My purpose in this book is to help the English-speaking reader, with an interest in Spanish literature but without specialised knowledge of Cervantes, to understand his long and complex masterpiece: its major themes, its structure, and the interconnections between its component parts. I approach Don Quixote from the premise that it is essentially a work of comedy, and see no justification for seeing it in any other way, since all Cervantes's explicit comments on it insist on this aspect, specifically on its gaiety and risibility. It is plainly contradictory to acknowledge, as not a few Cervantine critics do, that Cervantes was an intelligent, self-critical writer who knew what he was doing, yet at the same time to turn a blind eye to this aspect of his novel. To avoid misunderstanding, I take for granted that great comedy is capable of pathos and thought-provoking profundity. Don Quixote has both of these, particularly the latter, as is shown by the fact that since the first half of the eighteenth century, it has probably exercised a greater impact on Western culture than any other literary classic. In my view, the profundity lies in its conception of character, particularly the two central ones, and in the outlook on life implied by it, not, as has often been claimed, in some portentous philosophical, political or ethical message.

What kind of story is it and what's it about? What evidence is there for its enduring impact, and, most puzzling of all, what are the reasons for it? In this introduction, I propose to sketch a preliminary answer to these questions.

Cervantes published Don Quixote in 1605, and following its immediate success, brought out a second part in 1615. The action concerns an hidalgo from a village somewhere in La Mancha: that is, the flat, featureless, farming and grazing region of southern Castille, scorchingly hot in summer, bounded on its southern rim by the Sierra Morena, which separates it from Andalucía. This character goes mad through excessive reading of chivalric romances, and, despite his fifty years of age and rusty, makeshift armour, resolves to become a knight-errant like those described in Amadís de Gaula and its numerous sequels.