"In order to imitate . . . brave Sir Roland"

The liberation of the galley slaves in chapter 22 constitutes the narrative watershed of Part I for several reasons. In the

[8] The reference, of course, is to the title of Lope's apologetically defiant and ironically humble Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609).

first place, up until that point, aside from a tangential glance at the pastoral follies of Marcela and Grisóstomo, Cervantes and his readers have mainly attended to a single and manifestly extravagant case of symbiosis of literature and life. But afterward, as we shall see, two other cases offer themselves for inspection at center stage. In the second place, as in chapter 4 when Don Quijote's belief in his own invincibility was shattered by the merchants' adolescent muleteer, he is obliged again to superimpose a new fictional identity on that invented in Argamasilla. The obsolete knight now is confronted not with a single antagonist nor with a group of malandrines (scoundrels)—picaros, herdsmen, galley slaves, traveling players, or contentious villagers—but with organized society itself in the form of the Santa Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, as the state police of the time was called. As Hegel remarked in the section of his Aestetik entitled "Das Ende der romantische Kunstform," the aspirations of the heroes of both romance and novel would be untenable (are untenable!) in a nation blessed or cursed with really efficient law enforcement—apparently meaning that they are fundamentally antisocial. It is curious, therefore, that elsewhere he points to this episode as particularly significant. In any case, Sancho warns his master that the liberation of the galley slaves will not be overlooked, and Don Quijote reluctantly heeds his recommendation that they retreat into the wilderness of nearby Sierra Morena. However, since flight in any form is contrary to his code, he is perplexed, and a few chapters later we find him trying to justify himself by recalling from his past reading a suitable role model.

Who shall he be now? On the one hand, there is "brave Sir Roland," who, "when he discovered in a fountain the signs that Angelica the Beautiful had committed a villainy with Medoro," ran about the countryside where he "went mad, tore up trees, muddied the waters of clear running springs, slew shepherds, set fire to huts, tore down houses, dragged mares along after him, and did a hundred thousand other outrageous deeds [insolencias ] worthy of eternal renown and written record" (I.25). But Sancho demurs: "What evidence is

there that my Lady Dulcinea del Toboso has been trifling with Moor or Christian?" Don Quijote's answer—"That is precisely my point, . . . and therein resides the exquisiteness of my plan, for . . . if I do this much in cold blood, how would I behave in the heat of passion?"—is far more comic in Spanish than in English.^[9] Nevertheless, Sancho's objection (like everything else in this intricate compendium of memories) remains in Don Quijote's mind. In the next chapter we hear him meditating: "I will venture to swear that my Dulcinea del Toboso has never seen a Moor as he really is dressed in his native garb and that today she is as intact as the mother who bore her."^[10] Imitation of Orlando's fury would therefore be a form of chivalresque slander, a consideration that leads him to choose a more suitable alternative—Amadís, who after being rejected by Oriana also retreated into the wilderness. There, "without losing his senses and without committing mad extravagances, he won no less fame as a lover." There-

[9] "Si en seco hago esto, ¿que haría en mojado?" The expression en seco corresponds roughly to our army's "dry run," and the humor consists in the knight's coining of an unexpected variation: en mojado , or "wet run" (under fire?).

[10] Apparently the phrase was a vulgar and nonsensical oral Spanish commonplace, which Cervantes here relates (in the context of Dulcinea's possible Arabian lover) to Ariosto's remark concerning Angelica in Orlando Furioso (I, 55): "E che'l fior virginal così havea salvo / come se lo portò del materno alvo." ("And how she was, in fact / As when she left her mother's womb, intact" [Ariosto, Orlando Furioso , translated by Barbara Reynolds, p. 130; all translations of Orlando Furioso in this chapter are from this version].) The Cervantine version has confused overlogical translators, who have reverted to Ariosto's commonsensical commonplace; for example, Samuel Putnam's "She is today what she was when her mother bore her." As far as the phrase "dressed in his native garb" is concerned, it is well known that El Toboso was at the time a village of Moriscos, meaning more or less acculturated descendants of the Moors. Thus, Aldonza Lorenzo, although of Moorish descent, has never seen a genuine (or literary) Muhammadan dressed as such, like Medoro or Cervantes's own Algerian captors. The hidden point is that the more or less well situated Jewish converts returned the disdain of their Old Christian peasant neighbors by pointing out that since they were totally unaware of their own lineage, they were probably "tainted" with Morisco blood. In this sentence Cervantes teases the whole business, which, as we have said, he found utterly ridiculous. The glorious lineages of El Toboso are to the grandee Mendozas and Guevaras of Castile what Don Quijote is to Amadís of Gaul.

fore, Don Quijote concludes: "Now to business! Oh memory bring to mind the doings of Amadís, and teach me how to begin imitating them."

Aside from its comic juxtaposition of the two lovelorn fictional heroes Orlando and Amadís—the one grotesque (no matter what Voltaire thought!) and the other exemplary—Don Quijote's discourse reveals what his author-enchanter has been up to surreptitiously all along. As we remember, in chapter 23 the knight and the squire enter Sierra Morena by night, and at dawn they discover, in addition to the theft of the donkey, a valise the padlock of which was so ruptured ("roto") that its contents could easily be inspected. The ensuing inventory includes gold coins, fine clothing, and a notebook containing a poem about love and death addressed to Fili (a pastoral pseudonym) along with the rough draft of a desperate letter apparently intended for the same lady. The wordplay here is once again infernal for conscientious translators. Sancho, like other Castilian illiterates of the time, substitutes h for all f 's with the result that he hears Fili as hilo and interprets it to mean the "thread" of the still unknown story suggested by the mysterious valise.^[11] When, at the end of the same chapter, the participle used for the padlock (roto , from romper , meaning "to break" or "to sever") is used in Cardenio's mock-chivalric epithet "El Roto de la Mala Figura" (The Ragged—or Amputated—One of the Shameful Countenance), the careful rereader realizes that Cervantes has been engaged in subtle verbal allusion to, and continuation of, the

[11] As is well known, Castilian underwent a whole series of phonetic changes in the fifteenth century, one of the most conspicuous of which was the conversion of f to h , which was at first aspirated and later became unaspirated. Falcón , for example, became halcón , and Don Quijote imitates the language of his belovedly antiquated texts by pronouncing hermosura as "fermosura." The oral speech of the mass of the population was the source of the change, with the result that Sancho simply cannot hear the f of the pastoral name Fili . Cervantes adored the interplay of the written with the oral just as he did that of commonplaces (whether popular or courtly) with the outlandish variations and extensions he and his characters could come up with spontaneously.

narrative play with interruption and sequence we discussed in chapter 2, "Birth."

After the finding of the valise, two more discoveries follow immediately and augment the suspense both of the reader and of the discoverers. First a hirsute individual clad in velvet tatters is seen on high "leaping from crag to crag with marvelous agility" (I.23), and then the body of a mule that had apparently been driven to death is encountered.^[12] Neither Don Quijote nor Sancho know what to make of these mysteries, but our suspicion that this wild man may be a calculated reincarnation of Orlando (who, according to Don Quijote, "dragged mares after him") is confirmed by a passing shepherd. He and his companions—he informs the curious knight and squire—have been attacked by this mad desperado during the accesses of "furia" that alternate with intervals of courteous and rational behavior.^[13] He might even have "killed" one of them with his fists and teeth, if they hadn't subdued him. It only remains for Don Quijote to recall in chapter 25 that Ariosto's Italianate Roland "slew shepherds" for us to be certain wherein Cervantes has now ventured to "invent."

The shepherd has just finished his account when "el Roto" himself suddenly appears on the immediate scene. He and Don Quijote, as we remember, exchange embraces and gaze into each other's eyes in wonder at their divergent varieties of eccentricity. However, in arranging the meeting with such care, Cervantes had something more in mind than to provoke laughter at comparative madness. As we have said, his narrative course has veered sharply, and he is now concerned—

[12] According to the critics, Cervantes invented both in Ariosto's epic and in a lyrical (meaning artistic rather than popular and oral) ballad of Juan del Encina, "Por unos puertos arriba," in which a similarly clad figure appears on high dressed in mourning beside his dead horse. Cervantes's inventiveness, as usual, is plural.

[13] The goatherd uses the rather high-flown word furia (instead of locura ), and later Cervantes terms Cardenio's temporary alienation a "furioso accidente," in order to suggest to readers this more unfamiliar ingredient of his intertextual play.

with the help of Ariosto—with guiding his presumably spellbound readers toward certain discoveries about their national literature that he has already made and that he wants them to make on their own. He is concerned with employing suspense positively (as opposed to its mockery in the fractured single combat with the Basque) by means of both mystery and a subtly orchestrated sequence of generic variations.

The careful development and the final oratorical confrontation of the Marcela and Grisóstomo episode have not been forgotten. Once again, a lyric poem and a shepherd's tale prepare us for not just one but two dramatic encounters: first, the courtly embrace, and afterward, the abrupt physical combat of the two extravagantly costumed actors. The narrative die has been cast. Nothing is now excluded except for the outrageous but sophisticated inverisimilitude that Ariosto adored. Nevertheless, the elaborate comic mystification of Orlando Furioso will be a means of engaging us during the whole of the Sierra Morena sojourn with unlikely encounters, with every kind of disguise, and with incessant role-playing by all the actors except Sancho and the shepherds. They—and we—make up the amused and bemused audience of a wilderness masque, an improvised and self-conscious comedia that ends, as we shall see, with a climactic denouement at the centripetal inn. When Shakespeare selected this portion of the Skelton translation (1610) for his lost Cardenio play, he understood perfectly what his contemporary had up his sleeve.^[14]

But for this purpose why invent in Orlando Furioso? How could a seemingly endless comic epic in verse contribute to the change from sequential to dramatically structured narration? To begin with, it enabled the quasitheatrical confronta-

[14] Guillén de Castro (who was the author of the source for Corneille's Le Cid ) also used this episode as the plot for his Don Quijote de la Mancha "comedia." Therein he presents Cardenio as being of peasant origin, includes references to Ariosto, and, like Shakespeare, resolves the conflict through the intervention of the noble father. For an idea of the content of Shakespeare's Cardenio play, see Lewis Theobald's "revised" version, Double Falsehood (London: Lowndes, 1767).

tion of the two madmen. Obviously, the allusions to Ariosto we have just detected were not as immediately familiar to the general public as were chivalresque, picaresque, and pastoral topika . But once they realized what was up, those preterit common readers were just as entertained as we are by the meeting, the dialogue, and the conflict of the supposedly flesh-and-blood actors Cardenio and Don Quijote, each representing in his own way—the one desperately and the other playfully—Orlando and Amadís, two antithetical archetypes of fictional heroism at moments of extreme erotic distress.

In addition, Ariosto provided his devotee, Cervantes, with a model for a new kind of narrative sophistication. As we remember, the latter had imitated—at second hand—the characteristic thread cutting of the former when he interrupted the single combat with the Basque. And now the Spaniard, in direct rapport with his favorite poem, could go on to weave skeins that suddenly appear out of the blue (the still anonymous ragged acrobat seen leaping like a goat), that are just as suddenly interrupted (Cardenio mute and "furioso"), that reappear when least expected (the story recommenced with "almost the same words"), and that intertwine with others (that of Dorotea). Ariosto, to the amusement of the cynical "knights of the court" to whom he read his poem aloud, was a superb manipulator of the comedy and theatricality that are inherent in chivalry as a self-conscious social show. A consummate puppetmaster, he taught Cervantes how to vary episodic sequence with plotted sequence. Dialogue and memory aside, prior to chapter 22 the Quijote 's narrative form had been essentially that of Amadís ; in Sierra Morena it is that of Orlando Furioso .

In Ariosto's poem the drawn-out suspense—an essential ingredient of Stendhal's "happiness"—seemingly could have lasted for a thousand and one cantos. But for Cervantes, at once a theorist of the drama and in his own opinion an unfairly neglected playwright, plots were by definition Aristotelian. They had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, as indeed they do, first in Sierra Morena and afterward at the inn—just as Sancho surmised proverbially, when he heard

the name Fili in the poem, that hilo (strand) might lead to the ovillo (the whole ball of yarn or the heart of the matter).^[15] And when Cervantes, using the same topical image, describes his new narrative tack as a "rastrillado, torcido y aspado hilo," he does not mean tangled up, as unprepared readers might assume, but rather "cleansed, twisted, and reeled-up" (I.28).^[16] Like Sancho in chapter 20, Cardenio and Dorotea can only spin their yarns (with or without interruption) in a straight line. Cervantes, however, thanks to Ariosto, can convert their lives and stories into a "reeled-up" dramatic plot and thereby save them at the end of "Act III" from the apparently inevitable results of their follies—which is what traditional comedy on stage, as contrasted to Don Quijote's tragicomic or comitragic novel, is all about.

But this is by no means all there is to it. The presence of Orlando Furioso in Sierra Morena acts as a catalyst that reveals aspects of Spanish life of far more concern to Cervantes than the comic confrontation of two madmen (each of whom lives his own mad story in his own mad fashion) or than the increment of narrative sophistication. Although Cardenio's wretched and antiheroic account of loss of nerve in a small-town Andalusian ambiance may seem antithetical to the only too justifiable fury of Orlando, a fantasy hero in a fantasy demesne, they do have one thing in common. Both are "knights" who, having reason to believe their ladies have betrayed them, fail to live up to the exigencies of their knighthood. In concocting this essay in comparative chivalry, Cervantes is as subtle as ever. Orlando's furious alienation, maliciously arranged by that super-stepfather Ariosto, needs

[15] "Por el hilo se saca el ovillo" (I.23). Cervantes's constant play with the notion of the narrative thread led him inevitably to this proverb as an image for plot.

[16] In this collection of verbs having to do with the preparation of yarn (for weaving a story), cardar is conspicuously absent. However, Beth Tremallo, who is equally competent in both Spanish and Italian literatures and who suggested the relevance of Ariosto's verbal play with weaving and thread cutting to the narrativity of the Quijote , pointed out to me that it is audible in Cardenio's name. To card the wool is the first step in the process, and he is the initiator of the new story sequence.

no further comment here, but the caso (a socioliterary case history) of Cardenio is far more complex. Told in the first person instead of the third, it reflects Cervantes's awareness of a curious congruence in the Italian poem, which the poet had suggested but did not emphasize—that of the severed narrative threads with the severed identity of Orlando.^[17] We have seen the results. Cardenio is his story, and when it is interrupted, he interrupts himself. Ariosto's gleeful narrative malice is Cardenio's unbearable burden.

On the face of it, it would appear that this change in point of view (from third-person "epic" insouciance in the historical present to anguished Erzählung in the autobiographical past) should impede or render impossible the transition from lyric lament and oral tale of woe to the theatrical denouement that here concerns us. However, that appearance is misleading insofar as it ignores two pertinent factors: the ambivalence of the designation caballero (at once gentleman and knight) in the Spain of the time, and the reflection of that ambivalence in the drama of honor that prevailed on the stage. As far as the first is concerned, Cardenio is a gentleman "of noble lineage and wealth," a native of one of the

[17] When the shepherd shows Orlando the bracelet the latter had bestowed on Angelica as a token of his adoration (and she in turn had given to the former in gratitude for having saved Medoro's life), that piece of evidence is "la secure / che'l capo a un colpo gli levò dal collo" (XXIII, 121) ("the axe which at one final blow / His head then severed from Orlando's neck" [p. 723]). Seven octaves later he concludes: "Non son, non son io quel che paio in viso: / quel ch'era Orlando, è motto ed è sottera" ("I am not he, I am not he I seem / He who Orlando was is dead and gone" [p. 725]). From then on Orlando will not have the "lucid intervals" that Don Quijote, also desperately in love, shares with Cardenio (XXIV, 3), but, curiously enough, after emerging from his madness, Orlando does share with the latter a phantom recollection of his previous mad behavior. In Cervantes's version "the bout which he had with Don Quijote came to his memory as if out of dreams" (I.29), whereas Ariosto's hero, having swallowed the magic potion, awakes as if from a "noioso e grave sonno" (XXXIX, 58). Flaubert, who began his literary experience by listening to the Quijote read aloud, exaggerated the connection when he remarked, "Cervantes plus grave et plus pur refit l'oeuvre de l'Arioste" (cited in Jean Bruneau, Les debuts litteraires de Gustave Flaubert: 1831–1845 [Paris: Armand Colin, 1962], p. 161). But he does indicate his awareness of the intricate ties, of which a few have concerned us here.

most "illustrious" birthplaces in all Andalusia. Because of his membership in this social class, he is honor-bound to play the role of chivalric knight when called on to do so, a role for which he knows all the proper rhetoric and vocabulary. He promises Dorotea later on:

I swear to you as a Christian caballero that I will not forsake you until I see you don Fernando's wife; and if my arguments cannot bring him to acknowledge his duty to you, I shall invoke the right which my rank as a caballero confers on me and with just cause challenge him on account of the injury [en razón de la sinrazón ] which he has done to you—without remembering the wrongs he has done to me which I shall leave Heaven to avenge while I take yours in my charge here on Earth.
(I.29)

When first heard, this speech sounds worthy of Don Quijote himself.^[18] We are not surprised to learn in the course of his story that both Cardenio and his lady, Luscinda, are (like Dorotea) avid readers of romances of chivalry, or that, like Alonso Quijano and the Innkeeper, he believes their characters to be historically real. The role of caballero is ready-made and not questioned, but, as his story reveals, he cannot perform it. Not only does he hesitate to interrupt the wedding, but even in the defiant speech we have just heard he proposes to begin with pleading. We have been well prepared for the theatrical climax at the inn, during which he first hides in Don Quijote's room and then behind his offender's back in order to avoid recognition. However, to explain Cardenio's behavior in psychological terms—alienation as the resuit of inhibition—as is often done, amounts to reading him in the same way he read the Amadís or to guessing the number of Lady Macbeth's offspring. Like everybody else in the Quijote , Cardenio is born and lives verbally—if not from

[18] In addition, there is an echo of the second paragraph of the book, which no Spanish reader can fail to notice. Alonso Quijano is there described as being particularly titillated by such chivalresque conceits as "La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace . . ."

books, then as a failed incarnation of the most painfully problematical words of the national theater: caballero and honor . His is an abject and Hispanicized replica of Orlando's heroic undoing.

At this point English readers of Cervantes may well have reservations. Obviously, Cardenio's furia is antithetical to Don Quijote's idée fixe. Instead of being a simultaneous "cuerdo loco" (II.17),^[19] he is alternately mad or sane and so does not conceal beneath a chosen role a sentient self, the "profession" of which (according to Mark van Doren) is acting.^[20] From what he tells us about himself and his background (small-town middle-class nobility), there is no reason to suppose that he has ever heard of Ariosto's epic, let alone that he has read it and been incited as a result. His "furia" is entirely his and stems from his excruciating awareness that he has been, and still is, "a coward and a fool" (I.27). However, as we have suggested and as perceptive readers of the first edition surely realized, Cervantes has not abandoned literary satire. The big game he now intends to hunt is no longer the romances of chivalry (already deliquescent as a genre, as we noted) and certainly not Orlando Furioso (which

[19] This crucial descriptive paradox was designed expressly by Cervantes to avoid what Castro termed the "programming" of his character, meaning any kind of fixed, stereotyped, generic or causal explanations of Alonso Quijano's unique life as Don Quijote. Here, as elsewhere, his intent is to leave everything up in the air (the author, the characterizations, the narrative world, the possible reactions of readers) except the immediate truth of experience emergent from adventure. The expression has been rendered in many ways by translators in many languages; for example, "a mixture of good sense and extravagance," "a sensible madman," "tantôt pour un homme fou, tantôt pour un homme sensé," "einen gescheiten Kopf, der ein Narr sei." As we can see, the temptation is to convert a living paradox into syntactical sense.

[20] The readers I seek are surely familiar with Mark van Doren's admirable study, Don Quijote's Profession (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), and if they have followed the general tenor of this one (reiterated in the penultimate sentence of the preceding note), they will understand the reasons for my partial disagreement with Professor van Doren. Don Quijote often puts on an act, but he is not a professional, and he slips from posturing and oratory into profound authenticity as imperceptibly, continuously, and unsurveyably as do his adventures into experience.

he adored) but instead the overwhelmingly popular "new comedy" of Lope de Vega and his followers. Precisely because the Amaíds and its progeny extolled the same irrationally heroic exaltation as the comedia with a comparable lack of verisimilitude, the former provided Cervantes with a perfect straw genre for the purpose of "arousing men's contempt" for the latter.

Cardenio, socially speaking, is a caballero, but in accord with his century he does not wear armor, mount a charger, or joust with skeptics in defense of the perfection of his lady's eyebrows.^[21] Rather, on foot with cape and sword he courts her—arranging trysts, smuggling in missives and poems, contending with treacherous rivals. In short, the role he plays—and fails to play at the moment of truth—is that of

[21] Tournaments (such as the one in Zaragoza in which Don Quijote planned to compete) continued to be held in the seventeenth century, but after the middle of the sixteenth the participating caballeros de la corte (whom Cervantes as an old soldier despised) became increasingly aware of their artificiality and historical obsolescence. As a result, in contrast to the fierce prearranged battles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, tournaments took on a marked burlesque character. Comedy, at once sophisticated and gross, became the dominant note of the mottos, pseudonyms, outfits, stentorian announcements, and general pomp and circumstance of the festivity. It was precisely this attitude toward the institution of chivalry—a refusal to abandon it combined with the kind of mockery employed by Quevedo in his portrait of the Cid—that Cervantes exploits when he has Don Quijote present himself with deadly seriousness as a "caballero andante." With this in mind, we may better understand the ambivalent reactions to the comic hero—acceptance and ridicule—both by the readers of the time and by those whom he encounters along the road. In any case, the Quijote did not laugh Spain's chivalry away, as Lord Byron believed; courtly society was taking care of that task on its own. What it did do was to transform that very laughter into salvation of all that had been admirable and noble in chivairy's mad institutionalization of heroism. It was this that Nabokov and Unamuno, each of whom in his own way revered the knight and disdained his author, failed to understand.
Two more tangential observations may be in order. First, as Don Quijote observed to the Knight of the Green Overcoat, the really dangerous—but stupid—antagonists of the seventeenth-century caballeros were not their human rivals but bulls. Second, if it had not been for that really execrable admirer of Lope who hid behind the name of Avellaneda, what a marvellous mockery of such decadent mockery would have been in store for us! What an opportunity (only partially realized in the joust with Tosilos) for Don Quijote to exhibit his "true" valor!

those typical galanes who, during the performance of countless comedias, were concerned with surpassing each other in valor, in amorous conquest, in intrigue, in conceits (in both the moral and poetic senses of the term), and in maintenance of honor. These were the new "knights," as stereotyped as their chivalric predecessors and, in Cervantes's opinion, fictionally far more deleterious. Why? Not only because beneath the masque of honor their behavior was often ignoble but also because the stage on which they strutted and fretted was perceived by its audience as an exemplary mirror of social behavior. Cardenio, in other words, before retreating in shame into Sierra Morena, has lived as if he were a hero of a comedia, and then he is forced to realize he is neither brave nor shrewd. As a result, he loses both his lady and his honor and is reduced to a nonentity. He is literally a broken man "who is not who he is," in the parlance of the time.^[22]

Thus, Cervantes is deeply concerned with the latest and, for him, peculiarly sinister literary rage—the comedia; not only because of the aesthetic objections that were expressed surreptitiously in the Scrutiny but, more important, because of the theater's toxic effects on Spanish society and on the individual's self-image as a member thereof. Cardenio's is an extreme case—a well-calculated parable of inability to cope with the Literarisierung des Lebens imposed by the increasingly self-conscious theatricality of interpersonal relations.^[23] In this

[22] See Leo Spitzer's article, "Soy quien soy," Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 2 (1947), p. 275. Self-affirmation is endemically Hispanic, and to open up one's interior self (see Octavio Paz's explication of rajarse , in El laberinto de la soledad ) is what Jalisco should avoid above all according to the mariachis. The point is that Cardenio's is a case of self-negation. What Américo Castro has referred to as the "imperative dimension" of Spaniards (possessed in exemplary fashion by Don Quijote) has been fractured beyond repair.

[23] At a recent (autumn 1985) gathering at Ohio State University dedicated to discussion of Shakespeare's history plays, this aspect of seventeenth-century European consciousness was mentioned by many of the assembled scholars, often in connection with Essex's use of Richard II as political propaganda. As a student of Romance languages, I found it curious that they uniformly ascribed it to the Renaissance. Although I no longer find the generalizations of Geistesgeschichte as illuminating as I did years ago, this seems mistaken. I would suggest that my colleagues in English literature take the time to read Richard Alewyn's Das grosse Welttheater (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1959) or the French translation of it by Danièle Bohler, entitled L'Univers du Baroque (Geneva: Gonthier, 1964).

connection we should remember Lope's dictum that "cases of honor" (in which a character loses and regains his or hers) provided the kind of plot that most "forcefully moved" the national public.^[24] Such suspense, neatly resolved at the end by the playwright's ingenio , relieved individual theatergoers of the tensions of problematical existence in an honorobsessed society that demanded more of its members than fragile human nature can usually provide. This is precisely why Cervantes arranged Cardenio's happy ending in a fashion so contrived as to be caricaturesque. If society has turned you into a puppet, Ariosto may save you by revealing the strings that connect you with that collective puppeteer.