46 pages • 1 hour read
Dale WassermanMan of La Mancha
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Inquisition
Man of La Mancha fictionalizes Cervantes’s historical imprisonment on charges of fraud and embezzlement. Instead, the musical’s Cervantes has taken a principled stand on applying the tax law equally to everyone, including churches, which has led to his arrest by the Inquisition. The Inquisition is thus the symbol of the oppressive, real-world forces that seek to crush principled idealists like Cervantes.
The play signals this oppression with ominous theme music whenever Inquisition guards enter the prison. When the play reaches its darkest moments after the muleteers’ assault on Aldonza, this theme music overwhelms Don Quixote’s reprise of “The Impossible Dream” and interrupts the play’s performance. Cervantes mutely shrinks away in fear as the guards descend, emphasizing the magnitude of the Inquisition’s threat. It also serves to link the Inquisition to the themes of The Conflict Between Idealism and Realism and The Transformative Power of Imagination. Since Cervantes is imprisoned for his idealistic stand for principles of equality, the scene equates realism and unjust oppression with the Inquisition. In interrupting the play, the Inquisition also momentarily disrupts imagination’s power, ushering back in a bleak reality.
This scene reverses itself at the end. Cervantes courageously goes with the guards to fight for truth against the Inquisition. Since he eventually publishes Don Quixote, the audience can assume he will win. Within the prison cell, music symbolizes this victory. According to the stage directions, the prisoners’ reprise of “The Impossible Dream” grows in strength until it drowns the Inquisition’s musical theme. The musical defeat of the Inquisition signals the triumph of idealism.
Dreams
The word “dream” can be either a positive description of a deep hope or a negative dismissal of something as unreal. For that reason, references to dreams function in Man of La Mancha as a recurring motif adopted by both sides of The Conflict Between Idealism and Realism. Dr. Carrasco, as the Knight of Mirrors, ends his triumph over Don Quixote by shouting, “Thy lady is a trollop, and thy dream the nightmare of a disordered mind!” (70). The knight’s quest and his elevated view of Aldonza are nighttime delusions from which a healthy person ought to wake. When the Padre muses on the good and bad of Don Quixote’s apparent delusions, he sings:
Yet if you build your life on dreams
It’s prudent to recall
A man with moonlight in his hands
Has nothing there at all (46, emphasis added).
The Padre assumes that dreams are beautiful but empty, and so uses this motif for the anti-idealist part of his musings.
By contrast, Don Quixote presents his intention to better the world as a noble dream worth any sacrifice. His central anthem is even called “The Impossible Dream.” He tells Dulcinea, “The mission of each true knight…his duty—nay, his privilege! To dream the impossible dream” (49). His entire “Quest” is a dream that is an honor to follow. This conversation happens during his pre-dubbing vigil at night, a time when people traditionally sleep and dream. This may echo his original transformation into Don Quixote, since Cervantes tells us that the formerly mild-mannered squire studied the books that inspired him through the night. When he first encounters Aldonza, he similarly asserts that he has “dreamed” of her (23).
At the end of the play, idealism triumphs when Don Quixote switches between the two meanings of “dream.” After having been “cured” by Dr. Carrasco, the former Don Quixote dismissed his memories of knight-errantry as dreams until Aldonza arrives. She begs him to “please bring back the dream of Dulcinea” (78). For her, the dream is a possibility worth realizing in her life. Don Quixote responds by musing that his foggy recollections may be real: “then perhaps…it was not a dream” (78). This prompts both knight and lady to return to singing “The Impossible Dream,” reasserting their idealistic dedication to imagining a better world even in the face of suffering and failure.
The Golden Helmet of Mambrino
Don Quixote sees a barber carrying a shaving basin on his head and accosts him. Don Quixote demands the basin, which he insists is the magical “Golden Helmet of Mambrino” that protects someone of noble heart from all wounds. He breaks into song, declaring of the “helmet” that “there can be no hat like thee” (43) and the rest of the company soon joins him. The line is ironic because (as the other characters explicitly acknowledge) headwear with such magical powers does not actually exist. The basin/helmet thus functions as a symbol of Don Quixote’s whimsical and idealistic view of even ordinary things.
The musical draws attention to this episode with a full song, which notably it does not do with some of Don Quixote’s earlier delusions, such as the windmill/giants or inn/castle. This musical number serves as the symbolic culmination of these comic delusions. The way in which others join into his song also prefigures how he will ultimately draw them into his idealistic vision.
