How Don Quixote drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605
RenaissanceRelevance
6/10
On Don Quixote’s page
- Don Quixote's famous Golden Age speech (I.11) is lifted straight from Ovid's Ages of Man — read the Metamorphoses and you'll catch the source the knight is solemnly reciting
- Cervantes takes Ovid's machinery of transformation and reroutes it through delusion: the same world-changing power, but the changes are all in the mind
- A deliberate Ovidian text under the comedy — knowing the original sharpens every one of Quixote's enchantments and metamorphoses
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Ovid's Metamorphoses opens with the Ages of Man — gold, silver, bronze, iron — a world declining from a lost golden age
- Cervantes hands that whole scheme to a madman: Don Quixote's Golden Age speech (I.11) laments being "born in this our iron age to revive the age of gold"
- The Ovidian engine of transformation runs straight through Don Quixote — only now the metamorphoses happen inside a deluded head, where windmills become giants and a peasant girl becomes a princess