Chapter 6 examines the force of lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment in the Galatea. At the confluence of verse and prose, allegory and history, mimesis and poiesis, this chapter treats the Galatea and contemporary works, beginning with the 1582 transition from verse to prose in Pedro de Padilla’s Églogas pastoriles (Seville). While the Galatea has often been dismissed in scholarship as a partially formed and immature work, or reinterpreted through standard approaches to the DQ, this chapter studies the chronotopic dynamism of Cervantes’ first prose fiction through the narrative emplotment of Lauso’s lyric interior. It is attuned to the sophisticated narrative architecture of an unprecedented capacity to juggle multiple lyric temporalities within a single narrative landscape. The Galatea lent novelistic immediacy to the timeless retreat of the pastoral through the use of lyric subjectivity. As a meditation on the nature of love and lyric subjectivity inherent in Pastoral Petrarchism, in the Galatea the figura of the poet as literary character was fully developed in Lauso. As a novel in key, the Galatea not only pertained to the fábulas of Cervantes’ literary milieu, it also wove a tapestry of narrativized lyric intersubjectivity necessary to the conception of the first modern novel.

Chapter 5 reconstructs the site of production for Cervantes’ prosimetric pastoral, the Galatea (1585), and investigates the way in which he disguised himself and members of his own literary milieu as shepherd-poets under pastoral pseudonyms. It employs paratextual sources to reconstruct this milieu. Drawing on early manuscript annotations (ms.2.856, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) that identify Cervantes as the “Lauso” of the Galatea and earlier scholarship on the Galatea as roman à clef, this chapter proposes an additional decoding of the work through attention to the use of biographical names (and pseudonyms) for poets associated with the river Tajo in the “Canto de Calíope” (Book VI of the Galatea). With the decline of literary circles in the courts, poetic life migrated from the Alcázar to the barrio de las letras. The established poets of Isabel’s reign – Figueroa, Laínez, Gálvez de Montalvo, Gómez de Tapia, and Cervantes – were joined by younger poets – López Maldonado, Pedro de Padilla, Vargas Manrique, Liñán de Riaza, Juan Rufo Gutiérrez, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora – to form a milieu of “urban pastoralists.” The encomiastic poetry that Cervantes wrote indicates a network of authors contemporary to the Galatea, in which the figura of the poet became a literary character.

The Introduction begins with the situating of the DQ at a turning point in Foucault’s History of Madness in order to draw out the fate of the Renaissance poet as that which Cervantes’ modern novel most obviously and most covertly dramatizes. Positing the unknown history of the Don Quijote as the oft-elided career of nearly four decades that Cervantes spent as a sixteenth-century author of pastoral verse and prosimetric poetry, the Introduction reconfigures the history of the modern novel through the reconstruction of sixteenth-century poetics, the poetics of Pastoral Petrarchism. While Velázquez’s Las Meninas has often been studied as a paradigmatic work of the transition from Renaissance to Baroque (oft-coupled with the DQ), the Introduction returns to Velázquez’s painting of El bufón llamado don Juan de Austria in order to more closely examine Cervantes’ role in this transition as an aging contemporary of the original Don Juan de Austria, a favorite patron of poet-soldiers. Engaging both the figure of the poet and the figure of the modern madman in the transformations of the DQ as exemplar of the modern novel and the modern subject, the Introduction lays the historical foundations and theoretical stakes of Cervantes the Poet.