Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Chapter 3 - Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance
- Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575
- Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
- Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury
- Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance
- Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages
- Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
EDMUND Gayton's Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot (1654) are, amongst other things, an extended homage to his supposed mentor, ‘Father Benjamino’ Jonson. A large folio volume which comments upon each chapter of the first part of Thomas Shelton's translation of Don Quixote in turn, using Cervantes' work as a jumping-off point for his own display of wit, Gayton's book is riddled with references to the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama. The first English commentary on Cervantes –possibly the first anywhere in Europe –the Pleasant Notes approach their subject in what we might consider to be a curiously back-to-front manner: rather than directly celebrating the talents of the Spanish author, they aim to construct a cultural bridge to their subject matter out of the materials provided by native dramatic productions of some twenty or thirty years earlier. Thus, the host of the inn at which Don Quixote stays is, on account of his demands for money, said to be ‘of that wise and provident house of the Iagas [sic], where this Maxime is intailed upon the Family … My son, put money in thy purse’. Don Quixote himself is regularly identified with what, to English eyes, was evidently the epitome of dramatic lunacy: having decided, in imitation of Amadis de Gaul, to go mad for love, and having selected an appropriately desolate venue for his insanity, Quixote is said to be ‘worthily taken with the site of his Stage, whereon he means to outdoe Ieronymo’; earlier, we have seen him ‘act Jeronimo in his short shirt’.
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- Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance , pp. 99 - 133Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003