Barbara Fuchs - The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature

The Poetics of Piracy

Emulating Spain in English Literature

Barbara Fuchs

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney.

Copyright 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fuchs, Barbara, 1970

The poetics of piracy : emulating Spain in English literature / Barbara Fuchs 1st ed.

p. cm. (Haney Foundation series)

ISBN 978-0-8122-4475-5 (hardcover ; alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index

1. English literatureSpanish influences. 2. English literatureEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism. 3. Imitation in literature. I Title. II. Series: Haney Foundation series.

PR129.S7 F83 2013

For Marshall Brown, who was on the lookout for Spain

The Poetics of Piracy

Imagine for a moment that we found, in some dusty attic, the late, lost play Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the unhinged lover-turned-wild-man in the first part of Don Quijote. Shakespeare scholars would be beside themselves with joy. A flurry of papers, conferences, publications would follow hard upon. But what would the discovery of Cardenio do for the shape of the discipline? Would English studies look any different if we miraculously recovered the lost play?

For scholars of Anglo-Spanish relations, the lost Cardenio looms large. The play is the absent center, the purloined letter, the missing link, the huge gaping O. Exhibit A for the connection between the two foremost representatives of early modern English and Spanish literatureShakespeare and Miguel de Cervanteshas gone missing, leaving in its stead a tantalizing title and the thought of what might have been. The recent surge of interest in this lost play, including several reconstructions both scholarly and theatrical, as well as an edition of its eighteenth-century redaction in the prestigious Arden Shakespeare series, mark it as a crucial missing piece in our conception of early modern English culture. By recovering the Spanish connection that makes sense of Cardenio, this book demonstrates how the plays absent presence has conditioned our understanding of Anglo-Spanish cultural relations in the early modern period and beyond. Beyond charting the lively debates around Cardenios absence, The Poetics of Piracy shows how rich the Spanish vein proved for early modern English writers, and analyzes the occlusion of that debt in their time as in ours.

Early modern English writers turned frequently to Spain for literary models, even at the times of greatest rivalry between the two nations. Spains position as the dominant European power of the period, as well as the huge explosion in Spanish prose and dramatic writing across a wide variety of genres in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made it an irresistible literary source. The frequent English translations from the Spanish, even during the long period of war under Elizabeth, provide evidence of a sustained fascination, from the bawdy Celestina (1499, translated by John Rastell in 1525 and by James Mabbe in 1631), to the picaresque Lazarillo (1554, translated c.1586 by David Rowland, among others), the pastoral Diana, with its interpolated Moorish novella Abencerraje y Jarifa (1559, trans. 1598 by Bartholomew Yong, among others), the romances of chivalry translated by Anthony Munday and Margaret Tyler in the 1580s and 1590s, and the early seventeenth-century translations of Cervantes and Mateo Alemn by Thomas Shelton and Mabbe. A broad variety of signal Spanish texts, many of them chefs-doeuvre for entire European traditions in poetry and prosechivalric, sentimental, and maurophile romance, as well as picaresque, pastoral, and novellathus made their way into English, even as the political situation between the two nations deteriorated in the wake of the Reformation and imperial rivalries. As philologists have long noted, Spanish sources, whether in the original or in intermediary versions, provided material for such central figures as Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare,

Figure 1. Gabriel Harveys reading list, from the flyleaf of his copy of Antonio de Corro and John Thorius, The Spanish Grammar (1590). Huntington Library.

Beyond charting his own fascination with Spanish, Harvey admires Spains potency, and the role of language in its imperium: Suo potentior, et gloriosior natio: e florentior, et nobilior Lingua. Cert, vt Monarchia praedominatur: sic tandem Lingua. Et ea Lingua dianissima; cuius Vsus maxim catholicus in genere; aut maxim necessarius in specie [The nation itself {is} Appreciation for the language is closely tied with admiration for Spain itself.

Yet while the English turn to Spain has been periodically notedmost fully in Dale Randalls 1963 classic, The Golden Tapestrytraditional literary history has managed neither wholly to insert Spain into English studies, nor convincingly to explain the ongoing disavowal of Spain in the field. As I argue here, the reason is twofold. First, the English turn to Spain appears paradoxical, given the religious and political enmity between the two nations. Second, and more important, the early modern English rivalry with Spain has largely colored our own cultural and intellectual histories, limiting our view of the Spanish connection. The challenge lies in recognizing that the often vociferous rhetorical denunciation of Spain in the period and beyond did not impede literary traffic. Certainly, the increasing acrimony between the two nations, which came to a head with the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588, raised the stakes for the English imitatio of Spain, placing literary transmission in a fundamental tension with religious and political conflicts, never fully resolved even when James declared peace with Spain in 1604. Yet transmission there was, from translation, to reelaboration, to occasional citationall versions of a sustained fascination with Spanish matter. I thus offer in this book a reading of imitatio as a historically situated practice, coterminous with imperial competition and national self-definition.

While the interdependence of empire and culture was a central assumption for humanists charting their own descent from Rome and their role in translatio imperii studiique, scholarship has only begun to grapple with the extent to which a fully contemporary imperial and cultural competition under-girds the complex relations between England and Spain in the early modern period. The work of Richard Helgerson and Roland Greene has illuminated these complex interrelations primarily in terms of imperial rivalry; my aim here is to consider more broadly how Spanish influence is negotiated, and how it makes its way to the English stage.even as it was disavowed. I juxtapose texts on Spain or translated from Spanish sources with early claims for Englands literary eminence, often expressed in a heightened rhetoric of violent competition. My focus is on central figures of the Anglo-Spanish literary exchange, who either took from Spain for their own texts or reflected on the vexed relation to Spain that characterized English letters, particularly on the stage: Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton. Together, they paint a complex picture of the literary fascination with Spain, and of how entangled it became in questions of national and religious identity.