Cervantes and Shakespeare - the end of feudalism and the origins of the modern

One of the themes that guided me when I thought about and wrote about British renaissance literature (Shakespeare especially) was the conflict between the closed, structural, hierarchical "Elizabethan world view," not so different from feudalism, and the rising of the idea of a modern world view: capitalist and bourgeois, but also at more focused on the individual, on human values, on freedom, on exploration - things opening up through trade and commerce, through the rise of the a capitalist class, through colonization. You see these conflicts so clearly in works like The Tempest, and I explored them in plays where the conflicts were less immediately apparent, that is, the comedies - maybe pretty obvious in the Merchant of Venice, much much harder to elucidate in the pastoral comedies such as As You Like It. You can see the same conflict emerging in "Don Quixote," by Shakespeare's exact contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes - Quixote with his obsession with feudalism and its value system, now lost in a world that no longer recognizes codes of honor and conduct, but in which every person has to struggle for survival and prosperity - the beginnings a modern world view - yet in Spain, at this time, the rural culture is not as advanced as in England - parts of Quixote seem almost Chaucerian, with the hardships of travel, the corrupt innkeepers, the goatherds, the traveling monks and friars. Moving forward in the novel, I will continue to look for hints at or evidence of the modern sensibility - it is clear that Quixote is a relic and a queer throwback, but not clear what is to replace him and his world view.