nd Pancracio is duped into believing that a sumptuous feast, which "appears" before him when he returns home prematurely from a business trip to find his wife on the brink of a debauchery, is a conjurer's trick and not the result of a well planned party. An itinerant student pretends to conjure the feast and guests, at least one of whom is the lover of Pancracio's wife Leonarda basing his trick on rituals learned at the mysterious Cave of Salamanca. The quick thinking student conjures to avoid a scene with a jealous husband, saying, "If I could only use the science I learned in the Cave of Salamanca . . . without fear of the Holy Inquisition, I'd be able to eat and stuff myself, regardless of expense."1 The credulous Pancracio wants to see and learn the magic for himself: "And, for pity's sake, don't leave my house till you've taught me all the arts and sciences you've learned in the Cave of Salamanca."2 Honig says, indeed, that the husband's "idealized view of his wife's fidelity is shown to be the counterpart of his superstitious belief in magic."3
The entire play is a fantasy inasmuch as it is a joke on the subject of credulity versus authority. Honig says that in The Cave of Salamanca "the image of authority is actually subverted" and that Leonarda and her maid "are gotten off the hook by the vast credulity of the husband and his appetite for magical hocus pocus."4 The success of the adulterers in hiding their reality turns on the fact that old Pancracio is as credulous of the forbidden fruit of magic as Quixote is of the tales and ethic of chivalric romance. Like Quixote, he is a figure of fun, and Cervantes as it were works a miracle on the situation in order to make a point about human psychology. Gerald Brenan comments on the ability of Cervantes, unaided by the insights of professional psychologists, to reach into the ability of the human mind to create a fantasy world. This element occurs not only in The Cave of Salamanc...