Part II of Don Quixote shares Part I's preoccupation with the readership of the romances of chivalry, but its view of the literary market and of women readers is less utopian. While Cervantes in Part II affirms that women can and should read, he presents chivalry as a tool for mischief rather than redemption. This shift reflects Cervantes's increasingly critical outlook on the powers of the reader as Don Quixote Part I circulates on the literary market. In Part II, the character Don Quixote truly has become like Amadís, though not in the way he would have liked. Both Quixote and Amadís are personalities of the printed page, unable to defend themselves against the imitations and interpretations of their readers. As in Part I, chivalric romance remains a tool that can be used to subvert or reinforce social hierarchy. While certain reading women in Part I were able to effect positive change by drawing on chivalric trope, in Part II, women readers of chivalry use their knowledge to corrupt, oppress, and discomfit others.

While characters in Part I observed Don Quixote's chivalric actions and laughed at their discordance with the environment, characters in Part II find in chivalric romance the building blocks for what Vladimir Nabokov terms ‘mental cruelties’. For Don Quixote the character, at least, these cruelties reflect a literary market more hostile to chivalry than ever. Throughout the volume, Don Quixote the character must repeatedly confront his unflattering literary reputation. Indeed, as Howard Mancing has pointed out, Don Quixote Part I enjoyed swift and dramatic success. Printed in an economical octavo format that appealed to silent readers and readers of all classes, the work was published in six editions in 1605 and eleven by 1617. The characters appeared as personae in public spectacles, and in Mancing's words, ‘everyone from the king down to the lowliest peasant knew who the tall, thin knight-errant and his short, fat squire were’. Adaptations of the work appeared as early as 1605 with Guillén de Castro's Quixote-themed comedia, and Don Quixote proved so successful beyond Iberian borders that it eventually became the work of world literature translated into the largest number of languages.