Gascoigne’s Globe: The Spoyle of Antwerpe and the Black Legend of Spain
Bradley Salamon, Linda
Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18
Abstract
As a military officer and a government agent, George Gascoigne had direct access to the action and the passion of his times; his taste for analysis and desire for fame as a writer allowed him to enter a geopolitical discourse that grew, in part, around the wars of religion in the Low Countries in which he participated. Gascoigne’s construction of the world beyond England culminates in The Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576), his account of the sacking of that city by troops of the Habsburg Empire who, in history as in his telling, gratuitously killed, raped, and looted their way through a defeated populace. Gascoigne’s stay in Antwerp was his last, but not his first, visit to the continent. Across his oeuvre, the representation of “forraine coastes” (I, 345) begins with anxieties about unknown yet stereotyped Others; it ends in open-ended curiosity about, and support for, England’s emerging endeavors to reach Cathay by “voyage…strange”. But Gascoigne’s entire imaginary of the globe – contingent as it is on his experiences and on the different voices he employs – falls under the dark shadow of Spain.
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