Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy: Tudor and Stuart Black Legends

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Were faeries and Amazons hiding in Guiana, and where was the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of these tales of love and arms as reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature, and how these circumstances primed the success of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.