Shakespeare and Santiago de Compostela

Sancho replied, "I would like your grace to tell me why Spaniards, when they do battle calling on Saint James the Moor-Killer, say, `Sant Iago, and close [ranks for] Spain!"'

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (II. 474)1

SHAKESPEARE'S interest in Santiago de Compostela, Spain's patron saint, is manifest in three plays of distinct genre: the comedy All's Well that Ends Well, the tragedy Othello, and the romance Cymbeline. Each of these plays sports with ideas about pilgrimages and miracles, themes which Reformed English sensibilities associated with Catholic holy sites such as Spain's Compostela, where the apostle James was reputedly buried. As he plays with these themes, Shakespeare not only makes use of Saint James' name (which appears in French, Spanish, and Italian in the plays), but also borrows from the specific legend of Santiago de Compostela, adapting aspects of the saint's myth to stage-- action in ways calculated to satisfy audience expectations for comedy, tragedy, or romance.

By analyzing a prominent English notion regarding the Compostela pilgrimage, the legend of Santiago Matamoros, and the dramatic use Shakespeare made of both, I hope to demonstrate that in All's Well, Othello, and Cymbeline Shakespeare subordinated Greco-Iberian myth, Catholic notions of pilgrimage and miracle, cultural prejudices regarding Mediterranean peoples, and even English anti-semitism to his overriding dramaturgical purposes. Specifically, I want to show that in these three plays Shakespeare stripped the Santiago myth, as well as English prejudices against Jews and Spaniards, of topical religious significance. In exchange he invested those myths and prejudices with erotic significance, and did so in ways appropriate to the comic, tragic, or romance dramatization of love relationships.

When Shakespeare linked the pilgrimage to Compostela with comic, tragic, and tragicomic eros, he was assisted by the reputation the Santiago pilgrimage had had in England since even before the Reformation. As Colin Smith writes, since the mid-twelfth century, when the Liber Sancti Jacobi proclaiming the miracles of Santiago was widely translated and propounded from European pulpits (Smith 23), travel to Spain had been associated by the English with exotic entertainments which sometimes included, "despite warnings, indulging in a little light-hearted dalliance away from the constraints of home." Smith also comments on the "folkloric and pre-apostolic associations" with Venus-worship suggested to the English (and other Europeans) by the seashell, the badge of the successful Compostela pilgrim (24). Of course, the example of Chaucer's Wife of Bath, who joins the Canterbury pilgrims to seek a husband, shows that the English association between pilgrimage and erotic quest did not just pertain to pilgrimages on foreign soil. But the English vision of the Mediterranean world as a hotbed of sensual intemperance 2 made a journey to Spain seem an especially likely occasion for romantic dalliance. And in fact, English skepticism regarding the spiritual motivation of some Compostela pilgrims was well-founded. In their two-volume history of Compostela, de Parga, Lacarra, and Rius attest to the existence of many pleasure-seeking "pilgrims" for whom the journey to Galicia was "little more than a pretext for the satisfaction of curiosity to encounter people and strange lands to satisfy the unquiet traveler's humor" (121): a worldly restlessness, if not, strictly speaking, an erotic one. An episode in the second part of Cervantes' Don Quixote bears out the claims of de Parga, Lacarra, and Rius. There Sancho Panza meets a Moor who has disguised himself as a pilgrim in order to "see it all," begging money as he travels (447). Luis Andres Murillo writes that such false Compostela pilgrims were many and were usually "single men and women claiming to be married" and giving a religious color to their clandestine dalliances (447 note 3).

Suspicions about such pilgrims abounded in England even before the sixteenth-century English Reformers' general condemnation of pilgrimages and shrines.3 A Jacobean audience might not have been surprised when All's Well that Ends Well's Helena claimed to be setting out for the shrine of "Saint Jaques," or Santiago (3.3.4-17),4 but then turned up far out of the way in Florence, spending her energies on a plot to dupe her wayward husband into consummating their marriage.' Shakespeare's audience might also have thought of wander-lusty pilgrimages to the shrine whose name lago bore when Roderigo called Othello an "extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere," or when Othello himself recounted his travels to strange lands (Othello 1.1.136-37, 1.3.130-45). Similarly, audiences would have been primed to accept Imogen's journey to Milford Haven as a love "pilgrimage" (though a licit one). In Cymbeline Milford Haven is a Welsh outpost whose location in Britain is analogous to the site of Santiago de Compostela in a place called "Land's End" in Galicia, western Spain (Simmons, Pierce, and Myers 6). But Imogen, of course, does not go to this British "Land's End" to venerate a saint. In place of "Santiago" Cymbeline gives us Jachimo, a worldly Mediterranean villain, and in place of a pilgrim's religious motive the play gives us Imogen's earthy desire to be close to her husband Posthumus (Cymbeline 3.4.141-84).