In this comprehensive study of the reception and conversion of "Don Quixote" in England, the author highlights the qualities of the novel that most attracted English imitators. The English Don Quixote was not the same knight who meandered through Spain, or found a place in other translations throughout Europe. The English Don Quixote found employment all sorts of specifically English ways, not excluding the political uses to which a Spanish fool could be turned. According to the author, a major impact of the novel and its hero was their stimulation of discussion about comedy itself, what he called the "aesthetics of laughter." When Don Quixote reached England he did so at the time of the rise of empiricism, and adherents of both sides of the empiricist debate found arguments and evidence in the behaviour and image of the noble knight. Four disputes battered around his grey head: the proximity of madness and imaginations; the definition of the beautiful; the cruelty of ridicule and its laughter; and the role of reason in the face of madness.