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9 Luiz Vaz de Camoes, the great Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century (1524?–1580).

1 In the Don Quixoteby Avellaneda, which is the book the two travelers are discussing, Don Quixote renounces his love for Dulcinea and is then called the Disenamored Knight.

2 According to Martín de Riquer, these are the insults directed at Cervantes that are mentioned in the prologue to the authentic part II.

3 Many critics have attempted to prove that Avellaneda was Aragonese on the basis of this statement, but Martín de Riquer states that it cannot be proved. He points out that the omission of articles has never been a characteristic of the Aragonese dialect or of writers from Aragón; further, in Avellaneda’s book there are only four cases of missing articles, something that could just as easily be found in texts by Cervantes. If Cervantes uses “articles” to mean “particles” (as some contemporary grammarians did), there are more instances of this kind of omission in the “False Quixote,” but it is still not a characteristic of Aragonese writing.

4 As Martín de Riquer points out, the error is less Avellaneda’s than Cervantes’s; in part I, Sancho’s wife had four different names, one of which was Mari Gutiérrez.

5 According to Martín de Riquer, Avellaneda’s Sancho, unlike the original, is stupid, slovenly, and coarse.

6 The idiom (hecho equis) means “staggering drunk” and is based on the image of the shape an inebriated person’s legs assume when he stumbles and struggles to keep his balance.

7 A chivalric activity in which men on horseback would gallop past a ring hanging from a cord and attempt to catch it on the tip of their lance.

8 The verses and epigrams, normally alluding to their ladies, on the shields carried by knights in jousts.

9 Martín de Riquer indicates that this objection is not justified, since Avellaneda’s descriptions of the liveries worn at the Zaragozan jousts are adequate.

2 These are lines from one of the ballads about the Infantes of Lara.

3 In Cervantes’s time, banditry was an especially severe problem in Cataluña.

4 A short, high-necked jacket of mail that was usually sleeveless.

5 A kind of short harquebus favored by the bandits of Cataluña; they were usually worn on a leather bandolier called a charpa.

6 Martín de Riquer points out that this is a mistake: the reference should be to Busiris, an Egyptian king who killed foreigners as sacrifices to the gods.

7 Perot Roca Guinarda was a historical figure whom Cervantes had already praised in his dramatic interlude La cueva de Salamanca (The Cave of Salamanca). Born in 1582, he fought constantly in factional wars, and although his adversaries favored the nobility, he received support from members of the aristocracy and the Church hierarchy, including Don Antonio Moreno, who plays a part in Don Quixote’s adventures in Barcelona. Roca Guinarda was known for his chivalric nature, and like other Catalan bandits, or bandoleros, he eventually abandoned his former life of crime and fought for the Spanish crown in Italy and Flanders. In 1611, he was granted a pardon and left for Naples as a captain in the Spanish army. The date of his death is unknown. As Martín de Riquer indicates, the topic of the Catalan bandit became a romantic theme in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as exemplified by these passages in Don Quixote.

8. The factions, or bandos, gave rise to the word bandolero (cf. “band” and “bandit” in English).

9 Martín de Riquer states that many of the Catalan bandoleros were in fact from Gascony and may have been Huguenot fugitives from France.

10 According to Martín de Riquer, Roque kept what could not be divided and gave his men their share of its equivalent value in money.

12 Martín de Riquer points out that, given the similarities between the languages of Gascony and Cataluña, the bandoleros probably spoke a mixture of the two; frade,