My father used to take me to the theatre. Along with my father’s classmate, Uncle Hüdai Yaramanoğlu, a sales inspector with us but a playwright at heart, we would visit different stages and were sometimes even welcomed backstage. I still remember how, at Gazanfer Özcan’s theatre, the husband-and-wife actors noticed us in the audience and improvised lines directly for us on the spot. I remember watching The Crucible. And I still remember how, sometime after we had seen that play, the Atatürk Cultural Center was reduced to ashes.
Anyway, recently, upon Allianz’s invitation, we found ourselves back at the theatre once again. I decided to turn that experience into a cultural GOYA for you. Even those with no particular interest in the arts may find it engaging.
Writing an article about Don Quixote and choosing such a title, does that amount to academic impertinence? Perhaps it does. But then again, I am just a biscuit maker. Recently, after watching the Don Quixote musical at Zorlu Center, my thinking on the subject became clearer. Let me be clear: this is not a comment on the musical itself. Rather, it reflects my broader views on Cervantes and similar literary works, and on how they have been transmitted and marketed to the present day.
What sets people apart is their ability to communicate, in other words, how they express themselves: language, writing, drawing, and of course visual and performance arts. These forms of communication are uniquely human. First came spoken expression, then written texts, thousands of years ago, yet the substance has remained substantially the same. In my view, beyond informing, teaching, or persuading, the underlying aim has always been to be recognized and remembered. For this reason, people have invented prophecy, claims of hidden knowledge, ways of speaking about the unseen and the future, turning the past into stories, and passing narratives from one person to another. I have always been drawn to novels and enjoy reading them, although for some time now, professional reading has left me little room for it. I had also not been able to go to the theatre for a long while, but I am finally beginning to make time for it again.
I read Don Quixote in my younger years. To be honest, at the time I had no idea that the original consisted of two volumes running to more than a thousand pages. Over the years, though, I have read countless interpretations and excerpts, and listened to many people who know the book. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is widely considered as the starting point of the modern novel. In more recent scholarship, the idea of the “birth of the modern novel” was explained through a systematic theoretical model by Ian Watt. Drawing on classics such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, Watt identified the defining features of the modern novel through concepts like modern individualism, experiential realism, and a sense of time. For this reason, Watt is often regarded as the critic who brought modern novel theory into a coherent system.
In my view, this characterization alone does not fully explain the work’s global cultural impact. Even today, its musicals are staged in many countries, its theatrical adaptations continue to be performed, and the novel is still published in multiple lengths.
In my view, Don Quixote does more than simply inaugurate a new literary form. It gradually turns into a vehicle for cultural transmission, reshaping Western, or Christian European, identity into an individualistic moral framework centered on reality and rationality. Whether this was Cervantes’ conscious aim is something we will never know!
From the perspective of modernity, Cervantes’ text stands among the first major works that allow the West to present its own core value system to the rest of the world as natural, reasonable, and universal. Far from being a simple parody of knightly romances, which Cervantes is widely believed to have written to mock the chivalric books of romantic heroism popular in the 1600s, does it not resemble the literary expression of Christian Europe’s effort both to reconstruct itself and to project itself outward? This is my personal view. A look at the critical literature shows no real consensus as well. There is still no agreement on whether the novel’s representation is purely derisive or whether it constitutes a complex, ironic, and multilayered structure (*).
Cervantes, one of the most important writers of the Spanish Renaissance, was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. During his military service, he took part in the Battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman navy in 1571, where he sustained injuries. On his return journey, he was captured by Algerian corsairs and spent five years in captivity in Algiers, before securing his release through ransom. That experience deeply shaped his reflections on freedom, idealism, and human nature. Throughout his life, Cervantes faced financial hardship and worked as a civil servant and tax collector, yet despite these difficulties, he continued to write until his death in Madrid in 1616.
The work, fully titled “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha,” consists of two volumes. When the first volume was published in 1605, it caused a sensation. The second volume followed ten years later in 1615, largely because another writer had produced a counterfeit sequel before Cervantes himself. As a result, Cervantes filled his second volume with pointed references mocking this impostor, effectively engaging in what might be called a seventeenth-century “copyright dispute”.
As I mentioned earlier, Cervantes is said to have written this work to satirize the “romances of chivalry” that were extremely popular at the time. These novels were believed to distance the public from reality through exaggerated heroism. This immediately brought to my mind the epics of Battal Gazi and the stories of Hazrat Ali. Don Quixote tells the story of Alonso Quijano, a hidalgo of Spain’s lesser nobility, who loses his sanity after reading too many chivalric romances. He renames himself Don Quixote, dons a rusty helmet and armor, names his frail horse Rocinante, invents an imaginary peasant beloved named Dulcinea, and sets out with his loyal companion Sancho Panza to dispense justice as he sees fit.
The work is not merely a satire. It has remained relevant because it articulates the conflict between human ideals, imagination, and beliefs on the one hand, and lived reality on the other. When Cervantes is read as saying that virtue, courage, and humanity can exist only through the “madness” of Don Quixote, all other messages in the novel are quickly forgotten. This is precisely why Don Quixote remains famous, both as a comic figure and as a tragic hero. Consider an era in which feminist critiques argue that Snow White is demeaning to women; in which Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is removed from school reading lists because of its violent elements; and in which even Lucky Luke’s cigarette was once deemed unacceptable and replaced with a blade of grass. In such an age, Don Quixote’s own demeaning, one-directional role in disseminating values is simply overlooked. Why?
Don Quixote moves its audience out of a passive role and draws the reader directly into the text, where interpretation becomes a way of forming identity. In this sense, it is widely said to have contributed to the birth of the modern reader. Cervantes achieves this by addressing the reader directly in the preface. The work is often praised as far ahead of its time for its sense of reality, character psychology, irony, and multilayered narrative. I am not so sure, though. Read much older texts and decide for yourself — the clay tablets in our archaeological museums would be a good place to start!
Today, the term “quixotism” (Spanish: quijotismo) is commonly used to describe what I would call a foolishly idealistic stance that is willing to clash with reality in the name of ideals. I must admit, I do not entirely dislike this emphasis.
Now let us look at Spain at the time. It was a period suspended between a Golden Age and decline. Cervantes lived during one of the most powerful yet also most contradictory eras in Spanish history.
By the 1500s, in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, Spain established colonies around the globe. Gold and silver flowed into the country, but this wealth fueled ostentation rather than production. Wars, the Inquisition, ecclesiastical pressure, and the collapse driven by imported wealth made life increasingly difficult. On one hand, there was a proud population with a strong imperial consciousness; on the other, poverty, debt, and social decay.
Cervantes felt this contradiction deeply, living at the heart of it. In Spain, the Inquisition prevailed, viewing Catholicism as “the only legitimate path”. Other faiths, including Judaism, Islam, and even other Christian denominations such as Protestantism, were not tolerated. Books were censored, ideas were suppressed. Perhaps for this very reason, Cervantes resorted to satire and irony, expressing his truth indirectly. Don Quixote’s madness served as a shield. Does it not, in a way, echo the wandering “abdals” of the East?
Society was divided into three classes: the nobility, the clergy, and the people. The nobles, or hidalgos, once warriors, had largely become idle and unproductive, a class to which Don Quixote belonged. The Church, backed by its authority and wealth, stood as the most powerful institution. By contrast, the people and peasants were the true laborers, yet they lived in poverty, a reality embodied by Sancho Panza. Through the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho, Cervantes set imagination against reality, noble ideals against the lived experience of ordinary people. The same century also produced figures such as Velázquez, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and El Greco. Literature and theatre were flourishing, yet their themes remained largely religious or heroic. Cervantes stepped beyond this tradition, drawing attention instead to ordinary life.
At the time, people had grown afraid even to think under the pressure of church and state. Cervantes’ protagonist, Don Quixote, stood as a symbol of thinking differently and imagining freely. In a country governed by the Inquisition, he was seen not merely as satire, but as a breath of freedom for the individual under pressure, with little thought given to what the novel elevated and what it diminished.
Writing in such a period, Cervantes was not simply making a literary choice. He was also weaving the West’s effort to preserve its Christian identity into the novel’s ironic structure, as the novel’s central tension between Don Quixote’s imagination and social reality is directly linked to Christian Europe’s attempt to rebuild its cultural legitimacy. Throughout the novel, society represents the principle of reality, a reality that aligns with observational Western rationality. Seen in this light, Don Quixote’s madness is not merely an individual problem, but a metaphor for the new order of knowledge that modern Europe was seeking to establish in opposition to the irrationality of earlier ages.
The religious and racial motifs of the period seem, if anything, to support this reading. In the novel, Cervantes creates an air of documentary realism by claiming that the story was written not by himself, but by an Arab historian. This fictional figure is the Muslim chronicler Cide Hamete Benengeli, whom Cervantes portrays as dubious, unreliable, and of questionable credibility. The more I explored this character, the clearer it became that he has received remarkably little attention from literary scholars and linguists, with no real consensus even on the meaning of his name. Some suggest that “Cide” derives from Cid, meaning “lord” in Arabic; others see “Hamete” as a form of Ahmed, and some even go so far as to argue that “Benengeli” is a satirical nod to the Spanish word berenjena, eggplant. (**).
In the novel, Christian reason is positioned as a kind of corrective authority, standing above the Muslim narrative. This goes beyond simple mockery. It points to an early expression of Europe’s long-standing claim to superiority in the production of knowledge vis-à-vis the East. The East tells the story; the West interprets it, corrects it, and ultimately decides what counts as truth. Is this not, in literary form, what Antonio Gramsci would later describe as cultural hegemony, that would come to underpin Orientalist discourse and nineteenth-century imperialism? In Don Quixote, the East appears as a diminished subject, while the West is quietly positioned as the center of reality, reason, and truth, does it not?
At this point, despite differences in historical context, the indirect parallels between Don Quixote and Eastern traditions of storytelling help bring the novel’s ideological function into sharper focus. The narratives of Dede Korkut, the epics of Battal Gazi, and the stories of Hazrat Ali portray a world in which heroism is grounded in divine legitimacy and justice is dispensed through metaphysical authority. In these texts, the hero is endowed with a special mandate to set the world in order.
Don Quixote, by contrast, tells the story of the collapse of that very heroic model. His desire to set the world in order is not met with sanctity, as it is in Eastern traditions, but with ridicule and illusion. This “collapse” marks the beginning of Western modernity, where metaphysical heroism gives way to worldly rationality. In this sense, Don Quixote reveals that a heroic ideal still sustained in the East had already lost its validity in Europe. What followed was an elevation of rationality over heroism, social order over individual bravery, and observation-based reality over divine truth. I see this transformation as a critical moment when Western modernity began to set itself apart from other cultures, perhaps even as the starting point of what we now call the clash of civilizations. And one cannot help but ask: had peace not been framed as a zero-sum game, where one side’s gain is another’s loss, would the world not be a more harmonious place today?
Interestingly, Don Quixote also brings to mind Ayn Rand, a writer I encountered in high school years. Rand’s heroes represent the rationalized heroic ideal of European modernity. They realize, through reason, the individual power that Don Quixote could only imagine but never achieve—figures of strength fully at home in the modern world. Where Don Quixote misreads reality, Rand’s heroes turn it into something tangible. Might this reflect the historical trajectory of Western heroism: a movement from the sacred to the secular, from the secular to the rational, and in the process, the quiet exclusion of other possible paths?
Taken together, these elements clearly reveal Don Quixote’s function in disseminating Western values. As the starting point of the modern novel, the work carries the core concepts of Western thought: the primacy of reality, individualism, rationality, secular order, the supremacy of social norms, and the homogenization and marginalization of the East in terms of access to knowledge. For a reader in China, Russia, or the Ottoman world, engaging with this novel means absorbing not only an unfamiliar literary form, but also a distinctly Western way of making sense of the world. In this sense, Don Quixote is not merely the beginning of the modern novel; it is also one of the earliest examples of the West presenting its own modernity as “a universal human experience.”
What makes Don Quixote singular in this global ideological role is its ability to do two things at once: to celebrate Western values, while at the same time subjecting them to irony and critique. The novel thus functions both as a vehicle for the West’s modernity narrative and as a critique from within. Perhaps the side we enjoy most, without fully reckoning with its blind spots, is precisely this critical edge. You will sense the same tension while watching the musical that inspired this piece, you will at times take pleasure in its critical and comic elements as well, where moments of comedy often carry a quietly critical charge.
For this reason, Don Quixote is not merely a parody of the chivalric romance but the literary infrastructure of Western Christian modernity’s process of self-centralization. The dramatic staging of the gap between reality and imagination, the individual’s eventual surrender to society after the defeat of idealism, the punishment of the irrational by rationality, and, ultimately, the framing of the West’s own order of knowledge as “universal reason…” All of this constitutes, beyond Cervantes’ creative irony, a narrative of cultural hegemony. In this sense, Don Quixote not only stands as a foundational literary text, but also marks one of the starting points of the West’s colonization of the human mind.
In conclusion, Don Quixote carries the cultural DNA of the modern world. It stands as both a symbolic and a practical expression of Europe’s long historical effort to position itself as the natural bearer of universal reason. This novel is more than the tale of a madman fighting windmills; it marks the opening move in the West’s great cultural campaign to extend its civilizational project beyond its own borders. Don Quixote’s defeat is, in fact, the triumph of what the West defines as “reality,” a triumph that has shaped the dominant paradigm of global intellectual history for the past four centuries.
Unlike cinema, theatre and musical theatre cannot run simultaneously across multiple venues; they become economically viable only through long runs on a single stage. This is why theatre operates under a different economic logic. In today’s digital, social media-driven world, the question of how theatre will sustain itself remains pressing. In this sense, Zorlu Performing Arts Center offers a real opportunity and a source of hope for our theatres. Congratulations to the Zorlu Group.
At Zorlu PSM, I watched a musical starring Selçuk Yöntem, Zuhal Olcay, and Cengiz Bozkurt. The production, a joint collaboration between Çolpan İlhan & Sadri Alışık Theater and Piu Entertainment, was directed by Işıl Kasapoğlu, with Volkan Akkoç serving as music director.
The adaptation we watched is based on the world-renowned musical Man of La Mancha, with music composed by Mitch Leigh, itself adapted from Dale Wasserman’s 1959 television play. The production enjoyed a long run on Broadway, where it was staged 2,328 times and received five Tony Awards. Structurally, the musical adopts a “play within a play” approach, weaving together Cervantes’ life, a prison setting, and the story of Quixote. From the outset, neither Wasserman nor others involved ever claimed that the text offered a faithful reflection of the novel. It is not a faithful depiction of Cervantes’ life or of Don Quixote, nor does it pretend to be. Wasserman himself repeatedly objected to the perception of the work as simply a musical version of Don Quixote. Its spirit is, of course, Quixote’s, and its core story comes from the novel; yet the text includes elements that move beyond the original, and each director inevitably brings a personal interpretation to the stage.
As a friend of mine put it, perhaps a harsh assessment, the adaptation fails to fully capitalize on the transformative power of musical theatre when retelling a story drawn from Cervantes, whether due to a reliance on conventional staging, production choices, or the limited expressive reach of the songs themselves. A work that might be expected to challenge audiences to question their own realities and to strive more boldy for their ideals feels, in my view, restrained and lacking in momentum. More troubling, however, is the portrayal of the Moors, long-standing neighbors of Spain, as thieves, along with the inclusion of a collective rape scene within popular reality, a choice I found both unnecessary and openly discriminatory. Out of curiosity, I looked back at the novel itself. Though Cervantes’ text does include forms of violence typical of its time, and even instances of sexual violence as secondary episodes, there is no such scene involving Dulcinea. Of course, the novel includes forms of violence common to Cervantes’ era, including abductions and roadside attacks, yet there is no collective rape scene involving Dulcinea. In fact, Don Quixote idealizes the figure entirely within his own mind, giving her the name Dulcinea del Toboso. She never appears as a physical character in the novel; she exists solely as his imagined, unreciprocated love. For this reason, an assault directed at Dulcinea makes little sense within the novel’s logic, as she is not a tangible presence in the narrative.
In 2025, should Don Quixote still be presented to younger audiences with the old-fashioned theatrical effects reminiscent of productions from the 1970s and 1980s, or should it be reimagined by drawing more boldly on today’s technological possibilities? At a time when we try to engage the next generation across every conceivable touchpoint, theatre’s insistence on standing still, almost as if life itself had paused, struck me as curious. Browsing online, I saw the same musical staged elsewhere with a much more pared-down design. My suggestion is simple: go and see it for yourself, and make up your own mind.
Selçuk Yöntem’s performance left an impression on me. Zuhal Olcay, in my view, was somewhat let down by the sound system, although she delivered a much stronger performance in the second half. While the volume was adequate, I did not find the orchestra sufficiently layered for a musical of this scale. Cengiz Bozkurt, as Sancho Panza, offered a clear and warmly engaging performance, which I genuinely enjoyed. And of course, a word of thanks to the dancers, performers, and technical crew behind the scenes.
References
(*) https://www.jstor.org/stable/26237377;
https://fount.aucegypt.edu/faculty_book_chapters/951/?utm_source=chatgpt.com;
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20063080
(**) https://brill.com/view/journals/me/3/2/article-p111_1.xml
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/donquixote/character/cide-hamete-benengeli/
Note: This open-source article does not require copyright and can be quoted by citing the author.
