727 UC-NRLF The Relations between Spanish and English Literature JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLT Litt.D., F.B.A. IT THE UNIFERSITr PRESS OF LIVERPOOL. 1910 PRESERVATION COPY ADDED itl AX The Relations between Spanish and English Literature THERE are numerous publications, varying in merit, which deal with what is called the influence of Spanish on English literature as though the extent of this influence were established beyond dispute, and as though there were no reciprocity in the matter. This has the advantage of assuming what ought first to be proved, and of enabling the writer to indulge in wide generalizations ; but the method is more con- venient than scientific. It is safer to speak of the literary relations between Spain and England, for, if the phrase implies a certain reserve, at any rate it does not prejudge the case. My purpose is to lay the main facts before you, so far as time allows. ' Influence ' is an elastic term, not easily defined ; yet, however loose your definition, I hope to convince you that there has been some exaggeration on this subject in the past. In the earliest period relations of any sort between Spain and England were necessarily slight (the word ' Spain ' is, of course, used here merely as a convenient geographical expres- sion). The Christian inhabitants of the land were too busily engaged in fighting the Moors to do much else, and the inhabi- tants of these islands took no special interest in the Peninsula. A little later many pilgrims from northern countries journeyed to the famous shrine of St. James, at Compostela, in Galicia. One such pilgrim is mentioned in Wace's Roman de Ron a certain Walter Giffard who brought back with him, as a present from the reigning King of Galicia to William the Conqueror, the horse which William rode at the battle of Hastings. This was not, perhaps, an auspicious beginning. GifTard was unable, for the best of reasons, to bring back from Spain anything in the shape of a characteristic literary monument. Learning was confined 383109 to the monasteries, and Spanish literature, as we know it, was not yet born. That literature cannot be said to have existed much before the death of the Cid in 1099. Ey that time the conquering rush of the Moors was over, and they were henceforth steadily pushed southwards. Yet, while their political influence was waning, their reputation as masters of speculative and physical science tended rather to increase throughout Western Europe, and attracted many foreign students across the Pyrenees. Among the adventurous scholars who found their way to Spain a few were English : Adelard, of Bath, who translated Euclid into Latin from an Arabic version ; Robert de Retines, the earliest trans- lator of the Koran, who finally made his home in Spain, and died as Archdeacon of Pamplona ; that fantastic, rugged genius, Michael Scot, who passed some time at Toledo, translating Arabic philosophers, and dabbling in the mysterious arts which earned him a sinister reputation as a wizard. It would be easy to add other English names to the list. Roger Bacon drops a perfidious hint that these trans- lations from the Arabic were really produced by ' ghosts,' or literary * devils ' needy Moors who did the work, took the money, and left the Englishmen to take the credit. This, no doubt, is one of the little amenities of literature a piece of malignant gossip, repeated long after the event. It is quite possible, and even very likely, that these roving English scholars consulted learned Moors and, still more ' probably, learned Jews when they met with difficulties ; this was one of their chief reasons for going to Toledo. But we need not pause to discuss Roger Bacon's story ; for the performances to which it refers have no real connection with either Spanish or English literature. It is not till much later that we meet with aut cases of literary contact between Spain and En Historians of literature mention the oddly named Lit. 5 los gatos as one of the earliest examples, and this cannot be dated much before the end of the fourteenth century. The anonymous Libro de los gatos a title which, as has been suggested, may be a palaeographic error for Libro de los quentos has often been described as essentially Spanish in character. This description cannot be accepted, and should warn us against being too positive in expressing our views on early Spanish literature. The Libro de los gatos is, in fact, a rendering into Spanish of the Narrationes of Odo of Cheriton, a Kentish Cistercian, whose collection of fables was finished not later than 1222. An abridgement of Odo's collection, entitled Speculum Laicorum, was made in England, and is currently ascribed to John Hoveden. The Speculum Laicorum was likewise done into Spanish, apparently at about the same date as the Libro de los gatos ; but the manuscript of this Espejo de legos, which repeats the doubtful attribution of the original to John Hoveden, remains un- published at the Escorial. These collections of apologues are not without a spice of acrid humour ; for us to-day, how- ever, their chief interest is that they go to prove the existence of literary intercommunication between Spain and England. Intellectual commerce was established at last ; but as you will observe, it was brought about in a devious and tardy fashion by two translations of cosmopolitan Latin bestiaries compiled in England a century or two before. Within a short while the two countries came into more direct literary relation. An Englishman named Robert Payne seems to have held a canonry at Lisbon towards the close of the fourteenth century, and to Payne belongs the credit of introducing English poetry into the Peninsula. It was a bold undertaking ; but Payne was not too bold. The temptation to translate Chaucer must have been strong, and, if Payne resisted it, we may assume that Chaucer's irrepressible tendency to parody and his ironical attitude to life and its problems told against him. As the Portuguese public had shown that it shared the prevailing Spanish taste for moralizing, Payne naturally looked about for some English contemporary who combined the attraction of novelty with an adherence to mediaevalism. He found precisely what he wanted in ' moral Gower,' and chose the Confessio Amantis as a suitable text to be translated into Portu- guese. The choice was necessarily something of a compromise. The Confessio Amantis is less didactic than might be expected; but it is as didactic as a work of art need be, and, for Payne's immediate purpose, it had the advantage of including many stories with which most of his likely readers were already acquainted in one form or another the legends of Troy, and Alexander, and Apollonius, tales from Ovid and the Secreta secretorum, from the Seven Wise Men, from Brunetto Latini's Tresor, and from similar compilations by mediaeval French and Italian authors. Payne might reasonably hope that a new setting of such famous stories would be attractive 1 , and events justified him. In a short course of time his Portuguese version (which seems to have disappeared) was' introduced into Spain, and from it Juan de Cuenca of Huete translated the Confessio Amantis into Castilian prose. The diffusion of the English original i. A similar hope was entertained long afterwards by the author (or authors) of Pericles, Prince of Tyre : To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come ; Assuming men's infirmities, To glad your ear, and please your eyes. It hath been sung at festivals, On ember-eves and holy-ales ; And lords and ladies in their lives Have read it for restoratives ; The purchase is to make men glorious : Et bonum quo antirjuius, eo mehus. If you, born in these latter times, When wit's more ripe, accept my rhymes, And that to hear an old man sing May to your wishes pleasure bring, I life would wish, and that I might Waste it for you, like taper-light. would appear to have been rapid, for the first draft of the Confessio Amantis was not finished by Gower till 1390 ; the Spanish codex, which reproduces the text of this first draft, is assigned by palaeographers to the end of the fourteenth century. English literature had at last obtained a foothold in Spain, but failed to keep it. Juan de Cuenca's Spanish prose version does not appear to have been appreciated at the time, and was overlooked till about the middle of the last century. We cannot pretend to be surprised. The Confision del Amante is little more than a literary curiosity, for Juan de Cuenca's translation, though fairly faithful to the letter, lacks charm and ease. It failed at the moment, but time brings its revenges, and, after waiting about five centuries for recognition, the Confision del Amante was published a few weeks ago at Leipzig under the editorship of Dr. Adolf Birch-Hirschfeld. So far the literary impulse, such as it was, had come from England to Spain, and not from Spain to England. It needs a microscopic eye to find allusions to Spain and Spanish matters in English literature of this early period. If Spaniards knew little of England, the English knew next to nothing of Spain. The marriage of the future Edward I at Burgos to Eleanor, half-sister of Alfonso the Learned, is not the subject of any memorable piece of literature either in Castilian or English. Nor did the Spanish campaign of the Black Prince fire the imagination of English poets. Still, two stanzas of The Monkes T^ale are dedicated to a panegyric on Peter the Cruel, who is described as the ' glorie of Spayne.' Although this is not the usual view of Peter's position in the panorama of Spanish history, there has undoubtedly been a slight reaction in Peter's favour during the last century or so, and it would be pleasant if we could point to Chaucer's eulogy as a proof of the poet's independence and historical insight. A likelier explanation is that Chaucer was paying one of the conventional compliments which laureates exist to supply, and that the two stanzas were more particularly addressed to John of Gaunt, Peter's son-in-law. From our point of view, there is more promise at first sight in Chaucer's introduction of the brass horse in The Squires Tale. This might seem to be a reminiscence of an oriental story brought by the Arabs to Spain, and long popular there : you will remember Clavileno, the magic steed which Sancho Panza rode when he caracolled among the spheres, and told such shocking lies, or travellers' tales, to Don Quixote that even this most polite and credulous of gentlemen could not pretend to believe them. The truth is that Adenet le Roi had so to put it ' Europeanized ' the story of this wondrous horse long before The Squires Tale was written. It had spread all over Europe from France, and was common property in the fourteenth century. Other attempts have been made to bring Chaucer into some relation with Spanish literature ; but, as in the case of The Squires Tale, they have hitherto been conspicuously unsuccessful. Here and there, in the literatures of Spain and England during the fifteenth century, a half-hypnotized investigator may persuade himself that he detects points of contact. But what do they amount to ? A scrap of what may be broken English in one of Francisco Imperial's poems/stray allusions in records of adventure, shadowy resemblances possibly due to the fact that northerners and southerners drew from common sources. The theory that Spanish was widely known in England at this time cannot be main- tained. It is constantly alleged in support of this thesis that the first (dated) book ever printed in English was the Dictis and sayings of the philosophers, translated by the second Earl Rivers from the Bocados de oro.y This does not take us far on our road, for Rivers (as I have noted elsewhere) frankly states in his preface that he translated from a French version made by Guillaume de Tignonville from the Latin : manifestly he had never seen the Spanish text, which is itself translated from the Arabic of Abu'l Wafa Mubashir ibn Fatik. The case is a typical one. It was really not till the sixteenth century that the Spaniards and the English drew nearer to one another. The achievement of her political unity had greatly increased the importance of Spain in the Council of Europe, and the dis- covery of the New World had added still more to her prestige. Soon after the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon, Englishmen began to interest themselves in the intellectual side of Spanish life, and this interest was no doubt stimulated by the arrival here of such scholars as Sir Thomas More's friend, Juan Luis Vives, who lectured for a while at Oxford. Vives may, therefore, be indirectly respon- sible for an English adaptation of the anonymous Celestina which was printed between 1524 and 1530. It so happens that he detested the original, which he denounces as an infamous work in his De Institutione Christianae Feminae, a treatise dedicated to Catherine of Aragon. There is not the least reason why we should agree with Vives : there are excellent reasons for agreeing with most of his contem- poraries who ranked the book as a masterpiece. Whoever may have been the author of this Spanish novel in dialogue, he wrote with extraordinary force, succeeded in creating a dramatic atmosphere, and contrived to invest the final episode the death of one of the ill-starred lovers, and the suicide of the survivor with something of the poignant pathos and impassioned exaltation which we meet later i n Romeo and Juliet. This is the work which some unidentified Englishman adapted under an interminable title, the first words of which are A new commodye in English in manner an enterlude rygbt elygant and full of craft of rethoryk. 10 It is no marvel of adroit arrangement. If the interlude was meant to be played on the boards, there is justification for condensing the first four acts of the Spanish book into one act ; the substitution of a happy ending for the tragedy of the original is a feeble and fatal concession to Philistinism. It has been suggested that the adaptor added his * morall conclusion and exhortacyon to vertew ' out of deference to Vives. Assuming that he knew Vives (of which there is no proof), this would -explain his tamperings : it is no excuse for them. Yet enough of the original survives to lend the English interlude a permanent historical interest. The New Commodye breaks with the allegorical tradition, introduces human beings on the stage instead of abstractions, and prepares the way for a drama of character. Shortly after Vives' visit to England, Spain began to produce a series of works which attracted the admiration of Western Europe. Most prominent among the Spanish authors of the day was Antonio de Guevara, Bishop of Mondonedo, whose Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio speedily became the vogue after its first appearance (without the author's consent) in 1528.) A French translation by Rene Bertaut was printed in 1531, and came into the hands of the second Lord Berners, then Governor of Calais, who 'set a bad precedent (too often followed, as we shall see) by translating Guevara into English through this French version. Though Guevara is not lacking in ingenious talent, and though he has a naughtier and more piquant humour than our squeamish and censorious generation thinks becoming in a bishop, he finds comparatively few readers nowadays in Spain itself, and is scarcely known else- where outside a circle of humble specialists. His rhetorical bombast and corybantics of style are found fatiguing : what our forefathers thought to be fine purple patches are now considered to be tawdry stuff. Perhaps both views are II wrong. However that may be, Guevara fascinated the reading public of his own time, and Berners' translation, first issued in 1534, was repeatedly reprinted. This is the basis of the opinion that English Euphuism, derives from Guevara. The opinion, though pious, is not de fide. Euphuism, as Professor Ker has pointed out in this connection, is at least as old as the speech of Agathon in Plato's Symposium ; it is found in all literatures, and Guevara himself would appear to have formed his antithetical style on Latin and Italian models. It does not seem particularly reasonable to hold any one man responsible for such a widespread craze ; but, if it must be so, Guevara's share of responsibility for English Euphuism is probably less than Berners'. Berners had already shown his fondness for inversions, alliterations and antitheses in the preface to his translation of Froissart ten years earlier five years before the clandestine edition of Guevara's Libro aureo was printed in Spain. In his free rendering of Guevara he deliberately accentuates these innate characteristics. We need not labour the point, but a word may be added on another matter. Though Berners had been in Spain, we have seen that he translated Guevara at second-hand through the French. The question at once suggests itself : did he know Spanish ? One would think so from The Cajtell of Lou& Berners' version of Fernandez de San Pedro's sentimental Car eel de Amor, which professes (on the title page) to be done ' out of Spanyshe into Englysshe.' But this is far from decisive. The Castell of Loue was issued posthumously ; the statement on the title-page may easily be due to the publisher or printer (both apt to be romantic and imaginative types of men) ; and it is as likely as not that in Fernandez de San Pedro's case, as in Guevara's, Berners had recourse to a French intermediary, for the obliging Bertaut had translated the Cdrcel de Amor through an Italian version in 1526. 12 The question whether Berners did, or did not, know Spanish is extremely germane, for it affects the general enquiry as to the extent of Spanish influence on English literature. If (as is quite possible) Berners did not know Spanish, who did ? Not his nephew Sir Francis Bryan, / who translated Guevara's Menosprecio de la Corte y alabanza de la aldea in 1548, with the candid avowal that he turned ' the same out of Frenche into our maternell tong.' > With the help of Mr. Underhill's useful monograph, it is easy enough to draw up a list of books nominally translated from the Spanish ; but no small proportion of these translations is the work of amateurs or hacks whose knowledge of Spanish was infinitesimal. A distinguished exception is found in Sir Thomas North whose rendering of Guevara much superior to Berners' appeared in 1557. Yet even North began by translating from a French version of the text, as may be gathered from a phrase inserted after the third book of The Diall of Princes : ' Here followeth the letters (which were not in the French copye) conferred with the original Spanish copye.' We may feel sure that the same course was taken by other translators who were less ingenuous. The more one examines the facts, the more one is tempted to think that, though Spanish may have been known to some extent in court circles and among people of affairs, practical men such as diplomatists, merchants, navigators, and perhaps an occasional theologian with a passion for controversy, it was less cultivated by the literary class in general. Spain's prestige had increased enormously, and in all directions. Still, she was chiefly admired in England not as a centre of culture, but as a country that had done great things in a practical way. Some of those material exploits are commemorated by Avila y Zufiiga, y whose Comentarios was translated by John Wilkinson, and others are commemorated by the various authors laid under 1.3 contribution in Richard Eden's Decades of the Newe Worlde. Both works were widely read, and it might have been hoped that a book of such brilliancy and accomplishment as North's translation of Guevara (which appeared two years later) would quicken interest in the purely literary achievements of Spain. Such an interest did, indeed, develop, but not in any great measure owing to North's version. The year after his Diall of Princes was published, Elizabeth succeeded Mary, and the triumph of the Reform- ation movement in England made a complete rupture with Spain only a question of time. These radical political and religious changes naturally affected the literary relations of the two countries. It was not to be supposed that Philip II would allow the circulation in Spain of polemical pamphlets issued by Spanish refugees in London, and, on the English side, there was a corresponding coldness. Hence, English readers who took any interest in Spain were driven, little by little, to turn their attention to imaginative literature. It is true that treatises on navigation and points of doctrine works of practical instruction and malignant recrimination continued to be translated from time to time ; but we must pass them by, as we shall pass by the compilations of Hakluyt and Purchas, published later on in this century and the next. It is more relevant to note that as early as 1563 Barnabe Googe gave in his Eglogs, E-pytaphes and Sonettes two versified adaptations from Jorge de Montemor's Diana, together with a verse rendering of a few lines by Garcilaso de la Vega, the chief representative of the Italianate school of Spanish poets. 1 i. Nine years before the publication of Googe's Eglogs, there is an instance of a Spanish poet who wrote in England. Juan Verzosa was in the suite of Philip II, and composed, in celebration of the King's wedding with Mary Tudor, the ' Epithalamie or nuptiall song ' mentioned in The Art of English Poesie by George Puttenham. This poem, however, was written in Latin (see Bartolome Jose Gallardo, Ensayo de una biblioteca espanola de libros raros y curiosos, tomo iv, no. 4507). Verzosa's name is given correctly by William Vaughan in The Golden Grove, Puttenham prints ' Vargas.' The record is meagre, yet to attempt to translate Spanish verse at all was an innovation, and it was some while before the attempt was repeated. Nevertheless Spanish poetry found, and continued to find, an occasional reader in England. This is clear from Ascham's condemnation in The School- master of Gonzalo Perez' incomplete blank verse rendering of the Odyssey, and from Abraham Fraunce's quotations from Garcilaso and his ally Boscan in the Arcadian Rhetorike, y published some twenty-five years after Googe's Eglogs. Fraunce, who was unkindly described by Ben Jonson as a fool, attempted no renderings from the Spanish poets. Perhaps this is no great loss, for his manifest prefer- ence for Boscan over Garcilaso leaves an unfavourable impression of his taste, judgement, and general qualifications ; and yet we should willingly exchange the superfluous versions of the everlasting Guevara by Hellowes and Sir Geoffrey Fenton for a few translations of Spanish lyrics. These are not forthcoming. The well-meaning, mediocre Googe reappears in 1579 with a rendering of Santillana's (Proverbios ; so far as concerns us, he then vanishes, and, if it were not for Sir Philip Sidney's translations of two songs from Montemor's Diana, we might search in vain for any trace of Spanish lyric poetry in Elizabethan literature. We may disregard Sir Lewis Lewkenor's version entitled The Resolved Gentleman, published in 1594, a rendering of Acuna's Caballero determinado : it is not lyrical, and Acufia's poem is merely a translation of Olivier de la Marche's antiquated Chevalier delibre. The case is different with regard to Spanish prose. Though there is no warrant for the assertion that Lyly is wholly under Guevara's influence, it is impossible to deny that A cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond Lovers in the first part of Euphues recalls Guevara's Menosprecio de la Corte. Lyly had no doubt read the Spanish book '5 in Sir Francis Bryan's version made from the French, and it had confirmed him in his foible for staccato antitheses, minted phrases, quick venues of wit, and other mincing fopperies of style. But this taste he had already acquired from his study of the later Renascence writers, and, as previously observed, the English variety of Euphuism cannot justly be said to derive from Guevara alone. Some slight approach to precision is desirable in discussing these matters. The result may be less popular than fiction unavowed, but it can scarcely fail to have the charm of strangeness and beauty which characterizes any tolerable approximation to historical truth. Let us now turn for a moment from profane to devout literature. Though the Spanish temperament is, as a rule, more ascetic than mystic, Spanish literature happens to be exceptionally rich in acknowledged masterpieces of mysticism : it is enough to point to the writings of Francisco de Osuna, Bernardino de Laredo, Saint Theresa, Saint John of the Cross, and Luis de Leon. To what extent were these typical representatives of the Spanish school of mystics known in later Elizabethan England ? With the exception of Saint John of the Cross, they were all available in print, and there were many more (like Juan de los Angeles) to choose from. Yet not one of them seems to have been translated. This is precisely what might be expected. The practical English mind turned from the dizzy sublimities of these rare spirits to the more intelligible asceticism of Luis de Granada, whose Guia de Pecadores was translated in 1598 by Francis Meres ; but here, again, it seems only too likely that the English version was based on a French rendering. Diligent bibliographers have found in the Register of the Stationers' Company the names of a few other devout Spanish writers who were translated into English ; but these writers are either not authentic mystics, i6 or, if they are, their works were usually translated from languages other than Spanish. If Meres probably trans- lated Granada from the French, Lodge undoubtedly trans- lated him from the Latin, and similarly Estella was Englished through Italian and Latin renderings. In all these cases, there is no attempt to preserve more than the letter of the original, and, even so, the letter is prone to be blurred or indistinct : for the rest, the quintessential Spanish spirit of the originals evaporates in the process of translating a translation of these originals. No Spanish mystic found a competent English translator till 1629, when Mabbe translated Cristobal de Fonseca, an author known all the world over (at least by name), owing to the fact that he is mentioned in Don Quixote. But, if one may say so without disrespect, neither Cervantes nor Mabbe can be congratulated on his taste in this instance, for Fonseca is one of the poorest writers of the mystic school. If we persist in our search for signs of Spanish influence on the works of English divines, our best chance of finding it is in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. For part of his system Hooker is undeniably indebted to Francisco Suarez, an authoritative orthodox philosopher of the day ; but, as Suarez wrote in Latin, Hooker's indebtedness is not in any sense literary. Thirty or forty years after Hooker's death, The Flaming Heart proved Crashaw to be a rapturous devotee of Saint Theresa. Unfortunately it proves nothing more. If we could catch Crashaw in our net, a little ingenuity might enable us to bring Coleridge into some distant relation with Spanish literature, for Coleridge admits that the central idea of Christabel was suggested by the author of the Hymn in honour of Saint Theresa. But did Crashaw know Spanish ? There are abundant indications that he knew Marino too well : of direct Spanish influence there is no such unequivocal sign, though it is hard to believe that Crashaw read Saint Theresa in translations only. Again, George Herbert's preface to Nicholas Ferrar's translation of the Consider aciones shows his acquaintance with the work of that remarkable | heterodox mystic, Juan de Valdes. But it must be borne in mind that the Spanish text of the Consider aciones has only recently been discovered, and that both Herbert and Ferrar (like all their contemporaries) were compelled to read Valdes' treatise in an Italian version. Moreover, these English writers take us to the fourth or fifth decade of the seven- teenth century, and (finally) nothing resembling Crashaw's and Herbert's metaphysical conceits can be found in the Spanish authors whom they respectively admired. We are on more promising ground when we go back to the Elizabethan period, and deal with the Spanish novel. The romances of chivalry may be neglected otherwise one might be tempted to dwell on the fact that Catalan Tirant lo Blanch, one of the oldest and best examples of its class, includes the story of Sir Guy of Warwick, and there- fore comes into touch with Norman England.) It is doubt- less true that the Spanish romances of chivalry were read here long after Spaniards had tired of them, and, as late as the eighteenth century Burke and Johnson sauntered through their enchanted caves ; but they arrived a little too late in the day to carry all before them in England, as they had done in France, and they were not introduced here under favourable circumstances. It was no great recommendation in literary circles that the chief translator of these knight-errantries was Anthony Munday, a dismal draper of misplaced literary ambitions who was pilloried by Ben Jonson as Antonio Balladino, and finally driven back to his yard-wand. It is no wonder, in these circumstances, that the Spanish romances of chivalry were not a frank success in England among the cultured class. Overbury, in his Characters, gives us to understand that such books were i8 chiefly read by chambermaids, and we may leave the subject with the inevitable remark that Munday's poor versions were pieced together from French translations. This is further confirmation of the view that a knowledge of Spanish was rarer in England than we are commonly given to understand. Endymion Porter, the grandson of a Spanish lady, was a notable exception at a much later period. Partly educated in Spain, he no doubt knew Spanish well, and he figures in { Suckling's Sessions of the Poets ; but a lively hope of favours to come, rather than any notable literary performance of Endymion's, is the only possible explanation of his friend Lycidas-Herrick's hyperbole : For, to say truth, all garlands are thy due : The laurel, myrtle, oak, and ivy too. But let us return to prose and fact once more. The romances of chivalry were supplanted in Spain by the pastoral novel. The poetic pastoral had been introduced into England as early as 1514 by Alexander Barclay, whose chief model was Giovanni Baptista Mantuano. English readers became familiar later with Sannazaro's Arcadia, the pattern of the prose pastoral romance which leapt into vogue in Spain with Jorge de Montemor's Diana. y A book so fashionable on the continent as the Diana could not fail to attract attention in England also, but one may easily over- estimate the amount of attention it received here at first. The Diana circulated in a French version, and two frag- ments of the text were, as we have seen, adapted by Googe. But it was not translated as a whole till 1583, and this translation by Bartholomew Yong was not printed till 1589, some thirty years after the original was published : evidently there was no unseemly haste in the matter. Nevertheless, before Yong's translation appeared, Montemor's Diana had left its mark on English literature. In his Apologie forPoetne, Sir Philip Sidney appeals pointedly to the authority of Sannazaro, and is silent respecting Montemor ; and yet he was no less indebted to the Portuguese-Spaniard than to the Italian. Sidney's verse translations of passages in the Diana have been already mentioned : in his Arcadia he draws on both Sannazaro and Montemor, the love-story being suggested by the Diana. To some degenerate readers of our day the Arcadia seems almost as tedious as Hazlitt thought it ; but Montemor found an admirer even more illustrious than Sir Philip Sidney. Part of the plot of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is taken from the Diana,. and it is now established that Shakespeare (or the writer of the play which he recast) read the Spanish book in a French translation. Montemor's Felismena is the prototype of Sidney's Daiphantus, and of Viola in Twelfth Night ; his landscape is reproduced in the forest of Arden, and it is perhaps not mere fantasy to imagine that some far-off reminiscence of Montemor's ' cold pastoral ' pervades Endymion and the Ode on a Grecian Urn. * The name of another great English poet is casually con- nected with Lazarillo de Tormes, the earliest of the Spanish picaresque stories, which was translated by David Rouland of Anglesey in 1568, and printed in 1576. A copy of Til Howleglas in the Bodleian Library contains the following inscription in Gabriel Harvey's handwriting : * This Howies- glass, with Skoggin, Skelton and Lazarillo, given me at London, of Mr. Spensar XX December [15^8, on condition ...[illegible]... by reading of them ouer before the first of January, ymmediately ensuing : otherwise to forfeit unto him my Lucian in fewer uolumes.' Sixteen years after Spenser gave this copy of Lazarillo de Tormes to Harvey (who seems to have thought it a foolish book), Thomas Nash published the first English picaresque novel under the title of Jacke Wilton ; and, though the incidents have scarcely any resemblance to those in the Spanish story, 20 Jacke Wilton keeps up the picaresque tradition by its spirit, good-humour, and contempt for the conventional code. To follow out the development of the picaresque tale in this country would be to write a long chapter in the history of the English novel: it would, moreover, be a work of supererogation, as the subject has been exhaustively treated in Professor Chandler's excellent monograph. / The influence of the Spanish novel grew more and more marked after the publication of Don Quixote in 1605 : that great book lent a new importance to all Spanish literature. But the influence of Spanish fiction must be sought in the English drama .> Here, as elsewhere, we must be on our guard against current misconceptions. Coleridge is, perhaps, responsible for the idea that there is an intimate relation between the national theatres of Spain and England, and for the notion that this indebtedness extends to form as well as to substance. It may be said without any hesitation, that these theories are erroneous. During the active period of Shakespeare's life, few Spanish plays were available in print ; those few were of slight importance, and there is not even a reasonable presumption that any of them were known in England. Here and there we may find correspondences, as between Lope de Rueda's Los Enganados and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ; but both have drawn upon Bandello, or perhaps upon a dramatized version by an Academy at Siena called ' Gl ' Ingannati.' | Nor can we accept the suggestion that Shakespeare went to the Conde Lucanor for The Taming of the Shrew, a recast of a previous play which dramatized a story that was common property everywhere. Equally untenable is the theory that the bullies of our drama the Ancient Pistols and the Bobadils came to us from Spain : they are literary descendants of Plautus' Miles Gloriosus. So, again, we may dismiss as far-fetched the view that certain Spanish politicians were the originals of characters 21 in Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays. To take one example, we should not be tempted to regard Don Adriano de Armado, the ' fantastical Spaniard ' in Love's Labour's Lost, as a burlesque of Antonio Perez. He is developed from the character of Sir Tophas in Lyly's Endimion, with touches added perhaps from a crack-brained Spaniard, nicknamed the ' fantastical Monarcho,' and known in the flesh to Shake- speare as a recognised public butt who had lounged about London town for years. Most of these current hypotheses are fanciful. What is true is that English dramatists went to Spanish sources not to Spanish plays, but to Spanish novels for picturesque colouring and romantic episodes*. In 1571 Pedro Mexia's Silva de varia lection was translated (it is. needless to say, trom the French) by Thomas Fortescue, whose Forest, or collection of histories supplied Marlowe with the raw material for his Scythian Tamburlaint, which was staged in 1587. A still more interesting case is that of The Tempest, the source of which can now be indicated. A Spaniard called Antonio de Eslava (not otherwise known to fame) published at Pamplona in 1609 a collection of mediocre stories entitled Nocbes de Invierno, and this volume was reprinted at Antwerp a year later. Thence it came somehow into Shakespeare's hands, and from the fourth chapter of the Noches de Invierno the plot of The Tempest is borrowed, Dardano of Bulgaria reappearing as Prospero of Milan, and- Serafma as Miranda, ' created of every creature's best.' This provenance may be thought to lend colour to the tradition that Shakespeare dramatized an episode from Don Quixote a book that he might easily have read in Shelton's translation published in 1612, or perhaps even in the manuscript which Shelton had kept by him for some four or five years. At any rate, the following entry occurs under the date of 1653 in the Register of the Stationers' 22 Company : ' The History of ' Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare, 2os. } ^ Whatever may be the fact with respect to Shakespeare, nobody read Cervantes with greater profit to himself than Fletcher. /There are two opinions as to the relation between Don Quixote and The Knight of the Burning Pestle : there can be only one opinion as to Fletcher's debt to the Novelas i exemplares on which six of his plays are based. Some traits in The Beggars' 1 Bush, too, seem borrowed from Cervantes's j-itanilla (the obvious source from which Rowley and Middleton derived The Spanish Gipsy}. Cervantes's post- humous romance, Los Trabajos de Persilesy Sigismunda, and the old-fashioned Historia de Aurelio y Isabela of Juan de Flores are likewise utilized by Fletcher who borrows further from Lope de Vega, Mateo Aleman and Gonzalo de Cespedes. Professor Schelling in his valuable Elizabethan Drama sums up the results of recent research by saying that, of the fifty-two plays attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, seven- teen ' show traces in their plots of Spanish sources,' and he inclines to favour Mr. Rosenbach's conjecture that six more of the fifty-two plays may probably be of Spanish origin. Yet it does not follow that Fletcher knew Spanish, for most of the books which he utilized were available in English or French translations. It is, indeed, alleged that he derived The Island Princess from the younger Argensola's Conquista de las Islas Molucas, and Lome's Cure it is not for me to discuss the correctness of the attribution of this play to Fletcher from La Fuerza de la Costumbre, a comedia by the Valencian dramatist Guillen de Castro. Mt seems certain that neither of these works was translated out of Spanish in Fletcher's time ; it is less certain that they are respectively the sources of the two English plays just mentioned. The question is still under discussion, and it must suffice to say that, at the present stage, the balance of probabilities is against the view that Fletcher knew Spanish. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Ben Jonson was better equipped in this respect. His casual references to Amadis de Gaula, to Don Quixote, and to Carranza imply no real knowledge of Spanish literature ; and the tags and phrases in The Alchemist might easily be pieced together from the reprint of Perceval's dictionary edited by that John Minsheu whom Jonson ungratefully branded as a ' rogue ' when tartly discussing his contemporaries with William Drummond of Hawthornden. A moment ago we referred to the alleged derivation of Love's Cure from a Spanish play a remarkable fact, if the derivation be established finally. Another alleged example of the same kind is The Renegado of Massinger which is stated to be based on Cervantes's Los Banos de Argel; and possibly a third example may be The Fatal Dowry of the same English dramatist which has some points in common with Cervantes's interlude entitled El viejo celoso. Neither of these Spanish pieces was translated in Massinger's day, but this is not final. The relation between the Spanish and the English plays has not been demonstrated in detail, and, even if it were, a considerable margin must be left for the possibilities of coincidence. For my own part, I confess to a growing scepticism respecting many of these supposed resemblances between plays written in Spain and plays written in England at this period. However, at a later time during the reign of Charles I one or two English dramatists do seem to show an increasing acquaintance with the Spanish stage. Shirley, the last important dramatist of the Elizabethan school, is credibly reported to have utilized Tirso de Molina's El Castigo del -penseque in The Opportunity, and Lope de Vega's Don Lope de Cardona in The Young Admiral : this statement is supported by high authority, but a minute demonstration of the extent of Shirley's borrowing would be still more satisfactory. Henceforward, the rapid accumulation of printed matter makes it impossible to deal with the subject in detail. One feature is constant : little or no interest is taken in Spanish lyrical poetry. In his Mytbomystes, published in 1632, Henry Reynolds goes forth to search for Spanish poets of distinction, finds them far back in Seneca, Lucan, and Martial, and at a later date discovers ' some good theologians also in rhyme ' ; but, he continues, with a conciliatory com- pliment to the Spanish school of novelists, ' for other poesies in their now spoken tongue, of any great name ... I cannot say it affords many, if any at all.' And all the evidence goes to show that Reynolds accurately expressed the current English opinion. References to the Celestina occur in The Anatomy of Melancholy (and they become more frequent in successive editions) ; but it seems possible that Burton read the Celestina in Earth's Latin version, and, at any rate, there is no evidence that Burton read any other Spanish verses beyond the few songs in the tragi-comedy. Donne had accompanied Essex in his expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and may have had a working knowledge of Spanish ; yet what might be taken for Gongorism in Donne is, as Mr. Gosse has shown, a personal form of expression natural to a super-subtle intelligence rejoicing in the metaphysical refinements of the scholastic tradition. Donne's hyperboles and paradoxes are his own, and the chronology of his poems shows that he cannot have read much less imitated Gongora's later cryptic compositions which contrast so woefully with the limpid elegance of his earlier manner. Gongora can have been known to few Englishmen of the seventeenth century besides Thomas Stanley, who attempted with more gallantry than success a translation of the first Soledad in / 1651. Stanley is likewise responsible for a version of Boscan's J Octavo Rima, and Boscan (together with Garcilaso) was read nearly half a century before by Drummond of Haw- 2 5 thornden, a connoisseur of Italian literature, and a follower of Guarini's ; still, but for Drummond's own statement, we should never have guessed that he had read a line of Boscan or Garcilaso, for no shadow of Spanish influence is visible in his poems. One very slight (and perhaps fortuitous) parallelism occurs to me as worth a passing mention : the resemblance between the estribillo of the decimas spoken by the imprisoned Segismundo in the first act of Calderon's La Fida es sueno, and the refrain of Lovelace's incomparable song To Althea from Prison. This may conceivably be a case of unconscious reminiscence. La Fida es sueno was printed in 1636, and Lovelace appears to have served in Spain ten years later.' But this matter is of little more importance than the quatrain in Waller, which purports to be translated from the Spanish. After the Restoration, English playwrights in search of exciting plots and thrilling incidents began to look for them in the collections of Spanish comedias which were now appearing. It would seem that, while residing on the Continent during the Commonwealth, the future Charles II had learned something of the Spanish theatre, and his taste in this direction would be encouraged by his Master of Requests, Sir Richard Fanshawe ; for Fanshawe had already visited Spain on behalf of Charles I, and, when captured after the battle of Worcester, had beguiled his leisure by translating Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza's Fiestas de Aranjuez, and Querer por solo querer. Charles IPs literary taste was not impeccable, but it was above the farrago of Spanish picaresque cliches brought together by Richard Head and Francis Kirkman under the title of The English Rogue. If Dryden, the second Earl of Bristol, Tuke, Mrs. Aphra Behn, Wycherley and Crowne did in England what Rotrou, Quinault, the brothers Corneille and even Moliere (in his first phase) had done in France, they were certain of approval at Court, and, in one or two cases, 26 their adaptations seem to have been made at the King's suggestion. But, though the Restoration playwrights con- trived a few effective acting plays by utilizing Spanish comedias, this method produced no dramatic masterpieces. So much for the drama of the later seventeenth century. In Hudibras Butler took from Don Quixote the idea of a reforming Knight and a Squire faring forth, just as he took his hero's name from The Faerie Queene ; but, except for this and a rare occasional touch, the connection between DJH Quixote and Hudibras is slight, the virulent party-spirit of the English book differing as widely from the universal irony of the Spanish as Cervantes's kindly patrician humour differs from Butler's vehement and robustious wit. The translation of Quevedo's Suenos made by Roger L'Estrange through the French ran through many editions, but left no permanent mark on English literature. 1 The 'same may be said of Philip Ayres' version of Salas Barbadillo's El necio bien afortunado, and the translation of Gracian's El Criticdn, issued by Sir Paul Rycaut in 1681. It has, indeed, been suggested that Defoe took the idea of Man Friday from Rycaut's version : this seems about as plausible as Coleridge's freakish contention that Robinson Crusoe derives from Cervantes's Persiles y Sigismunda. This is a fair illustration of what confronts us at almost every turn in the history of Spanish literature : fantastic theories put forward at random under cover of a name illustrious in some other department, but of no authority whatever in our branch of study. The best results of Spanish influence are observable in the eighteenth century when the tide of adaptations begins to slacken. The picaresque novel attains the highest I. My friend, Professor Kuno Meyer, informs me that L'Estrange's trans- lation of the Suenos exercised considerable influence on Welsh literature. It appears to have suggested Ellis Wynne's Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Czvsc (Visions of the Sleeping Bard), a Protestantized adaptation of Quevedo's book. Twenty- three editions of Wynne's work have appeared since its first publication in 1703. 27 level of ironical portraiture in Jonathan Wild the Great, a book which some have found deficient in character-drawing, but which abounds in the characterization of personages observed by Fielding's unerring eyes. It is Fielding himself who states that Joseph Andrews is * written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes,' and in Parson Adams we have a creation which is a near approach to the Manchegan Knight. Smollett met with defeat when, in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves, he rashly matched himself with Cervantes : it was not for him to bend the bow of Achilles, but in Ferdinand, Count Fathom he reproduced the picaresque verve, if not the judicial temper, of his Spanish models. In 1765 Bishop Percy made a new departure by including in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry translations by two Spanish ballads (one of them a genuine antique) ; though they cannot be said to have attracted much notice at the time, they entitle Percy to rank as a pioneer on the road followed afterwards by Lockhart and Gibson.* Spanish literature was now beginning to appear in its true perspective, and attention inevitably concentrated on Cervantes. The eighteenth century belongs to him, so to say. We need but mention the performances of the indefatigable Captain John Stevens who showed his interest in things Spanish in many compilations of his own, and by laying violent hands on earlier versions of Spanish classics. The first sumptuous edition of Don Quixote in the original was issued here by Tonson in 1737-38 ; the first serious attempt at a biography of Cervantes was expressly written for this edition by Mayans y Siscar, the most eminent Spanish scholar of the age ; new translations of Don Quixote were made by Motteux, by Jervas, and by Smollett ; the first attempt at a critical edition of the text was made by John Bowie, a country parson, who brought down on his head a torrent of petty abusive criticism from Giuseppe Barejti, a bumptious and 28 malignant person, but a competent Spanish scholar a combination still found occasionally, and by no means so seldom as one could wish. Perhaps a word may be spared for Mrs. Lennox's Female Quixote, greatly admired when it first appeared in 1752 : the title implies a desire to tread in Cervantes's footsteps, but the dust of oblivion has settled on the English book. So far we have been concerned mostly with the effect produced by Spanish literature in England. Meanwhile, to what extent was English literature known in Spain ? Not at all, so far as the external evidence goes. No doubt an individual Spaniard, now and then and here and there, read a stray book by an English author, but this was not necessarily a book written in English. Herrera, the celebrated Andalusian poet, probably went to some such source in the sixteenth century for his memoir of Sir Thomas More : I have not identified the work consulted by Herrera, but should expect it to be a Latin book like Stapleton's (though not Stapleton's book itself). The material for La Corona Trdgica was obtained by Lope de Vega from George Conn, a Roman Catholic divine long resident at Rome, whose Latin book on Mary Stuart was published there in 1624. As Latin offers few difficulties to an educated Spaniard, the fact that a contemporary Latin text was translated into Spanish argues that it was expected to interest the general public. Under this heading we have Spanish versions of John Owen's Epigrammata, and translations by Pellicer de Salas and (later) by Gabriel de Corral of John Barclay's Argenis, which was dramatized by Calderon under the title of Argenis y Foliar co in 1637 or earlier. Very likely there are other instances of the same kind ; but there is not, so far as I am aware, any external evidence that English literature proper was known in Spain. The War of Succession left Spain exhausted, and its own 2 9 literature was much impoverished during the first half of the eighteenth century. Little interest was taken in national classics, and less in what was being produced abroad. The few who had the curiosity to enquire sometimes made dis- concerting discoveries : they learned, for instance, from The Spectator that there had once existed a Spanish thinker named Huarte, long since forgotten by his countrymen, but still highly esteemed abroad. This experience actually befell Feijoo, the most enlightened and encyclopaedic Spaniard of his generation. If native writers were thus neglected, foreigners naturally fared worse. With respect to translations of English books into Spanish, so far as my knowledge goes, there is a blank between the end of the fourteenth century (when Juan de Cuenca translated Gower) and the middle of the eighteenth century, when some passages of Paradise Lost appear to have been translated by Ignacio Luzan, the leader of a new literary movement in Spain. These fragmentary renderings of Milton were apparently unknown to Luzan's friend and ally Luis Jose de Velazquez as late as 1754, the year of Luzan's death ; for, in his Origenes de la poesia castellana of that date, Velazquez refers to Alonso Dalda's unpublished version of Paradise Lost as ' the only translation from English that we have.' Like the rest of the world, Velazquez knew nothing of Juan de Cuenca's Confision del Amante.^ During the latter half of the eighteenth century a breath of the cosmopolitan spirit passed over Spain, and English literature came in for some small share of notice. It was not altogether a happy moment for us. Cadalso, like Luzan, translated passages of Paradise Lost, and in his Cartas marruecas there is an occasional reminiscence of Goldsmith's Chinese Letters (afterwards entitled The Citizen of the World} ; but Young was the idol of the hour, and Cadalso respectfully modelled his Nocbes lugubres after 30 Young's Night Thoughts. Jovellanos also translated the first book of Paradise Lost, while his protege Melendez Valdes, a more gifted poet than himself, sought inspiration most often in Thomson, Young and Pope, though he also imitated Milton fitfully. Later on Quintana translated passages from Addison, and based his uninteresting tragedy El Duque de Viseo on Matthew Gregory Lewis's dull play The Castle Spectre. This takes us just beyond the eighteenth century, and, as we have trespassed over the border-line, it may be noted that a certain tinge of English influence is found in the liberal school of poets centred at Seville. Lista imitated The Dunciad, and passages of Hamlet were admirably trans- lated by Blanco White, that restless self-torturing man of genius who, after securing for himself a niche in the temple of English literature by his once famous sonnet, made his home among you here in Liverpool. A passing reference must suffice for translations of Burke and Blair,, for NoronYs rendering of Alexander's Feast, and for his Spanish versions of Sir William Jones's Latin translations from the Arabic. But these casual essays in exoticism did not affect the development of Spanish literature. A marked revival of interest in Spanish took place amongst us after the Peninsular War. Certain stanzas of Childe Harold and Shelley's magnificent fragment from Calderon's Mdgico prodigioso survive from that period ; poems on Roderick by Scott and Southey found many readers and perhaps some admirers (such as Mr. Arthur Pendennis, who ' projected an epic poem in blank verse, Cortez, or the Conqueror of Mexico, and the Inca*s Daughter ') ; Lockhart's translations of Spanish ballads continued the work begun by Percy, and it is, no doubt, to their initiative that the English- speaking world owes Longfellow's admirable versions of the Coplas de Jorge Manrique, and the mystic song embodied in The Seaside and the Fireside. When Ferdinand VIPs i 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY TEL. NO. 642-3405 This book is due on the last dai&ta