The Cervantean

"The Cervantean is as multivalent as the Shakespearean: it contains us, with all of our severe differences from one another. Wisdom is as much an attribute of the Don and Sancho, particularly when they are considered together, as intelligence and mastery of language are qualities of Sir John Falstaff, Hamlet, and Rosalind. Cervantes' two heroes are simply the largest literary characters in the whole Western Canon, except for their triple handful (at most) of Shakespearean peers. Their fusion of folly and wisdom and their disinterestedness can be matched only in Shakespeare's most memorable men and women. Cervantes has naturalized us as Shakespeare has: we can no longer see what makes Don Quixote so permanently original, so searchingly strange a work. If the play of the world can still be located in the greatest literature, then it must be here."

--Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994), 145.