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

RESEÑAS 117 Fuchs, Barbara. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. HB. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780812244755; Ebook ISBN: 9780812207767. This is an important book, extending Barbara Fuchs’s explorations of the cultural politics of the Anglo-American academy and the place accorded to the culture of early modern Spain in English literary histories. It analyzes the ways in which the debt owed by the English-speaking world to Spain, and its culture, has been consistently disavowed and occluded, both then and now. Imperial competition, religious and political antipathy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explain the tortuous nature of the English imitatio of Spain. Translation and travel brought back vast cultural riches, booty from a political enemy. This underlies the figure organizing Fuchs’s critique, a poetics of piracy. A grudging admiration for and the aping of a country through frequent appropriations and “Englishing” of its cultural goods was accompanied by consistent attempts to distance and denigrate the very products being imported. Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem to James Mabbe’s Guzmán de Alfarache, a picaresque novel redolent with the “worlds wit,” typifies the nature of English attempts to disassociate and deracinate admired works from national contexts. More importantly, Elizabethan and Jacobean writers’ construction of their contribution to a triumphalist national narrative at the expense of their Spanish sources has had a lasting legacy and continues to color our relationship with all things Hispanic. Anxieties about the relative poverty of the English vernacular drew muscular responses from numerous authors towards the end of the sixteenth century, who sought to enrich their language, while avoiding a pretentious or slavish dependence on the foreign, whether Latinate “inkhorn terms” or imports from other languages. Martial and mercantile imagery recurred frequently in the prefaces and dedications to translations that ambivalently offered to domesticate dangerous foreign matter, uncovering secrets the better to hurt the enemy and inoculating its audience against their pernicious influence with their intelligence. Cultural triumph precedes actual colonial success. Linguistic appropriation became a synecdoche for imperial success and England’s longed for colonial territorial expansion, for which Spain REVIEWS 118 provided the model. Alonso de Ercilla’s epic of empire, La Araucana, for example, is resituated through its translation by George Carew around 1600, not in Chile but in England’s Irish colony. The Spanish romances of chivalry avidly consumed by English readers in the 1580s and 90s through translations by Anthony Munday and Margaret Tyler, were domesticated and ironized in theatrical recastings like Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), a play that simultaneously availed itself of Cervantes’s undercutting and reflexive aesthetic, while insisting on its localism and rootedness in a specific urban London context. When Jacobean dramatists turned to Spanish plots for inspiration, the resulting plays rehearse Machiavellian, Jesuitical stereotypes of Spaniards even as they celebrate the possibilities of such stories as political warnings and ethical critique. Cultural indebtedness is constantly used to promote national distinctiveness. So in Fletcher’s Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, the domestic triumph of the apparently complacent husband Leon over his Spanish wife Margarita is intertwined with echoes of Elizabethan privateering—specifically, Drake’s landing of the Spanish treasure ship Cacafuego. The book culminates with a consideration of the missing Cardenio, a Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration allegedly adapted by Lewis Theobald in 1727 as Double Falsehood. This play has been the inspiration for two recent adaptations. Despite a playful modernization, the first, by Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee, skirts around its inspiration in a plot by Cervantes and foregrounds its Shakespearean heritage. The second, by Gregory Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, attempts to restore the play to its Spanish roots, and in doing so stages a Spanishness that is “a fantasy of Catholic and Mediterranean excess, a lusty, dusty Andalusía that is wildly enjoyable but also emphatically not us” (126). The importance of this book lies in its excoriating exposure of the parochialism of views, still all too prevalent, informed by the Black Legend and anti-Spanish prejudice that render us “unable to recognize those early debts” to what was, to this reviewer’s mind, truly a Golden Age...