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"Spain is Portugal/And Portugal is Spain": Transnational Attraction in The Stukeley Plays and The Spanish Tragedy

Situating England's "Stukeley plays" and The Spanish Tragedy in the context of Philip II's 1580 unification of the Iberian crowns, this essay interrogates disciplinary approaches that have read these dramas primarily in terms of emerging national consciousness. Early modern polities were as inclined to ally in large "composite states" as they were to enforce strict national boundaries, and these "Portingale plays" counter this incorporative movement by discovering the transnational structures authorized by Roman Catholicism as politically effete and doctrinally suspect. At the same time, the essay argues that the "stateless" figures represented in this drama, such as the English renegade Thomas Stukeley and the Portuguese pretender Dom Antonio of Avis, troubled early modern nationalist sensibilities by embodying the continuing attractions of transnational adventuring at a moment when conceptions of nation and empire were being violently contested.