ABSTRACT
The history of English translations of works by Miguel de Cervantes in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is, almost exclusively, the history of the translations of Don Quixote and their influence upon its reception in Britain. John Phillips, second English translator of Don Quixote, published his version in 1687. Rather than attempting to produce an entirely new edition, Phillips set out to revise and polish Shelton's work with the additional insights provided by the French version of Filleau de Saint-Martin, but also incorporating elements from the distorted vision of the knight which had crystallized through the influence of Gayton and others. The early-nineteenth-century Romanticists read Don Quixote as a purely Romantic, a sad and idealistic novel, instead of a comedy. The adventures of the Spanish knight, however, were not the object of any new English translations during and after the period known in the history of literature as Romanticism.
