Madman of La Mancha: A Stage Play of Don Quixote

By Diana de Armas Wilson

A stage-play in 16 choice scenes, Madman of La Mancha aims to update Don Quixote for our post-9/11 times. Although often regarded as a “funny book,” Cervantes’s great novel is interlaced throughout with the Christian-Muslim hostilities that characterized his age (1547-1616). My adaptation shows how Cervantes himself—a captive in Muslim Algiers for five years—chose to make an Arabic historian into the “true author” of Don Quixote. A representative of Christian Spain’s most marginalized population, the character of Sidi Hamid Benengeli affords English-speaking audiences a fresh take on the antics of literature’s most endearing madman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diana de Armas Wilson
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310318627

Diana de Armas Wilson

Diana de Armas Wilson has published books on Cervantes with Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford University Presses. She is the sole editor of the current Norton Critical Edition of Don Quijote and serves on the Editorial Board of Cervantes, the official journal of the Cervantes Society of America. She has received three different National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants, the latest for a translation of a captivity memoir titled An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), written in the 1580s by Antonio de Sosa, a friend and fellow slave of Cervantes in Algiers. She has been invited to talk on Cervantes in many cities beyond the USA, including Oxford, Córdoba, Bogotá, Barcelona, Orán, Istanbul, Cali, and Fez. A Professor Emerita of Renaissance Studies, she currently lives in Boulder, Colorado. She is the mother of four daughters, all graciously supportive of this stage-play project.

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MADMAN OF LA MANCHA

A Stage Play of Don Quixote

by Diana de Armas Wilson

From the Novel by Miguel de Cervantes

Madman of La Mancha

Copyright © 2014 by Diana de Armas Wilson. All rights reserved.

First Smashwords Edition: 2014

Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

Khorzev painting used by permission from The Raymond and Susan Johnson Collection

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

For my grandson Kai

NOTE TO DIRECTORS

Don Quixote is the True American. You do not have to look into many American eyes to suddenly meet somewhere the beautiful grave lunacy of his gaze.

—Tennessee Williams

I have long imagined Don Quixote as a post-9/11 stage-play, an adaptation that would foreground references to the Islamic world and Muslim culture that underlie the entire novel. In keeping with this aim, Madman of La Mancha is more political, less sentimental, than the 1959 Man of La Mancha , that long-time staple of American dinner theater.

Beneath the story of Don Quixote lies another story—the mystery of its authorship. A writer of suspected Jewish converso heritage, Miguel de Cervantes identifies himself as the stepfather of his novel, giving its fatherhood to an Arab historian, Sidi Hamid Benengeli. Pretending to find this Arab’s lost manuscript, Cervantes then arranges for its translation into Spanish by a bilingual Morisco, a forcibly converted Hispano-Muslim. By granting the novel to its true author—an Arab who periodically comments on Don Quixote’s antics—Cervantes dramatizes the complexity of racial and religious interactions in his time.

Religion was the great cause of conflict across Spain’s Golden Age. Plans to homogenize Spain began with Ferdinand and Isabella’s shameful expulsion of the nation’s Jews in 1492, a move Spain currently aims to retract by offering its Sephardic descendants citizenship. In 1501-1502, the conquered Hispano-Muslims of Granada (and later, those of Aragón and Castile) were given the choice to convert to Christianity or emigrate. In 1547—the year Cervantes was born—Spain legislated its Purity of Blood statutes against both Muslims and Jews. While still a boy in 1562, he may have witnessed the public burnings of heretics in Seville. As a young man in 1571, he fought the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto, where he lost the use of his left hand. Between the publication of the two parts of Don Quixote (1605-1615), Spain brutally expelled most of its Moorish population. In the inquisition of Don Quixote’s library—Scene 4 of my play—Cervantes famously parodies the Spanish Inquisition and its burning of Qur’ans, infidels, and heretics.

Religious bigotry framed both the rise and fall of imperial Spain. Catholic Europe’s victory at the Battle of Lepanto kindled hopes of a renewed crusade against Islam. Spain’s vast empire—funded by gold from the conquests of Mexico and Peru—stretched from Naples to the Philippines, named after King Philip II (1556-98). Countless Spaniards crossed the ocean to conquer and colonize great swathes of the American continent. Although the conquistadors considered themselves lords of all the world, Spain’s imperial power was being sapped by plagues and famines, wars and bankruptcies. By the time Cervantes published Part Two of Don Quixote (1615), Spain’s empire had begun its slow collapse.

Where might Cervantes have picked up the idea of a Muslim historian to author the story of a Christian knight? Both figures were very likely hatched in an Algerian prison. En route home from soldiering in various Mediterranean wars, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates. A captive in Muslim Algiers for five years (1575-80), he survived four unsuccessful escape attempts before being ransomed by Trinitarian monks. Returning to Spain as a disabled veteran and unable to earn a living as a playwright, he worked for years as a tax collector, including for the king’s Invincible Armada against England (1588). He applied and was turned down for several jobs in America. Having lived through all the delusional aspects of Habsburg Spain, Cervantes then wrote them into his novel. 

Don Quixote lives in an age of iron, as he himself tirelessly reminds us, and in a racially tainted space (La Mancha = the stain). His madness is an attempt—an impossible dream— to escape both his time and place. Reinventing himself as a knight-errant, and persuading the illiterate peasant Sancho to serve as his squire, Don Quixote sets out to fight windmills, wineskins, and imaginary Saracens. Much of the novel’s subversive humor comes from the craziness of a world, and a hero, steeped in the combative language of holy wars.

Don Quixote is a book about books. Susan Sontag regarded it as the first and greatest epic about addiction. A fifty-year old virginal gentleman farmer is addicted to reading romances of chivalry round the clock. He sells his pastures to buy these books. Published during the childhood of the printing press, these tales of knights and ladies were the runaway bestsellers of 16th-century Europe, the first wave in the sweep of mass media and the entertainment industry. Readers from Scandinavia to Sicily devoured these books, including kings (Charles V of Spain and Francis I of France) and saints (Ignatius Loyola and Teresa of Avila). The fictional time of these stories was centuries earlier, many set in the age of the historical Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers, all fighting Saracens.

Don Quixote reads these fictions day and night until his brain dries up. At that point he decides to become a knight-errant, to light out for the wilderness beyond La Mancha. His new identity obliges him to fall chastely in love with Dulcinea, an invention he calls the lady of my thoughts. Don Quixote lives by the book. The book moves him to travel penniless because, as he himself explains, the knights in his romances never carry money. The book obliges him to come to the rescue of the afflicted—of wronged maidens, penalized galley slaves, and captive puppets. And the book inspires him to rage in the wilderness in imitation of knights like Ariosto’s Orlando, who lost his Angelica to a comely young Muslim.

The most memorable scene in Don Quixote for Americans—cited by such early Puritan worthies as Cotton Mather—is the episode of the windmills, where the hero is painfully shown to be misreading reality. We may agree with Sancho that Don Quixote has windmills on the brain. Cervantes, however, does not let us off so easily. In his novel’s gallery of over five hundred characters, a striking number display manias or addictions. The division between sane and insane is an arbitrary cultural construct. Cervantes wrote a book about the most sane and endearing of lunatics, a figure who fabricates a brave new world from old fictions. The tension between madness and sanity is a constant theme in Don Quixote, a book that makes us question how much of our own lives is an illusion produced by what we read, hear, or see.

As the above epigraph shows, the