Publication of Part One of Don Quixote transformed a book whose prospects had seemed uncertain into an immediate publishing success. Issued in 1605 after printing was completed in December, the work quickly circulated beyond Castile, generated repeated editions across Europe, and became part of its own story: its popularity was celebrated within the novel, while a rival continuation made the authority to continue it a public literary dispute.

Origins and Publication

Cervantes’s precise movements between 1598 and 1603 are unknown, but the account considers it likely that he conceived Don Quixote and began writing it while in prison. The suggestion rests in part on the First Part’s preface; the exact circumstances of composition remain uncertain. The work was also a product of Cervantes’s extensive reading, including romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry, and chronicles, materials that informed the book’s treatment of the literary fashion it would mock.

Cervantes eventually sold the manuscript to Francisco Robles of Madrid. Robles secured the copyright for Castile but did not initially pay to obtain rights for Aragon or Portugal, a decision that left those markets open to unauthorized publication. Printing was finished in December, and the book appeared with the new year in 1605. Cervantes secured the additional copyrights in February, as publishers were already preparing editions in Lisbon and Valencia and a further edition with broader territorial rights.

Reception and Circulation

The speed of those preparations challenges the claim that Don Quixote was initially received coldly. The evidence points instead to public demand strong enough to encourage pirated editions almost as soon as the book reached readers. Robles responded with a third Madrid edition in 1608, described as the seventh edition overall. Editions followed in Brussels in 1607 and 1611, and in Milan in 1610; by then the book’s reputation had crossed the Pyrenees and reached readers in Italy and the Low Countries.

Its reception was not uniform. Readers among the aristocracy who possessed wit and discrimination welcomed the book, but aristocrats more generally could resent a work that ridiculed their favored reading and the ideas attached to it. The dramatists aligned with Lope and the culto poets associated with Gongora also regarded Cervantes as an opponent. Thus the book’s broad circulation coexisted with resistance from literary and social groups whose tastes or standing its satire challenged.

Popularity Within the Novel

The Second Part makes the First Part’s success visible as a feature of the fictional world. Samson Carrasco describes the history as widely read by children, young people, adults, and older readers, and as familiar enough that a lean hack brings Rocinante to mind. He also pictures copies passing from hand to hand in the antechambers of noble households. The detail turns sales and readership into more than external measures of success: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have become recognizable figures among the people who read about them.

That self-conscious account of reception sits alongside a debate about the book’s construction. Carrasco reports that some readers objected to the insertion of a novella they considered unrelated to Don Quixote’s history. Don Quixote, in turn, criticizes the historian for including irrelevant stories and insists that historical writing requires judgment and truthfulness. The dispute makes the book’s formal choices part of its imagined public life: readers are not merely consuming a popular history but assessing how it has been made.

The Rival Continuation and the Second Part

Cervantes did not immediately follow the First Part with a continuation. In 1613 he published the Novelas Exemplares, and their preface offered the first clear hint that further exploits of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were forthcoming. The continuation remained incomplete the following year. By October or November 1614, Cervantes had reached Chapter LIX when he encountered a book presenting itself as a Second Part by Avellaneda. Its appearance sharpened the consequences of the delay and provoked the response reflected in the later chapters of Cervantes’s own Second Part.

Cervantes addressed the rival book directly in the Second Part’s dedication to the Count of Lemos. He framed his own Don Quixote as already on the way to its readers, urged on by requests that it counter the disgust caused by the other book, which had traveled under the same title of a continuation. A comic account of an Emperor of China supposedly asking Cervantes to send the history and become rector of a Spanish-language college carried the joke further: the emperor, he noted, offered no travel money. The anecdote makes the book’s international fame part of its own performance, even as Cervantes’s refusal of the imagined invitation turns back to the practical support he received from the Count of Lemos. Publication had become both the source of the work’s reach and the ground on which its author asserted the distinction between his book and an unauthorized imitation.