ABSTRACT
Many English literature scholars continue to believe that the novel rose in eighteenth-century England. Most scholars of English literature, though, have failed to realize Cervantes's impact on the eighteenth-century English novel. The influence of Cervantes on Shakespeare is a fascinating subject on which one can only speculate. The only proven fact is that Shakespeare wrote Cardenio, supposedly based on the Cardenio story in Don QuixotePart I. Gayton portrays Don Quixote and Sancho as a pair of buffoons at whom everyone jeers. Gayton's Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot, published in 1654, have been condemned by many critics, and taken as exemplary of the seventeenth-century's superficial reception of Don Quixote. It has been suggested that the reception of Cervantes in England progressed through three stages: the comical reading in the seventeenth century, the satirical understanding in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the Romanticized reading from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards.
