Avoiding Garrulity: An Introduction to Sir Edwin Sadleir and His Improvement of Cervantes's Don Quixote

Abstract

Avoiding Garrulity:An Introduction to Sir Edwin Sadleir and His Improvement of Cervantes's Don Quixote Dale B. J. Randall In the latter decades of seventeenth-century England, one of the surest signs of Don Quixote's popularity was the appearance of English abridgments. For those ladies and gentlemen in the upper reaches of society who wished to be au courant without troubling themselves to read so long a work (over six hundred pages in the 1687 translation by Milton's nephew, John Phillips), a shortened version could furnish more fun with less work. For those whose leisure was limited, condensation may have made reading more possible. Whatever motives readers might have had, however, late-seventeenth-century publishers and booksellers alike (sometimes, of course, one and the same) clearly thought it worthwhile to produce shortened versions of Cervantes's great work. So far as we know now, there were four such condensations: two very short, two rather long, and all four put forth anonymously. A reasonable preliminary assumption might be that all were written by London hacks trying to earn their bed and beverage. The fact that not one of them so much as mentions Cervantes even in passing might suggest also that for some people the figure of Don Quixote had by this time become public property and therefore been subject to fairly casual appropriation. After all, abridgments aside, Thomas Shelton's full-scale History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don-Quixote, Pt. 1 (1612) had already been succeeded by The History of Don-Quichote, Pt. 1 (1620), The Second Part of the History of the Valorous and Witty knight-Errant Don Quixote (1620), The History of the Valorous and Witty-Knight-Errant, Don Quixote (1652 and 1675), and The History of the Most Renowned Don Quixote (1687). [End Page 468] In any case, the earliest of the four abridgments was published in 1686 and titled The Famous History of Don Quixote de la Mancha. This one manages to squeeze the first half of Cervantes's story into seven short chapters totaling only twenty pages. In effect, it is a slim pamphlet based on Thomas Shelton's translation of 1612. The second abridgment appeared three years later and was a much longer effort of some 204 pages. This one is titled The Delightful History of Don Quixote. Together with its anonymous writer, it is the principal subject of the present paper. The third and fourth abridgments, though they do not specifically concern us here, deserve mention insofar as they help not only to fill out the quartet but also to demonstrate both the durability and the relative plasticity of the Spanish knight and his story. Somewhat complicating the case, these last two abridgments raise problems of dating. Edwin A. Knowles argued over a half century ago, however, that the earlier of the two was probably The Much-esteemed History of the Ever-famous Knight Don Quixote de La Mancha (a work of some 191 pages), published in 1699.1 It, too, was based on Shelton's work. Although the fourth abridgment, a work of some twenty-four pages and titled The History of the Ever-renowned Knight Don Quixote de La Mancha, has fairly recently been assigned the date "1695(?),"2 Knowles held, perhaps correctly, that this one should be dated 1700 on the grounds that its illustrations are somewhat cruder versions of those in The Much-esteemed History and, further, that while the language in both is similar in many passages, it is more likely that the shorter work borrowed from the longer one rather the other way around. Whatever the truth of the matter, The History of the Ever-renowned Knight Don Quixote de La Mancha is another book indebted to Shelton.3 However the sequence of the abridgments is perceived, the present article is focused on exploring the previously unexplored statement that the abridgment of 1689 differs interestingly from all of the other three insofar as it is the longest of the four, that it is not based on Thomas Shelton's translation of Don Quixote, and that it no longer need be considered anonymous. [End Page 469] Only recently has the writer of...