ABSTRACT
Because of the historic presumption, which goes back at least as far as Menéndez Pelayo’s Orígenes de la novela, that the comic prose-narratives and prose-dialogues of the Spanish Golden Age are precursors of ‘the modern novel’ there has been a tendency amongst modern critics to align such works, particularly the classics, with the typical strategies of that genre as defined by its major modern theorists (Lukács, Bakhtin, Watt, Booth and others). In adopting this line, the critics tend to obscure or downplay features which are manifestly dated and alien to modern taste. The purpose of this article is to show how this kind of modernizing recuperation hinders our understanding of comic character in Spanish Golden-Age literature, and to suggest alternative ways of considering it. I propose to exemplify the process as it applies to the picaresque novel, and will then focus specifically on Cervantes because of all the writers of the period he had the most original conception of character and lavished most care on it. For him, the inventive originality on which he prided himself was displayed above all in the portrayal of Don Quijote and Sancho.
