He also is naive because inexperienced, as we see in his confident and idealistic misinterpretation of his very first, pre-poisoning, aphorism: «yo he oído decir que de los hombres se hacen los obispos» (43). His history will show that in his society, decidedly not a meritocratic one, the worthy do not rise so «naturally» to high office; bishops are chosen by those who are bishops, for the same reasons that saints are «todos frailes y religiosos» (72). (N. from the A.)

After the dangerous, storm-buffeted passage from Cartagena to Genoa leaves everyone «trasnochados, mojados y con ojeras», the captain takes his soldiers and Tomás to church before they undertake their rest and recreation (47). Judging from our evidence, there are among the crowd of characters in this tale three friends who practice their Christian faith: Valdivia, the nameless Hieronymite, and Tomás, though we ought not exclude the possibility that Tomás's good and true Salamanca friends (about whom we have no evidence of their beliefs, but positive indications in their conduct) were also of this dishearteningly small number. Tomás packs in his travel bag only two books, testaments to his esthetic refinement and his ingrained habit of daily prayer and devotion, «unas Horas de Nuestra Señora y un Garcilaso sin comento». (N. from the A.)

Rodríguez-Luis gives a clear-eyed account of the scrupulous mutual respect of Tomás and Valdivia (19596), and Casalduero emphasizes appropriately the modernity and humanistic cultural function of Tomás's study and travel abroad. (N. from the A.)

Rodrigo de Cervantes, Miguel's younger brother, who tended the author's wounds after Lepanto and shared captivity with him in Algiers, continued in military service and died in Flanders at the battle of the Dunes, on July 2, 1600 (Canavaggio 197). He was an alférez, the rank that Valdivia offered to Tomás. «El licenciado Vidriera», commonly thought to have been composed ca. 160406 (El Saffar 5051 n. 45), was imagined in the shadow of that loss.

The solace of friendship («en compañía de su buen amigo») is the singularizing and touching detail about Tomás's end. «Dejando fama... de prudente y valentísimo soldado», in contrast, is a cliché and an indicator of how little the narrator knows or cares to record about the mature achievements of his protagonist; Mateo Alemán uses the cliché and many others in his formulaic dedication of Guzmán de Alfarache, II, to Don Juan de Mendoza, who in Flanders and Milan «alcanzó señaladas victorias, mostrando tanto valor y prudencia, cuanto admirable gobierno». (N. from the A.)

Quoted by Lida 107. (N. from the A.)

I would expand the following comment of Avalle-Arce's to embrace all of Tomás's career, rather than the Rueda portion alone: «Al estatismo de su filosofar [i. e., Vidriera's] le sucede... la dinámica de la soldadesca, lo que sería la verdadera novela de la vida de Tomás Rueda, no del licenciado Vidriera, y que Cervantes [his narrator, I would correct] no escribe» (Deslindes 65). (N. from the A.)

The author plays with this idea in his last sentence: his narrator repeats the verb eternizar in characterizing his protagonist's roundabout course to forgotten fame. Tomás, the idea seems to be, will receive on high the full and fair reading of his life that is denied to readers of «El licenciado Vidriera» by the narrator's prejudiced indifference.

The words of Ruth Benedict that I choose for my epigraph are the middle part of a splendid paragraph that begins: «It is clear that culture may value and make socially available even highly unstable human types. If it chooses to treat their peculiarities as the most valued variants of human behaviour, the individuals in question will rise to the occasion and perform their social roles without reference to our usual ideas of the types who can make social adjustments and those who cannot». The paragraph concludes: «The person unsupported by the standards of his time and place and left naked to the winds of ridicule has been unforgettably drawn in European literature in the figure of Don Quixote». And as well, we must add, in the well-adjusted but lamentably under-supported Tomás, Alonso Quijano's nephew-in-literature. (N. from the A.)

Es decir, el perspectivismo narrativo del novelista, del cual Flores afirma: «el perspectivismo narrativo asume muchas formas y apariencias en la obra de Cervantes; surge, por ejemplo...en las maneras de percibir una o diferentes situaciones» (275). (N. del A.)

«The Female Quixote», Covent Garden Journal, 24 (24 de marzo de 1752), según la reimpresión en Covent Garden Journal, ed. Gerald Edward Jensen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), I, 107283, on pp. 108 and 27982. La edición de Jensen fue reimpresa en 1964. (N. del A.)

Esta técnica se ha denominado entrelacement y fue característica del romance. Véanse Loomis 95 y Tuve 364. (N. del A.)