A Tempestuous Romance: Chivalry, Literature, and Anglo-Spanish Politics, 1578-1624 PDF Download

Author: Victoria Marie Munoz
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Languages : en
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Book Description
Chivalric romances were long fictional epics, typically in prose, which depicted the adventures of chivalrous knights as they traveled across the globe defeating monsters, heretics, and other evil agents and committed heroic feats on behalf of their monarchs. Set during the era of the medieval Crusades, chivalric romances greatly appealed to early modern Europe in the midst of unprecedented global exploration and transatlantic trade. The Introduction tracks the rise of romance from its roots in the European Crusades to its Renaissance in Golden Age Spain, which produced the most popular chivalric chronicles of the sixteenth-century. In Chapter 1 I argue that Spain’s role in reviving romance on the continent also caused the genre to decline in status in England. English critics deliberately feminized romance—presenting false evidence of their popularity with female readers—in an effort to cast the genre as immoral and inferior. The common subject of moralist criticism, Spanish romances nonetheless earned widespread popularity with both male and female readers and among laboring and privileged classes alike. Chapter 2 argues that appropriation from Spanish chivalric literature could be used to wage ideological war with Spain. This phenomenon most notably occurs in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590; 1595). Arcalaus, the evil sorcerer from Amadis de Gaula (1508), was the inspiration for Spenser’s Archimago, a representative of Philip II of Spain, specifically, and of Spanish falsehood more generally. Spenser’s anti-Spanish allegory also extends across Book I through Archimago’s various deceptions and contests with Redcrosse, the English Everyman who represents Saint George, patron saint of England. Prior to The Faerie Queene, however, Saint George did not appear as a decidedly English hero. Saint George was patron to various parts of Habsburg Europe, including Aragon and Cataluña in Spain. I argue that Spenser defensively Anglicizes Saint George—as a form of translatio imperii—in order to revive England’s own tradition of chivalric romance and compete with the Spanish cycles arriving in England. Elizabethan Hispanophobia partly derived from English propaganda that demonized the Spanish as heretical, bastardly and cruel, citing as evidence contemporary reports of the violence of Iberian conquistadors colonizing the New World. However, English depictions of Spain were neither uniformly antagonistic nor entirely approving. As Chapter 3 illustrates, prominent playwright, Ben Jonson, both praises Spanish culture and repeats stereotypical prejudices against the Spanish. Jonson’s representation of Spain was tempered by his comingled distaste for traditional Spanish romances, which associated with the failure of humanist ideals, and his great admiration for Baroque works, namely Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605) and Guzman de Alfarache (1599). Chapter 4 describes the softening of English vitriol against Spain through William Shakespeare’s Mediterranean romance, The Tempest (1611). Although scholars have traditionally argued that The Tempest lacks a direct source for the plot, I argue that the plot actually originates from Antonio de Eslava’s Noches de invierno (Winter Nights; 1609). I show that Shakespeare’s adaptation urges cooperation with Spain in order to advance England’s transatlantic aspirations. In adaptation, therefore, Shakespeare’s version presents a nuanced commentary on transatlantic colonization.