Tilting at Windmills

In seventeenth-century Valladolid, Spain’s new capital, Miguel Cervantes is busy writing his comic masterpiece, Don Quixote , which is being issued in installments. It is quickly making him the most popular author in the country, when three potential disasters strike: Cervantes discovers that there is a real Don Quixote, just like the character he thought he’d invented; a jealous poet concocts a scheme involving one of the novel’s other characters to make Cervantes a laughingstock; and Cervantes