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

More than a generation has passed since Walter Cohen’s Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (1985) began inspiring us to challenge the truisms of Anglo–Spanish literary history by viewing national canons commonly regarded as “rival” in relationship rather than primarily in isolation. The subsequent accumulation of monographs, journal articles, edited volumes, institutes, conference panels, and dissertations suggests that “Anglo-Hispanists” now comprise a growing subfield within early modern studies. Among those who have energized this “Spanish Connection,” Barbara Fuchs has been the most prolific and visible, and so the arrival of her work on the occlusion of Spain in English literary history, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, has been eagerly awaited.

Fuchs’s introduction immediately brings the project into material focus. To my mind, the point that the English drew inspiration from Spanish literature—”even at the times of greatest rivalry between the two nations” (1)—could not be made more effectively than with the accompanying reproduction of the Spanish reading list of Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge-educated Latinist, Hispanophile, and improver of the English language, who has been most often remembered as a promoter of Edmund Spenser’s poetry. As Fuchs observes, the titles Harvey jotted down on the flyleaf of his personal copy of Antonio de Corro’s The Spanish Grammar (1590)—including Lazarillo de Tormes, Juan Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, Jorge Montemayor’s Diana, the Petrarchan poetry of Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as “other legends of chivalry and errant knights”—”would still belong on a master’s exam in Spanish Golden Age literature” (3).

Harvey’s interest in Spanish language and letters should not seem especially surprising. If England and Spain were often at odds in the early modern period, they also shared a long history of dynastic alliance, commercial exchange, and cultural connection. However, largely due to the ensuing institutionalization of literary study around our modern vernaculars, the transnational nature of the Anglo–Spanish literary relationship has often gone unrecognized. By demonstrating that “the often vociferous rhetorical denunciation of Spain in the period and beyond did not impede literary traffic” (4), Fuchs sets out to offer a corrective to modes of analysis emphasizing native traditions at the expense of broader patterns of interchange.

The book’s first chapter, “Forcible Translation,” observes how humanist notions of copia, imitatio, and translatio could take on a martial tenor during the highly nationalistic Elizabethan years, so that its second, “Knights and Merchants,” can demonstrate how these processes worked, especially in relation to the drama, during the more openly Hispanophilic reign of James I. English literature’s extensive debt to Cervantes comes early to the stage via Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), which one contemporary observed as “a sort of Quixot [sic] on the Stage” (39). Long a staple of Renaissance drama surveys, the play’s allusiveness to Don Quixote has often seemed apparent to readers acquainted with Cervantes’s masterwork. And yet, generations of English scholars have downplayed the possibility of a Spanish connection by insisting that Beaumont’s play had been an independent development “satirizing the same chivalric romances” (43). As Fuchs rightly observes, even if there were no Cervantine intertextual presence within The Knight of the Burning Pestle—and I wholeheartedly believe that she is right to insist that there is—the romances the play satirizes themselves demonstrate Spanish influence. And yet, Fuchs argues, patterns of critical denial have indicated an attempt “to contain Spanish influence in an effort to promote a national English canon that seems to depend on a refusal of influence, or its...