justice808 said:
Very interesting.
BTW,I cannot say i'm very familiar with Dom Quixote de la Mancha(please excuse my ignorance).Can anyone shed some light on this?Thank you.
Don Quixote
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Don Quixote (or Don Quijote) de la Mancha is a novel by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. It is one of the earliest novels in a modern European language and many people consider it the best book in Spanish. Originally written in Spanish, the story has been translated to many languages, including English. The full original title was El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha. The adjective "quixotic", meaning "idealistic and impractical", derives from his name, and the expression "tilting at windmills" comes from his story.
The plot covers the journeys and adventures of Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza. Don Quixote is an ordinary Spaniard (an Hidalgo, the lowest rank of the Spanish nobility) who is obsessed with stories of knights errant (libros de caballerías). His friends and family think him crazy when he decides to become a knight errant himself, and to wander Spain on his thin horse Rocinante, righting wrongs and protecting the oppressed.
Don Quixote is visibly crazy to most people. He believes ordinary inns to be enchanted castles, and their peasant girls to be beautiful princesses. He mistakes windmills for oppressive giants sent by evil enchanters. He imagines a neighboring peasant to be Dulcinea del Toboso, the beautiful maiden to whom he has pledged love and fidelity.
Sancho Panza, his simple squire, believes his master to be a bit crazy, in particular he knows that there is "really" no Dulcinea, but he plays along, hoping to get rich. He and Quixote agree for instance that because Dulcinea is not as pretty nor does she smell as good as she should, she "must have been enchanted", and from that point on the mission is to disenchant her.
Both master and squire undergo complex change and development throughout the story, and each character takes on attributes of the other as the novel goes on. At the end of the second book, Quixote decides that his actions have been madness and returns home to die. Sancho begs him not to give up, suggesting that they take on the roles of shepherds, who were commonly heroes of pastoral poems and stories.
Master and squire have numerous adventures, often causing more harm than good in spite of their noble intentions. They meet criminals sent to the galleys, and are victims of an elaborate prank by a pair of Dukes.
Many Americans may be more familiar with the musical Man of la Mancha than with the book itself. If they read the book, they would be in for some surprises: for example Dulcinea, or Aldonza Lorenzo, one of the main characters of the play, is never seen in the book.
In the novel, she is constantly invoked by Don Quixote as his lady, but never appears, allowing his hyperbolic statements of her beauty and virtue to go untested. However, the peasant girl he has mistaken for her, eventually, comes to his death-bed and acknowledges that she is, in fact, "his Dulcinea".
Films
Several films are based on the story of Don Quixote, including:
Don Quixote (1933), directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Man of La Mancha (1972), Directed by Arthur Hiller
"Quijote de Miguel de Cervantes, El" (1991) (mini), Directed by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón [Also Known As: "Don Quijote de la Mancha" (1992) (mini) (USA)]
Don Quixote, begun by Orson Welles but never finished; a reshaped version by Jesus Franco was released in (1992)
Don Quixote (2000), directed by Peter Yates
Lost in La Mancha (2002) is a documentary movie about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to make a movie adaptation of Don Quixote.
Hanna-Barbera released a short-lived children's cartoon based on the story called Don Coyote and Sancho Panda. Other than the anthropomorphic main characters, the other roles' species have not been changed, and use the original names.