Man of La Mancha and Don Quixote
The film Man of La Mancha is a movie that is based on both Don Quixote and its canonical collection, making it a more loosely canon piece within the canon. The film, which was released in 1972, is originally based off the 1964 musical of the same name. The musical itself is also based upon a 1959 teleplay, making the movie actually a canon piece based on a canon piece based on another canon piece based upon the original material. If that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is. As a whole, the film is exemplary in the case of the canon, but like any part of the canon, each new piece has elements that diverge from the original source material of the canon. As Cascardi describes it in the chapter “Don Quixote and the invention of the novel” from The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes:
The translating and editing of the “original” text suggest the ways in which all the many discourses in this novel are not simply juxtaposed, but layered. They constantly shadow one another, and this …show more content…
In order to save his life, possessions and his script, Cervantes convinces the other inmates to let him have a trial, where in which Cervantes himself opts to perform his play as a way to plead his case and takes on the role of his protagonist, Don Quixote himself. This is very much unlike the novel itself in that Cervantes plays a role almost completely outside the activities and adventures in Don Quixote. In fact, Cervantes is a secondary/tertiary narrator for most of his own novel. In the first part of the first volume, he is going off a manuscript he discovered and for the rest of it, Cervantes is “retelling” the story based on the translation of a Moorish man from a book by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian. Thus, the dual part in the film which Cervantes plays is not canonical at
The film Man of La Mancha is a movie that is based on both Don Quixote and its canonical collection, making it a more loosely canon piece within the canon. The film, which was released in 1972, is originally based off the 1964 musical of the same name. The musical itself is also based upon a 1959 teleplay, making the movie actually a canon piece based on a canon piece based on another canon piece based upon the original material. If that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is. As a whole, the film is exemplary in the case of the canon, but like any part of the canon, each new piece has elements that diverge from the original source material of the canon. As Cascardi describes it in the chapter “Don Quixote and the invention of the novel” from The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes:
The translating and editing of the “original” text suggest the ways in which all the many discourses in this novel are not simply juxtaposed, but layered. They constantly shadow one another, and this …show more content…
In order to save his life, possessions and his script, Cervantes convinces the other inmates to let him have a trial, where in which Cervantes himself opts to perform his play as a way to plead his case and takes on the role of his protagonist, Don Quixote himself. This is very much unlike the novel itself in that Cervantes plays a role almost completely outside the activities and adventures in Don Quixote. In fact, Cervantes is a secondary/tertiary narrator for most of his own novel. In the first part of the first volume, he is going off a manuscript he discovered and for the rest of it, Cervantes is “retelling” the story based on the translation of a Moorish man from a book by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian. Thus, the dual part in the film which Cervantes plays is not canonical at