ays that "no poet is as bad as Cervantes, nor so foolish as to
praise _Don Quixote_," and he goes on to speak of his own plays as being
odious to Cervantes. It is obvious that the two men had quarrelled since
1602, and that Lope de Vega smarted under the satire of himself and his
works in Cervantes' forthcoming book; _Don Quixote_ may have been
circulated in manuscript, or may even have been printed before the
official licence was granted on the 26th of September 1604. It was
published early in 1605, and was dedicated to the seventh duke de Bejar
in phrases largely borrowed from the dedication in Herrera's edition
(1580) of Garcilaso de la Vega, and from Francisco de Medina's preface
to that work.

The mention of Bernardo de la Vega's _Pastor de Iberia_ shows that the
sixth chapter of _Don Quixote_ cannot have been written before 1591. In
the prologue Cervantes describes his masterpiece as being "just what
might be begotten in a jail"; on the strength of this passage, it has
been thought that he conceived the story, and perhaps began writing it,
during one of his terms of imprisonment at Seville between 1597 and
1602. Within a few weeks of its publication at Madrid, three pirated
editions of _Don Quixote_ were issued at Lisbon; a second authorized
edition, imperfectly revised, was hurried out at Madrid; and another
reprint appeared at Valencia with an _aprobacion_ dated 18th July 1605.
With the exception of Aleman's _Guzman de Alfarache_, no Spanish book of
the period was more successful. Modern criticism is prone to regard _Don
Quixote_ as a symbolic, didactic or controversial work intended to bring
about radical reforms in church and state. Such interpretations did not
occur to Cervantes' contemporaries, nor to Cervantes himself. There is
no reason for rejecting his plain statement that his main object was to
ridicule the romances of chivalry, which in their latest developments
had become a tissue of tiresome absurdities. It seems clear that his
first intention was merely to parody these extravagances in a short
story; but as he proceeded the immense possibilities of the subject
became more evident to him, and he ended by expanding his work into a
brilliant panorama of Spanish society as it existed during the 16th
century. Nobles, knights, poets, courtly gentlemen, priests, traders,
farmers, barbers, muleteers, scullions and convicts; accomplished
ladies, impassioned damsels, Moorish beauties, simple-hearted
country-g