Resumen de Cervantes: Phallic Mice, a Madman Story, a Folk Song and Two ‘Modern’ Folk Tales
In Cervantes’s El retablo de las maravillas, which is based on the international folk tale known as The Emperor’s New Clothes, the women spectators jump on top of chairs and wrap their skirts tightly around their ankles when the narrator describes a great number of mice that supposedly appear on stage. A Portuguese folk story that I recorded in 1975 from an old lady from Madeira in San Diego, California, confirms that the women are so terrified because mice were seen as being phallic. A second tale, a border joke recorded in 1974 from an immigrant from Trás-os-Montes in Toronto, which tells how a Spaniard and a Portuguese try to inflate an ass in order to sell it for a better price, shows that Cervantes was inspired by a similar story in order to chastise Avellaneda for daring to write a continuation of Part I of Don Quijote. These two stories, of course, help to confirm the importance of the relationship between folklore and literature.
