Don Quixote met with immediate success. Within a short time of the publication of Part i in 1605, the book became hugely popular in the Spanish-speaking world. Already in 1607, the figures of Quixote and Sancho had appeared in street pageants in Peru, as they may well have done in Spain itself, though our first record of this is a pageant at a public fiesta held in Salamanca in 1610. The Bodleian Library at Oxford received a copy in 1605, and a couple of years later, the English writer John Fletcher based a story on one of the tales interpolated in the novel. Another interpolated tale inspired a play, Cardenio, now lost, which Fletcher may have written in collaboration with William Shakespeare. The first English translation of the Quixote appeared in 1612, the French in 1614; that is to say, even before Cervantes had published Part ii in 1615. The book's influence has scarcely diminished since. In a poll conducted in 2002 by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 100 leading writers from 54 countries voted Don Quixote ‘the best work of fiction ever written’.

According to Harold Bloom, ‘This great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers who have come after him. Dickens and Flaubert, Joyce and Proust reflect the narrative procedures of Cervantes, and their glories of characterisation mingle strains of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Still, how could a Spanish writer have created a work that has had the power to influence world literature for some 400 years? In order to attempt an answer to this question, one should consider not just Cervantes’s inventive genius but also the context in which the book was written and the nature of the enterprise itself.