1
I refer to the first edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), p. 49. Cf. the Conclusion, P. 221.
2
See the section entitled «Novela» in his article on «Teoría literaria» in Suma cervantina (London: Támesis, 1973), pp. 310-22.
3
In the above-cited section Riley says that Cervantes senses a distinction between two species: «romance» and «novel.» The first deals with a fantastic, idealised world akin to dream; the events in it are the marvellous products of chance, and their ordering seems planned by providence. The second deals with life as it is experienced historically, and the events in it are ordered by natural causality. See pp. 319-20.
4
In the prologue to Persiles y Sigismunda written a few days before his death, Cervantes describes an encounter between himself and a student, when he was returning with two friends from Esquivias to Madrid. The student, realising that he is in the presence of Cervantes, greets him as «el manco sano, el famoso todo, el escritor alegre, y, finalmente, el regozijo de las Musas.» Cervantes concludes that prologue by bidding farewell to life: significantly, it is a farewell to jests and to friends. See the edition by R. Schevill and A. Bonilla, 2 vols. (Madrid: Bernardo Rodríguez, 1914), I, p. lviii.
5
It has affinities to the genre of comedy in the status of its protagonists, its general theme (lances de amor y de fortuna), and its dénouments -often, too, in specific situations of plot, such as those in the Captive's story (Don Quixote I, Chapters 39-41) and in Cervantes' plays on imprisonment in Algiers.
6
In a number of contexts Cervantes implies the relevance of the traditional precepts of comedy to the comic fable: thus in the Prologue to Don Quixote Part I he refers to the requirements of «imitation» and plain style. The main precept, or problem, of epic theory which concerns him is that of unity and relevance. It emerges in the discussion of the relation between episodes and main action in Don Quixote; see especially Part II, Chapter 44.
7
These are the standard reactions of discreto characters to Don Quixote and Sancho, also to other comic figuras of Cervantes. See Don Quixote Part II, Chapter 44, in the edition by Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Juventud, 1975), p. 850.
8
See Lope de Vega, «Arte nuevo de hazer comedias en este tiempo», lines 174-80, in Dramatic Theory in Spain, edited by H. J. Chaytor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 21.
9
These dates are offered as hypotheses to underpin the argument about the evolution of Cervantes' art of the «comic fable.» They are based partly on my own judgement, partly on the estimates of M. A. Buchanan, R. Schevill and A. Bonilla, L. A. Murillo, R. El Saffar, and others who have gone into the question. The argument is not seriously affected if one allows a margin of error of one or two years in the dates suggested.
10
See my article «Characterization and Dialogue in Cervantes's 'Comedias en Prosa'», MLR 76 (1981), 338-56 (p. 344).