The Much Esteemed History of the Ever-Famous Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha (1699): the editorial success of an abridged English translation

In this article, we analyze a little-known abridged English translation of Don Quixote, first published in London by N. and M. Boddington in 1699, and with many further editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have reproduced the illustrations, and edited and discussed the preface and a poem included in the preliminaries. This Don Quixote is one of the four abridged translations published in the seventeenth century. We provide evidence that the 1699 translation was the most successful, and from our study of the preliminaries and the illustrations we draw some intriguing data for the understanding of the reception of Don Quixote in England.