Comical History of Don Quixote, Part 2

The first dramatization of Cervantes's revolutionary novel in any language, Thomas D'Urfey's "The Comical History of Don Quixote" brought the mad knight and his squire to the English stage in 1694, with original music by Henry Purcell. This second part of the trilogy plunges Don Quixote into the corrupt world of Spanish nobility, where his delusion becomes both comedy and critique. The Duke and his court encounter the knight-errant and find him useful for their own schemes, a mirror held up to the vanity and artifice of power. D'Urfey transforms Cervantes's satire into a Restoration spectacle, using music and wit to ask what becomes of idealism in a cynical world. The play captures the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes that obsessed late seventeenth-century culture: the tension between romantic ideals and modern reason. This is theatrical history rendered as living drama, bringing Don Quixote's eternal collision with reality to the stage that birthed the modern novel.