Mirrors of Spain: Recent Works on Cervantes and Shakespeare

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Mirrors of Spain: Recent Works on Cervantes and ShakespeareTerri Bourus and Gary Taylor, eds. The Creation & Re-Creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xviii + 329 pages. $32.00.David Carnegie and Gary Taylor, eds. The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, & the Lost Play. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xiv + 420 pages. $65.00.Barbara Fuchs. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 200 pages. $45.00.The early twenty-first century is proving to something of a golden age the study of Anglo-Hispanic literary relations. Two important commemorative milestones have already rolled by: the 400th anniversary, 2004, of the Somerset House Conference and the Treaty of London which ended the war between England and Spain; and the fourth centenary of the performance, 1613, of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio. The latter event was given additional prominence by the bold decision of the Arden Shakespeare general editors to include Lewis Theobald 's play Double Falsehood or The Distressed Lovers (1728) the Arden 3 series, on the grounds that Falsehood not only derived from Cardenio but also retained some of the original text. Brean Hammond 's edition appeared 2010 and controversy still rages, including the pages of two of the volumes reviewed here.If James I's reign England began with rapprochement with Spain, it ended the diplomatic debacle of Prince Charles's personal visit to the Court of Philip IV 1623, an attempt to conclude a marriage with Philip's sister. This visit has prompted fruitful research, captured Glyn Redworth's The Prince and the Infanta and Alexander Samson's multidisciplinary collection of essays, The Spanish Match. Although a romantic failure, Charles's Spanish adventure did bring back an appreciation of High Renaissance and Baroque art to an England that had been largely insulated from developments the visual arts southern Europe. Edward Chaney and Timothy Wilks, The Jacobean Grand Tour, have demonstrated how novel the artistic taste Charles's circle was and how great England 's isolation was (25), but England 's early attempts at serious connoisseurship were ended by the Civil War and Commonwealth, when most of the grand collections (including Charles's own) were sold off. The intriguing coda to James I's flirtation with Spain, when Philip IV's agents bought back the 1650s the paintings given to Charles 1623, has been covered by, among others, the late Francis Haskell, Sir John Elliott, Jonathan Brown, and Jerry Brotton.Barbara Fuchs begins her study of The Poetics of Piracy with an earlier generation, when Spain and England were still at war and Anglo-Hispanic contacts were usually bellicose. Her subtitle, Emulating Spain English Literature, is a reminder that cultural influences during the reigns of the Tudors and early Stuarts ran from south to north. England was a small country, lacking influence and speaking a language that no one outside of the British Isles would see the point of learning. Spanish literature would often reach English readers through the medium of translation, and here the whole question of how far translation can true to the original text lurks the background. Is translation a window through which one culture views another with perfect clarity, or is it a mirror which reflects but also distorts? Neuroscientist and theater director Jonathan Miller explained the unreliability of reflections when curating an exhibition of paintings which, like Velazquez's Las Meninas, contain mirror images: in contrast to the 'actual ' view to seen through a window or a door reflected views are 'virtual' or apparent: they are not where they seem to be (11). Miller also noted, however, that it is only by reflection that we can see our- selves. …