311
But others like the French monk Emeric Crucé (1590–1648), Blaise Pascal
(1623–1662), Montesquieu (1689–1755), and John Locke (1632–1704) tried to follow in this tradition, all tied like a heavy, unrealizable vacuum to doomed helium
balloons. Between the Magna Carta of King John of England at Runnymede (June
15, 1215) and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet (1775–1776), the human
world witnessed war upon war, and little else.
While Cervantes’ 1605 and 1615 volumes One and Two of Don Quixote are typically thought of as the first novel (considered by many—and rightly so—to be the
greatest work of world fiction), it is clear that his intentions strayed far from his
precise contemporary, Shakespeare (he and Cervantes died within a week of one
another), in advocating for a certain irresistible dream, as contradistinguished from
the cinema verité pathologies and tragic ironies of early seventeenth-century humanity. The redundancy of grief throughout Shakespeare is not easily compiled because,
to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, there was already such an abundance of tears that
one must laugh so as not to cry. Note the murders in Macbeth; Richard II’s killing
of an uncle, his treachery then backfiring; of Richard III, that bloodiest of princely
protagonists, whose imbroglios took no less than nine lives, preceding his own; the
rivaling Montague and Capulet families culminating in suicides of Romeo and
Juliet; a dinner-turned-massacre, with the cutting off of heads, tongues, and hands
before General Titus’ son Lucius finally grabbed the throne in Titus Andronicus.
And Horatio on the sickness of Hamlet’s era, “Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced
cause, And in this upshot, purposes mistook/Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads”.
4
For Cervantes, that same period in our history, his own personal history, owed far
more to Sannazaro (1458–1530) and the other Italian Arcadian poets
5
than to the
gifted poetics of journalism that were so embedded in Shakespeare’s topology.
Which is not to ignore the very roots of la Mancha, meaning tainted, or stained. We
know that Cervantes’ travails had not the theatrical outlet of a Shakespeare, with
actors in robust profusion populating the Globe Theatre. Pent up, all but anonymous, Cervantes’ personal problems undermined the aspiring writer whose principal competition exerted so prolific an output in the personage of one Lope de Vega
(1562–1635), Spain’s giant of the Baroque. De Vega produced over 500 plays and
16 other fictional works, in addition to thousands of sonnets.
But by whatever biographical mysteries we may forever interpolate, there they
are, Don Quixote, his tired horse Rocinante, Sancho Panza and his donkey, Dapple,
and Dulcinea del Toboso. Their exploits—to a degree endlessly more tempting to
illustrators than most anything in De Vega or even Shakespeare—owe their theatrical enjoyment to the landscapes, beginning with the first illustrated edition in
English (translated by John Milton’s nephew, John Phillips, London, 1687, with
4 “Hamlet,” Act V, Scene 2, Lines 381–384.
5 See Jacopo Sannazaro – Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues, Translated with an introduction by
Ralph Nash, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1966.
34.1 Early Ecological Epics
But others like the French monk Emeric Crucé (1590–1648), Blaise Pascal
(1623–1662), Montesquieu (1689–1755), and John Locke (1632–1704) tried to follow in this tradition, all tied like a heavy, unrealizable vacuum to doomed helium
balloons. Between the Magna Carta of King John of England at Runnymede (June
15, 1215) and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet (1775–1776), the human
world witnessed war upon war, and little else.
While Cervantes’ 1605 and 1615 volumes One and Two of Don Quixote are typically thought of as the first novel (considered by many—and rightly so—to be the
greatest work of world fiction), it is clear that his intentions strayed far from his
precise contemporary, Shakespeare (he and Cervantes died within a week of one
another), in advocating for a certain irresistible dream, as contradistinguished from
the cinema verité pathologies and tragic ironies of early seventeenth-century humanity. The redundancy of grief throughout Shakespeare is not easily compiled because,
to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, there was already such an abundance of tears that
one must laugh so as not to cry. Note the murders in Macbeth; Richard II’s killing
of an uncle, his treachery then backfiring; of Richard III, that bloodiest of princely
protagonists, whose imbroglios took no less than nine lives, preceding his own; the
rivaling Montague and Capulet families culminating in suicides of Romeo and
Juliet; a dinner-turned-massacre, with the cutting off of heads, tongues, and hands
before General Titus’ son Lucius finally grabbed the throne in Titus Andronicus.
And Horatio on the sickness of Hamlet’s era, “Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced
cause, And in this upshot, purposes mistook/Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads”.
4
For Cervantes, that same period in our history, his own personal history, owed far
more to Sannazaro (1458–1530) and the other Italian Arcadian poets
5
than to the
gifted poetics of journalism that were so embedded in Shakespeare’s topology.
Which is not to ignore the very roots of la Mancha, meaning tainted, or stained. We
know that Cervantes’ travails had not the theatrical outlet of a Shakespeare, with
actors in robust profusion populating the Globe Theatre. Pent up, all but anonymous, Cervantes’ personal problems undermined the aspiring writer whose principal competition exerted so prolific an output in the personage of one Lope de Vega
(1562–1635), Spain’s giant of the Baroque. De Vega produced over 500 plays and
16 other fictional works, in addition to thousands of sonnets.
But by whatever biographical mysteries we may forever interpolate, there they
are, Don Quixote, his tired horse Rocinante, Sancho Panza and his donkey, Dapple,
and Dulcinea del Toboso. Their exploits—to a degree endlessly more tempting to
illustrators than most anything in De Vega or even Shakespeare—owe their theatrical enjoyment to the landscapes, beginning with the first illustrated edition in
English (translated by John Milton’s nephew, John Phillips, London, 1687, with
4 “Hamlet,” Act V, Scene 2, Lines 381–384.
5 See Jacopo Sannazaro – Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues, Translated with an introduction by
Ralph Nash, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1966.
34.1 Early Ecological Epics