141
Pellicer, Diego Clemencín reports, emended «large» on the grounds that the Spanish seventeenth-century public would not understand the term Gothic. The Spanish Academy did not accept Pellicer's emendation and restored the original text. See El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Ed. IV Centenario (Madrid: Ediciones Castilla, 1966), Vol. V, p. 1529, note 24.
142
For Clemencín, Gothic letter type, commonly called «letra de Tortis», was large and thick so as to be easily read on signs (Loc. Cit.).
143
See H[enry] Thomas, «What Cervantes meant by 'Gothic letters'», Modern Language Review 33 (1983), 412-16.
144
Tesoro de la lengua castellana o expañola, under letra.
145
See Thomas, p. 414.
146
This interpretation is clear from a drawing of Don Quijote riding Rocinante found with the papers on the knight's life and prowess. At Rocinante's feet («a los pies de Rocinante») there is a scroll bearing the name «Don Quijote» (I, 9). The ensuring vivid description is of Rocinante and not of Don Quijote.
147
See «Plasticidad del símbolo cervantino» in Cervantes y su concepto del arte, pp. 395-98; «Los consejos de Don Quijote a Sancho», in Cervantes and the Renaissance, Ed. Michael D. McGaha (Easton, Pennsylvania: Juan de la Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs, 1980), pp. 218-19; and «Authorial Strings: A Recurrent Metaphor in Don Quijote», in Cervantes 1(1981), 52-54, 56-60.
148
Cervantes refers to the typical soldier's colorful outfit crowned with a plumed hat when the student Tomás Rodaja, the main character in El licenciado Vidriera, joins the army and gets dressed «de papagayo» (Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Edición facsimile de las primitivas impresiones [Madrid: Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1917], Vol. IV, p. 113).
149
We recall with Howard Mancing that Don Quijote undertook his third sally urged by the priest, the barber, and especially by Sansón Carrasco. See «Knighthood Imposed», The Chivalric World of Don Quijote. Style, Structure, and Narrative Technique (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1982), pp. 129 and ff.
150
The emblematic figure of the runaway horse appears in the Bible, in Homer's Illiad, in Plato's Phaedrus, in the allegorical medieval tradition, also in several of Calderón's plays to signify uncontrollable passion, and in his religious autos «invariably to represent presumptuousness and the Devil». See Pedro R. León, «El caballo desbocado, símbolo de la pasión desordenada en la obra de Calderón», Romanische Forschungen 95 (1983), 23-35, particularly 35.