We already started with Inktober 2021, this year as a reference literary work for the first inktober cover is by Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes.
As some around here know that I speak Spanish and one of the most important literary works that you should read in classical literature is Don Quixote of La Mancha (especially in high school in my country, which is mandatory to read Quixote), since it is the most important work in the Spanish language.
And as you will notice, I chose the best-known chapter in which Don Quixote confuses the windmills with "Giants" before Sancho Panza, while he tells Quixote that they are not giants, that they are windmills.
This time I drew myself as Sancho Panza, I am very different from him.
Like last year the cover of the first inktober, it was the Divine Comedy by Italian writer Dante Alighieri and this year Don Quixote.
Sancho Panza is a play in four acts and a prologue by Melchior Lengyel, with songs by Hugo Felix. It is based on the novel "Don Quixote de La Mancha" by Miguel de Cervantes. The play was originally produced by Russell Janney and staged by Richard Boleslawsky of the Moscow Art Theatre. “Ziegfeld Follies” costumer James Reynolds designed the costumes.
It starred Otis Skinner in the title role. Robert Robson played Don Quixote and Robert Rosaire played Dapple, Sancho Panza’s donkey.
“Mr. Skinner’s new play is a whirling, colorful panorama of Spanish life In the sixteenth Century — a kind of Spanish ‘Arabian Nights’ as it were, with knights, impassioned damsels, Moorish beauties, kindly wenches, slaves, dancing girls, and jesters to the king.”
First performances of the play were held on October 22, 1923 at the New Detroit Theatre (MI).
The play opened at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City NJ on October 29, 1923. After a week at the shore, the play opened in Washington DC, and Springfield MA.
The play opened on Broadway at the Hudson Theatre (44th Street) on November 26, 1923, and closed after 40 performances on December 29 1923.
In January 1924, the play moved to Boston, then Chicago. Skinner continued touring the play into 1925.
"How would you govern, Sancho?"
"Why, sir, I would rule my people as I would my Dapple, for I find little difference between men and asses."
In 1940, playwright Lengyel was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of Ninotchka. Sinner finally returned to Broadway in King Henry IV, Part I in 1926, as Sir John Falstaff, a role he played again in 1928 in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
As for Sancho, he would return to sidekick status and was immortalized in the musical Man of La Mancha (1965). The 1973 film version starring James Coco as Sancho opened at the Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City on June 1, 1973. This is the same venue where Skinner played the role live fifty years earlier!
"I hope your worship's imagination will harbour no such thoughts," Answered Sancho; "Take my advice, and never meddle with players, who are a set of people in such high favor with the public, that I have known an actor taken up for two murders, and yet escape scot free: your worship must know, that being in the ministers of mirth and pleasure, they are favoured, protected, assisted, and esteemed by every body; especially if they belong to the king's company, or to some grandee; in which case, all, or most of them, look like princes in their manners and dress."
Craig: At the top of chapter twenty three he says, "I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to the low born is throwing water into the sea." That sucks.
i feel like leporello and sancho panza would be friends. at the very least they would be ‘round rumpled sidekick and literary foil to an absolutely wild 17th century don’ solidarity