It can scarcely be doubted that _Don Quixote_ contains many allusions to contemporaries and contemporary events. We can catch the point of his jests at Lope de Vega’s fondness for a classical reference, or at a geographical blunder made by the learned Mariana; but probably many an allusion of the same kind escapes us in Cervantes’s pages. The same may be said of Shakespeare, and hence both Cervantes and Shakespeare have been much exposed to the attentions of commentators. In a celebrated passage of _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_ Oberon addresses Puck:—
Thou rememberest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid’s music.
An ordinary reader would be content to admire the lines as they stand, but a commentator is an extraordinary reader, who feels compelled to justify his existence by identifying the mermaid with Mary Queen of Scots, the dolphin with her first husband the Dauphin of France, and the certain stars with Mary’s English partisans. In precisely the same way Don Quixote has been identified with the Duke of Lerma, Sancho Panza with Pedro Franqueza, and the three ass-colts—promised by the knight to the squire as some compensation for the loss of Dapple—have been flatteringly recognised as the three Princes of Savoy, Philip, Victor Amadeus, and Emmanuel Philibert. These identifications seem quite as likely to be correct in the one case as in the other. We need not discuss them. But if _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_ and _Don Quixote_ were really intended as a couple of political pasquinades, they must be classed as complete failures: the idea that Cervantes and Shakespeare were a pair of party pamphleteers is a piece of grotesque perversity.
Apart from the matter of _Don Quixote_, the diversity of its manner is arresting. Even those who most admire the elaborate diction of the _Galatea_ are compelled to admit its monotony. The variety of incident in _Don Quixote_ corresponds to a variety of style which is a new thing in Spanish literature. Still there are examples of deliberate imitation, not only in the travesties of the romances of chivalry, but in such passages as Don Quixote’s famous declamation on the happier Age of Gold:—