Man of La Mancha

At the end of the play, a key exchange explains the title of the play:

THE GOVERNOR: I think Don Quixote is brother to Don Miguel.

CERVANTES: God help us—we are both men of La Mancha (82).

Don Miguel de Cervantes is the protagonist of the frame narrative. He is thrown in prison and needs to gain the sympathy of the prisoners to preserve his manuscript of Don Quixote. Don Quixote, the protagonist of the play-within-the-play, drives that narrative with his apparently delusional ideals of being a knight-errant confronting the world’s evil. The two protagonists are, as this exchange reveals, fundamentally the same: They are both men committed to their ideals and the world as they imagine it should be. Don Quixote serves as a proxy of Cervantes’s character in which Cervantes, with self-deprecating humor, exaggerates his idealism and its “madness” in the eyes of others so as to weave an enticing story and transform other people’s opinions.

Miguel de Cervantes is a struggling poet and playwright who became a tax collector to support himself. Wishing to treat all equally under the law, he attempted to foreclose on a church for back taxes, and so

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