French Classical Drama and Cervantes's Novel: Key Aspects

French Classical Drama

The theater became one of the major genres in European literature in the 16th century. During the Middle Ages, the first theatrical performances sprang from religious and secular matters.

The fifteenth century was an important step in the history of the theater. Dances of death became fashionable, and humanistic comedy also emerged with important Spanish works such as La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas. At the end of the sixteenth century, the fusion of popular and cultured theatrical trends led to the birth of national theaters in England, Spain, and France.

The theater in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became a mass spectacle, and plays reflected the life, feelings, and needs of the people.

Some theorists believed the theater was subject to three literary rules:

• Time: The argument represented should not exceed 12 hours.
• Place: All the action must happen in the same space.
• Action: The work should represent a single action of the main characters.

In France, the theater grew later and was less popular initially.

The theater was often done under the patronage of royalty and the court. Catherine, the king's brother, and later King Louis XIV, supported the theaters, paid theater companies, and chose their preferred line of works, often tragedy.

The French theater sought a balance between faith and reason.

Historical figures were adapted to their own situation.

Cervantes and the Origins of the Modern Novel

Cervantes's novel is universal for several reasons:

He is credited with the origin of the modern novel. The essential elements in his novel are the narrative, description, and dialogue, through which the characters show the variety and richness of real life. He uses naturalness, reason, irony, and humor to portray the clash between illusion and reality through his characters and language.

Irony and parody lead to the inexhaustible humor of Don Quixote, and we find humor in the hilarious dialogues between Sancho and Don Quixote.

Characters in Don Quixote discover their secrets in a dialectical process that defines them as independent and living beings.

Cervantes manages to capture realism in his characters. Don Quixote and Sancho have an effect on the reader's consciousness of the work, creating a sense of real people who have escaped from the novel.

An important Baroque feature of Don Quixote is its dynamism, which affects both the structure and style. Dynamic is the movement of the characters.

Cervantes in Don Quixote gives us:

• A summary of all of the sixteenth-century novelistic genre.
• The novel's narrator multiplies and takes on different points of view, mixing reality and fiction to introduce new narrative techniques such as simultaneous actions that coincide in time.
• Humor based on jokes and misunderstandings.
• Literature within literature.

The theme is a worldview mirroring the wealth of the world in his time. The theme of the play revolves around whether it is possible to find an ideal in reality.