Don Quixote isn’t simply one of the greatest novels ever published, it’s a masterclass in the art of storytelling. In ‘Don Quixote as Theatre’, Dale Wasserman writes persuasively about Cervantes the playwright, and how the author’s failure in the domain of theatre led to creation of the timeless Knight of the Doleful Countenance. To wit:
Miguel de Cervantes was passionately and pre-eminently a man of the theatre. Very logically, his literary creation was an actor quite aware of the role he was playing. […] A playwright has no problem identifying the techniques of theatre in the novel Don Quixote. There is the creation of living, breathing characters; the manufacture of a world better than the one we have been born to; the search for concise yet poetic expression of that world; the difficulties of realization which never measure so splendidly as the dimensions in one’s mind.
Wasserman also quotes my own favourite lines from the novel, and which, in a nutshell, sum up Quixote’s character and his abiding appeal:
‘When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it might be.’
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