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Festive Theater, Restive Narrative in Don Quixote, Part 1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jay Farness
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Abstract

An impromptu “festive theater” spreads its folkloric motives and themes throughout the action represented in the 1605 Quixote, shedding light on the knight's vexed status as hero or fool and the often lamented eclipse of his adventures by interpolated subplots in the book's second half. In a manner similar to the one C. L. Barber ascribes to Shakespeare, Cervantes allows the saturnalian rule of misrule to govern the theatricalized, carnivalized interactions of characters. But in archly celebrating the sentimental, romantic closures of a renewed golden age, the Cervantine narrative conspicuously stages—and thereby arouses curiosity about—the mediated text's dependence on unmediated festival. This complicity of theater and text typifies the negotiations between the high culture of early modern Europe and the popular practices and traditions that saturate it.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Theory of Literary History , January 1992, pp. 105 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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