In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame.
Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling he was about to follow.
So then, his armour being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet, his hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul.
This month's Key West Mystery Fest has us longing to build a drink for the tall, tanned
knight-errant who made literary history as the hero of Sarasotan John D.
Lorca suggests that these doctrines allowed Cervantes to create a moral contrast between Don Quijote and Marcela, representing the
knight-errant in the worst possible light (a literary fool) and the shepherdess in the best possible light (a stoic sage).
First, Eric Ziolkowski's book The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest carefully analyzes the links between the two novels, with the objective of illustrating how Greene sanctifies Don Quixote through the character of Monsignor Quixote, turning him into a
knight-errant who fights tooth and nail for his Catholic beliefs in a secularized world (6-7).
While the Knight prepares his army (no solo
knight-errant nonsense but a serious campaign) the Fool teaches the lonely wife Mara to juggle, and in desperation to follow her husband, she changes guises with the frail androgynous Fool.
Despite the fact that more than 400 years have passed since the work was published, The history of the valorous and witty
knight-errant Don-Quixote of the Mancha is still being edited and read.
"It's not often that an event comes along that perfectly distills an approach to life at large and how we live it, in that it reattributes our priorities to the core, starting with seeing windmills as dragons as Cervantes denied Don Quixote's desire for elevation to
knight-errant and instead cast a leg- endary figure down to the firm and unadulterated reality of the real Dul- cinea we face today in the form of a crisis." Er, quite.
The preposterous picaresque adventures of the
knight-errant Brancaleone, in Mario Monicelli's films, seem closest to those of Don Quixote.
In addition to spelling out the positive meaning of the Donghai woman's violence, Li Bai also casts her as a
knight-errant, as shown in the couplet: "She learned the art of swordsmanship from the maiden [master] of Yue, / and was able to leap and soar like a shooting star".