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When a character becomes the centerpiece of a literary creation, and then he or she enters the collective memory of a given culture, we are dealing with a major event in literary history. Often such a character tends to be more than a lifesize tragic hero or heroine.
English classical literature offers us, among others, Shakespeare's tragic heroes such as Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and even a superhuman "hero" such as Milton's Satan. In French Classical theatre we find tragic heroines such as Racine's Phèdre. In Golden Age Spanish theatre we find, among many others, Calderon's Segismundo at the core of Life is a Dream.
The subject is more than challenging or interesting: it is important and fascinating, because it leads us to the heart of the literary experience, the most difficult, most enduring creation of a playwriter or a novelist, the crafting of unforgettable characters.
In the "real" world it takes a man and a woman to give birth to a child, and years of experience, learning, and inner development to turn this child into a person worthy of our attention. In the virtual world of literature it takes a writer of genius to create a character that will endure longer than any man or woman, and will go on providing wisdom, joy, awe, pity, or terror, for generation after generation of readers.
Hamlet and Don Quixote should be in the short list of unforgettable characters. They have been in the past and I cannot think of a future where they have disappeared.
When Shakespeare creates Hamlet and Cervantes fashions Don Quixote each writer has reached the peak of his literary power. Both know that an unforgettable character has to be three-dimensional, complex, contradictory, and growing. We are given the background of these characters: Shakespeare does so briefly and indirectly by making Hamlet a prince in Denmark, at the Elsinore royal castle. A gloomy background, yet exalted, noble, refined. Hamlet towers over other characters from the very beginning. A physical description seems unnecessary: the actors, and sometimes actresses, that play the role intuit Hamlet to be tall, pale, brooding.
Cervantes goes to great pains to describe Don Quixote's background. Cervantes is writing a novel, not a play, therefore the visual impact that for Shakespeare...