation of Theobald’s Double Falsehood with help from theatre colleagues and academic communities in Spain, to reassert some of the tone of the Cervantes’s original; and testing the text with Spanish-American actors from New York’s LAByrinth Theatre Company at an RSC residency in Michigan University, and in two workshops in Stratford. His purpose is not to pastiche an ‘authentic’ version of what the play might have been in 1613, but to re-explore the story in theatre terms for the twenty-first century. The production reopened the Swan Theatre in April 2011.

This chapter traces how Taylor’s ‘creative reconstruction’ of The History of Cardenio has been tested and developed in performance, from the first publicly performed reading at New York’s Public Theatre in 1994 and others that followed, to the first full production in New Zealand in May 2009. That production, including the rehearsal process and the associated academic colloquium on which this book is based, provided Taylor with the most substantive ideas yet about where the script might best be strengthened, and has led to further revisions, including explorations of race and of bisexuality in Cervantes, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. Each of these versions, and all the directors and actors, have influenced Taylor’s quest to discover something of what the Shakespeare‐Fletcher play might have been like in performance — indeed, in a larger sense, how an idea becomes a script and a script becomes a performance.

This chapter re-examines and reinterprets key seventeenth-century documents concerning The History of Cardenio and its relationship to Cervantes, Fletcher, Shakespeare, Beaumont, the King’s Men, their composer Robert Johnson, the publisher Humphrey Moseley, and the scholar-writer Edmund Gayton. By this process it narrows the range of plausible candidates for the 1613 play, connects it to seventeenth-century English responses to Cervantes and Spain, and relates it to patterns in the transformation of prose narratives into drama. It also provides detailed new stylometric evidence for Fletcher’s authorship of a song by Johnson based on an episode in Don Quixote, and for the presence in Double Falsehood of writing by Theobald, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. It concludes that the ‘lost play’ is not entirely lost, but survives in fragments, which may be identified by careful historical and stylometric analysis.

Cervantes's novels came into being in the age of, and under the sign of, imperial Spain. This book discusses how the cross-cultural contacts that Colombus inaugurated in the Indies – exploration, conquest, and colonization – resonate throughout Cervantes's two long novels, Don Quixote and Persiles and Sigismunda. It holds that his novels were stimulated by the geographical excitement of a new world. The rise of the early modern novel came on the heels of the incorporation of the Indies into the European maps and legal documents. Cervantes's novels point at multiple targets of satire and assault a great number of vices in the real world of the sixteenth century.

This chapter surveys the role of the New World, from 1492 to 1616, in both Cervantes's writing projects and his personal history. His novels respond to the events precipitated by Spain's ultramarine enterprise in startling ways. As cultural forms, these novels are engaged in a dialogue with a great ensemble of lived and fictional practices that we now call Spanish colonialism. This chapter reviews some of the promising twentieth-century research on Cervantes's reading – what he had access to, what he was indebted to – in the huge textual family of the Chronicles of the lndies, classified as a mass of texts covering Spain's exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas. The chapter ends with a biographical sketch of Cervantes's life, including his frustrated attempts to emigrate to America.

This chapter examines the idea that Cervantes's Persiles provided the ‘germ’ of Robinson Crusoe. Aiming for coevolutionary histories of the novel as alternatives to evolutionary ones, it focuses less on historical origins than on geographical entities; specifically, places and people in the New Wolrd that challenged old forms of thought. It examines Defoe's continued interest in the Spanish Indies for both his colonial propaganda and his novelizing. It also suggests here, the debt of both writers to the Caribbean cannibals.

This chapter addresses America's first epic, Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, a long narrative poem about Spain' s conquest of Chile that Cervantes periodically quarried for his writings. Ercilla is celebrated for his ‘strange grace’ in Cervantes's Galatea, a text that includes a gallery of 16 poets either born or settled in the New World. Passages in Don Quixote and Persiles, as well as other Cervantine fictions, also serve as monuments to Ercilla. This chapter explores Cervantes's transactions with Ercilla's American epic, a poem widely known as the ‘Chilean Aeneid’.

This chapter explains the objective of this book, which is to provide a historical understanding of Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes' poetics and practice of comic fiction. It contends that Cervantes saw his fiction in the low or comic mode primarily as an extension of comedy. This book examines the basic principles of Cervantes' poetics of comic fiction in relation to his comic theatre and analyses the socio-cultural situations that influenced Cervantes and his conception and handling of the comic genre.

This chapter examines the basic values of Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes' poetics of comic and satirical fiction. It highlights Cervantes' corrective and regulatory attitude towards other writers' works and compares his writings with those of his Spanish contemporaries in order to determine what made him distinct. This chapter concludes that Cervantes deliberately distanced himself from the writers around him and the traditions they followed for socio-cultural reasons.

This chapter examines the prologue to Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and how he is distinct from his contemporaries. It argues that Cervantes' insistence on appropriateness in fiction writing can be best understood by considering it in relation to its Renaissance background. It suggests that Cervantes has transformed his comic fiction and differentiated himself from other writers by purging its traditionally base subject matter and by presenting it from a central perspective which is basically enlightened or honourable.

This chapter argues that the principle of decorum is the foundation of Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes' theory and practice of comic fiction. Decorum was one of the salient qualities that Cervantes' contemporaries admired in him as a writer. This chapter explains that decorum is a principle of authorial selection and narrative pitch, but it is a complex notion of appropriateness that originated in Aristotle's classification of the character traits normally shown by people in a given age group or social class.