Abstract
What is the relationship between translation, immigration, and the work of imagining the nation in early modern England? Translations from Spanish into English accelerated under James I, whose ratification of the Treaty of London with Philip III in 1604 accelerated Anglo-Spanish cultural exchange. One of the most widely read authors in translation was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, whose Don Quijote was first translated into English in 1612 by Thomas Shelton and whose collective works furnished popular hits for the printing presses and for the stage.
This chapter analyzes John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's stage adaptation of Cervantes' novel Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda) into their 1619 play The Custom of the Country and shows that Fletcher and Massinger adopted storylines centered around immigrants depicted by Cervantes as marginalized within and ultimately expelled from their country of origin. Not only do Fletcher and Massinger follow foreignizing prescriptions in their translation of Cervantes' works, but their translation of immigration from the Cervantine oeuvre also operates as a mode to foreignize the English nation by appropriating the gendered body of the immigrant to allegorize the instabilities and disenchantments of subjecthood under James I.