101
Lotman and Uspensky offer an extremely useful analysis of the individual's participation in the «semiotics of culture». In his Cuestión de límites, Díaz-Plaja notes that Cervantes's knowledge of Italian puppetry is itself rooted in the author's historical experience in Italy during the 1570's.
102
See Menéndez Pidal (24-27) on the double origin of the Gaiferos legend (cited by Murillo in Don Quijote II, 240, n. 3).
103
On the sexually charged language of the boy's narrative, and on its relation to Don Quixote's unconscious desires masked by lethargy, see El Saffar, Beyond Fiction (118-19).
104
This perverse species of authorial manipulation characterizes many of Don Quixote's most striking sequences. For a reading of Part One, chapter 43, in this light, see Gaylord, «'The Whole Body'».
105
On these ubiquitous Golden Age Rodrigos, see Gaylord, «Spain's Renaissance Conquests».
106
In many instances, the reality of historiographic layering is purposefully blurred by wholesale plagiarism, as in the case of the official chronicler Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, whose prolixity and derivative accounts Cervantes pillories when he calls the author of the 1614 competing second part of Don Quixote's adventures «escritor fingido y tordesillesco»
in the final lines of his own second volume (II, 592). María E. Mayer notes that Herrera y Tordesillas had acquired a certain notoriety on account of a series of scandals for which he had spent time in prison (99). Mayer makes intriguing connections, relevant to this study as well, between the uses of realistic detail in Cervantes's narrative and that of the American chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo.
107
See Murillo's note 1 (Don Quijote II, 239).
108
A sharp jab at Lope de Vega's implausible dramatizations comes à propos of the narrator's anachronistic reference to Moorish campanas. To Don Quixote's protest, the puppeteer raises his counter-protest: «¿No se representan por ahí, casi de ordinario, mil comedias llenas de mil impropiedades y disparates, y, con todo eso, corren felicísimamente su carrera, y se escuchan no sólo con aplauso, sino con admiración y todo»
(II, 244). The barb echoes the Curate's lambasting of the Lopean Comedia in Part One, chapter 48.
109
On the romance as a kind performed history which activates the twin temporal perspectives of historical subject and audience, see Stephen Gilman, «On Romancero as a Poetic Language».
110
The importance of saying and doing in chapter 26 and in the novel as a whole is the subject of an unpublished chapter of my forthcoming book.