ABSTRACT
The great majority of Cervantes’s contemporaries read Don Quixote as a burlesque book of chivalry without further significance, but this parody is often intertwined with political and ideological discourses. This is so because Cervantes’s concern for reality was not simply aesthetic but also intricately tied to social and political matters. He looked around with an attentive and critical eye. Some contemporary readers saw that Cervantes had used the madness of Don Quixote to offer a critical vision of his world. The principal testimony for understanding how Don Quixote was understood in the seventeenth century is the apocryphal Quixote by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. This writer was entirely identified with the social, political, and religious order dominant in the Spain of the Hapsburg regime and concluded that the madness of Cervantes’s protagonist was an anomaly against which it was necessary to react. Avellaneda turned his book into a didactic tool in the service of power and established order. In 1615, Cervantes resolved to oppose this repressive exercise. To do so, he explored the inner complexity of Don Quixote and Sancho, assigning them far greater dignity and freeing the knight from his madness.
