Tablante de Ricamonte before and after Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Summary

Many readers of this volume may not be familiar with the work of medieval origin discussed here, although it has had two recent editions (Santoja, Baranda) as well as two from the early twentieth century (Bonilla, Benegeli). I refer to one of the old romances of chivalry that Cervantes places in the library of Don Alonso Quijano and that contributed to Quijano's becoming the mad knight-errant Don Quixote. Hispanists generally refer to the romance as Tablante de Ricamonte, the title Cervantes gives it in chapter 16 of the first part of his Don Quixote, with an additional allusion to the work later, in chapter 20. In chapter 16, where there is also an allusion to another romance of chivlary, Enrique fi de Oliva, Cervantes comments:

¡Bien haya mil veces el autor de Tablante de Ricamonte y aquel del otro libro donde se cuentan los hechos del conde Tomillas, y con qué puntualidad lo describen todo!

Scholars and commentators have correctly interpreted Cervantes’ comment on the “puntualidad” or brevity with which the authors of Tablante de Ricamonte and Enrique fi de Olivas describe everything as an ironic expression of praise for the two works. These were indeed short works, in contrast to many other romances of chivlary in Don Quixote's library, such as Amadís de Gaula, consisting of multiple volumes that sometimes had equally long continuations recounting the chivalric deeds of the hero's son, etc.

Curiously, the name that Cervantes gives to the first of the two romances praised for their brevity is not the name of the hero of the work – the usual pattern for the titles of such romances – but that of the hero's principal enemy, the haughty knight Tablante de Ricamonte, and it is by this name that the work is known in the history of Spanish literature. The earliest surviving version of the Spanish romance is that printed in Toledo on the 26 July, 1513, by Juan Varela of Salamanca. There may have been earlier printings, perhaps even a lost incunable or a pre-1501 manuscript version in Spanish, but no documented references to such survive. Although the 1513 text is likely derived from a now lost French version of the romance, the story ultimately dates back centuries to an earlier Provençal Arthurian romance in verse called Jaufré.