Like Jonson, Cervantes was a frustrated classicist playwright, losing to Lope de Vega, the Spanish counterpart of Shakespeare. Like Cervantes, Jonson detested chivalric romances. For both the exemplar was Horace, a would-be playwright in the Aristotelian line, frustrated by the vulgar taste of the Romans. All had fought at Lepanto, Tunis, Flanders or Philippi.
Is there a close relationship between the two literary principles shared by Jonson and Cervantes? Did Aristotle and Horace really have nothing to do with books of chivalry? As a sort of detective story, the author invites the reader to work out this hitherto unsolved question.
In the bad manner criticized by Jonson and Cervantes, the reader goes back to their era, and Is guided through their age to ancient Greece via old Rome, traveling round the hemisphere--from England to Spain, and back, from these all over Europe, even to Africa and America. You meet hundreds of people on the way to the conclusion, which may challenge you to rewrite the history, not only of literature, but also of ideas.
