1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910779145903321

Autore

Griffin Eric J

Titolo

English Renaissance drama and the specter of Spain [[electronic resource] ] : ethnopoetics and empire / / Eric J. Griffin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2009

ISBN

1-283-89019-4

0-8122-0210-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (316 p.)

Disciplina

822/.30935846

Soggetti

English drama - Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 - History and criticism

English drama - 17th century - History and criticism

National characteristics, Spanish, in literature

Public opinion - Great Britain - History

Spain In literature

Spain Foreign public opinion, British History

Great Britain Relations Spain

Spain Relations Great Britain

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction. The Specter of Spain -- Chapter one. From Ethos to Ethnos -- Chapter two. A Long and Lively Antithesis -- Chapter three. Thomas Kyd's Tragedy of "the Spains" -- Chapter four. Marlowe Among the Machevills -- Chapter five. Shakespeare's Comical History -- Chapter six. Othello's Spanish Spirits -- Afterword. A Natural Enemy -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

The specter of Spain rarely figures in our discussions of the drama that is often regarded as the crowning achievement of the English literary Renaissance. Yet dramatists such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare are exactly contemporary with England's protracted conflict with the Spanish Empire, a traditional ally turned archetypical adversary. Were these playwrights really so mute with respect to their nation's Spanish troubles? Or have we failed-for



reasons cultural and institutional-to hear the Hispanophobic crosstalk that permeated the drama no less than England's other public discourses?Imagining an early modern public sphere in which dramatists cross pens with proto-imperialists, Protestant polemicists, recusant apologists, and a Machiavellian network of propagandists that included high government officials as well as journeyman printers, Eric Griffin uncovers the rhetorical strategies through which the Hispanophobic perspectives that shaped the so-called Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty were written into English cultural memory. At the same time, he demonstrates that the English were as ready to invoke Spain in the spirit of envious emulation as to demonize the Spanish other as an ethnic agent of intolerance and oppression.Interrogating the Whiggish orientation that has continued to view the English Renaissance through a haze of Anglo-American triumphalism, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain recovers the voices of key Spanish participants and the "Hispanized" Catholic resistance, revealing how England and Spain continued to draw upon shared traditions and cultural resources, even during the moments of their most storied confrontation.