Literary and Theatrical Resilience: Quixote, from Classic and (Post)Modern Character, to Syndrome

Abstract

A classic character brought to myth rank, Cervantes’s Quixote was tackled philosophically, by Miguel de Unamuno in his essay Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho, 1905 on the realm of Spanish literature; we have been recently amazed from a postmodern, even postcolonial perspective, by Salman Rushie (Quichotte, 2019) and dramatically on the stage of the National Theatre of Iași by Carmen Dominte who initially proposed The Quixote Syndrome (2021) as a theatrical performance meant to be read. Without dealing with the adaptations in various arts (Minkus’s ballet), we will study the resilience of a character with reference to the above texts and what was left of it on stage with insights into adaptation theory and theatrical interpretation in the context of pandemic distancing.