English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (review)

Eric Griffin’s English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire considers early modern Anglo-Spanish relations as they apply to some of the most important dramatic works of the period.¹ Griffin’s general argument is threefold. First, he shows that anti-Spanish discourse was “far more pervasive in early modern English public culture” (2) than we have previously recognized and that the so-called Black Legend of Spanish cruelty extended even to the plays of the period now considered most canonical. Second, Griffin indicates that despite the more prevalent Hispanophobic positions taken by Elizabethan elites, there existed largely forgotten examples of Anglo-Spanish complementarity, in the form of cultural interaction, mercantile exchange, and admiration and imitation of Spain and its empire, which he seeks to recover. Third and most provocatively, Griffin argues that English Hispanophobia evolved from a position grounded in ethos—condemning the Spanish crown from a moral standpoint for its actions—to a position grounded in an emerging sense of ethnos—condemning the Spanish and valorizing the English people on the basis of who they were. In this respect, Griffin traces the emergence of racial identity, which governs both how English writers portrayed the Spanish and how they viewed the English nation itself.

The last of these is clearly the most significant and novel of the book’s claims. The book begins by tracing the anti-Spanish discourse from the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, a period during which England’s prior ties to the Spanish crown were condemned by John Foxe and other Protestant writers. Griffin reflects especially on Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which singles out Henry VIII’s sinful marriage to Katherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip II for special censure. More generally, a religious and political component to Foxe’s condemnation concerned what Foxe viewed as the immorality of the Spanish crown’s actions in the context of European events. Furthermore, in terms of theology, the (Spanish) Catholic doctrine of salvation by works, restored after the marriage of Mary Tudor and Philip II, when compared to the prior Edwardian doctrine of faith, was viewed as the “Devil’s Faith” (41). Griffin compares Fox’s book to later publications, which utterly transformed the way in which the English viewed Spain. In particular, the influence of the English translations of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destruicción de las Indias (1552, translated 1583) and the Apology or Defense, of the Most Noble Prince William . . . Against the Proclamation and Edict Published by the King of Spain (1580) signaled a “distinct shift from the discourse of religiopolitical ethos” to an “essentialist view of the ethnic features that define Hispanicity” (47). Later texts responsible for disseminating the leyenda negra effectively essentialized and racialized the Spaniard, recounting a barbaric genealogy and condemning the Spaniard’s actions as driven by a violent and cruel nature.

The remainder of the book explores a number of dramatic works from the period as they relate to these questions. The second chapter considers a collection of lesser-known plays from the 1580s and 1590s, including George Peele’s Edward I, Robert Wilson’s Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The Spanish Masquerado. These dramas employ a dichotomizing logic, “which turns white to black by rewriting virtually every index of Spanish identity as the ethnic opposite of everything essentially English” (65). In the process, two distinct ethnicities—English and Spanish—emerge, replacing the more complex and overlapping network of marriage alliances and shared identities of the past.

Subsequent chapters focus on Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, and William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Othello. For each of these, Griffin analyzes the drama by referring to the historical context within which the play was written and staged...