Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra with lifetime years 1547–1616 and credits John Ormsby as the English translator of Don Quixote. David Widger receives digital credit. The catalogue points to other improved electronic editions, which were not checked for this profile. This specific linked text supplies two selected counterparts. Its HTML ISBN identifies the electronic edition; no underlying print publisher is established. Other similarly named archive labels are not merged.

In Part I, Chapter XXII, Don Quixote tells the guards that it is hard to make slaves of people whom God and nature have made free. His demand for release and the ensuing confrontation matter when interpreting that declaration. In Part II, Chapter XXXII, he discusses Sancho’s promised government with the duke, arguing that good intentions and advisers can compensate for limited learning and warning against bribes. The comic setting prevents these speeches from becoming simple legal or educational instructions. Both selected extracts match Ormsby’s English text under limited normalization.

Reading this voice

Read the galley-prisoner encounter through its consequences and the discussion of government through its warnings about conduct. Preserve Don Quixote as the speaker; neither passage establishes Cervantes’s own political advice without further evidence.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• It seems to me a hard case to make slaves of those whom God and nature have made free.
• We know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us that scarcely know how to read.