“Staging the Last Stand: The Politics of Aben Humeya in Richard Lalor Sheil and Francisco Martínez de la Rosa”

Dealing with an Irish and a Spanish playwright and two dramas staged thirteen years apart in London and Paris respectively, this essay experiments with a comparative reading of parallel texts in order to gauge its potential for insights in the context of Romantic-era Anglo-Hispanic studies. The two authors—Richard Lalor Sheil and Francisco Martínez de la Rosa—were representatives of a political and literary-cultural liberal internationale in the post-Waterloo years. Their plays on Aben Humeya, the leader of the morisco rebellion of 1568–71 (The Apostate, 1817, and Aben Humeya, o la rebelión de los moriscos, 1830), proceed from this ideological background and trans- national web of cultural exchanges and literary developments. While examining the parallels and divergences in their treatments of this material, this essay also provides further evidence of how the Spanish-Moorish imaginary constituted a powerful clus- ter of thematic and ideological faultlines crossing European literatures between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a rich quarry of stories and histories associated with ‘hot chronologies’ (most notably, the conquest of Granada in 1492) and available for allusive, coded inscriptions of current concerns.