Spice Race: The Island Princess and the Politics of Transnational Appropriation

Abstract

Recent scholarship has located John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621) in the historical context of the early modern “spice race” but has not addressed the extent to which the intra‐European tensions staged in the play also enact an international contest for symbolic and cultural resources. Taking as its starting point Fletcher's acknowledged sources, Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola's Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) and Louis Gédoyn de Bellan's “Histoire memorable de Dias espagnol, et de Quixaire princesse de Moluques” (1615), this essay places The Island Princess in the thick of an appropriative process that moved from Portugal's periphery to Spain, from Spain to France, and from the Continent to England. In doing so, it also traces the contours of a mercantilist logic that linked political dominance, literary hegemony, and economic supremacy—and pursued all three as mutually reinforcing national goals.

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