Early Modern Spanish and Portuguese Material Culture and lingo in the Domestic Domain in the Works of James Shirley (1596-1666)

Abstract

The international dominance of the Habsburg Empire (which from 1581 until 1640 included Spain and Portugal) fostered the expansion of both the material and symbolic culture of the Iberian Peninsula in Europe and more specifically in England. This article sets out to broach the nature and extent of the presence of that material culture in the work of James Shirley, whose literary debt to Spain is one of the most conspicuous of the Jacobean-Caroline period and constituted a touchstone for the penetration of Spanish literature and Iberian culture into Early Modern English society. Moreover, since the socio-textual relationships concerning material culture in literary texts between Early Modern Spain and England have not been analysed extensively, except in the case of Shakespeare (Duque 1981 and 1991), the analysis of the Shirleian opus presents a privileged vantage point from which to obtain an overview of how diverse material elements of Spanish culture had penetrated into English life and how this was reflected in the literary works of the time.