The Poetics of Piracy by Barbara Fuchs (review)

In 2009, Marina Brownlee edited a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in which a number of scholars analyzed “the dialogic context of Anglo-Spanish cultural articulations” in the early modern period.¹ In that volume, Alexander Samson notes documented tensions in the diplomatic relationship between England and Spain dating back to 1422, and highlights the use and resonance of literary figures and tropes from romance novels in socio-political documentary sources.² That is, the real was described in terms of the fictional or, as Barbara Foley and Nicholas D. Paige might describe it, the “pseudofactual.”³ Also published in 2009 was a volume edited by J. A. G. Ardila on the reception of the works of Miguel de Cervantes in Britain.⁴ In his own opening article to that collection, Ardila handily sums up the quantity of immediate literary borrowings: “More than a thousand allusions to characters and passages from Cervantes’s works have been found in seventeenth-century English literature,” then elaborates on details, authors and types of influence from that moment forward.⁵ Both editors make clear that although, since the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars have noted textual borrowings from Spanish letters in the writings of English authors of the early modern period, they have also at times obviated or downplayed those adaptations, most specifically regarding disputed claims to glory, such as the invention of the novel: was it the Spanish picaresque and then Cervantes (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries); or Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (eighteenth century); or French epistolary and memoir novels (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries)? For the latter choice, it should be noted that the 1492 Spanish Cárcel de amor is a sentimental novel with allegorical, epistolary, and autobiographical elements which might indicate that, once again, the Spanish have it. The polemic regarding who had the earliest and best belles lettres surfaced after the French coining of the term in the middle of the seventeenth century, raged during the eighteenth, became codified in determinations on national canons during the nineteenth, and continues to mark how we today perceive the writings of the early modern period. Fortunately, some scholars have begun to move beyond that perspective to look closely at the literary relationships on their own terms, yet also in their full historical context. This is what Barbara Fuchs does, very successfully, in The Poetics of Piracy (Philadelphia, U of Pennsylvania P, 2013).

Fuchs reviews numerous English-language translations and adaptations of early modern Spanish works, notes previous critical attention given to those textual borrowings but also the tendency to give them a low, if any, profile, then rightly states that the “challenge lies in recognizing that the often vociferous rhetorical denunciation of Spain in the period and beyond did not impede literary traffic” (4). As she describes it, the English national canon emerges squarely in the middle of that country’s heightened social and political rivalry with Spain, and texts by English authors evidence the socio-historical conflicts in literary terms, as those writers pirate plots and imaginary while simultaneously characterizing Spaniards as “plotters and Machiavellians” (11). Fuchs skillfully demonstrates her premise of intellectual piracy as contentious appropriation with a review of translations of military manuals realized both before and during the 1585-1604 war between England and Spain (14–23). She notes the “dark irony” in one writer’s “careful description of military strategy and idealized formations” as he translates a treatise recovered from “a scene of carnage that transgressed all military and civilized norms” (17). In this and other volumes, she notes a generally belligerent tone on the part of the English translators, along with unseemly dedications and insulting annotations that triumph the loss of both battle and book, as the latter is rendered into English.

In her second chapter, Fuchs turns to Francis Beaumont’s dramatic work, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, published in 1613 and contentiously debated since for its debt to Cervantes’s Don Quijote. For Fuchs, the play should be read...