Even at the moments of England’s closest political rapprochement with Spain and greatest cultural fascination with its literature, taking from Spain was always fraught. The peace of 1604, which I discussed in the last chapter as a key context for The Knight of the Burning Pestle, was followed hard upon by the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605, which exacerbated the sense that a militant Catholicism threatened England’s very being. Despite James’s own commitment to peace and his prolonged efforts to secure a Spanish marriage for his heirs, the memory of Elizabethan resistance to Spain’s primacy animated English Protestant nationalism. If the Elizabethans discussed in Chapter 1 trumpeted their open rivalry with Spain and the clear advantages for England in challenging its primacy, Jacobeans seemed more worried about Spain’s machinations, despite the peace that had at least momentarily been reached. The fear of Spain’s open hostility became a pervasive anxiety about its secret designs on England, as the triumphant vision of stolen intelligence that had animated so many Elizabethan translators gave way to a sustained mistrust, in pamphlets as on the popular stage. Suspicion about why Spain had sought peace at all, and worry about the workings of a “Spanish faction” in James’s court, tainted the entire period of the peace.1 At the same time, the abundant rendering of Spanish materials into English, which had scarcely waned under Elizabeth, reached new heights, as the peace led to the translation of Cervantes’s and Alemán’s protean fictions, and the frequent use of Spanish sources by a wide range of English dramatists.
Jacobean playwrights found in Spain and Spanish literature abundant settings and source material. While this penchant may surprise readers who expect from such writers as Thomas Middleton or John Fletcher the hispano-phobia of good Protestants, it is part of the larger cultural ambivalence about Spain over the course of James’s reign, from the initial peace to the increasing anxiety about Spain’s continued actions against Protestants on the continent and its secret designs on England, against the backdrop of a possible “Spanish match” for James’s children. While popular sentiment had largely turned against Spain by the 1620s, James remained hopeful that an alliance could be secured through the marriage of Charles to a Spanish infanta. This ambition was strongly at odds with the crisis developing on the continent, as England sought the restoration of the Protestant Frederick, Elector Palatine, married to James’s daughter Elizabeth, in a conflict that would become the Thirty Years’ War.
This chapter begins with the heightened moment of the “Spanish match,” as the failed dynastic union is generally known, and works backward to consider more broadly the various guises in which Spain made its appearance on the Jacobean stage, from the xenophobic representation of plotting Spaniards to the frequent reliance on an (over)abundance of Spanish plots. Middleton’s plays on Spanish sources and themes—The Lady’s Tragedy (also known as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 1611), The Changeling (1622), and The Spanish Gypsy (1623)—span this period. Although Middleton’s best-known work on Spain, A Game at Chess (1624), was also his most direct ideological engagement with Spanish policy, his wider oeuvre shows a sustained attention to Spain. Fletcher, for his part, was perhaps the dramatist who most consistently engaged Spanish sources, especially Cervantes. My focus here on his Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1624), a play largely ignored by modern criticism despite its early success, is an attempt to show the complexity of enlisting translatio in nationalist projects.2
The multiplicity of representations on the Jacobean stage complicates any simple story about England and Spain: cultural, political, and religious relations were not always perfectly aligned, and even the writers most suspicious of Spanish plots where geopolitics was concerned turned to Spain for literary material. In part, this paradox might be explained by a poetics of piracy that glorifies England’s forcible taking from Spain in the cultural arena as the patriotic equivalent of privateering, as I suggest in Chapter 1. Yet the sheer polysemy and range of the Spanish materials appropriated often undoes any simple Englishing of the same. “Spain” is rehearsed in very different keys, from the carnivalesque shenanigans of The Spanish Gypsy to the transparent allegory of A Game at Chess. Even the most explicitly jingoistic of the plays I discuss here, Fletcher’s Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, sees its ideological thrust adumbrated by the multiple plots that it attempts to reconcile. Much as the interruptive aesthetic of Don Quijote complicates the Englishing of its matter in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, as I showed in Chapter 2, the contradictory thrusts of the Spanish plot and subplot in Fletcher’s play qualify the ideological force of its translatio.
The possibility of an even closer dynastic rapprochement to Spain in the 1620s made Spanish materials ever more fashionable, even as it fueled anti-Spanish sentiment.3 The disastrous project to marry James I’s heir, the future Charles I, to the infanta María of Spain was to founder over the Spanish insistence that Charles convert to Catholicism. The failed match thus marks a moment of desired rapprochement with Spain, as well as a crisis in the construction of an English national identity heavily dependent on religious difference.4 The protracted negotiations for a possible marriage between Charles and the Spanish princess, the sister of Philip IV, produced a wide range of texts, from plays to anti-Hispanic pamphlets, including John Reynold’s fantastic Vox Coeli, a heavenly dialogue among past English sovereigns on the advisability of the match.5 In 1623, in one of the most astounding transgressions of diplomatic protocol in the period, Charles and Buckingham traveled to Madrid to advance the marriage negotiations. Although this was presented as a spontaneous, romantic adventure, Philip IV had known for a year that Charles would undertake such a journey. Philip’s powerful privado, the count-duke of Olivares, did not favor the match, however, and after months of delays and negotiations Charles finally decided to return to England, sans his Spanish bride. The failure of the match and Charles’s safe return from his escapade to Madrid were widely celebrated in England, in an outpouring of anti-Spanish sentiment. Yet a resilient hispanophilia coexisted with the suspicion and prejudice.6
The Spanish match produced a wide range of dramatic responses, from Jonson’s masque Neptune’s Triumph to plays as varied as Massinger’s The Renegado, Middleton’s A Game at Chess, and Fletcher’s Rule a Wife and Have a Wife.7 These monitory (and compensatory) performances offer themselves up for topical readings in which the playwrights subtly or not so subtly veil their ideology in the dramatic conflict, and they must be read for their precise location in the timeline of Anglo-Spanish negotiations. Yet although it is important to reconstruct these precise contexts, it is also crucial to recognize that the English theatrical engagement with Spanish materials extended far beyond the specific moment of the Spanish match, both chronologically and thematically. The crisis around Charles’s possible marriage to a Catholic princess simply serves to underscore how sustained and enduring the fascination with Spain really was, in that it could transcend the potent upwelling of popular sentiment against the union.
Thomas Middleton penned the most scandalous response to Charles’s marital adventures, in the wildly successful A Game at Chess. Performed in August 1624, the play was unique in the period both for its popularity and for having led to a diplomatic crisis. As Gary Taylor notes in his introduction to the early form of the play, it was “perceived by contemporaries as simultaneously the most subversive and the most commercially successful play of its era.”8 Confronted with the baldly allegorical representation of Spain as the “Black House” (on which more below), the Spanish ambassador, Carlos Coloma, lodged a formal complaint with the Crown, and threatened to leave England if the play continued to be performed. The famous record set by A Game at Chess, of nine days of performances, was thus in fact simply the time it took for the authorities to shut it down, as it was still playing to a full house when that occurred. In what may have been a canny choice not to alienate the popular fervor that greeted the play, James gave as the rationale for his censorship the forbidden representation of a sovereign on stage, rather than the play’s overwhelming disrespect for Spain.
A Game at Chess is a play of plotting gone mad. Readers are typically befuddled by the multiplication of plots and subplots, including at least one—the gelding of the White Bishop’s Pawn—for which no back-story whatsoever is offered. The central plots are the attempt by the Black Bishop’s Pawn to seduce the White Queen’s Pawn, and the machinations of the Black Knight Gondomar (the former Spanish ambassador to James I, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña) to gain power over the White House, in part by luring the White Knight and his companion, the White Duke, to the Black Court, in a close dramatic echo of Charles and Buckingham’s escapade to Madrid. Meanwhile, the Fat Bishop of Spalato (Marco Antonio de Dominis), a former Catholic recently converted to the White House, is lured back to the Black House, while the White King’s Pawn secretly works for the Black House. Viewers of the play presumably followed its blatant color-coding (“the houses well distinguished,” as the prologue puts it) to track all the plot turns, and enjoyed its more spectacular effects, such as the final “checkmate by discovery” (5.3.174) that sends all the black pieces “into the bag” (5.3.178).9 As Taylor notes, visually the characters would be quite distinct, even if they are difficult to follow in print.10 Despite the blatant difference staged by the chess allegory, however, the vulnerability of the White House to seduction and the duplicity of some of its members create considerable suspense, paradoxically reminding viewers of the indeterminacy and illegibility of religious and political allegiance.
The essence of the Black House is its obsessive concern with power and seduction. Although religious difference provides the ostensible rationale for the conflicts, religion per se appears less important than the struggles for power and influence. Middleton stages a potent series of Spanish stereotypes, allegorizing English prejudice into the figures of the chess game. Here, I trace the genealogy of one of those stereotypes, the plotting Jesuit, to show how plottedness itself becomes a key component of Middleton’s corpus. To provide the fullest picture of the relation between Spain and English drama in the period, I want to underscore the tension between the fertile plots that Spain contributes to the theater and the English denunciation of plotting as the very heart of Spanish evil. The strong dichotomies of A Game at Chess and its repudiation of Spain predispose us to find a similar relation to Spain in Middleton’s earlier plays. Yet his corpus instead yields the paradox that the plotting Spaniards (in the political sense) have been providing dramatic plots all along.
Preposterously, I begin here with Middleton’s last play, in which the close association between Spaniards and plots makes the Black Knight Gondomar a powerful dramatic figure. Like Barabas in The Jew of Malta, the Machiavellian in this text steals the show with his dreams of world domination and unlimited power. But whereas Marlowe invokes the actual “Machiavel” for his Mediterranean fantasy, Middleton instead emphasizes the association of Spaniards and Jesuits with plotting, in a Machiavellian translatio that makes Spaniards the new outsized villains.11 Marlowe’s prologue had featured Machiavel himself; Middleton’s induction gives us the Spanish founder of the Society of Jesus, “Ignatius Loyola [in his black Jesuit habit] appearing, Error at his foot as asleep,” who complains that his children’s “monarchy” is “unperfect yet” (Induction, 11–12). The struggle for world domination is the “great game” (Induction, 78) being played on stage, beyond the individual plots. From Gondomar’s first appearance, in the wake of Loyola, he is associated with this outsize plotting:
Black Knight Gondomar (aside): So, so
The business of the universal monarchy
Goes forward well now, the great college pot
That should be always boiling with the fuel
Of all intelligences possible
Thorough the Christian kingdoms. (1.1.243–48)
In this passage as in multiple other instances, the aside serves to portray political duplicity onstage, raising the stakes of this standard dramatic resource. More explicitly, Gondomar gathers intelligence from across Europe (“Look you, there’s Anglica, this Gallica,” 1.1.301), pulling the strings of his various plots. When his Pawn warns Gondomar, “Sir, your plot’s discovered,” he counters: “Which of the twenty thousand and nine hundred / Fourscore and five? canst tell?” (3.1.126–28). Thus the fear of endlessly multiplying Spanish plots against England and of a Catholic universal monarchy orchestrated by Jesuits animates Middleton’s play.
In England, Jesuits were strongly associated with Spain as well as with Rome, and connected in particular with the Counter-Reformation challenge to Protestantism everywhere. The Anglo-Spanish conflict and the Jesuit missions to England had exacerbated English suspicion of the order, whose members were regarded as both a religious and a political threat. The Jesuits were cast as Machiavellian figures whose political ends trumped any qualms about their means. In particular, they were associated with the doctrine of equivocation or mental reservation—strategies essential for the survival of persecuted Catholics in England but perceived as proof that Jesuits could not be trusted.
Although the order was not responsible for the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Crown deliberately attempted to implicate it, thus cementing the association between Jesuits and Machiavellian plotting, and scapegoating the “Spanish” order for a plot hatched by English Catholics.12 As Arthur Marotti has shown, the official account of the Gunpowder Plot trials “kept up a steady attack on the Jesuits as the alleged masterminds of the plot,” placing it in a longer continuum of Catholic assaults on England.13 The connections between Jesuits, Spain, and Machiavellianism soon tarred all Spaniards with the same brush, and by the time of Charles’s possible marriage to a Spanish princess, Spanish plotting was loudly invoked against the union.
The demonization of Jesuits in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot increasingly made Catholicism itself appear foreign, aligning England ever more closely with its Protestantism. As Marotti notes, the larger narrative of “recurrent Catholic dangers, plots, and outrages” animated a Protestant English history based on the resistance to a threatening Catholic internationalism.14 But this focus on supposedly external religious enemies negated the most pressing problem for England in this regard: the internal debate about religion. In the aftermath of the failed Spanish match, animosity against Spain and a Jesuit-mad version of Catholicism could momentarily pave over divisions among Protestants, yet these would be the central religious conflicts in England in the years to follow.
Through his assiduous cultivation of James I, Count Gondomar, the historical Black Knight, who served as Spanish ambassador to England from 1613 to 1618 and 1619 to 1622, was able to repair some of the damage done to English Catholics by the Gunpowder Plot. Yet deep suspicion of Gondomar’s own actions expanded the earlier association of Jesuits and plotting to a broader concern with Spanish designs on England. By the 1620s, the association of Spain with plotting and of Gondomar with Machiavelli had become a commonplace of anti-Hispanic pamphlets. Thomas Scott’s (1580?–1626) Second Part of Vox Populi (1624), on which Middleton appears to have drawn heavily, bears as its alternate title Gondomar appearing in the likenes of Matchiauell in a Spanish parliament, wherein are discouered his treacherous & subtile practises to the ruine as well of England, as well as the Netherlands. In the same year, Scott also published A Second part of Spanish practises, or, A Relation of more particular wicked plots, and cruell, inhumane, perfidious, and vnnaturall practises of the Spaniards with more excellent reasons of greater consequence, deliuered to the Kings Maiesty to dissolue the two treaties both of the match and the Pallatinate, and enter into warre with the Spaniards. His Narrative of the wicked plots carried on by Seignior Gondamore for advancing the popish religion and Spanish faction (London, 1679), though only published much later, sounds the same notes. Protestant paranoia about pro-Spanish sympathizers extended beyond the earthly realm: in Reynold’s Vox Coeli, Mary Tudor races to write both Gondomar and “the Romane Catholiques of England” with the news that the heavenly debate on the Spanish marriage has come down against it, so that they can compensate on earth with their own corrupt scheming in favor of the match.15 As this brief catalogue of pamphlets shows, opposition to the marriage solidified a series of anti-Spanish stereotypes that would be rehearsed ever more vividly on Middleton’s stage.
The stereotypes of Spanish plotting colored even the more judicious assessments of the match. In a pragmatic reflection on the proposed marriage, English observer James Howell wrote, “For my part, I hold the Spanish match to be better than their Powder, and their Wares better than their Wars, and I shall be ever of that mind, That no Country is able to do England less hurt and more good than Spain, considering the large Trafic and Treasure that is to be got thereby.”16 Even for a sympathetic observer, that is, the alternative to the Spanish match is England’s vulnerability to Spain’s gunpowder, both in the larger military sense and in powder plots. Yet Howell’s assessment underscores the strong connections—commercial and otherwise—that existed despite the demonization of Spain.
Figure 3. Thomas Scott, Second Part of Vox Populi. Huntington Library.
In the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, and despite James’s peace with Spain, the suspicion of Spanish Machiavellianism transfers to that nation the existing stereotypes of Italy as “a fantasy setting for dramas of passion, Machiavellian politics, and revenge.”17 Spain thus becomes an ancillary Italy, and the pleasure of watching Italians behaving badly is extended to Spain. For popular drama, this is a hugely effective translatio, in that Spain, unlike Italy, was a feared rival to England. Although the vision of a corrupt Spain is certainly present in earlier plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Lust’s Dominion, written during periods of frank emnity, the 1604 peace and the possibility of a dynastic alliance with Spain create an irresistible tension, making Spain newly available while raising the stakes for exposing Spanish duplicity. While the Jacobean peace made the literary traffic between England and Spain more fluid, that is, the concurrent anxiety about a Catholic takeover, whether through violent or dynastic means, found its expression in a series of plays that emphasized the dangers of Spain even as they turned to Spanish sources.
The strong association of Spain and Spaniards with endless plotting culminates in Middleton’s Game at Chess with its dramatic antithesis: the discovery. As Gondomar triumphantly reveals his dissembling (“What we have done/Has been dissemblance ever,” 5.3.158–59), the Black House is unceremoniously swept into the bag, which gapes open “like hell-mouth” (5.3.179). Anagnorisis—that standard moment of revelation in early modern drama—thus becomes politicized, as the play works to confirm the “truths” peddled by the anti-Spanish pamphlets, all of which claimed to warn and protect their readers by bringing to light Spain’s shadier dealings. Again, Thomas Scott provides an eloquent example of the anti-conspiratorial, revelatory pitch, with An Experimentall discoverie of Spanish practises, or, The Counsell of a well-wishing souldier, for the good of his prince and state wherein is manifested from known experience, both the cruelty, and policy of the Spaniard, to effect his own ends (London, 1623). In a similar vein, the first quarto of A Game at Chess highlights the “checkmate by discovery” on the title-page engraving, where the phrase is assigned to the White Knight, as though to promise readers the satisfaction of a revelation that will only confirm their worst expectations.
Middleton’s play thus trades in anti-Spanish prejudices, giving literary life to political cliché. Beyond political and religious divides, moreover, Middleton invokes the frequent racialization of Spain in the period—a facet of the Black Legend that insisted on Spain’s miscegenated nature, its Jewish and Moorish blood.18 Even though the play features its share of double-crossing and duplicity, the blackness of the black characters sets them apart. There are Whites who are secretly Black, such as the White King’s Pawn, spectacularly stripped of his white upper garment to reveal a black one beneath (3.1, 262–63). But no Blacks are secretly White, suggesting an essentialist and racialized version of Spanish difference.
Figure 4. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess. Huntington Library.
Yet while this color-coding would seem to make Spain radically other, the play’s allegory also lends itself to more complex understandings of England, the “White House,” for its vulnerability and openness to seduction. As Richard Dutton expresses it, “Are [the English figures] virtuous characters who finally turn the tables on the ingenious villainy to which they have been subjected? Or are they weak, easily deluded and perhaps self-important characters, who must bear some responsibility for the danger in which ‘the White House’ finds itself?”19 The play’s success may be explained by this ambivalence: its surface symbolism offers up a simple xenophobia that would have appealed to most contemporary viewers, while the complexities of its allegory engage more critical readings.
The Machiavellian-Jesuitical genealogy of plotting that I trace above finds its literary analog in the hyper-plottedness of a Mediterranean, Italianate group of plays—not quite revenge tragedy, although it overlaps with that genre in important ways—that takes from Cervantes as liberally as from Boccaccio or Cinthio. The very term plot, widely used for political conspiracy, is first used to describe a storyline in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The first literary use is in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, itself much concerned with Spanish plots in a comic vein: “The plot of our Plaie lies contrarie, and t’will hazard the spoiling of our Plaie.”20 If we read retrospectively from A Game at Chess to Middleton’s Spanish plays—The Lady’s Tragedy, The Changeling, and The Spanish Gypsy—we find that the stereotypes of plotting Spaniards coexist with an extensive reliance on Spanish sources. Even as Spain is anathemized, Spanish prose fiction furnishes the dramatic materials for English plots.
The Lady’s Tragedy (1611), which has usually been known as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, is Middleton’s first engagement with these Spanish materials. The plot features the Tyrant, “a usurper,” who lusts after the Lady, betrothed to the legitimate ruler, Govianus. Her father urges her to improve her lot by giving in to the Tyrant, as his mistress if not his wife. Under assault by the Tyrant’s soldiers, the Lady takes her life rather than succumb to his lust. Govianus and the Tyrant then continue their struggle, literally over her dead body. A parallel plot features Anselmus, who, doubting his wife’s fidelity, urges his friend Votarius to test her by trying to seduce her. Votarius succeeds only too well, but he and the Wife are betrayed by her servant, Leonella. They die by poison in what was to be only a show-quarrel to placate Anselmus, while Anselmus dies in the aftermath of their struggle.
Closely based on “El curioso impertinente” (“The Curious Impertinent”), an interpolated novella in Don Quijote (1605) that tells the story of the doubting Anselmo and his wife Camila, the parallel plot marks The Lady’s Tragedy as one of the many literary fruits of the peace with Spain in 1604, and of the intense interest in Don Quijote in England from the moment of its Spanish publication in 1605. The 1611 dating of The Lady’s Tragedy suggests that Middleton, who read Spanish, may well have had access to Don Quijote in its original language, or have come across Shelton’s translation while it was still in manuscript.21
The Lady’s plot also echoes Cervantes. While these connections do not endorse the fanciful recent claim that The Lady’s Tragedy is the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio, based on the same material, Govianus’s position does recall that of Cardenio in Don Quijote.22 Like Cardenio, whose beloved Luscinda is stolen by a duke’s son, the impetuous Don Fernando, Govianus finds his betrothal to a lady who reciprocates his love threatened by a more powerful figure. In both cases, might trumps right, and the lady’s family encourages her to embrace the usurper. In both cases, too, the rival seems motivated primarily by mimetic desire, although Cervantes makes it much clearer that Cardenio’s love for Luscinda inflames Don Fernando in the first place and, of course, his Luscinda remains alive.
Middleton’s most interesting innovation to the “Curious Impertinent” plot from Don Quijote is his emphasis on the class transgression of the Wife’s servant, Leonella. Once the maid discovers the affair between the Wife and Votarius, she repeatedly challenges her mistress, arguing for her own right to a lover: “I know no difference, virtuous madam, / But in love all have privilege alike” (4.1.84–85). The Wife recognizes that her own impropriety has emboldened her servant, yet the dramatic effect is a potent erasure of class.
The Lady’s Tragedy features a multiplicity of plots, from the two ladies’ stories, which are conceptually related but do not overlap, to the less fully fleshed-out plots of the Tyrant’s usurpation of Govianus’s throne and of Votarius’s quarrel with the dangerous Bellarius. The play presents a world of dissimulation, betrayal, and ruthlessness, where transgression is the standard modus operandi, including in this case the scandalous breach of the Lady’s tomb and the Tyrant’s necrophiliac passion. With the exception of the courtier Helvetius—an anchor of “Swiss” Protestant virtue in the play—and the minor figures Memphonius and Sophonirus, the names suggest an Italianate world, as does the Cervantine source. Despite the lack of a specific geographic location, and its Spanish sources notwithstanding, then, the play contributes to the vague association of Mediterraneans with plots and plotting. Although it is not technically a revenge tragedy, it abuts that genre in its violence, its thematic concerns, and its imaginative geography.
No Spanish sources have been identified for Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), although its main plot reprises a story in a collection by the prolific anti-Spanish pamphleteer John Reynolds.23 Although the play is located in Valencia, the first references to place are more generally Mediterranean and maritime. In the opening scene (usually attributed to Rowley) there are mentions of Malta, and of ransoming Greece from the Turk, yet the specific Spanish setting of the source is attenuated.24 Nonetheless, much as in Fletcher’s Rule a Wife, the metaphor of privateering legitimates various kinds of forcible taking. As the play opens, Jasperino longs to join his friend Alsemero’s wooing, as women become ships and love a conquering venture: “Methinks I should do something too; I meant to be a venturer in this voyage. Yonder’s another vessel; I’ll board her: if she be lawful prize, down goes her topsail” (1.1.89–92). The names of the nobles are not particularly Spanish, but participate in a Mediterranean lingua franca of toponymy that underscores the perceived connections between Italy and Spain. By the end of the scene, however, the Spanish context becomes more insistent, with the inquiry into Alsemero’s origins (“Alsemero: A Valencian, sir. / Vermandero: “A Valencian?” [1.1.170]), to make sure that no stranger is afforded entry to the “chief strengths” of the city, and a quick reference to the “rebellious Hollanders,” whom Alsemero’s father died fighting (1.1.186).
In The Changeling, transgression and betrayal animate yet another plotting play, in which vaguely Spanish aristocrats tragically assume that their own privilege will protect them from moral condemnation, on the one hand, and revenge, on the other. In order to marry Alsemero, the noble Beatrice-Joanna plots to murder the man to whom she is already betrothed, the unsuspecting Alonzo Piracquo. Strikingly, it is a servant, the tellingly named De Flores, who is the most ruthless figure in the play, manipulating his mistress’s use of him in her murder plot to his own advantage. A driving, insatiable sexual passion for his mistress animates De Flores, but his sexualization of the “service” he provides Beatrice also introduces a disturbing class dynamic into the play. While De Flores commits murder for Beatrice, he will not be paid off with money. Instead, as his name anticipates, he demands the right to deflower her, in a scene that comes very close to rape. Given Beatrice’s profound distaste for De Flores, and her condescension to him as a servant early in the play, his transgression violates not only her virginity but the class hierarchy of this fictional Spain. As Swapan Chakravorty has noted, “By sexualizing class relations,” the play “exposes idealized loyalties of late feudalism as functions of political strength.”25
Class and sex are similarly at stake in the famous bed-trick scene, in which the desperate Beatrice persuades her servant, Diaphanta, to take her place next to Alsemero in the nuptial bed, in order to disguise her own shame. Beatrice thus restages the violation she herself has suffered, but restores the expected social hierarchy, in which mistresses govern the bodies of their maids. Diaphanta’s pleasure in the arrangement, however, further destabilizes the moment, transforming the potential scene of violation into a comic exchange, which leaves the mistress jealous of her servant as pleasure trumps social distinction.
Through the figures of De Flores and Diaphanta, Middleton and Rowley displace anxieties about class onto a rigidly aristocratic Spain of the imagination, where the violation of hierarchies has an outsize effect. In production, it is striking to note how the villain’s name, De Flores, which is insistently repeated, is also the one most clearly recognizable as Spanish.26 Yet both the transgressors come to a bad end, as Diaphanta dies in a fire set by De Flores, and the exposed De Flores chooses to take his own life. Ultimately, both the displaced setting and the obliteration of the upstarts soften the force of these transgressions, which are simultaneously advanced and muted.27 The play’s second plot, usually attributed to Rowley, in which the beleaguered wife of an asylum-keeper resists the overtures of gentlemen disguised as madmen, provides a bourgeois alternative to the aristocratic depravity of the castle, and perhaps yet another echo of Don Quijote. Yet the asylum, marked by its own abuses of power, remains an equivocal moral option at best.
While the Spanish setting is only intermittently invoked in The Changeling, it locates the play in the Mediterranean and threateningly duplicitous world of revenge tragedy. Margot Heinemann, A. A. Bromham, and Zara Bruzzi, among others, have linked the play more closely with English anxieties about the Spanish marriage, through its possible echo of the Frances Howard case.28 At thirteen, Frances had been married to the earl of Essex, but she eventually succeeded in having the marriage annulled, claiming that, through no fault of her own, their union had never been consummated. The judicial test of her virginity was widely mocked, and it was suspected that another woman had replaced her. Frances was by then in love with James’s favorite, Robert Carr, later earl of Somerset, whom she married as soon as the annulment was granted (Middleton wrote the now lost Masque of Cupids for the wedding). In 1615, Frances and Somerset were convicted of the murder in the Tower of Thomas Overbury, a friend of Somerset’s who had advised him against the marriage. Although Frances obviously had not killed him herself, she confessed to instigating his poisoning. In 1622, after a few years’ imprisonment in the Tower, the Somersets were released by James, which renewed the scandal. As a member of the Howard family, Frances was connected to the Catholic and pro-Spanish faction at court, and James’s leniency toward the Somersets was read as an alarming sign of goodwill toward Spain.
The echoes of the Howard case in The Changeling are manifold, from the plotting bride who does away with an inconvenient partner to the substitution of that bride by a true virgin in order to feign her purity. In her insightful introduction to the play in the Complete Works, Annabel Patterson nonetheless expresses some skepticism about the exhaustive reading offered by Bromham and Bruzzi: “The most that can be argued from this collage of internal sign-posts and stage historical detail is that The Changeling permitted its original audiences to intuit a connection between Spanish/Catholic interests, crimes of violence, and sexuality out of control” (1635). That intuitive connection, I suggest, is fleshed out by the longer genealogy of perceived Spanish plotting I have traced here. Even if the play is not fundamentally about the Howard case, it contributes to the larger association in the English imaginary of Spain and nefarious plotting.
More broadly, one might argue that the play also presents a Spanish marriage as a hopelessly disingenuous move, given the predatory, immoral nature of the bride, as figured in Beatrice-Joanna, and the larger context of venality and betrayal. Just as an Elizabethan would be hard pressed to imagine a dynastic union into the tumultuous world of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, so Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling sounds a warning note for Jacobeans about the unreliability of Spanish vows, which the play’s setting and dark machinations would have abundantly recalled. It thus anticipates the more blatant notes sounded by A Game at Chess in its warning about dangerous seduction by Spain. As Cristina Malcolmson has argued, the sexual vulnerability figured in Beatrice-Joanna, as in the White Queen’s Pawn, suggests the political vulnerability of England to Spanish invasion: “the vulnerable female body symbolizes the weakness of the body of the state, disturbingly open to the infiltration of foreign Catholic powers who stand ready to enter England.”29 As depraved instigator of the murder, then, Beatrice-Joanna might remind viewers of Frances Howard or impress on them the danger of a Catholic queen. As victim of De Flores, conversely, she might recall England’s vulnerability. All these versions suggest just how powerfully Middleton used sex and class to think through politics.
Perhaps the most fulsome taking from Spain on the Jacobean stage occurs in The Spanish Gypsy (1623) the play in which Middleton and his collaborators rely most heavily on Spanish sources, at the very moment when the crisis over the Spanish marriage was at its peak.30 With Charles newly returned from Madrid, there was tremendous uncertainty over whether the Spanish would agree to a union about which the English themselves felt most ambivalent. Yet the considerable animosity toward Spain that Middleton would fully exploit in A Game at Chess is surprisingly muted in this play, which instead turns to Spain for its literary plots.31 Although the play may have been written under the expectation that there would be a Spanish match, the Spanish materials retained their interest even as the match foundered, and the play proved a great success.32
Like Fletcher, Massinger, and other Jacobeans, the authors of The Spanish Gypsy find in Cervantes a rich trove of materials. From the Novelas ejemplares, the collection of short stories Cervantes published in 1613, they take two of the main storylines for the play: the rape that eventually leads to a restorative marriage, from “La fuerza de la sangre,” and the gypsies who are actually aristocrats in disguise, from “La Gitanilla.” The sheer multiplication of Spanish plots underscores the fascination with Spanish materials even at a moment of great suspicion of Spain.
Unlike The Changeling, whose Spanish setting is not consistently marked, The Spanish Gypsy dwells obsessively on its Spanishness from its very title. Its characters have unequivocally Spanish names, and the title assigned to Roderigo’s father—Corregidor of Madrid, equivalent to Lord Mayor of London—is both accurate and contemporary. Hence although none of the characters are historical figures, the play is situated in a recognizable Spain, in the very city that Charles and Buckingham had taken by surprise. As Taylor notes, the Madrid setting is insistently referenced, and the authors go out of their way to introduce topical references to the royal escapade.33 In the opening scene, moreover, characters discuss Spanish traits and mores, reifying national difference in varying attitudes to everything from drink to honor.
The play begins with Roderigo’s rape of Clara, closely modeled on Cervantes’s novella, yet in this version the events move much closer to the physical and political center of Spanish authority: Cervantes’s Toledo becomes the capital, Madrid, and the unspecified nobleman of the novella, whose lust leads him to violence, is here identified as the son of the Corregidor. Thus The Spanish Gypsy presents a profoundly lawless Spain, whose very centers of power are marked by violence and excess. In a play probably penned while Charles was still in Madrid courting his Spanish bride, the vision of Spanish disorder is striking. Yet at the same time the text refigures the tortuous and seemingly impossible dynastic union into an impetuous ravishment. Roderigo brooks no objections, and takes the object of his desire first, leaving any consequences for later. Strikingly even for the period, the rape plot ends happily, with Roderigo recognizing his fault and eventually marrying Clara. Her honorable, patient suitor Luis, meanwhile, is sidelined by Roderigo, whose rape perversely establishes his power over Clara. In Luis’s frustrated suit for Clara, despite her parents’ repeated promises, Taylor reads allusions to Charles’s futile quest.34 Equally striking, in my view, is the juxtaposition of that failure to a union consummated through violence.
In the text, Spanish aristocrats are generally characterized by their arrogance and violence, in contradistinction to the jovial gypsies. To the rape plot of Roderigo, we may add the complex plot of Luis’s revenge for his father’s murder. In a dramatically awkward but ideologically striking interlude, the entire episode is related indirectly, as “an old don” reviews past acts of violence and carefully catalogued slights: “I well remember how our streets were frighted / With brawls, whose end was blood” (2.2.83–84). As its awkward introduction suggests, this plot is completely superfluous to the many other strands woven together in the play.35 While the over-plotting may be due simply to too many cooks for this theatrical broth, it recalls the stereotypes of Spanishness I have charted above, both in its formal excess of plot and its construction of Spanish arrogance and hotheadedness. The shading of the Spanish into the Mediterranean and Machiavellian is strikingly suggested, too, by the completely unmotivated appearance of Roderigo “disguised like an Italian” (s.d. 3.1).
Other stereotypes, however, are handled very differently, as the abundantly plotted play moves from the serious rape and revenge plots to a ludic, carnivalesque scene of gypsies. Reprising Jonson’s popular 1621 court masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, in which the gypsies had actually been played by aristocrats, the play stresses that these gypsies are not dark, not criminal, and not like English gypsies. Thus the world-upside-down of this play actually reverses the stereotypes about gypsies and the commonplaces of the Spanish picaresque into a semblance of order.36 Moreover, the playwrights radically refigure Cervantes’s romance plot, which focuses on a single aristocratic girl, stolen as a baby and brought up by the gypsies, and her disguised noble suitor, into an entire community of “Spanish Gypsies, noble Gypsies!” (2.1.11), whose actual relation to Spain is much discussed.
The Spanishness of these irresistible entertainers is both insistently noted and occasionally qualified. The leader of the gypsies offers that if one Spanish city cannot sustain them, another will: “Does Madrid yield no money? Seville shall. Is Seville close-fisted? Valladolid is open; so Cordova, so Toledo” (2.1.54–56). Yet his imaginative geography soon moves beyond Spain: “Do not our Spanish wines please us? Italian can then, French can” (2.1.56–57). In a similarly ambivalent moment, the “foolish gentleman” Sancho (a name made famous by Don Quijote), who also passes for a gypsy, refers to them as “Egyptian Spaniards,” “jugglers, tumblers, anything, anywhere, everywhere” (3.1.51–53). In their self-consciousness about their own artifice, these gypsies both represent a stereotypical Spain and transcend it.
Sancho’s self-referential moment is just one among many. For The Spanish Gypsy refers constantly to its characters as entertainers and to itself as entertainment, showing a remarkable awareness of the conventionality and artificiality of “Spain” on the English stage, even at this early date. Strikingly, in this register Spain is viewed favorably, whatever its moral failings. The improbably unmarked gypsies of this play thus represent a consumable “Spanishness” on the English stage (and, in the picaresque or Cervantine sources, on the printed page) that provides pleasure to viewers and readers, transcending the immediate political crisis. In the Spanish source text for these scenes, the gypsy entertainers also provide immense pleasure: Preciosa, the titular “gitanilla” of Cervantes’s novella, is famous in Madrid for her grace, and she is showered with both money and poems by her admirers. Yet when the novella is Englished, Spain itself becomes the source of literary pleasure, packaged for easy, no-strings-attached consumption by London audiences. Just as the prodigal Sancho dismisses land in favor of gold—“Hang lands! It’s nothing but trees, stones and dirt. Old father, I have gold to keep up our stock” (3.1.85–86), the gypsy plot on stage refuses the territoriality and referentiality of politics, replacing it with the free circulation of carnivalesque pleasure.
The Spanish Gypsy thus appears as a play at odds with itself: insistently Spanish, it supplies both ample stereotypes of Spanish identity and a highly self-conscious version of “Spanishness” as theatrical property. It even reflects on the dynamics of imitation and translation, by making the sometime villain Roderigo into a faux-Italian comedian who will join Sancho in writing plays for the gypsies. Sancho welcomes him warily: “A magpie of Parnassus! Welcome again! I am a fire-brand of Phoebus myself; we’ll invoke together—so you will not steal my plot” (3.1.68–70). When the play ends with a series of anagnorises, as the various gypsies are revealed to be missing aristocrats, the artifice of this “Spain” is further underscored. Nothing is what it seems to be, but the equivocation makes for good theater. Unlike the morally and ideologically loaded “discovery” of A Game at Chess, which marks the ultimate division of White House and Black House, the revelations here offer a vision of national difference as a valuable theatrical commodity, mobile and profitable.
Middleton’s Spanish plays thus mark the enormous distance between popular jingoism and official policy, on the one hand, and between political rivalry and literary allegiance, on the other. Despite James’s attempts to cement a dynastic allegiance with Spain, the popular theater was never more successful than when Spain was reviled, as in A Game at Chess. Because the differences between Spain and England were never as pronounced as black versus white, however, the power of Middleton’s allegory lay in oversimplifying the complexities of national and religious identity and disavowing the inevitable points of contact between the two polities. At the same time, even as Spain became increasingly associated in the popular imagination with a Machiavellian excess of plotting—from Jesuit plans for world domination to the Gunpowder Plot to the machinations of Gondomar—English plays turned to Spain both as a fertile source of literary plots and a rich, all-purpose Mediterranean setting for stories of intrigue and betrayal. The tension between reviled plotting Spaniards and desired Spanish plots animates a corpus that relies on Spain more often than we might imagine.
The Spanish plays of Middleton and his collaborators frame Spain in a variety of ways, alternately invoking and confuting stereotypes, deterritorializing Spanishness into a kind of all-purpose Mediterranean Machiavellianism, fixing it via allegory, or, as in The Spanish Gypsy, reveling in the contradictions that made the play appealing in a confusing political moment. In what follows, I turn to a different vector of the Spanish connection, focusing on the Jacobean playwright who made the most frequent use of Spanish sources, and particularly of Cervantes’s prose oeuvre. From the novella “La señora Cornelia” to the Byzantine romance Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes provides the source for a number of Fletcher’s plays.37 Yet as Gordon McMullan perceptively notes, Fletcher’s prefatory poems to The Rogue, Mabbe’s translation of Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, which I discussed in Chapter 1, attempt to “separate literary appreciation from political implication.”38 Ventriloquizing the Spanish rogue, Fletcher challenges the view of the Spaniard as plotting Machiavellian:
I come no Spy, nor take
A Factious part; No sound of Warre I make,
But against sinne; I land no forraine mates;
For Vertues Schooles should Free be in all states.39
Instead, Fletcher announces a common literary concern with exposing vice. As McMullen suggests, Fletcher’s praise of the rogue Guzmán for his “strange bifronted posture,” which “can better teach by worse meanes,” expresses an aesthetic based on irony, a central tenet of Fletcher’s own production.40 As I will argue below, the ironies attendant upon the use of Spanish sources are multiple, and only partially contained by the author’s own nationalist sympathies, or even his “politics of unease,” as McMullen fruitfully terms it.
Fletcher’s Cervantine penchant, perceptively discussed by McMullen, has been addressed in recent criticism, most thoroughly in Alexander Samson’s overview, “ ‘Last Thought upon a Windmill’?: Cervantes and Fletcher.” Yet the 1624 Rule a Wife and Have a Wife has been largely ignored, despite its popularity in its day.41 The play combines two Spanish sources: the lively comedia El sagaz Estacio, marido examinado, by Salas Barbadillo (apparently never published before 1620, although authorized for publication in 1613), and the better known Cervantes novella, “El casamiento engañoso” (“The Deceitful Marriage,” published as one of the Novelas ejemplares in 1613).42 Like The Spanish Gypsy and A Game at Chess, Rule a Wife was first staged during the public uproar at the ever-postponed “Spanish match,” a mere three months after Middleton’s succès de scandale. Yet unlike Middleton, who resorts to color-coded allegory to address the disappointments of the failed match, Fletcher weaves a jingoistic thread into his very translatio, evoking English triumphs over Spain at a particularly fraught point in the relations between the two nations.
The context for Rule a Wife includes both the geopolitcal events and their unsubtle dramatic rendition in Middleton’s allegory. Fletcher’s Prologue pointedly reminds the audience of both the earlier play and the dynastic debacle:
doe not your looks let fall,
Nor to remembrance our late errors call,
Because this day w’are Spaniards all againe,
The story of our Play, and our Sceane Spaine:
The errors too, doe not for this cause hate,
Now we present their wit and not their state.
(Prologue, 3–8)
The distinction between “wit” and “state” nicely renders the English fascination with Spanish culture despite political and religious differences. Even as it recalls the success of A Game at Chess, Rule a Wife distances itself from its predecessor’s more blatant allegories of state, presumably to avoid a similar repression. Tongue firmly in cheek, the Prologue also reassures the ladies in the audience that the “grosse errors” they will see on stage, of a wanton beauty seeking “to abuse her husband,” would never occur in their own kingdom (9–12). From the start, then, the play foregrounds the comparison between the two nations, and the delicate business of representing for the sake of pleasure a reviled popular enemy, who nonetheless provides abundant material for the English stage.
Fletcher resolves this tension by staging the comeuppance of the rich Spanish intended. As its title suggests, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife revolves around marriage. In the main plot, a lascivious wealthy lady of loose morals, Margarita, seeks a compliant husband as cover for her erotic adventures. She is tricked into marrying the foolish soldier Leon, only to find him transformed into an exacting husband (echoes of Shakespeare’s Petrucchio) when it is too late. Subdued, Margarita recognizes Leon’s dominion over her, accepts her fate, and agrees to become a properly subservient wife. Leon triumphantly tames his wife and takes possession of her person and property, reasserting his masculine privilege while enriching himself in the process. If the Stuart “Spanish marriage” founders because of Spain’s insistence that it has the right to dictate the terms of the union, Fletcher rewrites the dynamic in his play as the triumph of a wily husband over a dominating, over-assured Spanish wife. In the picaresque subplot, meanwhile, a soldier and a disreputable serving-woman trick each other into marriage, only to discover that they have been conned in return by their victim—there is no taming here, only a sustained connection between marriage, wealth, and misrepresentation.
In its main plot, Rule a Wife distinctly renders the proposed dynastic union between England and Spain as an act of pillage. Margarita’s riches are much more important in Fletcher’s version than in the Spanish source; even the heroine’s name (Marcela in the original) has been changed to emphasize the wealth of the Spanish bride, referred to by one of her suitors as “the pearle of Spaine, the orient faire one, the rich one too” (3.3.33–34).43 Leon, the husband who tricks her and gains possession of all her riches, recalls the lions of English royal heraldry, in what is perhaps a more subtle reference to the prince’s proposed marriage. But the most explicit connection of this farcical domestic comedy to the fraught stage of international relations comes through a minor character, the usurer Cacafogo, who is entirely Fletcher’s invention. While the name is partly a scatological joke, it is most pointedly a reference to Elizabethan attacks on Spain, recalling for readers a highly romanticized moment of English privateering and plunder. In compensation for the humiliations of the Jacobean rapprochements, Fletcher evokes Elizabethan heroics against Spain. For the Cacafuego was, famously, the spectacular Spanish prize that Francis Drake captured on his circumnavigation (1577–80), an event described in the narrative of that voyage:
It fortuned that John Drake going up into the top, descried her about three of the clocke, and about sixe of the clocke we came to her and boorded her, and shotte at her three peeces of ordnance, and strake downe her Misen, and being entered, we found in her great riches, as jewels and precious stones, thirteene chests full of royals of plate, foure score pound weight of golde, and sixe and twentie tunne of silver.44
The routine personification of the Spanish ship as female (tellingly, here, a penetrated female) in the narrative of Drake’s voyage anticipates the metaphorics of nuptial pillage in Fletcher’s play, in which both Margarita, the Spanish pearl, and the hapless Cacafogo will serve to enrich Leon.
The playwright makes a point of foregrounding the reference to Drake, lest his audience miss it. Cacafogo is a bit of the roaring boy, emboldened by his recent inheritance. When he first comes on stage, he announces: “My Fathers dead: I am a man of warre too, / Moynes, demeanes; I have ships at sea too, captaines” (1.5.33–34). He is first warned about Dutch pirates: “Take heed o’the Hollanders, your ship may leake else” (1.5.36), but the text soon gets to the real piracy in question. After Cacafogo bullies Leon, the usurer’s companion tells him: “You have scap’d by miracle, there is not in all Spaine, / A spirit of more fury then [sic] this fire drake” (1.5.51–52).45 These not-so-subtle nudges from the author suggest that there is more at work here than mere onomastic coincidence. Elizabethan heroics haunt the play; while they may appear simply as faint echoes in a farcical context, they signal Rule a Wife’s investment in Anglo-Spanish rivalry as popular dramatic and political currency. The comical Cacafogo serves to remind the audience of the time before the proposed “Spanish marriage,” and of their most antagonistic feelings toward Spain. As Cacafogo evolves from Leon’s rival for Margarita’s hand to rich victim of the newlyweds’ subterfuge, pillage becomes also a means to reconciliation, providing the embattled couple with a shared sense of purpose. The arrogant Spaniard—a familiar caricature—is brought low through trickery and becomes the play’s scapegoat.
The humbling of Cacafogo is actually preceded by a striking scene of Spanish disarmament. When Leon first puts an end to Margarita’s escapades, his wife’s former lover, the Duke, assigns him a false command to fight in Flanders. Leon calls the lovers’ bluff, however, by ordering that his untrustworthy wife, and all the household goods, accompany him. The Duke confidently taunts Leon, “I saw your mind was wedded to the warre, / And knew you would prove some good man for your country” (4.3.95–96), but once his plot is revealed no-one goes to war. Instead, Leon decides to visits Margarita’s “Land ith Indies” (4.3.199), later amended to her peaceful “country house” (5.3.1). Although the Duke presents Leon with a captaincy—a “true comission” (5.5.160)—to make amends at the end of the play, any warring is projected far off into the future, when Margarita will “deliver [Leon] to the blew Neptune” (5.5.175). For the space of the play, the domestic conflict suffices to contain Spanish military expeditions; alternatively, the fighting in Flanders is never more than a pretext for domestic misrule.46
Yet if the main plot seems audacious in its use of a Spanish source to stage the triumph over a Spanish wife and the neutralization of Spain, the Cervantine subplot somewhat complicates matters. The redoubled intertextuality produces a text that is far more ambiguous in its message, as the deceitful marriage of soldier and serving-woman, so closely copied from Cervantes, casts a skeptical, even ironic shadow on the main plot. Both marriages, after all, depend on misrepresentations, but in the subplot no-one wins, and there is no patriarchal or national triumph to redeem the trickery. Here the problem of translation and adaptation from the Spanish becomes truly interesting: while Fletcher’s text undoubtedly references the Spanish marriage, the rather simplistic jingoism of its allusion is undone precisely by the breadth of his borrowing, and by the multiple intersections of plot and subplot with each other and with their redoubled sources. In producing an intertextual Spanish match—one that refers to Spain, takes from Spain, yet draws on Spain—the text reveals itself as far more hybrid a product than its strident nationalism would suggest.
The overriding irony of such a text lies in plundering Spanish materials to stage an allegorical victory over Spain. Yet this tension would be obvious only to bilingual, sophisticated readers or viewers of Rule a Wife, and would not impede the general audience’s enjoyment of the dramatic put-down. Fletcher’s appropriation thus participates in the poetics of piracy that I chart throughout this study, which recasts English co-optation of foreign texts to England’s advantage.47 A key example of this pirated corpus, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife provides invaluable evidence of the vexed dynamics of cultural indebtedness and national distinction that characterize Anglo-Spanish drama. Yet it also reminds us that despite the proliferation of stereotypes and appropriations that I have charted throughout this chapter, translatio remains fundamentally unstable, and cannot necessarily be placed at the service of a particular ideology, particularly once plays are published and read instead of simply performed. Literary history might thus be charged with reconstructing not only the rhetorical valence of a performance in its own time, but also how that valence shifts in subsequent, retrospective rereadings or restagings.48 While this is a fraught operation when the original text is lost, as in the case of the Shakespeare and Fletcher Cardenio that I discuss in Chapters 4 and 5, redactions and recreations provide abundant evidence of the text’s inherent interest.
