Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria continues his Yale course on Cervantes' Don Quixote, arguing that Part II is the first political novel. He traces how the narrative adds concrete Spanish geography and sociopolitical texture, reading the boat episode as a clash between Don Quixote's obsolete Ptolemaic worldview and the new Copernican universe. The duke and duchess appear as stand-ins for Spain's indebted idle aristocracy, kept solvent through loans much like the Crown itself. Gonzalez Echevarria examines Don Quixote's debate with the ecclesiastic as a critique of the Church rather than of faith, unpacks the hunt as a staged aristocratic leisure activity, and reads the forest pageant as a baroque perversion of Dante's Purgatorio. He closes by considering Dulcinea's transvestite appearance as a burlesque expression of Don Quixote's repressed desire, before wrapping up the duke and duchess episode and the pretended aunt.