The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature

Abstract

The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature By Barbara Fuchs Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 What would the discipline of Anglo-Spanish literary relations look like if the lost play Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote, were discovered? As Barbara Fuchs explains in the introduction to her exceptional book, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, Cardenio is the Holy Grail and the "absent presence" (1) of Anglo-Spanish culture. The Poetics of Piracy is, in many ways, a response to the surge of high-profile interest in this "absent center" (1), as seen in endeavors ranging from Stephen Greenblatt's The Cardenio Project (2003) through Gregory Doran's rewriting of Cardenio for the RSC (2011) to an Arden edition of Lewis Theobald's Double Falsehood (2010), an eighteenth-century adaptation of Cardenio. In the introduction and final two chapters of the book, Fuchs engages directly with the textual history of Cardenio, offering sustained critiques of recent bibliographic, academic, and creative approaches to the play in order to question its centrality to the discipline and to demonstrate how its prominence is rooted in both Hispanophobia and good, old-fashioned Bardolatry. Yet, Fuchs's project is much more than an intervention in the debate surrounding the absence of this lost play; The Poetics of Piracy skillfully and cogently exposes "the Spanish connection that makes sense of Cardenio" (1), the vibrant, sustained, and often paradoxical networks of relations between English and Spanish culture. The early modern period represents an era of tension between Spain and England, with especially strained feelings mounting at pivotal moments such as the hostilities culminating in the Armada; piracy, privateering, and the feud for wealth and power in the New World; the failed courtship of Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta; and the Thirty Years' War. These incidents affected the reception of Spanish texts in surprising ways. As a Catholic superpower, Spain posed significant political and ideological threats to England. English racial bigotry impacted the perception of Spaniards, who were feared not only for their Catholicism but also for their supposed Moorish or Jewish heritage. Essential to the national imagination and to the self-construction of Englishness was a differentiation from Catholic continental Europe and a perception of England as a strong, unique Protestant nation. Paradoxically, despite the abundance of documented hostility towards Spain, readers continued to enjoy Spanish literature throughout the period and steadily increasing numbers sought to learn the language. As Fuchs explains, "The cultural fascination with Spain never waned, even when it was most inconvenient in military or religious terms" (9). Spanish literary genres, forms, and plots inspired myriad Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, including many studied by Fuchs, yet the prominent role of Spanish literature in shaping English literary culture is habitually overlooked. This, Fuchs posits, may be attributed to "frequent unthinking prejudices about Spain," which she identifies as "a kind of intellectual 'Black Legend' " (8). Fuchs illuminates and historicizes these prejudices and returns Spain to its rightful place of belonging in studies of the transnational character of early modern English literature; she examines the politically and aesthetically charged cultural traffic between Spain and England, "trac[ing] the emergence of a national canon for England in the context of its rivalry with Spain" (4), thereby providing a stimulating, and more accurate, picture of English literary culture. In Chapter 1, "Forcible Translation," Fuchs elucidates how English writers style their acts of imitatio and translatio of Spanish material according to metaphorical language of piracy, which evokes and glorifies a forceful, hostile takeover of Spanish material. …