Blessed with a Baby or “Bum-Fidled with a Bastard”? Maternity in Fletcher’s The Chances and Cervantes’ Novela de la Señora Cornelia

Abstract

Fletcher’s sustained attraction to Spanish literature is incontestable. Seventeen of his approximately fifty-four plays derive from Spanish sources, thirteen of those from Cervantes’ oeuvre, making Fletcher the most prolific English ambassador for Iberian literature.1 While Fletcher’s Hispanophilia is readily apparent, his Hispanophobia is less visible. Indeed, despite Fletcher’s “twenty-year obsession with Cervantes’ writings,” he “was also determinedly Protestant and anti-Spanish.”2 This duality of fascination and aversion is typical of the early modern English response to Spanish literature. “English interest in Spain,” Alexander Samson concludes, “was not mutually incompatible with political prejudice.”3 As a Catholic superpower, Spain was viewed with great suspicion in post-Reformation England. However, notwithstanding heightened Anglo-Spanish tension and the abundance of documented hostility toward Spain, translators, adapters, and readers continued to enjoy Spanish literature and steadily increasing numbers sought to learn the language.4 Often, as in Fletcher’s The Chances, Spanish characters are subjected to English nationalistic bigotry: they are ridiculed, morally debased, or depicted as Catholic or Moorish Others. For instance, in her analysis of Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Barbara Fuchs reveals Fletcher’s “strident nationalism” and discusses “how the playwright weaves a jingoistic thread into his translatio” (152, 155).