Don Quijote, ed. cit., IX, 186.
This is particularly true in the case of Feliciano de Silva's works. [See Chapter VI, supra].
«Don' Quijote and the Alcahuete», in Estudios dedicados a James Homer Herriott (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 109-16, reprinted in The Literary Mind of Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), pp. 193-200.
III, 188, 11. 2-3 of Rodríguez Marin's edition, cited above: «le quiso tanto, que fue uno de los más regalados garzones suyos». Garzón in an Arabic context meant «un sodomita mantenido por un señor árabe» (Haedo, cited by Corominas).
Sancho's etymology of Ptolomeo (II, 29), a scatological reference in Teresa Panza's letter to her husband (II, 52), an allusion to menstruation (II, 23) and no doubt others I have missed.
I said «in the Quijote alone», because I am sure that a systematic survey of the Cervantine corpus would turn up many more sexual allusions. There is a constant sexual undertone to El celoso extremeño (and El viejo celoso), there are references to syphilis in El casamiento engañoso, and various types of sexual allusions in El coloquio de los perros. (My thanks to Ruth El Saffar for a stimulating discussion of this topic).
In his introduction to Tirante el Blanco, I (Barcelona: Asociación de Bibliófilos de Barcelona, 1947), li-liii, and almost verbatim in his Aproximación al Quijote, pp. 68-69, Riquer maintains that Cervantes criticized the romances of chivalry as a genre as «incitadores de la sensualidad». He cites three passages in support of this allegation, two of which are spoken by the canon from Toledo, whose identification with Cervantes is in any event not to be taken for granted (see Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles [Princeton, 1970]). The first of the quotations («¿Qué haremos de la facilidad con que una reina o emperatriz heredera se conduce en los brazos de un amante y no conocido caballero?») was cited by the canon as an example of lack of verisimilitude, not of licentiousness; in the second, the canon compares them to the Milesian fables, then goes on to explain that he means by this that they lack a moral lesson, which is the point made by Cervantes' obvious source, López Pinciano (Philosophia antigua poética, II, 12), as well as the earlier Pérez de Moya (cited by Blecua, «Libros de caballerías» [supra, note 139 to Chapter IV], pp. 152-53) -not that they are obscene, as Riquer tries to show from other texts. The final quotation Riquer uses to prove his point is spoken by the Caballero del Verde Gabán, who says that knights-errant were «en daño de las buenas costumbres», an extremely vague comment that by no means need refer to sensuality.
Although not mentioned in this context by Riquer, others have seen Cervantes as criticizing the Celestina for its licentious elements, in the comment of Donoso, «libro en mi opinión divino / si encubriera más lo humano» (D. W. McPheeters, «Cervantes' Verses on La Celestina», Romance Notes, 4 [1963], 136-38; Pierre Ullman, «The Burlesque Poems which Frame the Quijote», ACerv, 9 [1961-62, publ. 1965], 220-23). I would venture the opinion that to see these lines as referring to sex reflects our modern prejudices, and that by «lo humano» Cervantes meant the whole spectrum of human passions presented in Rojas' work.
It is noteworthy that Cervantes never criticized Avellaneda for his greater crudity in these matters.
At Don Quijote's death, the escribano said that «nunca había leído en ningún libro de caballerías que algún caballero andante hubiese muerto en su lecho tan sosegadamente y tan cristiano como don Quijote».
This does not mean that Fonseca is the most unusual name in the Tirant, nor that there were not chivalric figures, such as Bernardo del Carpio, who had Spanish names. But within the context of the sixteenth-century Castilian romance of chivalry (and Cervantes had no way of knowing that the Tirant was not such a work), the appearance of any Spanish element is striking. Following the lead of the Amadís, the books had neither a Spanish setting nor Spanish characters, and though occasionally a Spanish knight might turn up at a tournament, he would have a fantastic name, undistinguishable from those of the other knights. This is the case even in those books whose titles would lead one to believe otherwise: Cristalián de España, Rosián de Castilla, Florando de Castilla.
The other, briefer allusions to the Tirant in Don Quijote are no more indicative of a favorable attitude on the part of Cervantes. Aside from the list in Don Quijote's speech at the beginning of I, 20, the description in I, 13, «el nunca como se debe alabado Tirante el Blanco», is ambiguous, and the adjectives acomodado and manual used to describe him in II, 1 are frankly insulting, despite Riquer's attempt in a note to his edition of the Quijote, 6th ed. (Barcelona: Juventud, 1969), II, 548, to explain them away. Acomodado, in the Diccionario de Autoridades, is «el que es muy amigo del descanso, regalo y conveniencias»; manual, citing this very passage as its example, is «el hombre que tiene el genio dócil, y es muy fácil en hacer quanto le mandan».