The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature by Barbara Fuchs (review)

Already a well-established, major contributor to the field of early modern Anglo-Spanish literary relations – particularly as these pertain to the discourses of nationhood and Empire – Barbara Fuchs, in her latest book, focuses on English translation and appropriation of Spanish Golden Age sources.

True to these interests, Fuchs aims to present ‘imitatio as a historically situated practice, coterminous with imperial competition and national self-definition’, her specific thesis being that the English ‘national canon’ emerged through ‘rivalry with Spain – a model emulated even as it was disavowed’ (pp. 4–5). As Fuchs intriguingly proposes, English writers developed a ‘pugnacious rhetorical apparatus’, which enabled them to ‘reframe their profound debt to Spanish sources’ through a ‘recurring metaphor of piracy’, not as a sign of inferiority or dependence but of forcefulness and valour; in this fashion, ‘translation’ was envisioned ‘as an act of successful looting … a national victory’ (pp. 7, 10).

In the study’s five chapters, Fuchs thus traces this practice of literary appropriation and the discourse that enabled and celebrated it. Chapter 1, ‘Forcible Translation’, outlines the dual process whereby Spanish source literature was ‘Englished’ through an aggressive discourse of patriotic appropriation. As Fuchs argues, England, in the later sixteenth century and beyond, experienced a ‘sense of belatedness’ as to culture and literature, a sentiment often concerned with the language itself, and upon the urgency of ‘enriching’ its ‘copiousness’ (pp. 13–15).

Chapter 2 focuses on a Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), a Jacobean city comedy best known as a remarkably early – and parodic – appropriation of Don Quijote (1605). Fuchs makes the intriguing observation that ‘most of the earliest references to Don Quijote in England come from the theater’ (p. 42). Besides examining the process of ‘domesticating’ this canonical foreign text – the English emphasis on the local colour of ‘prentices’ and alehouses is also evident in Heywood’s parody of Spanish chivalric romance in The Four Prentices of London – Fuchs addresses the analogous critical tradition of emphasising the originality of adaptations and downplaying their debt to original works.

Chapter 3, ‘Plotting Spaniards, Spanish Plots’, explores Middleton’s A Game at Chess, which Fuchs aptly describes as ‘the most notorious anti-Spanish play of the period’, in order to examine the nature of the dramatist’s ‘engagement with Spain’ (p. 11).

These three initial chapters establish the foundations for the book’s ultimate consideration, in Chapters 4 and 5, of the lost Cardenio play and the two recent creative reconstructions of it. Thus, while Chapter 4, ‘Cardenio Lost and Found’, examines the history of negotiating Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s – and specifically the Bard’s – unknown Spanish debt, the fifth and final chapter, ‘Cardenios for Our Time’, addresses the significance of the Stephen Greenblatt–Charles Mee version (2008) and that by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2011). In discussing the latter’s ‘hugely successful’ production of the ‘reimagined’ text (p. 115), Fuchs highlights the continuation of a rather one-sided process of Anglo-Spanish literary relations, which she traces to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English intellectual culture.

Carefully researched and well written, this study is of invaluable benefit to the scholarship of early modern England and Spain, and also an oddly exhilarating read, highly recommended to specialists in the field, to students, and other interested readers alike.