no instance has he carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea in the background, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very existence we are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote’s worship of her virtues and charms with an additional extravagance, and gives still more point to the caricature of the sentiment and language of the romances.
One of the great merits of Don Quixote , and one of the qualities that have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity.
There are, of course, points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which do not immediately strike a reader nowadays, and Cervantes often takes it for granted that an allusion will be generally understood which is only intelligible to a few.
For example, on many of his readers in Spain, and most of his readers out of it, the significance of his choice of a country for his hero is completely lost.