Windmills of Reality, Giants of the Imagination

With the arrival of a princeps edition of the 1605 Quixote in the same year of its printing, the British public developed an immediate fascination with the novel. Literary references and adaptations to the book appeared as early as 1607, well before the first published translation into English in 1612. From Shakespeare to Fletcher, from Milton to Dickens, and down to the present day, the antics of Don Quixote and Sancho have become assimilated into British culture. This chapter discusses the most significant influences of Cervantes’s writings in British society since their inception into the British Isles.