“We can now enjoy in our own time, which is so in need of joyful entertainment, not only the sweetness of his true history, but also the stories and episodes that appear in it and are, in some ways, no less agreeable and artful and true than the history itself.” Quixote, ch XXVIII
Reading the Cardenio section in Don Quixote, (end of book 3/ start of book 4)…. and thinking about the theory that Cardenio is a lost text of Shakespeare. As a result reading this sequence in Quixote with a Shakespeare head on, looking at the story and seeing so many of the classical elements of a Shakespearian tale. The lover made delirious by that most existential of moments in medieval times, the act of marriage. A door to happiness or, should it close, a door to lunacy. The story within the story. The priest’s observation that it’s the details that “should not be passed over in silence and deserved the same attention as the principal part of the story”, which could be the words of a dramatist, who knows that the story might be known, might contain little or no dramatic tension, but it is the recounting of the story which is the art which binds the listener or the audience to the tale. The image of the forlorn lover, banished from the civilised, urban world, forced to roam the wilds. an image which seems so particular to the common world Shakespeare and Cervantes. An image which is at the same time humorous and tragic. The wilderness as something active, a space beyond the boundary, which is an active not a passive space, a space which calls the misfit, the thwarted lover, the betrayed king. The detail of Cardenio hidden behind the arras - and here there is dramatic tension - will he emerge and speak, will Luscinda kill herself or betray him, or will neither have the courage to act?
There’s a lot of conjecture about the possible links between Elizabethan England and Golden Age Spain. The notion of a lost Shakespearian play called Cardenio, modelled on this section of Quixote, makes perfect sense. Reading around it’s speculated that after England made peace with Spain in the early 17h century, ie towards the end of Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist, an abundance of Spanish texts, including Quixote, infiltrated and were read upon the sceptered isle. As ever, what this would have revealed is that the two cultures had far more in common, (in cultural, epistemological, moral terms), than they had differences.
(Final random thought - is it curious how close the name Cardenio is to the name Cordelia?)
