A Conversation about Cervantes, the real Man of La Mancha, with Isabel Lozano Renieblas

Isabel Lozano Renieblas (left) is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College and is honorary President of the Asociación de Cervantistas. (When we met her via Zoom we asked if a prerequisite was being named “Isabel” – the name of Cervantes only child.)  Her research and teaching focus on the aesthetics of the novel and, in particular, the aesthetics of the Cervantine novel.

When Maria reached out with her Dartmouth connection Isabel graciously agreed to a conversation – in which we learned a great deal about Miguel de Cervantes, the real Man of La Mancha.

“I am not an expert in Don Quixote, I am an expert in his last book, Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda – which Cervantes thought his best, not Don Quixote,” she began in a voice rich with the proper Spanish pronunciations of the people and places who figure in the tale. (She teaches Don Quixote in the original language to Dartmouth students meeting advanced prerequisites for majoring in Spanish and who have spent a term abroad there. “Why are they attracted? I must give a pragmatic answer – they really have no advance idea of the book, but the attraction to it comes at the end when they discover ‘who is Don Quixote, who is Sancho?’”)

When Cervantes presented Don Quixote de la Mancha to the world in 1605 (420 years ago!) he had the example of great works in Greek and Latin and, as Isabel shared, “He wrote an adventure novel in imitation of one of the great novels of antiquity, the Epic of Gilgamesh.”

Yet there were enough errors in the book – “he forgets names; what happened to Sancho Panza’s donkey?” – that an apocryphal “sequel” appeared that was so popular Cervantes issued “part 2” in 1615. By using part 2 to correct his mistakes, Cervantes can laugh at himself, “In Chapter 3 he even discusses the mistakes with the reader.”

Cervantes created Don Quixote in a jail cell where he was imprisoned for a problem with the bank in connection with olive oil sales to the Spanish Army, and not for anything to do with the Inquisition, Isabel advised. “But one of the main ideas in most chapters is the principle of freedom,” she said. “Chapter 14 and the free woman Marcella, Chapter 22 and the galeotes (galley slaves) condemned by the king to row his galley. This interpretation was drawn from the book later, but when an idea is repeated in a work, it goes beyond the characters. Cervantes was a slave in North Africa for five years so he knew the problem with liberty and these ideas.”

In 1965, when playwright Dale Wasserman set out to create a drama based on Don Quixote, (with Lee Cobb as Cervantes), he presented it in a small, three-quarters round theater with the audience on three sides as we do under the tent at Blow-Me-Down Farm. He said, "My man of La Mancha is not Don Quixote; he is Miguel de Cervantes."

Wasserman’s challenge, like Cervantes' was in presenting complexity. And as Isabel explained, “The 1615 'second' Don Quixote has many layers in the narration and moves forward into criticism of the society, the ducal palace and the customs of the nobility.” So the musical’s back-and-forth between Cervantes the author in a jail cell and his creation Don Quixote actually gets to the heart – some might say soul – of the original.

A fascinating article,  Behind the Story: Man of La Mancha – Barrington Stage Company, explains, "Man of La Mancha is not a musicalization of Don Quixote; it is instead a show about a few hours in the life of Miguel de Cervantes, using Quixote as a storytelling device.”

The musical is also true to the original work in that, as Isabel explained, “Cervantes was trying to write a novel but has no idea how to do that. The first artistic question in 1605 was to write a long novel with the model of the books about chivalry he had read. Spain was one of the most important artistic and political powers at the time but there’s no reference to that. The characters are very simple, just external projections, using the same action dynamic as those books used: Don Quixote is in the road and sees a windmill. He thinks ‘what would the knight do? Oh yes, fight the giant!’ The second part has “many layers in the narration and moves forward into criticism of the society, the ducal palace and the customs of the nobility.”

So the musical’s back-and-forth between Cervantes the author in a jail cell and his creation Don Quixote actually gets to the heart – some might say soul – of the original. “From the point of view of the novel, Don Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza are approximating each other as crazy man and thoughtful observer,” Isabel said. “Sancho starts out as an idiot but not at the end. Cervantes used the two characters to create a complex characterization.”

At the beginning, Don Quixote was read as a comic work (in fact Isabel has written about the development of a contrast between feelings of admiration and sardonic laughter in the work). But by the romanticism of the 1800s, the work was read totally differently, as a serious work. Dostoevsky wrote of Don Quixote, “In the whole world there is no deeper, no mightier literary work. This is, so far, the last and greatest expression of human thought... And if the world were to come to an end, and people were asked there, somewhere: “Did you understand your life on earth, and what conclusions have you drawn from it?”—man could silently hand over Don Quijote.”

In Don Quixote’s words, “This is my conclusion about life. How could you condemn me?”

For Wasserman, for the Man of La Mancha, and for audiences who still love the musical (at Opera North, July 24, 25, 26 & 27), the conclusion is “to dream the impossible dream.”