The Forging of a Tawny Spain: Othello, Lepanto, and the "Turkish Heart Hid Beneath"

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This study explores the role that the battle of Lepanto (1571) plays in the construction of Spain as a racialized, "tawny" nation (Love's Labour's Lost 1.1.171). By examining the ways in which two literary works—Shakespeare's Othello (c. 1602) and James I's poem Lepanto (1585)—obliquely refer to the battle, and even more inconspicuously to Spain, these pages demonstrate the engagement of each text in the hispanophobic or hispanophilic energies unleashed by this military landmark. Lepanto not only constitutes the greatest military clash in the history of the Mediterranean, but also a sort of representational microcosm of the European wariness towards Iberia. Understanding the nature and workings of this representational dynamics can shed new light on how Iberian otherness was forged in the literary and artistic European world of the 1500s and 1600s, and the ideological bearings that this ethnic characterization owes to the complex Anglo–Italian–Spanish relationship of the period.