Hi, I'm

Heard Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought

to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich, online at historyof philosophy.net. Today's episode, Touch me with your madness,

Thervantes Don Quixote.

I've lost count of the number of authors who sounded a triumphalist note in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The Age of Darkness was over and all of Europe was glorying in the rebirth of art, literature, science, and philosophy that still gives the Renaissance

its name. It would have been outright insanity to look back regretfully to the glories of the

medieval past, right? Well, exactly. It's this particular form of craziness that drives the plot

of Don Quixote, the sprawling and pioneering novel that makes its author,

Miguel de Hervantes, the only plausible rival to Shakespeare for the title of the greatest

literary figure in Europe around the turn of the 17th century. As if to invite us to compare them,

Ravantes and Shakespeare both died in 1616, probably only 11 days apart. There are indeed resonances

between them, especially due to the self-referentiality and self-awareness of both authors.

Ravantes, who was a playwright, as well as a novelist, echoes the all-the-worlds-stage idea

by comparing the world to a theatrical performance. Much as Hamlet contains a play within a play,

Don Quixote embeds shorter stories within its larger story. One of those interpolated tales

was turned into a play that was put on at the Globe Theatre by Shakespeare's troupe.

Despite those parallels, the Elizabethan work that is most comparable to Don Quixote

might be Spencer's Fairy Queen, which is a narrative rather than a play, and which reflects,

with ironic distance, on chivalric literature and its ambiguous relationship to Christian ethics.

It is thanks to the assiduous collecting and reading of such literature, tales of noble and

...