SQUAT, fat, stupid Sancho Panza starts out as a figure of fun, but I’m not sure that he ends up that way.

Cervantes, his creator, introduces the illiterate peasant from La Mancha in the first section of Don Quixote, as a figure even more comic than the mad Don Quixote himself. Sancho knows that the person he follows so faithfully is possessed by a mad vision—he has left his village and imagines himself as an errant knight, strong and noble,