Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in the site of Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Was Baja California really an island or a peninsula—and did romances of chivalry contain the answer? Were Amazon women hiding in Guiana and where was the location of the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature. 

The chapters in this book represent separate case studies regarding the use of romance strategies and tales of love and arms more generally in the imperialist myth-making of early modern England against the threat of imperial Spain, particularly those which were first used by Spanish authors to justify Spain’s own imperialist designs. With interwoven readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the English colonial mindset developed through a concerted conversation with the reality of Spain’s presence in the colonial world, particularly in the historically contentious sites of Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California and Australia, producing emergent discourses of English nationalism and proto-imperialism as contextually contingent responses to the Spanish problem. By uncovering long-neglected Spanish romantic influences on canonical English works, this book also tracks for the first time the unique social, political and cultural circumstances of English hysteria with Spanish romance that primed the success of Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.