Coda

Taking its cue from the Victorian periodical debates characterizing realism as a crocodile and romance as a monster or ‘catawampus’, this chapter examines the role played by Amadis in early discussions of what the novel was, or should be; how it had developed; and where its future direction lay. For literary historians, Amadis constituted a bridge between the newly constructed ‘medieval’ and the emergent ‘modern’. Philosopher-theorists (Bakhtin) and novelists (Nabokov) alike continued to be fascinated by the relationship of Amadis to Don Quixote and its implications for theories of the novel. Novelists themselves (Bulwer Lytton, Ouida, and Thackeray) enlisted Amadis in their critique of modern masculinity. The final iteration of Amadis in English takes the form of chivalric compilations and abridgements for children; this concluding transformation proves to be emblematic of the many varieties of cultural work into which romance can be enlisted.

Amadis as Spectacle and Source

The reception of Amadis changes in the eighteenth century, with a play (Granville’s The British Enchanters (1706) ) and an opera (Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula (1715) ) presenting the romance for theatrical consumption and emphasizing its overt spectacularism in a revivified Amadisian aesthetic. In a parallel development, Amadis was mined by Shakespearean editors, Hispanists, and literary historians such as Isaac Reed, John Bowle, and Thomas Warton as indicative of early modern taste and a means of elucidating the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare. The chapter closes with an account of the ‘spectral’ relationship of Amadis to early Gothic fiction, arguing that the ‘ancient romances’ invoked in the preface to the second edition of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) are none other than the libros de caballerías, and showing how Lewis’s The Monk (1796) takes the traditions of peninsular ‘fancy’ in an entirely new direction.

Princely Reading or a Wanton Book?

In sixteenth-century England Amadis was known to elite readers primarily through the French version published in the 1540s. A wider audience gained access at the end of the century, with the first English translations by Anthony Munday of book I (1590) and book II (1595), and the anonymous book V (1598). In this period Amadis was both applauded as the reading of ‘mighty potentates’ and condemned as a ‘wanton’ book, full of extreme fabulations. This dichotomy structures the chapter, which begins by examining Amadis as the favourite book of the Spanish and French courts, lauded as a repository of eloquence and a book of fine love. Amadis features widely in English poetry, fiction, and drama of this period, for example in the works of Sidney, Spenser, and Greene, as an exemplar of romance reading.

The Legacy of Don Quixote

Reading Amadis in Jacobean England was conditioned by two publishing events: the appearance of the first part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in 1605, and Munday’s 1618–19 edition of the first four books of Amadis. The revived Jacobean currency of the romance, alongside its association with Ovid and Sidney’s Arcadia as ‘arts of the heart’, explains its appearance in plays by Jacobean and Caroline dramatists including Jonson, Dekker, Massinger, Beaumont, Shirley, Brome, and Davenant. The second half of the chapter examines Amadis as the palimpsest upon which Don Quixote was written and highlights the theme of ‘ravery’ that links Amadis and Don Quixote, drawing examples from the satirical modes in which this topic is played out. This chapter therefore opens up a rich seam of literary allusion and parody that has not previously been studied, as well as shedding new light on the mechanics of reading Don Quixote in England.

Introduction

Beginning with the phenomenon of the postcolonial Amadis as manifested in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Muldoon, and Walt Whitman, this chapter analyses the cultural and historical flexibilities of Amadis that have recommended it to readers and writers in diverse periods, languages, and cultures. An overview of the genre of the Spanish books of chivalry (libros de caballerías) to which Amadis belongs, an account of its defining relationship with Don Quixote, and a survey of the French translations by Nicolas de Herberay that first mediated the romance to England, set the scene for the succeeding chapters.

Receiving Romance

This chapter explains the book’s methodologies in the history of reading and elaborates its theory of ‘removed’ reading. ‘Removed’ reading describes the acquisition of familiarity with an anterior text through the reading of a posterior text in which it is embedded, as Amadis is in Don Quixote. The political and cultural conditions that determined and inflected Anglo-Spanish relations across the relevant centuries are outlined, and their implications for the reading of romance explored, as is the long-standing function of French as an intermediary for translated Spanish works in English. The second half of the chapter addresses the act and function of allusion-making, and outlines the modes and strategies of reading romance that are deployed or advocated in different historical periods and social contexts, with a particular focus on gender and reading.

The Genius of Old Romance

In 1803 two new translations of Amadis were published: from French, by W. S. Rose, and from Spanish, by Robert Southey. It was through Southey’s editions of Amadis and Palmerin (1807), another Spanish romance, that Keats, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Hazlitt gained their knowledge of the genre. This chapter undertakes the first detailed consideration of Southey’s Amadis and demonstrates that it was heavily dependent upon Anthony Munday’s translation, to an extent not perceived at the time by the critics who praised Southey’s seemingly authentic Elizabethan diction. The translations of Southey and Rose were treated to a detailed assessment by Sir Walter Scott in the Edinburgh Review (1803) and exerted a considerable influence on Scott’s knowledge of medieval literary history and on his novels. The central themes of this chapter are the Romantic preoccupation with the medieval and Elizabethan periods, historical authenticity, and the recreation of the literary past.

The Homer of Romancy-Writers

This chapter’s title quotes Margaret Cavendish’s description of Amadis and it explores the return to prominence post-1660 of Amadis’s relationship to French, rather than Spanish, literary culture. Don Quixote’s ‘witty abusing’ of chivalric romance is tempered from the 1650s by the importation of heroic romance from French and the development of ‘serious’ romance which defines itself in opposition to its Iberian forebears. Amadis became part of the Restoration refashioning of antebellum literary culture partly thanks to English writers’ experience of exile in France and the Low Countries. After the Restoration, Amadis continued to be a popular reference point in comedies, as the archetypal text of ‘amour and adventure’ and a window onto the lost world of Caroline theatre. Behn’s Luckey Chance (1686) and Farquhar’s The Inconstant (1702) are representative of this refashioning of the literary past, while D’Urfey’s Don Quixote plays of the 1690s look back to Jacobean stage satire.