With its dominance as a ecu energy and the explosion of its prose and dramatic writing, Spain supplied an impossible to resist literary resource for English writers of the early glossy interval. however the deep and escalating political contention among the 2 international locations led English writers to barter, disavow, or try and unravel their fascination with Spain and their debt to Spanish resources. Amid thorny problems with translation and appropriation, imperial festival, the increase of business authorship, and anxieties approximately authenticity, Barbara Fuchs strains how Spanish fabric was once transmitted into English writing, entangling English literature in questions of nationwide and non secular identification, and the way piracy got here to be a crucial textual metaphor, with appropriations from Spain triumphantly reimagined as heroic looting.

From the time of the tried invasion by way of the Spanish Armada of the 1580s, in the course of the upward push of anti-Spanish rhetoric of the 1620s, The Poetics of Piracy charts this connection via works by means of Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton. Fuchs examines how their writing, really for the level, recasts a reliance on Spanish fabric through developing narratives of militaristic, forcible use. She considers how Jacobean dramatists advanced the texts in their Spanish contemporaries by means of placing them to anti-Spanish reasons, and she or he lines where of Cervantes's Don Quixote in Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Shakespeare's past due, misplaced play Cardenio. English literature used to be deeply transnational, even within the interval such a lot heavily linked to the delivery of a countrywide literature.

Recovering the profound impression of Spain on Renaissance English letters, The Poetics of Piracy paints a worldly photo of the way countries can serve, right now, as opponents and resources.