The Man From La Mancha -- Episode 1 (part 1 of 3). The book Don Quixote.

This is the story of how one of the greatest books ever written, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, became one of the most successful musicals in broadway history, which of course was The Man from La Mancha by Dale Wasserman.

The year is 1579, and a solider being held in an Algerian prison is about to make his 4th escape attempt.  It will fail, and there’s a very real chance that although he’s escaped severe punishment the first 3 times, this failure could be fatal.  (McKendrick 82)  His foiled attempt will not result in being put to death, but will leave him utterly without hope of escape. 

What utterly impossible set of circumstances had to happen for this prisoner to even get out of prison, much less become one of the greatest writers of all time?

The year is 1615, and a very conventional playwright is writing the second part of a very unconventional book.  Really wanted to be a playwright, seemed almost ambivalent about being an author of books.  In it he pens the phrase “My guess is that there is not a nation or language into which the book will not be translated.”  This prediction will prove to be entirely true.

What about this book is so compelling that it makes its own equivocal author an accurate prophet, beyond his own wildest dreams?

The time frame is now the mid-1960s a playwright is looking to convert a stage play into a musical, and he’s having a meal at small restaurant where the cook is also the sole proprietor and the menu has one item.  The cook is also a psychic, so the writer asks whether the musical will be a successful endeavor.  The psychic predicts not only that it will, and will soon overwhelm the writer’s life.

Both predictions are entirely accurate.

Not only are these 3 events connected, but they are connected by a straight line and by the exact same narrative.

In this 3-episode series I pursue the history Don Quixote, and episode 1.1 starts with the book -- how did it get written, what's it about, and why has it become such a class?  Episode 2 will explore the life of the author, MIguel de Cervantes, and episode 3 will get to how the author and the story got woven into a musical.

Transcript

The year is 1579, and a soldier being held in an Algerian prison is about to make his fourth escape attempt. It will fail, and there's a real chance this failure could be a fatal one. What completely impossible set of circumstances had to happen for this prisoner to even get out of prison?  And even more improbably, how could this escaped convince write a narrative that 350 years later get translated into one of the world's most successful musicals in Broadway history? What impossible and unlikely events had to happen for the world to inherit Don Quixote? 

[intro]

The first episode in this series, I'm going to break it into three different parts.

The first one, we'll just talk about the book, Don Quixote, where did it come from? How important was it? What made it good? The second part, talking about the man, Cervantes, who was it? Where did he come from? And what strange connections did he have with other artists of the time? And finally, I'll talk about the musical. What was it that made The Man from La Mancha such a smash hit? And how did it get to be there? Diving right in, episode 1, the book. How big a deal was the book and why was it so good? This book has got to be, by all accounts, the second greatest story ever told, just dwelling on its success.

How many people have read this book? According to Scott Miller, the Artistic Director of the New Line Theater in St. Louis, it is the second bestseller of all time. Now, what's a little weird about that is Scott Miller cites no source on the matter. I can find nobody else who has cited a source to prove that that is true, but everybody says that this seems to be one of the things that everybody knows.

Number one best-selling book of all time, The Bible. Number two best-selling book of all time, Don Quixote. But no matter how you count it, this thing is enormously popular.

It was first published in January of 1605. It had a second run later that spring, and it was never out of print. It had nine print productions in the author's lifetime, but it's never stopped.

According to P.E. Russell of Oxford, it got really popular, really fast. And according to Femi Oyubodae of the Cambridge University Press, it broke all sales records in the first three months.  

Before we go any farther, I was going to premise this series by saying, this is going to be shoddy academic research that makes random unsubstantiated statements about musical theater, but as I got into this, I feel like that's really the way this happens with all musical theater research because while Oyubodae has claimed that it broke all sales records in three months, I've seen other sources that said it wasn't even one of the top four best sellers at the time it was released in that spring of 1605. So take that with a grain of salt. But whatever is true, it definitely caught on.

People were reading this book in Spain almost as soon as it was released. Not only was it an immediate popular success in spring, it was the first international bestseller. The characters appeared in Peru by 1607.

Apparently they were having some ring joust and there was a festival that had that and the winning entry in the costume contest were two characters, Don Quixote and Sancho. And so just to do that math super quick, the book is published in Spain in 1605 and by 1607, the characters are so recognizable they're being used to make costumes in Peru.  For this to happen, the book made it across the continents. For reference in 1607, Jamestown was still struggling to be the first permanent British settlement. So this was a long time ago.

Retracing just a bit, the book is published in 1605, it's being referenced in English by 1607. It was translated to English in 1611. It was made into a play in England by 1611, according to Malvina McKendrick of Girton College, which I think is part of the Cambridge University system.

There were a half dozen more translations between 1612 and 1900. It was first translated into French into 1614. The French loved it.  According to McKendrick, it was a resounding success in both countries. 

So I know that that's a lot of facts and figures really quick, but just thinking about how many books did this sell? It sold a lot of copies. It got translated almost immediately.

It was a big hit wherever it went in Spain, in England, in the new world in France. And the readership kept growing. The book is never stopping popular.  People have never stopped reading it or publishing it or re-translating it. 

What is slightly unusual was it was published in two parts a decade apart, which will be an issue we return to later. The first one appeared in 1605 and the second part was published by Cervantes in 1615 and everything I just said about its popularity was talking about before part two even got released.

The longer the book has been around the more popular it’s become. So this book, the second greatest story ever told, it's the second most told tale other than the Bible. That is kind of a big deal.

Beyond just the number of copies that it sold though, the amazing thing about this book was its impact. It is the first novel. As predicted, it was translated into all languages.

In part two of the book, there's a character called Sanson Carrasco who said, “there will be no nation on earth and no language spoken in which it will not have been translated.”  Nostradamus is famous for being a prophet because he used words like Hyster and said a bunch of stuff that's all mixed up, but everybody thinks that's a great prophet. But compare that to the quote that Cervantes has put into the mouth of Sanson Carrasco.

There will be no nation on earth and no language spoken in which it will not have been translated. And that is exactly what has happened to this book. By 1637, both Miles Standish and Cotton Mather were referencing it.

According to de Armis Wilson, by 1637, it's being quoted in the New England colonies. Lord Byron loved this book.  He said that “reading it in Spanish was a pleasure before which all others vanished.” Faulkner claimed to read it at least once a year. There are those who have claimed that this book inspired Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Ahab, the idiot of Oskayevsky, and the Faderis from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Hemingway claimed that all American literature was a variation on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Huckleberry Finn. And Huckleberry himself refers to Don Quixote, in the Mark Twain’s book, as the source of all his knowledge. 

I got to say, I found that, so I'm doing my shoddy research for this thing, I'm looking for references like, is there a connection between Mark Twain and Cervantes? 

If you dig deep, you can find a couple sources that actually make legitimate academic connections. But what you really find is a whole bunch of plagiarism sites that are offering to write a paper for you about the connections between Mark Twain and Don Quixote that probably says something about the popularity of the book, and the sorry state of the internet and higher education.

You may know that Picasso made his famous sketch about Don Quixote.  According to Bayless of the University of Kansas, Picasso was, of course, exiled by Franco and spent a lot of time thinking about Spain and the Spanish character. For him, Don Quixote was central to that. So to see the connection between one of the greatest authors of all time and one of the greatest painters of all time is something.

So this project, Don Quixote as a concept, is a novel. It's become a national monument. There's literally a monument that is in Spain.

And Dale Wasserman, the guy who wrote The Man from La Mancha, the musical, claims to have been inspired by that. It's been made into multiple films, including an unfinished film by Orson Welles and a completed film that had mega-stars Peter O'Toole and Sofia Loren in it. 

And it has recently inspired a space station.  In 2005, the European Space Agency announced a near earth object deflection mission named Don Quixote, the name of the mission. And the two unmanned craft were named Sancho and Hidalgo.

The text is a big part of the Spanish national movement.  The icon, of that movement Miguel de Unamuno, was an academic and a great Spanish liberalist.

He started as an intellectual. He was removed from one office by the dictator, Primo de Rivera. He then tangled with Franco and central to his thinking were the ideas that were produced in Don Quixote and that is according to Unamuna himself.

The monument to him was erected in 1916. Hugo Chavez, the dictator from Venezuela, gave away one million copies of the book, ostensibly to inspire the population to take on the giant imperialist powers that oppressed them.

All in all, there is no doubt that Cervantes did for the Spanish language that Shakespeare did for the English language.

And as a teaser, we'll explore the cosmic connection between those two writers, Cervantes and Shakespeare in episode two. 

What I am actually struck by is that this story inspired as many failures as it did successes for the successful stage productions of Don Quixote. There have been a whole bunch that just did not work.

The films generally have been panned and it is pretty terrible. In fact, one of the commentators actually said, you know, that movie with Peter O'Tullan's feeling it's not as bad as everyone says it is. There's something to go on there, but nobody says it was a triumph of cinema.

And yet there is something so moving, something so central about the story of Don Quixote that all the failures have not detracted other people from seeing value in the story and trying to move it forward. Before we foray into what does this book means, and how it result in a piece of musical theater, the first thing to know is this book is a great big deal and it's probably bigger than you have thought about before. It's certainly bigger than I had thought about before I started looking into this.

If you’re like me, you probably know who this guy Don Quixote was. Maybe had the phrase Knight Arendt. He knew that he waved his sword at some windmills that he thought were giants and that he had a sidekick and a mule.

But beyond that, there's something in this narrative that has made it translate to every language in the world, inspire countless other truly great thinkers and great heroes of literature and stage. If you were to say who's the most influential English author of all time, you would probably say Shakespeare. If you were to say who's the greatest Spanish author of all time, you would definitely say Cervantes.

And if you were to say which of the two of them have had more influence, tough to say, but this narrative is up there with one of the greatest stories that's been told in the world. What I'm trying to establish here is we know the story was a compelling one. 

Dale Wasserman in his book about how this came to be put out when he calls the Wasserman test.  How can you tell what a good musical will be? And he says, well, if you strip the musical of the music, is the story powerful enough that it can carry a narrative by itself? This narrative has got to be the one that can do that, right? This is the story that has been found to be compelling, to resonate with audiences literally across centuries, across continents and across languages. So what I want to do now is ask the question, why? What is it about this book that is so fantastic and so compelling? Let's start with the plot. And here I'm just going to quote from Malvina McKendrick.

She is of Cambridge University and her book, is just called Cervantes, and it's a biography. She has this summary of the plot.

“In outline, the plot is a simple one. Alonzo Kehano, an impoverished, elderly Hidalgo living with his niece and his housekeeper in an unmanned village in La Mancha, the Hidalgo, because of his social and psychological pretensions, was a common figure of fun, is so addicted to reading romances of chivalry that he ceases to be able to distinguish between their view of the world and his own. Thereafter, all his perceptions and experiences are translated into chivalric terms as he seeks to create an appropriate context for attempts to win fame for himself as a valiant and chivalrous knight.

The narrative traces his determined search for adventures and equally determined efforts of his family and friends to get him home. The clash between the two provides many of the incidents and much of the humor in the book. For his second sortie, Don Quixote acquires Esquire, a local country bumpkin called Sancho Panza, who, with his proper riddled speech and very basic attitude to life, provides the perfect foil to the learned and rarefied ravings of the knights.

For his lady, the essential prerequisite for any knight errant, Don Quixote metamorphosizes Al Donza Lorenzo, a buxom wench he knows but has barely seen, into the beautiful Dulcinea del Tivoso, who dominates the poor man's imagination and pervades the whole book, yet never actually appears. That's kind of what happens. But within that, there are layers upon layers of meaning.”

And what I want to do right now is to pursue the question, What does the book mean? What have other people said that it means? And let me just say, this is truly an impossible task. There are so many different interpretations.

I'm going to highlight the ones that struck my eye or caught me as funny, but this is just to give you kind of a quick glimpse at a quick flavor, and it won’t be close to being comprehensive.  One issue is that Cervantes doesn't give away a single meaning, according to Robert Bayless, from the University of Kansas, Cervantes intentionally includes multiple ways of reading the book. There is a narrator, but it turns out that the narrator is unreliable.

As a quick side quest I’d like to talk about this concept called the death of the author, which might be familiar if you're into philosophy or literary criticism. If not, it just sort of means that although we tend to give authors all the deference for what does your book mean, it's now abundantly clear that meaning is co-created between and author and the audience. There's the meaning the author gives the book, and then there's the meaning that the audience reading the book has.

And then there's the conflicting different interpretations you can have of the same text. And part of the thought is that the author isn't necessarily the one who has the privilege, the best, or the only read of their own work. According to desArmis Wilson, there's no central authority.

And in fact, Cervantes is inviting the reader to interpret the book in ways that Cervantes won’t don.  In the text the phrase, “you, the reader should decide” appears constantly throughout this book. And thus there are these layers of meaning and different things that you can pull out of the book, is it just funny? Is it making fun of him? What does it mean that he's insane? Sancho Panza has stuff to say. Is that just foil? What does it all mean? One of the first things that especially modern critics do when they look at this book is just, there's so many layers here.

And it is one of the first times in Western literature that the author invites audience to participate. If you were to say, there's this grand new movement in modern critical literary theory called death of the author, where does it trace to? You could trace it back to Cervantes and Don Quixote as one of the seminal times that starts to happen in the book. 

Okay, back to the possible meanings.

As a starting point, what the book claims to be is a critique of this chivalric romance, which was a type of book that had been dominating the previous 100 years worth of Spanish literature. 

There's a lot of courtly love. So there's a knight trying to get to a damsel.  There's adventures that happen. There are damsels in distress. There are sword fights.  There are amputations. The amputations get repaired with magic spells. Think Arthurian legend.  

Think of trials by combat or grand quests to win a lady's heart or something that must be done to find love in the end. Those were all the rage and Cervantes felt them to be shallow and pointless. You might think of them as the way we regard romance novels today.

And so in prologue, what Cervantes says is, my book, what I'm about to write, Don Quixote, is making fun of all of these chivalric romances. But within that, there's of course, a lot of other stuff. Quixote has lucid comments amidst the moment of insanity.  It is novel. It's kind of a big deal that Don Quixote himself is insane. That didn't happen a lot in literature of the time.

The second part, the one published in 1615, talks about the first part of the book where the fictive character will meet other fictive characters that have literally read the first book they had done in reality. It's all in and out of the fourth wall. Oya Bode has said, there's definitely magical realism that happens in the book.  In fact, it might have been invented in this book. And that became a very powerful movement in subsequent literature. It has been massively studied.

There are many interpretations over the years. In fact, Bayless ends the article that they had written that says, how is it capable of acquiring so many different meanings in disparate contexts? Postmodern critics love him. In fact, there’s a book with the title Cervantes and his postmodern constituencies.

If you're looking for something that has multiple possible meanings, multiple possible perspectives, the death of the author, all of these are postmodern concepts, you can find all of them there. Professor McKendrick, however, notes that he was definitely a moralist and he was definitely commenting on his age. And for Russell, it defines or comments on the Spanish character.

In fact, there is an article by Villar, who said it was a reflection on his times. Spain was, of course, one of the original imperial empires. It was sort of at its apex and beginning its decline right when Don Quixote came out.

And Villar believes that the audience at the time just like the escapism as reality was starting to crumble around the Spaniards. The ability of that book to make fun of the history and the silly romances at the same time, inviting the audience to escape into it at the time when the Spanish empire itself was collapsing was something that others have pointed to as one of the meanings of the book. And Bayless notes that inevitably the Spanish commentators say that book has something profound to say about Spanish national identity.

That's certainly what Picasso thought. It's certainly what Unamuno thought. If you're a psychiatrist and when psychiatric criticism became a deal in literature, you can obviously point to this book and say, hey, this one has an insane character.

There's also Nietzsche that can be thrown in here. Nietzsche both read and wrote about Don Quixote. Nietzsche himself was, probably crazy, probably insane, writing a book about a character was probably insane talking about suffering.

I'm not sure that I’m ready to call Don Quixote a book about Nitzchean philosophy, but let's just say there's enough multilayered meaning out there that if you want to find Nietzsche in Don Quixote, you definitely can. And Nietzsche himself definitely found a bunch of Nietzsche and Don Quixote.

Russell thinks that the book was fun because it let people poke fun at the aristocrats just as the fuel system were failing. Villar thinks people were in sympathy with Robin Hood type. 

So: Cervantes said:  “I'm making fun of chivalric novels.” That is what it's doing. But subsequently postmodern literary critics, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, authors of Spanish history have all come to read so much into this character and all from different ways and all from different interpretations.

Both Russell and Bayless have made the point that there's no way Cervantes himself could have anticipated all these different interpretations. Bayless has made the point that what's kind of funny is that a lot of people who have opinions about Don Quixote and what it means have never actually read the entire book. You know, it is a book that is so famous. It's one of those books that you put on your bookshelf, even though you've never read it, just  because the story is so famous.

The meaning starts to spin way beyond what the original author intended. 

But one thing that’s for sure is that the book has multiple layers of meanings, and another thing that’s for sure is that a LOT of thinkers over a LOT of time have produced a whole bunch of different interpretations of what the book might mean.

Okay, that's a lot.   And for help here, I'm going to turn to Robert Bayless at the University of Kansas, who wrote an article in the journal comparative literature studies, and he boils it down to two basic interpretations.

Here's number one: The Cervantes novel had been received, above all else, as a satire that aims to do just as the prologue narrator's friend claims it does – to debunk an outdated mode of imaginative fiction and to demonstrate the dangers that reading such romances might involve. This interpretation privileges the conclusion of book 2 in the multi-volume work in which Don Quixote renounces his misguided behavior and even his chivalric name, casting aside the moicker Don Quixote and instead calling himself Alonzo Quijano the Good.  That ending only really makes sense if the point of the book is that chivalric endeavors – taken to an extreme -- are foolish.  So in the end, it's just a funny book, making fun of chivalric romances, and that’s the point.

Here's interpretation number two. This is a direct quote from Bayless. “The 19th century romantic approach to the novel, however, embraces the night as a heroic idealist and noble visionary intent upon improving the world by reviving a lost golden age.”  Under this interpretation, chivalric endeavors, taken to an extreme, reveal a laudable nobleness of character that is to be celebrated, not mocked.

It is this line of interpretation that's been the most influential in recent centuires and how Don Quixote has reappeared in the last several decades, perhaps best exemplified by the Broadway musical, The Man of La Mancha. Quote, “the greatest madness for all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.” In interpretation number one, it's a funny book and it's funny because it's making fun of Don Quixote, who has to return to reality in order to save himself. 

And then the second reading, the nobleness of Don Quixote's intentions, the idea is that he is clinging on to the best of the chivalric age and believes it in the face of his own madness. That's what is noble and that's what is appealing.  In this reading of Don Quixote now we're not laughing at him. We are cheering for him and his conviction that we should pursue what is noble in the face of impossible odds.

I think both of those interpretations are important in understanding why Don Quixote was such a huge success.

That first interpretation, that it's just a damn funny book, that's the one that really gets this book through the first 150 years. Russell wrote an article titled “Don Quixote as a funny book” and that title was pretty much what the article had to say.

And Bayless agrees, it's just really fun. The title of Bayless's article was “what Don Quixote means today,” – so definitely not only exploring it as a funny book -- both Bayless and Russell agree that what made the book such a hit initially was just that it is really, really funny.

Now, just to reflect on that, if you read the unabridged translations, those could be multiple volumes like 1500 pages. Even the Game of Thrones – which are super-long books – has struggled to get through seven seasons. Imagine writing 1500 pages of comedy that can survive 400 years and still be funny.  That is no small accomplishment. 

That gets the book through the first couple of centuries.  But the subsequent success he had is due to that second interpretation -- the vision of Quixote as a noble fighter in the face of certain defeat. He's definitely seen as a noble dreamer.

That's definitely the point of Bayless's article. In the view of Bayless, it is big enough to hold lots of things.  And his phrase is it has “contextual elasticity.” What a great phrase. The book has many, many possible interpretations that were there that were multilayered.

So now we're down to the big why. We know this book was one of the greatest stories ever told. We know that it was initial commercial success.  We know that it had a huge impact through the ages. We know that it has been subject to an enormous amount of commentary, books and books and books and thousands of articles dedicated to the question of just what this book means and what does it make it so good. 

And what I am going to do is -- in Don Keahody -- like fashion, foolishly attempt to offer my own interpretation.

Here, I think is the big why.  The book had to be layered enough that as you read and re-read it, you can always see something new. The Harvard Gazette interviewed Mary Gaylord, the Harvard professor of the romance languages and literature. And she says she rereads it every year, just like Faulkner said that he did.

Her quote is, “I always find something in it that I hadn't noticed before. It's a truly inexhaustible text for it to have had the life it did. It had to anticipate parts of the human character that had not even been named.”

The book took has the ability to warp into something that was about a poly vocal postmodern texts that initiated the death of the author. Those were all things that Cervantes himself would not have known, but he had to have those themes in there so that as human thinking change, there was the idea to grab on to. To be as successful as it’s been, it has to have many, many, many layers, hence the contextual elasticity, but it still has to be accessible or funny.

He created a novel that was a new form, but it was just fun to read and it still is. And here's what I think the key to it is. He was not just doing a lot of layered stuff, but he was keeping it coherent and making it fun at the same time.

He broke with a traditional, but he was sort of the Beatles of his day. He was more like John Lennon than Vincent van Gogh. And to presage the second episode in this series, this is really, really ironic.

Cervantes was the Beatle who didn't like rock music. It is possible to do something to this multi-layered that has a ton of different themes and a ton of different directions. And what Cervantes did was put in the psychology in the text and invent a new form of literature, the novel that did not exist before, but it is completely accessible and it's completely funny to have all that richness.

Anybody who's tried writing a musical or a stage play knows all this stuff already. But you put in all those layers, and then what we keep telling ourselves is now you got to go back and kill your babies, take out all those weird distracting side quests you're on. 

And what Cervantes could do was go on all the side quests, make every single one of them interesting and appealing and funny and keep it coherent.

What makes this book survive is both its contextual elasticity, its deep layers of meaning, but the coherence that was provided around them. Okay. Part of what I want to do here is I want to do a deep dive into the tales that go into musical theater and good musical theater productions.

But I'd also like to extract from this discussion something that we can take away as if you're an author, or just somebody who appreciates musical theater, if you just want to apply these ideas to musical theater, what's the big lesson here? What I take away from this is what makes a good piece of musical theater -- and let's be honest, between the singing cats, seeing Spider-Man, even Octo-Mom the musical (you are excused if you’ve never heard of that one) musical theater doesn't really have the best reputation as being a deep academic endeavor. But, I guess my belief is that there are definitely, as with everything else, good musicals and bad musicals, but the best ones pass the Wasserman test.

The Man from La Mancha has a great story in there. And so the lesson for musical theater that I take away from the man from La Mancha and the story that it is based on, Don Kehote, is that you can be polyvocal. You need to have multi-levels, but in the end, you have to be coherent.

And the more you can wrap a really good idea around a really coherent and powerful narrative and story, the more you got a winner.  That’s what made Don Quixote, the novel work, and that same structure formed the bones for the Man from La Mancha, the musical.

I will end it there.  But our treatment of Don Quixote is not done!

This book, as great as it was, would never have come to pass if Cervantes had died in prison. What would put him in prison and how would he escape? He'd need to escape at least four times.  How did he do it?

And after prison, his life had a star-crossed relationship with the greatest playwright of the day. It was not William Shakespeare, the progenitor of the very phrase star-crossed, although they did live at the same time. Who was it, and how did their paths cross? And what consequences did that relationship have? We will tackle these questions and more in our next episode.