themselves.” (p. 164)

     The Spanish concern, then, was with the very medium of 
print as effecting a new ratio of the senses, a new mode of 
consciousness. As Casalduero puts it in Cervantes across the  
Centuries  (p. 63): “Knight and Squire are neither opposites nor 
complements to one another. They are of the same nature with 
a difference in proportion. The comic spirit arises from the 
juxtaposition of these diverse proportions which are translated 
plastically.” With regard to the peculiar Spanish stress on the 
medium of the printed word, Stephen Gilman in a chapter on 
“The Apocryphal ‘Quixote’” in the same book notes (p. 248) 
that authorship in Spain was secondary: “The reader is more 
important than the writer.” But this is a long way from the idea 
of “what the public wants,” for it is the notion of the medium 
of the language itself as a public trust rather than of the