Golden Age Spain Wearing English Clothes: James Mabbe, Renaissance Translator of Spanish Prose Literature
James Mabbe (1572-1642?) was an English translator of works by Mateo Aleman, Fernando de Rojas, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Fray Cristobal de Fonseca and Fray Juan de Santa Maria. He worked during a time of religious, economic, and political rivalries between Spain and England, and produced a body of work that is significant in the field of Translation Studies because his technique and methods lie somewhere between “foreignizing” and “domestication”. Mabbe’s dual quality allows contemporary academia to understand the elements of Spanish prose and culture that were of interest to a seventeenth-century English readership and also to introduce another artist of literary merit from the same period as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other great Jacobean dramatists. By examining the context of English literacy and translation during the period 1500 to 1640, Mabbe emerges as one of the first serious critics and translators of Spanish prose work in the English-speaking world.