"Spain is Portugal/And Portugal is Spain": Transnational Attraction in The Stukeley Plays and The Spanish Tragedy

Abstract

hath no refuge for a Portingale.-Thomas Kyd, The Tragedy (c. 1587) (4.4.217)Exurge, domine, et vindica causam tuam.1-Standard of Armada, 1588As we are Englishmen, so we are men,And I am Stukeley so resolved in allTo follow rule, honor, and empery . . .-George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar (c. 1589) (2.2.27-29)For all of ink spilled by early modern writers on Iberian unification of 1580, significance of Philip II's ascension to throne of Portugal rarely registers in discussions of period's literature and culture. Perhaps because our modern academic disciplines were constituted during era that embraced idea of nation as lens through which history ought to be viewed-with generations of institutional commitments reinforcing what Roland Greene has dubbed an almost superstitious obeisance to category of (26)-scholars have often projected assumptions of their various national histories onto a world in which these perspectives were much less privileged. If specialists in English culture think at all about reorganization of geopolitical map generated by Iberian union, it is generally in relation to Armada, enterprise made possible by consolidation. Somewhat less frequently, Portugal's Spanish or Babylonian captivity (Nowell 135-49; Birmingham 2) is seen as unfortunate hiatus after which Portuguese nation could resume its long tradition of self-determination.The fact is that crisis surrounding Iberian succession profoundly affected European dynastic culture, and so it is not surprising that its shockwaves would ripple through world of Elizabethan theater. Thomas Kyd's Tragedy may have been first English play to register unification of crowns, but it does so in a manner than literal (Griffin, Ethos 193). In act 1, Kyd's Castilian King puts it chiastically: Now, lordings, fall to. is Portugal,/ And Portugal is Spain (1.4.132-33). Three other extant also examine significant aspects of crisis: George Peele's Battle of Alcazar (1588-89) takes a factual route while also intercalating, as its title page advertises, the death of Captaine Stukeley; anonymous Famous History of Captain Thomas Stukeley (printed in 1605, though dating from 1596 or earlier) heightens English connection by shifting point of view from genesis of Moroccan conflict to adventures of Catholic renegade himself.2 And The First Part of Hieronimo, printed in 1605, though probably performed as early as 1592, recasts elements of The Tragedy as a comedy of Portuguese patriotism (Griffin, Nationalism).3Taken as a group, these Portingale plays throw into relief important, yet often overlooked feature of early modern context from which Europe's eventually emerged. Although literary critics and historians have often located stirrings of modern nationhood in early modern period, it was not inevitable that polities such as England, France, Netherlands, Portugal, or would adopt borders, traditions, or even languages familiar to later centuries. And although these emerging appear to have been moving toward goal of distinct geographical and institutional consolidation, we can also observe that in shorter run they were navigating substantial incorporative counter-currents. Its inclinations toward nationhood notwithstanding, early modernity evidences a persistent tendency to form composite states (Elliott 50) or multiple monarchies (Koenigsberger 11), political units marked by inclusion of more than one country under sovereignty of one ruler (Elliott 50). These international movements, which sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations and social formations spanning nation-states (Vertovec 2), encouraged early modern subjects to think beyond local affinities in terms much like those we have come to associate with transnationalism. …