Character guide

Don Quixote

major

Also known as Alonso Quixano, Knight of the Rueful Countenance, Knight of the Lions, Don Quixote of La Mancha

He is a minor landowner from La Mancha who, addled by books of knight-errantry, dubs himself Don Quixote and rides out to right wrongs in a world that no longer has any use for knights. His defining tension is between the absolute, unshakable reality he perceives and the mundane reality everyone else inhabits — a gap he resolves not by doubt but by declaring his vision truer than their eyes. He matters because his first sallies set the whole engine of the book in motion: every stranger becomes a knight, every inn a castle, and every refusal to acknowledge Dulcinea's beauty an occasion for battle.

Sancho Panza

major

Also known as Sancho, Panza, Don Sancho Panza

Sancho Panza is a laborer with a wife, Teresa, and children, who trades the security of home for the squire's saddle because necessity and hope of a governorship push him out the door. His tension is between his shrewd, earthy common sense and his willingness to believe his master's promises — a contradiction he himself cannot untangle, as his own wife notices when his speech turns suddenly subtle. He matters because his droll, roundabout conversations and his loyalty give the early adventures their comic counterweight, grounding Don Quixote's flights in the price of bread and the health of a donkey.

Dulcinea del Toboso

supporting

Also known as Aldonza Lorenzo, Dulcinea, Doña Dulcinea del Toboso

Dulcinea exists in the book almost entirely as a name — the lady whose beauty Don Quixote demands strangers confess, and whose identity he insists must appear plainly in any verse written for her. The tension she embodies is that between a real village woman, Aldonza Lorenzo, and the ideal lady who exists only in her admirer's mind, a gap no one else can see or verify. She matters because she is the fixed star of Don Quixote's quest: every adventure, every battle, every letter home is performed in her name, and the comedy of the book depends on her remaining forever unseen.

Samson Carrasco

supporting

Also known as Samson, Carrasco, Bachelor Samson Carrasco

Samson Carrasco is a university man of about twenty-four, small in body but a great wag, with a sallow face and a large mouth that promise jokes. His tension is that he knows Don Quixote's madness is real and also that the madman has been made famous in print — so he treats the knight with elaborate courtesy while privately scheming to cure him. He matters because his arrival in the early chapters of the second part introduces the book's own fame into the story, turning Don Quixote from a private lunatic into a public figure whose deeds are already being read.

Miguel de Cervantes

supporting

Also known as Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Cervantes is the book's presiding intelligence, a man who grew up in a Spain where chivalry had died and printing had flooded the market with romances, and who read everything from ballads to chronicles in his youth. His tension is that he writes a book mocking knight-errantry while clearly loving the very romances he mocks, and he stages that ambivalence by pretending his manuscript was written by an Arab historian and translated by a nameless connoisseur. He matters because his layered narrators — the translator, the found manuscript, the doubts about Cide Hamete — make the question of who is telling the truth part of the story itself.

Cide Hamete Benengeli

supporting

Also known as Hamete Benengeli, Cide Hamete

Cide Hamete Benengeli is the invented author behind the book, a Moor whose Arabic manuscript the narrator says he had translated into Castilian. The tension he creates is one of trust: Don Quixote, hearing that a Moor wrote his history, worries that no truth can be expected from Moors, and fears the account may have sullied Dulcinea's purity. He matters because he lets Cervantes keep a straight face while undermining every claim of historical accuracy, and because the joke of a dubious Arab source becomes one of the novel's most enduring games.

Anselmo

supporting

Also known as the Anselmo

Anselmo belongs to the world of wealthy Italian gentlemen whose honor rests on reputation and the appearance of virtue. Rather than trust his marriage, he pressures his closest friend into testing Camilla's fidelity, treating suspicion as a puzzle to be solved. His fatal flaw is the belief that virtue must be verified to be real, and that experiment is harmless. He sets the tale's central moral trap in motion.

Camilla

supporting

Also known as lady Camilla, fair Camilla

Camilla is a Florentine lady whose beauty and integrity are the pride of her household, admired by all who know her. She is placed in an impossible position: her husband wants her tested, her tester is his dearest friend, and her own honesty forbids her from pretending not to notice. Her struggle between loyalty and the slow pull of Lothario's attentions exposes how virtue can be besieged by the very people sworn to protect it.

Lothario

supporting

Also known as the Lothario

Lothario is the intimate friend to whom Anselmo entrusts the impossible task of testing his wife's fidelity. He begins as the reluctant instrument of another man's jealousy, protesting that the scheme is both dishonorable and dangerous. The story's tension lies in watching his resistance erode as proximity, opportunity, and Camilla's own guardedness transform the tester into the tempted, and the friend into the betrayer.

Don Fernando

supporting

Also known as Fernando, treacherous Don Fernando

Don Fernando is a young nobleman of wealth and standing whose word carries weight in the inns and households he passes through. He pursues Dorothea with promises, then abandons her for a more advantageous match, treating affection as a game of rank and convenience. His presence in the later inn scenes forces the other lovers' tangled stories to collide, and his authority is what finally sets the stage for the reunions and confessions that resolve them.

Dorothea

supporting

Also known as fair Dorothea, lady Dorothea

Dorothea is a lady of beauty and high birth who has been seduced and abandoned by Don Fernando, and who refuses to let her story end in shame. She enters the narrative disguised as the distressed Princess Micomicona, enlisting Don Quixote's help in a fiction that mirrors her real grievances. Her composure, wit, and willingness to play a part make her one of the most resourceful figures in the inn, and her presence quietly steers the plot toward the restoration of broken vows.

Cardenio

supporting

Cardenio is a well-born young man whose betrothal to Luscinda was destroyed by Don Fernando's interference, leaving him to roam the wilderness in tattered clothes and fractured speech. He veers between lucid courtliness and wild outbursts, a living emblem of how love and betrayal can unmake a mind. His encounter with Don Quixote and Sancho draws the novel's scattered romantic tragedies together, and his story becomes one of the threads that the inn's later reunions must untangle.

Luscinda

supporting

Also known as This Luscinda, Lady Luscinda

Luscinda belongs to the world of well-born lovers whose private vows collide with the ruthless ambitions of noblemen like Don Fernando. Her constancy to Cardenio is tested by force and family pressure, and her anguish becomes one of the strands that draws Don Quixote and Sancho into the Sierra Morena's tangle of broken hearts. Her plight matters because it shows how the novel's romance plots mirror the very chivalric fictions its hero has swallowed whole.

Zoraida

supporting

Also known as Lela Zoraida, the lovely Zoraida

Zoraida moves between the corsair world of Algiers and the Christian Spain she yearns to reach, her beauty and secrecy making her an object of both desire and suspicion. Her willingness to abandon family and homeland for a new faith creates a tension between devotion and betrayal that shadows her reunion with the captive. She matters because her story folds the novel's chivalric fantasies into the harder realities of captivity, conversion, and exile.

Rocinante

supporting

Also known as Babieca, Rocinante Babieca

Rocinante is the four-legged partner of Don Quixote's knight-errantry, a tired workhorse elevated by his rider's imagination into a steed of legend. His wandering lust and frailty get the pair beaten by Yanguesan carriers, exposing the gap between chivalric fantasy and barnyard reality. He matters because his comic mishaps keep grounding the novel's loftiest ideals in the mud, hay, and bruises of the road.

Dapple

supporting

Dapple is Sancho's steady mount and closest possession, a creature whose plodding good sense contrasts with Rocinante's delusions of grandeur. He is there when Sancho meets the disguised Morisco Ricote and shares his bread with pilgrims, grounding the squire's adventures in ordinary kindness. He matters because his quiet endurance embodies the peasant world Sancho carries with him even as he chases islands and titles.

Teresa Panza

supporting

Also known as Teresa, Doña Teresa Panza

Teresa keeps the household running while Sancho rides off chasing islands, and she receives the duchess's coral beads and letters with a farmwife's mixture of delight and shrewdness. She cannot read, yet she reads people well, and her exchanges with the page and her daughter Sanchica reveal a woman who knows exactly what her husband is worth. She matters because her grounded voice keeps the novel's flights of fantasy tethered to the village life Sancho left behind.

Sanchica

minor

Also known as Señora Sanchica

Sancho and Teresa's daughter, who hopes for a better life.

Altisidora

supporting

Also known as the unhappy Altisidora, fair Altisidora

Altisidora belongs to the duke and duchess's castle, where elaborate practical jokes are staged at the knight's expense. Her feigned love and dramatic fainting are part of a larger conspiracy of amusement, yet her performance also exposes how easily Don Quixote's idealism can be manipulated. She matters because her teasing, and the notorious cat-and-bell prank that follows, mark the novel's turn toward self-aware mockery of its own hero.

The Duke

supporting

The Duke rules a country estate where Don Quixote and Sancho are welcomed as honored curiosities, then quietly converted into performers in his private theater. His humor is generous in appearance yet coolly experimental: he orders the majordomo to stage Sancho's island government and watches from a distance as the joke unfolds. He matters because his household becomes the novel's testing ground for whether mockery can be distinguished from cruelty, and his amusement keeps the travelers moving deeper into illusion.

The Duchess

supporting

In the ducal castle the Duchess is the true author of the games, inventing enchantments, distressed duennas, and the cat-and-bell prank that leaves Don Quixote wounded in bed for five days. She is delighted by his sincerity even as she exploits it, and her affection for the sport is inseparable from a certain coldness about the pain it causes. She matters because she embodies the novel's uncomfortable question about readers who laugh at the madman they have invited inside.

Marcela

minor

A beautiful shepherdess who rejects all suitors and defends her freedom.

Chrysostom

minor

A shepherd who dies of unrequited love for Marcela.

Ginés de Pasamonte

minor

Also known as Ginés, Pasamonte, Ginesillo de Parapilla

A cunning criminal freed by Don Quixote who later reappears as a puppeteer.

Andrés

minor

Also known as Master Andrés

A young boy beaten by his master whom Don Quixote tries to help.

The Priest

supporting

Also known as Pedro Pérez

As a man of the church and a reader himself, the Priest knows exactly which books inflamed Don Quixote's brain, and he joins the barber and housekeeper in the first attempts to wall off the library and lure the knight back to sanity. His method is charitable deception: he disguises himself, invents stories, and negotiates with strangers to coax his friend homeward. He matters because he represents the reasonable world's best attempt to rescue Don Quixote without breaking him, and his failures expose how little reason can do against a determined imagination.

Master Nicholas

supporting

Also known as Nicholas

Master Nicholas is a practical man of the village who knows Don Quixote well enough to mock him gently and love him anyway, and he lends his wit and his person to the priest's rescue plans. He is one of the first to dress up and play a role in the fiction that will eventually draw the knight off the road, and his willingness to enter the game shows how contagious Don Quixote's world becomes. He matters because he helps establish the pattern of friends who lie to the madman for his own good, a pattern the novel never quite endorses.

The Housekeeper

minor

Don Quixote's housekeeper who worries about his madness.

The Niece

minor

Also known as Antonia Quixana

Don Quixote's niece who cares for him and fears for his sanity.

Ricote

minor

Also known as the Morisco, the good Ricote

A wealthy Morisco and former neighbor of Sancho, forced into exile.

Basilio

minor

Also known as the despairing Basilio, Basilio the Poor

A poor young man who uses a trick to win his beloved Quiteria.

Quiteria

minor

Also known as the fair Quiteria

A beautiful woman caught between her love for Basilio and a rich suitor.

Camacho

minor

Also known as Camacho the rich, the rich Camacho

A wealthy man whose wedding to Quiteria is interrupted by Basilio.

Don Diego de Miranda

minor

Also known as Don Diego, Señor Don Diego de Miranda

A gentleman who hosts Don Quixote and is known as the Knight of the Green Coat.

Don Lorenzo

minor

Also known as Señor Don Lorenzo

The son of Don Diego de Miranda, a poet and scholar.

Roque Guinart

minor

Also known as Roque, the great Roque Guinart

A famous Catalan bandit who encounters Don Quixote.

Don Antonio Moreno

minor

Also known as Don Antonio, Señor Don Antonio

A wealthy gentleman in Barcelona who hosts Don Quixote.

Ana Félix

minor

Also known as O Ana Félix

A beautiful Morisco woman disguised as a man, daughter of Ricote.

Don Gaspar Gregorio

minor

Also known as Don Gregorio, Don Gaspar

A young Christian nobleman in love with Ana Félix.

The Countess Trifaldi

minor

Also known as the Distressed Duenna, Trifaldi, Señora Trifaldi

A duenna who tells a fantastic tale of enchantment to Don Quixote.

Trifaldin

minor

Also known as Trifaldin of the White Beard

The squire of the Countess Trifaldi, with a famously long beard.

Clavileño

minor

Also known as the peerless Clavileño

A magical wooden horse that Don Quixote and Sancho ride.

Malambruno

minor

Also known as giant Malambruno

The enchanter who supposedly controls the fate of the Countess Trifaldi.

Merlin

minor

Also known as that French enchanter Merlin, Señor Merlin

The legendary enchanter who appears in a prophecy to Dulcinea.

Montesinos

minor

Also known as cousin Montesinos, the venerable Montesinos

A legendary figure from chivalric romance who appears in Don Quixote's dream.

The Biscayan

minor

Also known as Biscayan, the gallant Biscayan

A Basque gentleman who fights Don Quixote over a perceived insult.

Maritornes

minor

Also known as poor Maritornes, Maritornes the Asturian

A kind-hearted Asturian servant at an inn who helps Don Quixote.

The Innkeeper

minor

The owner of the inn who dubs Don Quixote a knight.

The Innkeeper's Daughter

minor

The innkeeper's daughter who helps with Don Quixote's vigil.

The Captive

supporting

Also known as the captain

The Captive arrives at the inn as a traveler among travelers, but his story of captivity and escape, told in the novel's long embedded narrative, reveals a life shaped by courage, patience, and a Moorish woman named Zoraida who chose him over her family and her faith. His reunion with his brother the Judge and with Zoraida herself turns the roadside inn into a scene of recognition and quiet joy. He matters because his tale of endurance and cross-cultural love expands the novel's world beyond La Mancha and shows that Don Quixote's ideals of fidelity and rescue have real analogues in ordinary lives.

The Judge

minor

A Spanish judge who is revealed to be the captive's brother.

Claudia Jeronima

minor

Also known as Claudia, the fair Claudia

A young woman disguised as a man who seeks Roque Guinart's help.

Durandarte

minor

Also known as the wretched Durandarte

A knight from romance whose enchanted heart is shown to Don Quixote.

Belerma

minor

The lady love of Durandarte, seen in Don Quixote's cave vision.

The Goat Herd

minor

A goatherd who tells the story of Marcela and Chrysostom.